> One of the biggest concerns around our stance was that it would impact our diversity numbers. Since my post, we've grown our headcount about 110%, while our diversity numbers have remained the same, or even improved on some metrics.<p>My understanding is that they started off really bad, right? They had 3/4s of their black employees resign <i>before</i> that post and were at 3%. I guess they could have gotten worse, but being proud to be where you were when this whole thing started is a bit awkward.<p><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/27/technology/coinbase-cryptocurrency-black-employees.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/27/technology/coinbase-crypt...</a><p>> One by one, they left. Some quit. Others were fired. All were Black. The 15 people worked at Coinbase, the most valuable U.S. cryptocurrency start-up, where they represented roughly three-quarters of the Black employees at the 600-person company. Before leaving in late 2018 and early 2019, at least 11 of them informed the human resources department or their managers about what they said was racist or discriminatory treatment, five people with knowledge of the situation said.<p>Numbers aside, this thread is really difficult to take seriously due to the (hypocritical) inclusion of this tweet, which seems to undermine the rest of his thesis (that speaking up for things you believe in is a distracting waste of time that is bad for business).<p>> The biggest lesson I took away from the whole ordeal is that if you believe something is the right path, it's worth speaking up about it, even if it's controversial.<p>And also like, did anyone actually disagree that being a profit-driven company can be profitable? The tl;dr of this entire thread to me is "putting profits above people and morals was every bit as profitable as I thought it would be: thus, I'm vindicated".<p>I would expect to see the same thing from Big Tobacco, Big Oil, Big Copyright, etc.... we also see this same argument from companies like Apple and Facebook: "we are making tons of money, and so our actions are not only useful, they were <i>justified</i>".<p>> While the media reports were mostly negative, and it even spawned some retaliatory and intellectually dishonest hit pieces, the reaction both from employees and people I spoke to in private was overwhelmingly positive.<p>Finally, the issue I have here is that the vast majority (again: we are talking 97%) of Coinbase employees are not black, which calls into question this entire metric: an "overwhelmingly positive" reaction from the overwhelming majority is... underwhemling.