0:00As a young person, I actually had to call my mom and dad and tell them I was quitting my job to go do this crazy thing that they had never heard of.
0:07Coinbase is Coinbase.
0:08Coinbase.com was available for $1,700.
0:12So, it was a reasonably priced. I remember thinking, uh, I'm not sure I love it. All right. Temporarily, I'll pick Coinbase and I'll I'll choose a better one later. Did I know if it was going to be a successful company? No.
0:22What was holding you back? Why didn't you go all in?
0:24Self-doubt. Part of me was like afraid of looking stupid. I was very introverted as a kid. I was probably a little on the autism spectrum. It can be a superpower.
0:30You are crawling on the floor crying.
0:31There's [music] some dark days. They were saying, "Shut down Coinbase. It's over. Give the money back." My phone just starts ringing non-stop. I had never had the experience at that time of having thousands of people angry at you at the same time, you know, spewing like the most hateful things you could imagine.
0:42G has passed and the banks are coming back with clarity.
0:46Some of the banks still hate it and are trying to kill it. I don't think people should have banks should be lending out people's deposits without their permission. That's like this weird historical artifact that happened a long time ago. Banks have become so heavily regulated. They're like quasi government entities. they become in meshed with government. There's only a few people who can sustain this such high level of regulation. Then your first priority is to your regulator. Your second is to your customer. And that's why most customers are dissatisfied with the current financial system. People should support a level playing field where everybody can compete. Very little is going to get done actually in DC [music] without concerted effort and a large
1:15constituency. And you have to make it a priority. And it's not their fault. It's just there's a lot of things going on in the world. There's wars. There's trade debates happening. There's um AI.
1:24Would you make a prediction? I think the consensus view is great to see you. Thank you for flying in.
1:28I appreciate it. Yes.
1:32I'm Bonnie Chang and I am with Brian Armstrong, the co-founder and CEO of Coinbase. Brian, good to see you.
1:40Yeah, thanks for having me.
1:41So, the more I look into your story, the more I feel like I'm reading this comic book. There's this shy kid that created Coinbase and then took on Washington, took on Wall Street. It is a fascinating story.
1:57I've never heard the superhero idea, but you know, if I had been bit by a spider or something. Anyway, I like the reference.
2:02Yeah. I want to know how shy were you?
2:05Let's I want to establish this main character, right? How shy were you? Do you have like a most painfully Brian shy story?
2:15Well, yeah. I was um I was very introverted as a kid, I would say. And I I was never very good at speaking to people and communicating my ideas. I was I was kind of awkward or shy. And the thing that I found that I liked doing was playing with computers. And so I would usually stay up late most nights um learning how to install Linux or read, you know, read books or and it was actually kind of a problem because I would feel the most alive and energized
2:41at like 1000 p.m. to like 2 a.m. every and then I would be kind of a zombie at school the next day. And it might seem strange because now I feel pretty comfortable talking to people and you know, but it's like anything if you practice it a thousand times like you can get better at it. And uh I don't know what the lesson of that is other than maybe for kids who feel awkward or shy, it's like doesn't really hold you back. You can learn how to do anything and be if you want to or anything else.
3:09So your parents actually brought back this secondhand computer with German keyboard.
3:15Yeah, I mean you did your research. Uh yeah, we would just kind of find used computers and pick them up at garage sales and I think I had like three different computers in my room at one point just kind of building the hardware and learning different operating systems. Uh so yeah, that that was something that I gravitated towards.
3:34I mean, yeah, I would say like I was probably a little on the autism spectrum, too. I don't know if that came up in your research, but um I never like formally got diagnosed, but I've taken these tests where I'm like, "Yep, that's pretty clearly what I had." And um you know, it it can be a superpower actually. Um but it can also uh hold you back in some ways. I think it's net positive actually to be somewhere on the spectrum. You know, it can be bad if you go too far.
4:02In my case, um, what it allowed me to do was like I kind of had infinite ability to just concentrate on one thing for a long time if I got interested and excited about it. Um, sometimes with people I couldn't read their emotions or how to react and I would have later I developed all these like coping mechanisms where I would sometimes ask people well 1 to 10 uh how happy do you feel about that? you know, cuz sometimes I'm trying to read somebody and I'm like, they seem really excited, but they
4:31wouldn't be that, you know.
4:32So, there's lots of things like that I learned as coping mechanisms over time.
4:36So, your parents, I saw them in the documentary. They seem like wonderful people. Your mom used to work at IBM.
4:42Your dad was an engineer. What did you pick up from them, each of them?
