00:39:30 · Brian Armstrong, Molly O'Shea
[00:39:30] S0: Yeah, I think she's the best operator in the industry. [00:39:33] S1: We also just saw Kat. And so like how, okay, this is a fair question on the whole AI lens of things. AI has like a horrible brand right now. People are very pessimistic against it. You built a company in a highly regulated speculative environment, but have made it legitimate and trusted and cool. And like, by the way, your marketing still crushes. Like, I think I tweeted this out months ago because you guys did the Super Bowl ad, which was super fun, and then you did the earnings calls, which had, like, the subway racer kind of things, which were really fun. So how would you take what AI is is kind of branded as today, and, what would you change about that and the storytelling around it?
00:40:19 · Brian Armstrong
[00:40:19] S0: One thing I kind of learned over time was don't apologize for what you're doing. Have an opinion about the world, how you're improving it, and what you want to see the future. And there's gonna be lots of people out there with their own agendas. They're gonna try to build their own status by trying to tear you down. I think the AI companies, they've been a little bit first, there's too much fear mongering. Right? Like, this is gonna take everyone's jobs, and you should come regulate us. I I don't think that's helpful or necessary. And then I think that, if I were in their shoes, would just be a little bit more unapologetic about it. I'd be like, look, we're building this because we think it's going to be an incredible benefit to humanity and everyone can have their own AI tutor. You can have good mentor, can have a therapist, you can have a better doctor. For anybody sitting there saying that, I already have a great doctor. Would never use an AI. You're sitting there from a position of privilege. Many people in the world don't have the best access to the best doctors of the world, and, like, these AI agents are gonna create a world of abundance. And so we're going forward. And, you know, if you don't like the product, you don't have to use it. Right? It's, like, it's literally that simple. That's the approach that I would probably take, and I think at Coinbase, there's many times where we had to really stand up for our values even when it was unpopular. And maybe there was some bad actor in crypto, or maybe the SEC was, trying to kill the industry in The US and we had to sue them, and actually, went we won that case. Right? Or the Mission First blog post, or even with the Clarity Act that's going through Congress now, we see, like, the bank lobby trying to push back against that and say, oh, it's so dangerous. And they're just, they have a conflict of interest because they're trying to protect their own business model. Right? So we're always gonna stand up for what we believe is right. It doesn't mean you're not open to feedback. Like, if there's people who have your best interests at heart, I think you should be listening to that. But if there's people out there who just have their own agenda and they're trying to, you know, don't don't do any virtue signaling.
00:42:29 · Brian Armstrong, Molly O'Shea
Don't just try to optimize for optics of like, how do we look good into the world? Mhmm. People can see through that, and it actually backfires. I think you should just have an opinion, stand for it, and don't apologize. [00:42:42] S1: You mentioned this in a interview you did with David Sundra, where you were talking about the New York Times hit piece. And you said that you think everybody should have a New York Times hit piece. What did that teach you? What happened there by the way, for the people who don't know the context?
00:42:57 · Brian Armstrong
[00:42:57] S0: Yeah. Well, this was after we put out the Mission First blog post where we said, we're gonna focus on work at work. And if you wanna do political activism stuff not related to the mission, that's fine, but just don't do it at work. You can do it outside of work. And, yeah, I mean, the SEC or not the SEC. Sorry. The The New York Times, at this point, it was just I guess that was just, like, against their worldview. And so people told me later, what happened internally is they said, basically, just they put a team together to go write negative articles about Coinbase. So they sorta they had the they had the headline written before they'd even asked anybody what the news was because, you know, in my view, The New York Times is more of, a political propaganda arm than it is doing any real journal journalism at this point. So that was frustrating at the time. I was like, oh, man. These negative articles are coming out. But very quickly, I realized, it just didn't matter. You know? First of all, most of our customers don't read the New York Times or any traditional media, to be honest, or if they do, it's very rare. Like, I'd say people under 50 years old are mostly doing new media now, which would be, like, podcasts like this. They're reading blog posts in Substack. They're looking at x feeds. And so I think all companies should really, own their own distribution and, like, just publish directly and talk to new media. That's what I do with 8080% of my time. 20 of my time, I still spend with traditional media because there are people who are over over 50 or over 60, mostly on the East Coast, who still read traditional media. And so from, like, a deep like, if I wanna influence, like, policymakers in DC, I'll probably go talk to Politico or something. But, for most of our customers, the traditional media, it's dead. It's just not relevant anymore. And it took getting a negative article or two, which was scary at first to realize it just didn't matter. And it freed me up to think about, okay, what do I actually wanna create in the world if I don't have to, worry about being tact or, you know, and then it I think I got more creative and more confident.
00:44:56 · S2
[00:44:56] S2: Today's episode is sponsored by VCX by Fundrise, the public ticker for private tech, allowing investors of all sizes to invest in venture capital. Learn more at getvcx.com. Some of you may not have heard this yet, but our sponsor Public just launched something called generated assets, and it brings AI into investing in a way I've honestly never seen before. Here's how it works: You type in an idea like AI powered supply chain companies with positive free cash flow or defense tech companies growing revenue over 25% year over year. Publix AI then dispatches a swarm of agents that scan every single US stock, evaluates them, and instantly builds a custom index around your thesis. What really stands out is how clearly it explains why each stock is included. And before you invest, you can even backtest your idea against the S and P 500, so you're making decisions with real context, not just guessing. Beyond generated assets, Public lets you invest in stocks, bonds, options, crypto all in one place. They'll even give you an uncapped 1% match when you transfer your investments over from another platform. If you want to build a portfolio that actually reflects your thesis, visit public.com/sorcery, paid for by Public Investing. Full disclosure is in the description. Enterprise AI runs on Merge, the AI infra platform for integrations, agent tooling, and model orchestration, so your teams ship product, not plumbing. Mistral, Dropbox, and Drata already trust Merge in production. Start building at Merge. Dev. Founders scale faster on Deal. Set up payroll for any country in minutes, hire anyone anywhere, Get visas handled fast and get back to building. Visit deal.com/sorcery. That's deel.com/sorcery.
00:46:41 · Molly O'Shea, Brian Armstrong
[00:46:41] S1: I mean, it is pretty interesting, like with all, with all the FinTech companies wanting to be the everything app or the super financial app, there's also the competing headlines of, like, Anthropic and OpenAI being the everything company. Like, they're gonna do everything. Where do you stand in that? Because some people are like, oh, I don't especially with some investors, like, the VC side, they're like, they're having an existential crisis because they don't know if they should be investing in more things or if Anthropic's just gonna build all the companies. Where do you stand in that? [00:47:18] S0: Well, I don't think OpenAI and Anthropic are gonna build all the companies. I think they're mostly focused on building foundational models, which are broadly applicable. But for instance, don't think anyone thinks they're gonna get into regulated financial services. It's a very complex and typical thing. Most tech companies don't want to have anything to do with that. And then I think there's actually gonna be specialized models. Like, actually, I think Coinbase has a real opportunity to go build a frontier model for investing, for instance, right, based on the datasets that we we have from our customers. So, yeah, I'm not worried about them eating lots of different companies. I think the best companies are just gonna get even more efficient, like Coinbase is doing. And if there's companies that fail to integrate AI, then they could be they could get left behind, but the best companies in every industry are just gonna be even more productive.