The part of the original statement that seems inconsistent to me is this. Armstrong says that one of the things that helps Coinbase achieve their mission is:
> Enable belonging for everyone: We work to create an environment where everyone is welcome and can do their best work, regardless of background, sexual orientation, race, gender, age, etc.
Great. So Coinbase believes that critical to their mission is enabling everyone to feel welcome and do their best work regardless of their background or identity. And then the very next part is:
> We focus minimally on causes not directly related to the mission [such as] policy decisions: If there is a bill introduced around crypto, we may engage here, but we normally wouldn’t engage in policy decisions around healthcare or education for example.
Ok. So to pick an obvious example, two related issues that would clearly fall into the “not directly related to the mission” bucket are gay and transgender rights. Without getting at all into the issue of where you (Dear Reader) stand in terms of these particular issues, it seems to me that by saying “we explicitly will not lobby to make sure transgender people have equal rights, because that’s outside of our mission” is at direct odds with saying “we believe a core part of our mission is making sure transgender people feel welcome and can do their best work”.
The only conclusion I can come to is that Armstrong believes that people who have to fight for their rights can “feel welcome” and “do their best work” just as easily as those who don’t have to fight those same battles — and that seems, at best, a little naive/head-in-the-sand.
Adding on to that, as many people pointed out in this thread, Coinbase does make political contributions — it’s just that their interpretation of this sentence
> If there is a bill introduced around crypto, we may engage here
Seems to be (from a cursory glance at those listed contributions) that they are willing to support any politician that promotes their stance on crypto, regardless of any other stances that politician may take on any other issue. So continuing with the example above, Coinbase may be perfectly willing to support a politician who actively opposes gay marriage, as long as that politician actively supports crypto.
They’re obviously free to do so, but it seem disingenuous to do so while at the same time claiming that one of their core values has to do with enabling everyone to feel welcome and do their best work. At a guess, they are taking an extremely narrow view of “feel welcome while sitting at their office desk” — as in, they promote respectful communication in the office — but I question how “welcome” someone can feel when they know their employer contributes money towards the campaign of a person who (for example) is actively working to remove their right to be legally married.