4:47Well, growing up in the house, there was a lot of focus on math and science and academia in general. Uh so I did learn from them to study hard, focus on school. I would say the other thing they really taught me indirectly was my value system, right? Which I probably didn't really appreciate at the time. It it came from them about trying to create something useful in the world, trying to give back, trying to um contribute. And I
5:17learned and and really just treating others the way you wanted to be treated. I you someone might say these are like Judeo-Christian values. Um, and I also went to like a Jesuit high school uh that had some of those values as well. So, at [snorts] the time I didn't feel like it was in it was influencing me, but I think later in life it probably did.
5:36One interesting thing is you had a green iguana.
5:41Dogs and cats. So, a lot of animals in the household.
5:45What else did you have?
5:47Well, the the iguana's name was Spike, I believe.
5:51Yeah. And I mean, I was interested in having pets. That was that was fun. I actually at one point later in life had a pet uh tarantula, which was Wow.
6:00which was fun. Um I think it'd be cool someday to have like a pet raccoon or something, but it's actually illegal in most jurisdictions, so I haven't found a way to do that yet.
6:10But and that's just kind of fun to have like living things around the house that you're taking care of. I was also interested in business, so I I was reading I'd read like the business section of the newspaper every day for like when you were a kid. Yeah. And I don't know why, but I um I thought it was fascinating. I remember seeing these folks like um Bill Gates and Mark and Dreon and people like that and Steve Jobs and like these were kind of my heroes, you know? I don't know why, but I just thought it was really cool what they were building and they were
6:39changing the future and they could you could build this thing and people all over the world could use it at the same time. That just felt like so exciting to me. And I remember I learned how to build some of these early websites and I'd put something on the internet and I'd go to sleep and I'd wake up in the morning and and there was like a hundred people had look had clicked this link or looked at it and I just for some reason that gave me so much energy and excitement. I was like this is cool.
7:03Like I can build something that I helped 100 people while I was sleeping. You know in real life I'd have to go meet a hundred people in one day and do it every day over and over but this could scale this could scale impact. And so I was just tinkering early on with these um these little websites and these little businesses. Like a friend of mine in high school, we started reselling computer hardware and we built a little e-commerce site for it. Um so I didn't really know exactly at that moment that it was going to be a career of doing
7:32technology entrepreneurship, but the signs were there in hindsight looking back.
7:37And you built a tutor website, tutoring website.
7:40Yeah, that was when I was in college. Um yeah, I built a I started a tutoring company with uh one of my roommates at the time. And yeah, we realized that so it started because I was a in college I was sort of trying to have like a a job to earn a little bit of extra money. And you know, you could work at like the library on campus and maybe earn like $10 an hour or something. And I realized that if I was if I was to tutor high school kids in the area around the university, I could make like $60 an hour instead [snorts] of 10. I mean, it
8:09was 6x. So I started off tutoring high school kids in the area and then I real I guess my mind went back to this kind of scalability thing. How do I scale the impact? So I realized at a certain point okay instead of me doing the tutoring why don't I build a website to help match high school students and their parents with tutors and started just at the university I was at Rice University.
8:29Eventually it scaled to a bunch of other universities and so eventually we had you know thousands of tutors helping high school kids and we were trying to make a take a small cut. It was an interesting business in the sense that um I had trouble scaling it beyond that and so I would say it was like a base hit but it was not it was not like scaling and becoming really successful and at some point I had to learn to how to go build a more successful startup and start entrepreneurship is tough because you always have these moments where it's like okay I've been working
8:58for years on this thing is it is it one or two more fixes away from really taking off in viral growth or is it never going to do that and the difficult thing is you you don't No, there's no one can really tell you. And so, you have to know when to when to double down and like when when to quit.
9:14And um eventually I realized, okay, I don't think I was going to find a way to scale it. I uh I put the project pretty much on autopilot and I decided to go take a job at this was eventually at Airbnb where I did that was a fast growing startup and I got to learn a little bit of what a fast growing startup in Silicon Valley actually looked like. So, you know, um, again, in hindsight, I can paint paint all these pieces and point to how they have a through line, but at the time, I really felt lost. I felt like, oh, my my
9:43startup is a failure. You know, I really didn't know um what I was doing. So, it only makes sense in hindsight.
9:48And you went to Argentina when you felt lost.
9:51I did. I took a kind of a gap year you could say or just um yeah I went to go I wanted to sort of travel abroad and experience a b a bunch of different cities and I did fly down to Argentina and lived there for about a year. I mean so again I would this would not have made sense to me at the time but in hindsight why Argentina?
