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1 Year of Coinbase as a mission focused company

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Re: 1 Year of Coinbase as a mission focused company

#221

Post by danans »

afavour wrote: post #114
fleddr wrote: post #71

Just want to say how ridiculous this is from a European perspective. I know nothing better than for any company to be mission focused. You go to work to do work. And you do so with a degree of neutrality, as you can't pick your colleagues, yet still need to cooperate with them. This doesn't mean you can't say anything at all, it means you shouldn't be overly divisive or confrontational. A company isn't your personal…

As a European living and working in the US: your comparison is very shortsighted. European countries literally have no legal concept of at-will employment. They have strong social nets that make quitting your job much easier, and more prevalent unions that fight to improve working conditions (all of these things are, gasp, political! incidentally) By comparison employment in the US is messed up enough that if you lea…

I was going to post this, but couldn't have said it better.

The stakes of a job are quite a bit higher in the US, and it goes beyond healthcare.

The quality of a great many social foods in the US, from primary schooling to transit access and many others, are governed by your job. The social safety nets that exist kick in only at the extremes, of destitution (Medicaid) or age (Medicare).

Re: 1 Year of Coinbase as a mission focused company

#222

Post by woodruffw »

fleddr wrote: post #195
ABeeSea wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I doubt quoting MLK will change your mind, but considering what the Black community in America went through for 100’s of years; it’s worth consideration… >Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter. >Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity. >The hottest place in Hell is reserved for those who remain neutral in times of great moral conflic…

Change my mind about what? I was merely explaining how you can't draw strong conclusions based on silence. But I do love MLK quotes: "I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character."

It occurs to me that the content of one's character includes one's propensity for not being silent!

Re: 1 Year of Coinbase as a mission focused company

#223

Post by metalliqaz »

randomhodler84 wrote: post #15
teg4n_ wrote: post #5

This man spends way too much time on Twitter and not enough time learning the rules and regulations of the industry the company he leads participates in.

The mission is off track. He should stop listing garbage and stick to Bitcoin. Crap like that shiba inu token are absolute scams, like most EVM tokens. They do nothing, add nothing, and trading them on chain just enriches the miners, or off chain, the exchange. Say what you like about dogecoin, at least it’s a long standing L1 blockchain with developers and history/transactions.

They are in on it. Listing it on the exchange automatically causes a surge in value, what wouldn't you know it, the exchange had just bought a whole lot of coins in preparation.

Re: 1 Year of Coinbase as a mission focused company

#224

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

afavour wrote: post #160
fleddr wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think we're mixing up different political topics here. The one I think you're talking about is the US workers' struggle to defend or increase basic worker rights. Which indeed is a political struggle of workers versus management. If I'm not mistaken, the Coinbase case is about social justice types of topics like feminism, BLM, trans rights, colonialism, the like.

My point is that positions like Brian's require there to be a clear and bright line between "political" and "not political". I think it's at least slightly easier to draw that line in European workplaces where the nature of employment is not as politically fraught. Just to take two of your examples: feminism and trans rights. Both have healthcare implications. Your employer controls your healthcare. Should the health…

If Coinbase employees didn't feel they can weigh in on what their health insurance should cover, I would certainly agree that's a problem, but I'd be very surprised if that's the case. Armstrong's announcement acknowledged that there will be some cases where political engagement is inevitable because it intersects with the company's business. Remember that this position came in direct response to an incident where Coinbase employees demanded that the company publicly endorse a specific political slogan on the topic of police brutality - regardless of how blurry the line is in general, I hope we can agree that Coinbase's business doesn't have much to do with the police.

Re: 1 Year of Coinbase as a mission focused company

#225

Post by adamgordonbell »

motohagiography wrote: post #196
adamgordonbell wrote: post #55

Brian Armstrong was on Tyler Cowen and Tyler asked him if bitcoin was a zero sum game, in a round about way: COWEN: I’ve seen estimates that about 20 percent of bitcoin has been lost, or people don’t have their passwords, or it’s somehow abandoned or whatever. Let’s say that 20 percent were found. Those people would be better off, right? They’d have more wealth. Who is then worse off? ARMSTRONG: Yes, I suppose you ha…

Not a bitcoin fan, but this question of eating it for lunch or backing it with apples misunderstands that the fundamental liquidity backstop of bitcoin is risk. So long as you can take it to a casino (real or notional) and bet it, it has value. For it to go to zero, it would mean no two people could make a bet where one benefits from the result. Even random shitcoins have a non-zero value so long as there are partici…

Interesting! But isn't betting is a zero sum game? Betting on apples means some lose and some win, but the world is not better off as a result, because they cancel out.

Or that is my understanding.

