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Coinbase lays off around 1,100 employees

coindesk.com

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Re: Coinbase lays off around 1,100 employees

#581

Post by fleddr »

kingboss wrote: post #152

Wasn't this guy one of Paul Graham's darlings? Weren't the "geniuses" at YCombinator invested in this pile of trash? I would really like one of those "insightful" posts from pg telling us how to pick winners right about now.

You confuse personal opinions about crypto with business success.

Coinbase is a massive success. It has a 100 million users and is the best known crypto exchange for retail. They did pick the winner.

This layoff creates a lot of emotional attention but doesn't mean that much in business terms. They were overhiring anyway and all of tech is massively down. It's a small undoing of growing too fast.

Re: Coinbase lays off around 1,100 employees

#582

Post by rgifford »

Go back and read the HN thread from the Coinbase DPO [1]. Their valuation was insane then, before the war in Ukraine, inflation, or Omicron. The top comments on that thread shock me. Even at that time I expected every other comment to be about how overvalued they were, but it just wasn't the case.

Wonder if people could've been made to see this then. I went full on Chicken Little [2] and mostly just got treated like I was yelling at children to get off my lawn.

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26808275

2. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26808275&p=2#26812175

Re: Coinbase lays off around 1,100 employees

#583

Post by nickjj »

arrosenberg wrote: post #362
nickjj wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't need to be. For example I do personal customer support for ~40,000 folks who take one of my video courses (programming and tech related). I often write personalized multi-sentence responses to their issues and follow up to reply back to them as many times as needed to get it fixed within minutes or hours of a request coming in. I think the big difference there is it's my business. The best possible custome…

The big difference is that you aren't involved with peoples' finances. There is a whole other level beyond the crazy you attract in services and retail.

That's true, but upset developers are up on the list of "how can I word this to be the most passive / aggressive as humanly possible".

To be fair I think customer support in general is a hostile environment for the receiver. Everyone coming at you is usually dealing with an unexpected issue in some way that's preventing them from being able to do what they wanted to do. There's been a huge range of things I've seen. Everything from super nice folks including huge amounts of details and are calm to nothing more than "it's not working" and in 1 case a death threat because Docker wouldn't run on his Windows box. I don't think it was a serious threat (I'm still alive), but he wasn't trying to be funny. He was really upset.

I don't let those things phase me. I help everyone equally regardless of how they treat me. From doing this for 5+ years I've learned that people act way differently initially when unexpected things happen but more often than not they calm down and apologize afterwards.

Re: Coinbase lays off around 1,100 employees

#584

Post by alx__ »

Johnny555 wrote: post #45
sillysaurusx wrote: post #15

I think if employees feel slighted by being fired, they're fooling themselves. The best mindset is that you could be gone tomorrow. It gives you clarity and purpose. It also happens to be the truth. Coinbase was also extremely generous with severance. 12 weeks plus two for every one year at the company, I think. I've had the experience of being let go without notice and without severance. Devs seem a little more griz…

People keep pointing to Armstrong's $110M house like it's some sort of injustice. If you think billionaires should exist at all, then that's one of the least-bad injustices imaginable Ok, I'll admit it, billionaires should not exist at all, there should be a heavy wealth tax that makes it hard to become a billionaire. Will a CEO work less hard if he (and his peers) can only ever gain $100M in net worth before a wealt…

Christ on a skateboard!? All the temporarily displaced billionaires in this thread are something else.

If you require more than 100M in net worth to be "motivated" to work. There's a larger problem with you. Being a CEO/leader doesn't require some skill set that's given to you from some mythical watery being just because you're special.

Re: Coinbase lays off around 1,100 employees

#585

Post by cwkoss »

anonporridge wrote: post #579
Johnny555 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People keep pointing to Armstrong's $110M house like it's some sort of injustice. If you think billionaires should exist at all, then that's one of the least-bad injustices imaginable Ok, I'll admit it, billionaires should not exist at all, there should be a heavy wealth tax that makes it hard to become a billionaire. Will a CEO work less hard if he (and his peers) can only ever gain $100M in net worth before a wealt…

This means that if your business grows to a multi billion dollar valuation, you are reward for your success by immediately losing controlling share of your business. This might mean that motivated found might work less hard to make their businesses as competitive and big as possible, and could slow down the pace of innovation.