10:10Well I had been to Europe I had been to Asia um my plan was actually to go to Buenosarus and then spend like a month in each major country in South America just because I hadn't really been there.
10:20But once I had set up things in in Buenosaurus and had a bit of a home base, I was like, I don't know, it's going to be a pain to move and try to set that all up again and find another, you know, condo or apartment or something. So, I just stayed there. I did I did a couple trips to other um places, but mostly stayed in Argentina.
10:38And again, in hindsight, 2020, I I I saw a country that had gone through hyperinflation.
10:44That later helped me understand the power of Bitcoin. Um I saw some of the challenges that people had of like moving money cross border. So these were all things like pieces of the puzzle if you will. And I I ended up reading a lot of books when I was living in Argentina too about um you know some Einbrand and some Milton Friedman and sort of like libertarian economics and these things all primed me for when I later read the Bitcoin white paper in December of 2010.
11:11Let's fast forward Coinbase. Before Coinbase, it was BitBank.
11:19Why did that not work out?
11:20Well, it's a funny story. So, yeah, I always liked these names for companies that alliterate and have a repeating consonant sound like PayPal or CocaCola, you know, they they seem to stick in people's minds and they're very memorable. So when I was first brainstorming the name and I came up with this site Bitbank the double you know and I applied to Y cominator uh early on when I had this prototype I had built nights and weekends while I was working at Airbnb. It would eventually become Coinbase, but at the time, Bitbank. So, I applied to Y Cominator
11:49and I got accepted finally and one of the first things that the lawyer had on they have on staff. They said, "All right, about the name, it's actually illegal to have the word bank in your name if you're not don't have a bank license." And so, you're going to have to pick a new name. And I was like, "Darn, I really I really liked that one." Um, but I I ended up doing a quick search and I was the criteria that I had for the name were ideally it would it would have a alliteration sound, but that wasn't a requirement. It was one of
12:16the um the other ones were can you say the name in a loud bar and the person can actually hear it and know how to spell it.
12:24Oh, because imagine how annoying it'd be like if you start a company and for the rest of your life, you know, you're people are like, "What what is that called?" And you're like blah blah blah. And they're like, "How do you spell that?" you know, so it can be something that's not really ambiguous how to spell it. You can hear it in a loud bar and spell it. Um, something that had like eight letters or less. It had a positive connotation. It hinted at what the thing actually did, but, you know, didn't have to be explicit. So, I did a search of these different domain names and
12:52um, Coinbase.com was available for $1,700.
12:59It had, so it was a reasonably priced. I remember thinking, uh, I'm not sure I love it. Uh, because once you once you have a name for a company like like BitBank or something, it sticks in your mind and you're like you begin to feel resonance with it. So any other name that you see, it's like h I don't know, it's not that good. So I eventually I just I was like, all right, temporarily I'll pick Coinbase and I'll I'll choose a better one later just because I have to keep making forward progress. So here we are 14 years later.
13:26It's and then now I like it.
13:31It it sort of goes to say I think the first time you hear any name, it doesn't mean anything to you. So, a lot of times when people are thinking of naming a company or a product, they're like they're comparing it to something they like Google or something they know really well. Um, but you have to put yourself in the mindset of seeing Google for the first time without knowing what it was. The word, if you think about it, Google is actually a bad name for a company because it sounds um first of all, what is goo is like slime or
13:59something, right? And Google sounds like the word a baby would make like goooo gaga or something. It doesn't that's not a serious name for any company. It doesn't really hint at even what it does. Um and it's actually it it's actually a bad name. But the thing is once you imbue it with meaning, it it it means something else in your mind and you you actually never think about it.
14:24Like I don't the the product Slack for instance, it's a workplace productivity tool. Why the heck would you name it Slack? It sounds like Slack, you're Slacker, you're not working. It's literally almost the opposite of what you want.
14:35But nobody cares. Like you you think Slack is like a different um neuron in my brain firing. It has nothing to do with the word slacker. So these names can grow on you over time as you have as you imbue them with meaning, which is really the art of marketing.
14:49Wow, beautifully said. Now after Y Combinator, you were still working for Airbnb. Is that correct?
14:57No. So that was before I got into Y Combinator, right? So you were working on Bitcoin product and working for Airbnb.
15:05Nights and weekends.
15:07You have to be care if you're ever at an employer and you're thinking about doing a startup, make sure that you don't do it on company time and don't do it on company laptop. So I'm always careful to say and I and this is true. I built it on my own computer nights and weekends. um and then applied to Y cominator and yeah they got accepted and that's when I left Airbnb.
