Brian Armstrong: Coinbase’s Failed NFT Launch, Thoughts on SBF & FTX, Crypto Winter | 20VC #946

Brian, I'm so excited for this. So first off, thank you so much for joining me today.

Yeah. Thanks, Harry.

Not at all, but listen, uh, you've probably answered the question on, you know, how did you found Coinbase many, many times, and this show's gonna be very different in many ways. So I wanna dive by kind of going straight into it. We're all a function of our histories, and, you know, a product of our histories. If I ask you the question, what are you running from and what are you running towards, Brian, if we really just start at the deep end?

Mm-hmm. Yeah, well, I- I'm glad you're starting off right with the, the therapy session here. Um, you know-

(laughs)

... actually, not joke, all joking aside, I think there is a lot of psychology and therapy involved in starting a company. Um, so it's a, it's a really good question. I mean, look, I think a lot of people start off in their career, um, running from something. And I'll tell you what it was in my case. I think, you know, I was always a shy and introverted kid, and I had this fear of... It was a couple things. I felt like, you know, people didn't listen to me. They didn't maybe like... I ha- I, I felt like I have such good ideas, but I'm not like confident, I'm not articulate, and I couldn't get people to like hear my ideas. And then I think I had this like deep fear about never doing something important in my life. And I don't even know, really know exactly where that came from, but I, I was like, "I'm gonna, I'm gonna gosh darn do..." Can I, can I swear on this program? I don't know. I, I was like-

Yeah, yeah.

... "I'm gonna, I'm gonna fucking go do something great here or die trying." You know? And I, I had this real like desire to... Uh, maybe it was like a status thing or an imp- sense of importance. I just, I didn't feel important or worthwhile, like on my, you know, w- you know, on my own, which is like a deep kind of psychological thing. And then I would say that as people kind of... Oftentimes in a, in a entrepreneur's life, you, um, you grow, you see a little bit of success, and then what happens is the thing that was motivating you, which was probably like fear or anger or, you know, whatever, shame, initially, kind of starts to, uh, go away a little bit, maybe it's not 100%, and so you start to lose your motivation. And a lot of, I've seen a lot of entrepreneurs kind of go through this existential moment of crisis after they start to lose the, the initial thing that was driving them, like fear or anger, and then they have to move towards, you know, something that brings them actual joy or love or just that they're actually passionate about. And so I kind of had my own moment of that somewhere along the last 10 years, um, where I started to think, all right, what do I actually like doing now that Coinbase has been, you know, a billion dollar valuation or whatever, whatever goal I had in my mind. And I was like, okay, well, I love building things with technology. Like that's probably my favorite thing to do. If even if I was alone in a cabin in the woods for like a decade, you know, and I had no human contact, I'd probably just be building things. I don't know what I'd be doing, with wood and an axe or, um, you know, like building a garden or a road or a tree house, or like I'd be doing something and trying to make fire or whatever. And then the other thing I love doing is, is learning new things. So I'm always like curious, I'm trying to absorb new knowledge, and being a company CEO is always pushing you outside your comfort zone into new areas. And then I guess the last thing I just, I love is it makes me feel good to try to do things at scale that have an impact on, on like the big meta problems of the world. And so, you know, if I see like, oh, we went from a million people are using this to 10 million or something, it just gives me a high. I don't know why. It kind of, it gets me excited about, oh my gosh, like we can have even more impact. And some people, they don't have that. They're, they're very content having an impact with, you know, a classroom of 30 kids or maybe just helping one person that they're mentoring or whatever, and I, and they find that incredibly fulfilling, and I think that's great. For me, I couldn't, I don't get the same feeling unless I'm trying to do something at scale that has like a major impact on the world. So that's a little bit about my journey.