The world would be a better place with fewer monolithic walled gardens. It would encourage CEOs to build $999M businesses that interoperate with other businesses on the free market rather than acting like a cartel controlled within a single organization.

Re: Coinbase lays off around 1,100 employees

#586

Post by anony23 »

rnxrx wrote: post #408
ipnon wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Billionaires are highly correlated with millionaires, which don't seem to be beyond the pale for critics of wealth inequality. Countries with billionaires rank much higher on quality of life than those without. It hurts to see Bezos and Musk in yachts but the side effect of their wealth is companies like Amazon and Tesla that have a net positive effect on society in terms of products and employment.

Do countries with more billionaires inherently rank higher in terms of quality of life, or do billionaires tend to live in places that already have higher quality of life (...particularly for the wealthy)?

Or are the two things the same?

Re: Coinbase lays off around 1,100 employees

#587

Post by tshaddox »

jerry1979 wrote: post #278
Johnny555 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People keep pointing to Armstrong's $110M house like it's some sort of injustice. If you think billionaires should exist at all, then that's one of the least-bad injustices imaginable Ok, I'll admit it, billionaires should not exist at all, there should be a heavy wealth tax that makes it hard to become a billionaire. Will a CEO work less hard if he (and his peers) can only ever gain $100M in net worth before a wealt…

I'm not settled on this yet. I'm from the USA, and one thing that concerns me is the geopolitics of billionaires. What happens when USA taxes billionaires out of existence? Russia and China still have billionaires. Does that do something to the power relationships in the world? Is there such a thing as "our" billionaires? The other question I have has to do with feudalism. If we let "our" billionaires exist, does tha…

Would you apply that same form of argument to everything else that is illegal or strongly disincentivized? “We shouldn’t ban/disincentivize x because people will just go do x in some other country” doesn’t seem like an argument I would make for a large range of x’s.

Re: Coinbase lays off around 1,100 employees

#588

Post by boc »

sytelus wrote: post #503

I don't understand why Coinbase is feeling such a crunch. They are just middleman in buying and selling. Their advantage is supposed to be that they make money whether crypto goes up or down. How can they screw this up?

USDC.

They see something really bad on their books that's separate from their core business. Just like how Lehman Brothers was a profitable bank that got shredded by one risky trading strategy.

These stablecoins have been devoured one by one, and each time they fall more people start trying to get their money out. USDC will experience a run and it might not be survivable without liquidating user account holdings, which will be a massive extinction event for retail crypto.

Re: Coinbase lays off around 1,100 employees

#589

Post by mrzimmerman »

bsuvc wrote: post #323
hintymad wrote: post #20

Why they need these many people for an exchange is puzzling. I’m sure there are many things to do, but shouldn’t they grow their headcount organically and slowly?

> shouldn’t they grow their headcount organically and slowly? You would think so, but a lot of companies who are/were venture backed don't think this way. There is a tremendous pressure to use funding to accelerate growth, which can work fine in a good economy, but can be a disaster in a recession when no amount of capital can speed up growth.

Blitz-scaling is still the primary mindset at a lot of startups (at least where I've worked or the companies I've come into contact with). They may use some other term but the "grab market share as fast as possible and worry about profitability later" is the general strategy.

I think this leads to a lot of companies making bad calls like over hiring or building awkward products. I'm not saying blitz-scaling can't be a strategy, I just think it's treated as the only strategy that matters and people end up in hammer/nail situations.

Re: Coinbase lays off around 1,100 employees

#590

Post by jcampbell1 »

alx__ wrote: post #584
Johnny555 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People keep pointing to Armstrong's $110M house like it's some sort of injustice. If you think billionaires should exist at all, then that's one of the least-bad injustices imaginable Ok, I'll admit it, billionaires should not exist at all, there should be a heavy wealth tax that makes it hard to become a billionaire. Will a CEO work less hard if he (and his peers) can only ever gain $100M in net worth before a wealt…

Christ on a skateboard!? All the temporarily displaced billionaires in this thread are something else. If you require more than 100M in net worth to be "motivated" to work. There's a larger problem with you. Being a CEO/leader doesn't require some skill set that's given to you from some mythical watery being just because you're special.

It isn’t about the money, rather it is a public scoreboard to remind us that we must serve others and be innovative.
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