15:23But I want to know why like what was holding you back? Why didn't you go all in?
15:29Oh, right. Until the Y cominator acceptance.
15:32I mean basically it was self-doubt, you know? I I I didn't know. I mean I I had read the Bitcoin white paper. I had gone to some meetups.
15:41I couldn't stop thinking about it. I was like this this seems really powerful.
15:45And what if this happened? What if is the government going to try to shut it down or could it get enough traction? Is it going to be for payments or trading?
15:51To me, it was like something I couldn't stop thinking about. So, I had to try doing something. But did I know if it was going to be a successful company?
15:58No. I I had no idea. I mean, I think I was in part of me was like afraid of looking stupid, right? I mean, I I actually went I remember I told several of my friends this idea in 2011 time frame and I was like, and I've been reading a lot about Bitcoin. I think it's kind of interesting and what if this could happen and this happens and some of my smartest friends were like I don't really get it. It doesn't make sense. Uh why would anybody use like a currency that's not issued by a government? That doesn't that doesn't make sense. Um so you know there's Peter
16:27Teal has this great concept of startups need to be contrarian but right. And if you're doing something that's obviously right, there's probably other people already doing it. Um you know it's like cloud computing. Yes. Okay. Amazon came up with that whatever 15 years ago. So now you can't just be contrarian for being contrarian sake either. You can do all kinds of contrarian things. Uh but it has to be contrarian and right which is the sweet spot where you're like I think this could be big and most people
16:57That is the sweet spot of maybe something you should go pursue because you could be early and right. Um and so that's exactly where I was with Bitcoin.
17:08And so I don't think by the way if I had not gotten accepted to Y cominator which g it came with a 150,000 seed check. I'm not sure if I would have had the confidence to quit my job at Airbnb cuz this is going to sound dumb too but as a young person the factor that was in my mind was I actually had to call my mom and dad and tell them I was quitting my job to go do this crazy thing that they had never heard of. My mother and father were always very supportive, but they were a
17:36little more riskaverse. And I think they would have said, "Really? You gonna quit another job to try another startup?
17:41Like, don't you want some more job security and maybe try to save some money for the future and buy a home someday and have children or something like that?"
17:49So, I remember um getting that Y cominator check and Paul Graham was somebody who I really looked up to and he was willing to take a bet on me and say, "Maybe you're not crazy. Maybe there's something here. I'll give you $150,000 to check it out. And so I called my parents and I said, "I'm quitting my job, but this really cool guy, Paul Graham, gave me a check for $150,000."
18:10And I don't know why, but that was enough to get me to go take the leap.
18:13It's important that someone believes in you.
18:16It is. And I think a lot of people, if you ask them, "What's the most important impactful thing someone's ever done for you?" It's somebody who took a bet on them when they maybe saw something in them they didn't even see in themselves. And that's a powerful moment if you can try to recreate it for the next generation.
18:34I saw that you were overwhelmed by support tickets once and you were crawling on the floor crying. I'm not sure if it's true. When was the last time you cried like that?
18:46There is some truth to that. Um I don't remember if I actually did cry or I just felt like I wanted to cry, but there there was, you know, startups have lots of ups and downs. There's some dark days. Sometimes you feel like, oh my gosh, it's going to work. like everything's happening and the other days you're like it's over like we're screwed. I can't see any way through it.
19:02So I remember there was a rough day where um we had some this was pro probably in the first couple years of Coinbase and we had some bug that emerged on the website where people's balances were showing wrong.
19:14And we started to get lots of angry customers. This was when we had maybe five employees or something. So there was like 10,000 unread support tickets, 20,000. We couldn't get through them fast enough. And mean it was spilling out onto the internet too where people on Reddit and forums and X were were saying they were saying shut down Coinbase. It's over. Give the money back. The they're all thieves. They they stole stole our money. Whatever. And I had never had the experience at that time of having thousands of people angry
19:43at you at the same time on the internet, you know, spewing like the most hateful things you could imagine. Um, and now, you know, I feel like I've developed thick skin, but at the time that was that was very stressful. And I remember somebody put my um personal cell phone on the internet because they they were like, "Well, if you're not getting a response from customer support, call the CEO. Here's his number."
