Brian Armstrong: belief

Transcript context

…You’ve been critical of other companies for going beyond their mission statements and doing, for instance, politics. But if it is the case that other values stand above the mission statement in any case in every company, what’s wrong with that? Why can’t that be part of their meta mission statement? I think every company could do that on their own, so I don’t have any issue with other companies choosing to do that. They might actually clarify that in their mission statement, which is that their mission is to serve the ultimate human good or something more broad which could include activism or politics or something like that. In our case, my view is that the mission, which was to create an open financial system for the world — that might involve interacting with governments in the sense of if we need to go lobby for cryptocurrency policy or something like that, but it didn’t involve necessarily trying to solve every problem out there in the world. That was me basically saying it feels like some of these companies are allowing themselves to be distracted. If you try to solve every problem in the world, you’re actually going to end up solving none. There’s real value in focus and solving one hard problem. Do you think companies are letting themselves become more distracted by politics today as opposed to 30 years ago? And if so, what has changed to cause that?…

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