Brian Armstrong: belief

Transcript context

…It seems to me that Coinbase has had fewer regulatory issues and problems than many of its competitors. What have you done managerially to bring that about? Again, I would say that’s probably a cultural thing that came from the very early days of Coinbase, and we’ve had to reinforce it and persist at every opportunity that we’ve gotten. The thing that we did early on was that we decided we were going to be reaching out proactively to regulators, not waiting for them to come to us. When we reached out to them proactively, we tried to be an educational resource, and we tried to be basically legitimate. We’d put on a suit and tie, and we’d go in there and try to . . . It’s amazing how, basically, if somebody reads something on the internet, their default instinct is often like, “This is something bad. What are they up to?” But the minute they meet you in person, they immediately trust it more. That education-advocacy-outreach approach bought us a lot of goodwill along the way. Then that translated into a bunch of other things like we proactively went out and got licenses before it was even clear that we needed them. We were essentially pushing the industry forward and saying, “We think this should be a regulated, trusted industry.” Otherwise, we felt like cryptocurrency was always going to be in the shadows, or someone was going to try to shut it down. Now, you’ve described yourself as an introvert. Which personality traits do you have that make you so good at reaching out to regulators? That seems like a contradiction. Or is it that an introvert is better at doing that somehow?…

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