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A follow up to Coinbase being a mission focused company

blog.coinbase.com

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Re: A follow up to Coinbase being a mission focused company

#261

Post by SolarNet »

RIMR wrote: post #257
SolarNet wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HTTPS is political (see attorney general of united states). Do you use HTTPS on your websites? (a step against the U.S. government position) Have you turned HTTPS off in your browser? (a step towards the U.S. government position) Do you implement forward perfect secrecy for HTTPS connections? (more against U.S. government position) How do you weigh it's threat to national security against it's protection from crimina…

The DOJ just today announced that they are drafting new regulations on Cryptocurrency markets. Coinbase is intrinsically political. They're a financial institution. Their product is subject to both laws and public scrutiny.

Absolutely, which is why their apolitical stance is absurd.

Re: A follow up to Coinbase being a mission focused company

#262

Post by DoofusOfDeath »

JPKab wrote: post #178
eli wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This has been discussed extensively in the previous threads on Coinbase, but banning the discussion of certain topics in the workplace is itself a political stance. Very much so.

Is banning discussion of religion in the workplace a political/religious stance? Or is it just an attempt to be decent and get people to do the thing they were hired to do, which is to make their investors more fucking money? As a shareholder in several tech companies, I don't like the idea of people having discussions like these on my dime. How many bugs that were never fixed with Youtube Music, for example, could h…

> Is banning discussion of religion in the workplace a political/religious stance?

(Please forgive any flawed logic below - I assure you it's an oversight. I'm posting this in good faith.)

I'd say yes, but basically in the same way Coinbase's band on political speech in the office is a stance.

Consider religious people whose theology holds that they should attempt to convert everybody in their circles, even their professional circles.

It seems to me that banning that is tantamount to saying either (a) their theology is wrong, or (b) it's not wrong but the employer is resisting it regardless, or (c) the business has no place for employees holding those beliefs.

Re: A follow up to Coinbase being a mission focused company

#263

Post by femto113 »

disposekinetics wrote: post #193
yokaze wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see it the other way around. (Almost) everything is political. The mission of the company is not disjoint from the society it is embedded in. Things have become divisive by being able to ignore and blend out the opposing views. By not talking and listening to one another. This is just one more step in that direction. Funnily enough, I think it has been extrapolated by Neal Stephenson in Diamond Age. We will end up…

>(Almost) everything is political. I'm curious what your definition of political is, because my gut feeling is that (Almost) nothing is political.

Even deciding what is political or not is political. If you try to limit the definition to something putatively objective like "directly relating to the function of government agencies" a great many topics are immediately ambiguous: institutionalized racism? marriage? the environment? the economy?

Re: A follow up to Coinbase being a mission focused company

#264

Post by disposekinetics »

RIMR wrote: post #253
disposekinetics wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>(Almost) everything is political. I'm curious what your definition of political is, because my gut feeling is that (Almost) nothing is political.

This does seem to be the standard Libertarian worldview, but no matter how much you intend to ignore the world around you, it exists and you're a part of it, and you answer to your neighbors.

>you answer to your neighbors

Fundamentally, this is our disagreement.

Re: A follow up to Coinbase being a mission focused company

#265

Post by sprt »

etangent wrote: post #223
sprt wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which, as your parent seems to not realize, is also a political stance. This dichotomy is exactly what MLK refers to in the Letter from a Bermingham Jail (i.e. positive vs negative peace).

For an action to be "political" in a strong sense, its performer it needs to be consciously thinking about their political alignment. Majority of people are economically motivated and do not engage in in-depth analysis of their actions or inactions and thus describing their actions as "political" is quite tendentious.

Respectfully disagree. You're essentially arguing that they're not politically motivated in staying at/leaving their job. That's fair. Nevertheless their actions translate either support, inaction, or opposition. The implication which MLK argues is that inaction is harmful to the movement.

Re: A follow up to Coinbase being a mission focused company

#266

Post by TedShiller »

lawnchair_larry wrote: post #46

I am beyond sick of political activists in the workplace, so I hope this trend catches on.

Agreed. I think there are only two options for a company:

1) don't allow any activism in the company

2) allow ALL types of activism in the company

Right now, it seems most companies only allow liberal activism but not conservative activism. This is a recipe for problems because it's arbitrary and not democratic.

Re: A follow up to Coinbase being a mission focused company

#267

Post by tofuahdude »

ada1981 wrote: post #195

It’s unfortunate that CEOs / Founders think it’s appropriate to dictate the culture of the organization vs. learning to nurture the emergent values from within the team. It’s a sign of limited leadership capacity to attempt to install culture as a top down mandate.

Literally the job of executives is to define mission, vision, and the cultural approach to pursue that mission.

Emergent mission, vision, and culture is a recipe for bankruptcy.

Re: A follow up to Coinbase being a mission focused company

#268

Post by kmonsen »

heavyset_go wrote: post #33
potta_coffee wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not using your business as a political platform is not the same as supporting the status quo. The "if you're not with us, you're against us" stance is definitely polarizing and is not making things better.

But Coinbase is using their business as a political platform[1]. [1] https://www.fec.gov/data/receipts/individual-contributions/?...

They appear to mostly support one candidate that is very pro bitcoin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brianforde

"In recognition of his work, Brian was named a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum and one of the ten most influential people in bitcoin and blockchain"

Re: A follow up to Coinbase being a mission focused company

#269

Post by redis_mlc »

lykr0n wrote: post #214

I wanted to find an example for my response to this article, and I can't. I was looking for the sites like GitHub, Go Docs, Cloudflare, Hashicorp, and others what splashed a "#BlackLivesMatter" header on across all their sites. I remember a lot of places slapping banners or changing their headers black in support of the movement, and now I can't find any examples of that happening. They all seem to have been removed…

[dead]

Re: A follow up to Coinbase being a mission focused company

#270

Post by mrguyorama »

chrisseaton wrote: post #243
slow_donkey wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why wouldn't you be obtaining the equivalent amount of options at the next job? Let's say your vesting schedule is 4 years w/ 1 year cliff, it's only necessary to stay 1 year. Thereafter you're not 'losing' options by leaving.

You're forgetting the options gain value as the company grows (due to your own hard work which is the whole point!) You're awarded $100k but then it grows to $200k by the time you start cashing it in. When you switch company you get $100k again, not the $200k you threw away.

Do the vast majority of jobs in these companies actually give you stock options?

Most places I know of do not

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