20:06So, my phone just starts ringing non-stop. We're in the office. We're all sleepdeprived. It's like 2:00 in the morning. We've been working around the clock trying to fix this bug. And um I remember like I needed to get some food delivered to the office so we could all stay up that night and work. And my phone's just ringing non-stop, but the delivery guy is downstairs. So I'm like, "Oh my gosh, I'm going to have to answer my phone to to see if I get the delivery guy." And so I answer like a random call, you know, and it's like, "This is
20:36a reporter in Japan. Is this Brian Armstrong?" He's like, "No, wrong number." Like, "Okay, you know, and I after picking up a couple calls, it was like I'm the guy downstairs with your food." I was like, "Okay, cool. I'm coming [laughter] down." Um, anyway, there was moments like that where I was like, "Oh my gosh, we're failing and now like everyone's mad at me and why did I even do this?" And then those were the moments where I wanted to like cry on the floor. But then, you know, after a few minutes, I would pick myself up and say, "All right, what's the next step?
21:04How do we solve it?" Um, there's always something you can do to try to make forward progress. And you just have to be relentlessly resourceful and figure out some way to move the ball forward.
21:16You just said developing thick skin. Now G has passed and the banks are coming back with clarity.
21:26Now do you feel like at the time they feel like they given away a little too much. That's why they're fighting now.
21:34Yeah. So, the Genius Act did create a lot of regulatory clarity for stable coins, and it included something I think is really good for Americans, which is the ability to earn rewards on their stable coins. Why shouldn't people be able to earn more money on their money um in a free market? I do think the bank lobby in particular and the a couple of the big banks had a lot of buyer remorse about the language that got into the Clarity Act or sorry, in the Genius Act.
22:00I'm still not entirely sure why. I think it's I think it's basically a competitive pressure thing where they have large payment businesses and they thought stable coins especially if they were paying rewards to customers um you know that they would feel more comp competition from that. That to me is not a good reason to oppose legislation you know people should support a level playing field where everybody can compete. They made they made other arguments about community banks about um how these companies paying rewards
22:30should have a bank license which doesn't make any sense because you know fractional reserve et sounds like you've heard it all.
22:37So I think at the end of the day it was basically an anti-competitive thing that they were doing.
22:42Um but going forward now to clarity they've made an effort to try to put that in a better place for them. we've pushed back and tried to defend our customers rights. The Senate ultimately did a good job of brokering an agreement there and it landed in a place where in at least in the the draft of clarity that we've seen that's going to come up for a vote I think next week in the Senate um the ability to pay rewards on stable coins um is preserved. You can't pay them on idle balances, but as long as the customer has some sort of
23:12activity like a trade or a payment um in a relatively short period of time, which they'll determine later, then you can still pay rewards. And so that was the compromise. Some of the banks still hate it and are trying to kill it. Other banks have come out and endorsed it. Um like BNY Melon and Goldman Sachs and Fidelity. So I think there's enough momentum. There's also a bunch of reports have come out that have showed that the community banks aren't going to be affected by this. Their deposits have grown along with stable coin growth. So
23:41I think there's a good chance we can get something over the line. And if not, the regulators have said they're going to publish rulem to create the clarity.
23:48Anyway, would you make a prediction what's going to happen next week?
23:51I mean, I'm always cautiously optimistic on this. I think the consensus view is that it's less likely to happen. I'm on I actually would take the other side. I think it's more likely to happen, but in politics, nothing is guaranteed. And um you know, there could be something next week that breaks out that has nothing to do with crypto or the bill at all that just derails something. But I'm always an optimist and we'll just we'll keep showing up and defending our customers rights uh to get regulatory clarity in various places around the world and some will go faster and some will go slower.
24:18Let's play devil's advocate. Let's say the fund actually goes from uh fractional reserve to fully backstable coin.
24:27And it feels like a safer system, right?
24:32But where does the credit come from now?
24:34Well, first I like that you said moving to a safer system because I think actually a lot of people don't understand. They just think, "Oh, bank must be safe because it's regulated."
24:42The reason they're so heavily regulated is it's fractional reserve. They don't have all the money there. Yeah. As you pointed out, a regulated stable coin under Genius is required to have a 100% reserve in short-term US treasuries like less than 90 days, which are the kind of the less the lowest risk asset you can imagine.
24:59So, long way saying I do think stable coins are more safe. Now, I don't think that that means there's going to be um an evaporation of bank deposits. I think the banks have a big role to play in this. I think stable coins are going to be used for payments, for things online.
