If you don’t want your employees to be highly opinionated and engage in ownership politics, perhaps you shouldn’t hire smart people (who tend to be opinionated and think a lot) and hand them shares in your company (hence turning them into co-owners)?<p>Brian Armstrong wouldn’t have gotten very far with Coinbase if it was just him, on his own. Companies with this sort of management either blow up (RIM) or end up stagnant and dysfunctional (Facebook). He will end up alienating all of the people who he needs to resuscitate his company; moreover the sort of weird, semi-nuts people who create all of the great stuff in our industry (e.g. von Neumann) won’t go anywhere near his company.<p>Coinbase may be the centralized crypto exchange with the lions’ share of liquidity today, but there’s no guarantee they’ll even <i>exist</i> in an industry that evolves past its shitcoin phase. Maybe he thinks he can single-handedly navigate this transition on his own; let’s see. Clearly, the market doesn’t think so — pretty ironic that he’s a market-maker who ignores market signals…<p>Edit: I want to note that this tweet is toxic and disturbing on so many levels… It’s also comical given the history of our industry and the Traitorous Eight.<p><a href="https://mobile.twitter.com/brian_armstrong/status/1535305081360240642" rel="nofollow">https://mobile.twitter.com/brian_armstrong/status/1535305081...</a>
clickbait title of a clickbait article<p>better off reading the original thread<p><a href="https://twitter.com/brian_armstrong/status/1535304943728414721" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/brian_armstrong/status/15353049437284147...</a>
A related question: do people think it's possible for a major tech CEO to avoid having much of a social media presence?<p>Seems like Armstrong is really shooting himself in the foot here by running to Twitter and posting his brain dump on the petition. Also, I think he's painted himself into a corner over time by doing the same thing on other occasions in reaction to other internal matters at his company. He really ought to follow the advice he himself gives in the original thread: praise publicly and criticize privately. It's actually great advice but it applies to everyone.<p>Otherwise, I find I don't actually have much of an opinion about who's right here. I just find myself thinking, "If I were him, I'd just stay clear of Twitter."
Way I see it, working for Coinbase is like working for any gambling startup. For a significant amount of employees it's not going to be about "believing in the company's mission", it's going to be about making a lot of money quickly.
Stay and unionize. You get to keep your job and make it a better job. And the NLRB would love to hear about anti-organization efforts at a big tech company that violate labor law.<p>Let’s not just shrug and say “we’ve tried nothing and we’re all out of options.”
Lol what a delusional guy. He wanted everyone he hired to believe "in their mission" and take ownership in everything the company does, but he's okay to not care about them and would push them to feel free to quit. Lol.
I have to say he's right you know.<p>Just like the free-software movement that wanted to remove all non-free software from existence, some of those folks instead joined the likes of Microsoft, Google, Apple, and Meta and they have a nasty and vile history of unethical practises which are just a nasty as Coinbase who were also being involved with VCs pumping and dumping on retail.<p>But are we trying to find angels here? The pattern is the same. They DO NOT care and they will NOT change. So it is pointless expecting them to.<p>So if you don't like them you are free to leave, just like you were free to join them in the first place. Or be a founder at your own company.
Given this entire thing in context, and not as a quasi-clickbait headline (he literally said it verbatim, but he seems to have meant it slightly less intellectually honest than the headline implies) ...<p>You know what? Quit and find a company you believe in. I wouldn't want someone that doesn't believe in what they're doing working for me, and I wouldn't want to work for a company who I don't believe in. Don't get me wrong, our economy is in shambles, the world is falling apart, today is March 833rd 2020, our collective stress levels are at an all time high and only rising, and we're all out of the mental juice to handle both being alive at work and also job hunting: do it anyways, go find a job that is actually fulfilling to you.<p>Don't let shitty companies rob you of being actually successful in the ways that matter to you. You gotta live with yourself and what you've done, and the only person that cares about you is you. Your employer does not, and never will, give a shit about you.
I love most of Brian Armstrong’s response. I like that he deals with employee activism and doesn’t just shy away from it like a lot of big tech with a sf bay area foci.<p>Here though, I wonder if it is truly possible for employees to make the same suggestions internally.<p>This is an anonymous list of grievances, attempting to use some cryptographic signature solution to show support without revealing who supported.<p>Even taking out the proposal/demand for resignations, I wonder if the product suggestions can be made to any effect, internally.
Coinbase has done a poor job with planning and handled this challenging circumstance very poorly. That’s clear. That includes poor social media management.<p>Many, including myself, admired this company because many of our smartest peers were joining in droves. Thought of Coinbase as their dream job. It is clear that that is no longer true.<p>Therefore when they say that they survived a crypto winter before, what they miss is that they previously had many that rooted for their success. I hope they hold no illusion this time.
"...as people who have the rugged pulled out from under them...".<p>WTF? Am I reading Forbes or some old MySpace page?<p>Way to not proofread your shit at a major publication and put an automatic back button in the second paragraph.<p>TD;DR<p>Too dumb didn't read it.
That's cute coming from a C-Suite who has already rooked billions out of investors on a business model of "lets be the financial industry but drag our feet on compliance".<p>Mayhaps, just mayhaps... People are starting to realize the money is going to flow wherever some small number of people want it to, and are realizing that the only way to counter the perceived misallocation is from the inside?<p>Or mayhaps, they found the Company and the Work, but the Executives are the ones who don't fit? Bottom up pressure is a bitch, ain't it?