Re: 1 Year of Coinbase as a mission focused company

#226

Post by krrrh »

tootie wrote: post #62

This seems like a gross abuse of the phrase "mission focused" to mean "operating for profit with total blinders on to the wider world". With a very appropriate photo of the 90s Bulls being a group of self-serving egomaniacs who put winning above everything else. My current employer (a non-profit) uses the term "mission focused" to mean "we are serving the public good even when it isn't profitable and acknowledging ou…

He defined mission-focused in the original memo pretty clearly and succinctly.

> What is the scope of our mission?

> Coinbase’s mission is to create an open financial system for the world. This means we want to use cryptocurrency to bring economic freedom to people all over the world. This is difficult and important work, and every employee at Coinbase signed up because they are excited about this mission.

It's not operating with total blinders on the wider world, becoming profitable as a startup often requires having a vision of positively changing the world. Armstrong wants people who care about the mission quoted above, period. There are people who are passionately committed to this, yet have totally different opinions on abortion, marginal tax rates, racial politics, bail reform. There's no reason to think you can predict any of these for an individual based on adherence to the mission statement.

Achieving change on the one thing that matters to everyone also requires that you have viewpoint diversity on the things that don't, because your current and potential customer base sure does. To the extent that mission creep enforces conformity across a range of issues, you narrow the range of people who would be comfortable working at your company to an increasingly small pool, and you limit access to the sort of insights that lead to a better product.

The alternative is to have separate pillow companies for conservatives and liberals, which is ridiculous.

Re: 1 Year of Coinbase as a mission focused company

#227

Post by slownews45 »

sagichmal wrote: post #148
jdhn wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to be mean, but I'd say that Brian Armstrong took the actions he did to weed out people like you from working at Coinbase.

"People like [the OP]" are in my experience consistently better at what they do than the sort of folks which Coinbase is now apparently soliciting.

The folks pulling the late nights on projects and delivering great results - normally the issue is to get them to stop talking about work all the time (happy hour?!) - not to get them to start talking about a social justice issue around microaggressions or whatever!

Re: 1 Year of Coinbase as a mission focused company

#228

Post by fleddr »

b9a2cab5 wrote: post #211
femiagbabiaka wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I work in a tech hub in Europe that has 80 nationalities, people from all walks of life. Any ethnicity, sex, gender, sexuality, religion and political conviction you can think of and we all get along just fine with zero tensions. I’m sure this statement is not true, (racism and sexism don’t exist in Europe now?) but even supposing it is, there are very few companies in the U.S. that are this diverse. And the state…

Sure there are. Have you walked into any FAANG office? There are a huge variety of West/East European nationalities and East/Southeast Asians. That's representative of over half the world's population right there. You can probably find an engineer from every single one of the ex-Soviet countries in an NYC Google office. I suppose by diversity you mean the right kind of diversity then?

"Diversity" can be so confusing and misunderstood.

The example I gave, extreme diversity, is not the standard in my country, this tech hub is the exception. I've also worked in teams consisting of only white men.

The inconvenient reality is that I couldn't detect a meaningful difference in the quality or quantity of output in either team. As said, I did enjoy the increased diversity from a personal perspective, so there's that.

The reason for the roughly equal output is that the team of white men was also diverse. Pointing at a group of people with the same skin and concluding they're all the same is ignorant. It's factually untrue. Likewise, assuming a team is diverse/better due to them having a mix of ethnicities or other aspects, may also not be the case.

Don't get me wrong, there are cases where it matters, but also cases where it doesn't.

Re: 1 Year of Coinbase as a mission focused company

#229

Post by fleddr »

runako wrote: post #216
KKKKkkkk1 wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Companies with great policies can sometimes retain employees on that basis alone! So I recently quit a FAANG and they sent me a COBRA notice with the cost of their insurance benefit. You can get great FAANG insurance for about $10k a year, which is peanuts for a Silicon Valley engineer. We need to dispel the myth that Silicon Valley engineers are working for health insurance.

We need to dispel the myth that everyone that works at a Silicon Valley company is an engineer. Coinbase in particular will have legions of support people (who do you think answers the phone/customer emails?). I would bet that $10k (or maybe $15k for a family) is a meaningful fraction of the annual compensation for many roles at Coinbase.

"who do you think answers the phone/customer emails?"

In my experience, nobody at all.

Sorry, it's a common crypto joke.

Re: 1 Year of Coinbase as a mission focused company

#230

Post by krrrh »

lettergram wrote: post #49

My favorite is the recruiting page for coinbase. Which imo is overtly political https://www.coinbase.com/careers

I don't see any political statements on that page that aren't aligned with creating an "open financial system for the world & increasing economic freedom". The point isn't to not be political, it's about not being political about stuff that isn't related to the mission.
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