25:15Um I think the banks are also going to keep growing and do what they do with bank deposits. But just to push on this a little bit, um I think having credit available in the market is important. Obviously, we need ability for people to borrow to go build things. I don't see why uh that customers need to have their funds lent out without their permission or knowledge. And this is kind of the bank business model, right? Many of our customers, for instance, on Coinbase,
25:43they choose to put their funds into lending products to earn yield.
25:48They can do it with DeFi. They can do it in traditional finance methods. I think that there would be a market clearing price of um how many people want to earn this amount of yield and how much of their deposits they they put they opt into put lending it out. I don't think people should have banks should be lending out people's deposits without their permission. So that's like this weird historical artifact that happened a long time ago. Um, and they said, "All right, we're going to allow you to lend it out with their without their
26:16permission and maybe but there could be bank runs periodically or these things might fail, but in exchange we're going to give you this high high level of regulation." I think it created some dangerous outcomes, unintended consequences, somebody might say, in the sense that banks have become so heavily regulated, they're like quasi government entities in some cases. In some countries, they're literally governmentowned. In America, I'd say they're like quasi government entities.
26:42And there's they become imshed with government because it's the bar the bar of regulation is so high. Then the other thing that happens is innovation slows down, right? If your if your primary person you're trying to satisfy is your regulator and put the customer second um because you know it's it's almost like an oligopoly like of there's only a few people who can sustain this such high level of regulation then your first priority is to your regulator. Your second is to your customer and that's
27:11why most customers are dissatisfied with the current financial system.
27:16Now you're talking about regulators.
27:19You are going to Washington quite often these days. What is it about Washington that surprised you the most?
27:25Well, wow. Lots of things. I mean, um, I think when I first started going to to Washington, I was really just trying to be like an educational resource and crypto was a new technology. To me, it was clear like the we needed legislation to pass and I assumed that if I could just be a helpful resource when they needed some information that would all happen.
27:50Turned out that was not the case. um very little is going to get done actually um in DC without concerted effort and a large constituency and you have to make it a priority and it's not their fault. It's just there's a lot of things going on in the world. There's there's wars, there's trade debates happening, there's um AI data centers or whatever the flavor of the day is that people get excited about.
28:17And so they they're overwhelmed with priorities. There's people coming in and out of their office all the time trying to convince them that something should be done. And so they're not going to do it unless there are real um upsides or downsides in terms of the next election.
28:34Is there a true a real political constituency behind it? And so anyway, to make a long story short, I think we had to get uh organized as a crypto industry. That meant organizing a stand with stand with crypto um and funding that to help organize a grassroots movement with millions of voters who wanted to elect pro- crypto candidates.
28:53It meant for better or worse money is a factor in American elections with super PACs and hard money donations.
29:02It meant doing more of that. It meant uh writing research papers and uh sort of the supply chain of uh research reports and they go through think tanks and judges and everything. And so we had to build a real political operation along with many other companies in the space to help stand up for our customers rights. I believe that we have that in place now and it's been a major benefit uh to getting some some rules passed here hopefully.
29:26And you're doing a great job. So before we wrap up, one last question. When you were younger, you said you wanted 100k passive income and that is, you know, financial freedom for you and now look at what you've achieved. you know, Coinbase has mega, you know, market cap and you're obviously very, very successful. Now, looking back, what would surprise the 20-year-old Brian if you could meet him?
29:52Yeah. Well, in my mind at that time, work was an obligation, and I felt like with financial freedom, um, that it would allow me to then choose what I wanted to do every day. The interesting thing about achieving some level of financial success and not needing to work is that it turns out it's quite boring and unfulfilling to not work. Uh you know, you don't necessarily want to have to do a job that you don't like. Um but once you feel like you can choose a
30:21job, and you know, you can actually do that almost at any stage. I actually recommend people do it sooner. Like if there's a job that pays 40% less, but it's actually a bunch of really smart people in a field that you are really passionate about, you know, look, it's easy for me to say this here, but even when I didn't have any money, I would say take take the job that you're actually passionate about with smart people. You're going to learn, you're going to grow, you're probably going to make more money also, by the way, just because you're it's if you're passionate about it, you'll be better at it. You can become the top 1% in your field. Um,
30:51but yeah, I think what I would that's the biggest thing I I learned is, you know, if you if you reach a point where you you don't have to work, you almost have like an obligation to society to try to keep giving back and you'll feel a sense of fulfillment if you keep working on something you believe in that you think will help the world. So, that's what I'm trying to do with Coinbase. That's what I'm trying to do with other companies I've incubated and started and invested in. And I hope to keep doing that for as long as I can.
31:17That was beautiful. Thank you, Brian, for having me in your beautiful office.
