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Coinbase cuts staff by a further 20%

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Re: Coinbase cuts staff by a further 20%

#331

Post by Nextgrid »

totetsu wrote: post #156
SilverBirch wrote: post #87

Coinbase is a weird company, because it's got such an obvious comparable: CME Group. CME Group has about 3500 employees, did 1.2bn in revenue last quarter with 680m net income. Then you have coinbase now trimmming to about the same number 3500, 590m revenue and a net income loss of 550m. That's right, as far as I can see, Coinbase loses $1 for every $1 of revenue. Firstly, I don't see how Coinbase needs as many peopl…

If any startups want to put me on payroll just to increase their headcount for the purpose of raising more funding I'll happily take the money.

Problem is that you'll have to support and maintain a brittle, over-engineered mess and then find creative ways to further over-engineer otherwise-simple solutions to create busywork for yourself and others.

Re: Coinbase cuts staff by a further 20%

#334

Post by danuker »

smt88 wrote: post #327
cableshaft wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They've already survived two crypto winters as well before this one, so they've already had experience and gotten to see what works and what doesn't, and have structured their company accordingly. I think if any crypto company deserves to survive this crypto winter, they're probably the most deserving.

I doubt their past experience applies. This is far more than a winter.

I agree, this might be a prolonged depression because the interest rates are higher.

Re: Coinbase cuts staff by a further 20%

#335

Post by cableshaft »

kkielhofner wrote: post #310
jesuscript wrote: post #8

They literally had people with 1-2 years of experience conducting interviews last I remember. They were on an unhinged hiring spree before they ipo’d, so this was coming no matter what.

I spent most of the last two years working on an NFT anti-fraud solution[0]. My two prior startups were (essentially) in telecom and healthcare. Coming from these well established, highly regulated, somewhat legacy industries to "crypto"/NFTs/web3 was a very interesting experience, to say the least. Users/potential customers for our solution ranged from creators to marketplaces to collectors/investors. Several very g…

> The anonymous/pseudo anonymous nature of the space is bizarre. I would have multiple voice-only meetings with people using aliases and avatars for all communications. To this day I only know some people as "Mango Man" or whatever. Meeting people who could just burn down an entire identity and start fresh when things go sideways is an indicator of the nature of the space.

I can't blame them. It involves money and it's a new and risky and currently unregulated space. Things go sideways unexpectedly or the SEC changes their rules suddenly (see them possibly classifying a bunch of tokens as securities when they didn't before, with all the KYC and other regulations that requires) and you run the risk of having both users that went too deep into it (like exist for damn near everything, including Pokemon cards) trying to kill you and SEC trying to put you in jail.

I've done a little code assistance on a web3 project (mostly just helping a friend who's doing the actual coding, when they have questions) and I'm doing my best not to have my name associated with it, just in case, even though I think the project is trying to make positive changes and will be one of the 'good' ones eventually.

For the longest time I avoided any jobs involving money specifically because I didn't want to risk screwing something up and causing a lot of pain or lost money for people (reason why I avoided healthcare too). And yet now I've got professional experience working for a healthcare company and as a consultant for a major financial company, so I ended up down that path anyway.

Re: Coinbase cuts staff by a further 20%

#336

Post by ycombobreaker »

spaceman_2020 wrote: post #273
roflc0ptic wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is silly hyperbole. I was paying honest attention to crypto and I was continually surprised that it didn’t crash. Eventually I gave up and stopped guessing it was going to crash. Then it did :shrug:

Bitcoin has dropped about the same amount as Netflix, Meta and Tesla (~70-74%) It has significantly outperformed VC darlings like Peloton (-93%) and WeWork (-90%). You can't tell me that WeWork stock wasn't working on the greater fool theory any more than Bitcoin's price works on finding more bagholders. It's all a grift, some worse than others.

Peloton in particular was a beneficiary of the pandemic and lockdowns. With no ill will, I'm content to see their stock price drop if it is correlated with an improvement in the general state of the world.

It's absolutely not informative to compare their returns to various crypto.

Re: Coinbase cuts staff by a further 20%

#337

Post by jasode »

tptacek wrote: post #328
jasode wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>CME isn't just "corn commodities"; Yes, I understand that and I wasn't dismissing CME as a simple platform. I used to work across the street from the CME and saw the traders walking around in their yellow jackets every day. The "corn" was only one example to tie it to a bank services scenario. >, and a minter of new derivative products like S&P futures I think Coinbase recently offered something similar: https://www…

It's not that it's dismissive (though the corn thing was a bit much) so much as that it's probably wrong. CME is mostly a tech company, and they do a lot of stuff.

>(though the corn thing was a bit much) so much as that it's probably wrong.

I was trying to convey that a farmer can't get a loan from the CME to finance his seeds/fertilizer/etc and use his corn crops as collateral. What is factually incorrect about that?

Coinbase and CME have obvious overlaps, but they also have massive financial functions where they don't. That's what the corn bank loan example was trying to highlight.

EDIT to reply: >The assertion is that Coinbase has more work to do and thus more need for headcount than CME. I dispute that.

Sorry for the misunderstanding! I never intended to convince people that Coinbase needs more employees than CME. I should have put a disclaimer in my original comment such as "Coinbase may only need 1/10th the number of CME employees but as fyi, Coinbase is not a direct comparable to CME..."

Re: Coinbase cuts staff by a further 20%

#338

Post by tptacek »

jasode wrote: post #337
tptacek wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not that it's dismissive (though the corn thing was a bit much) so much as that it's probably wrong. CME is mostly a tech company, and they do a lot of stuff.

>(though the corn thing was a bit much) so much as that it's probably wrong. I was trying to convey that a farmer can't get a loan from the CME to finance his seeds/fertilizer/etc and use his corn crops as collateral. What is factually incorrect about that? Coinbase and CME have obvious overlaps, but they also have massive financial functions where they don't. That's what the corn bank loan example was trying to high…

The assertion is that Coinbase has more work to do and thus more need for headcount than CME. I dispute that. That's all.

Re: Coinbase cuts staff by a further 20%

#339

Post by cmsj »

Alex3917 wrote: post #280
_fat_santa wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I interviewed with them last year and while I didn't get the job, looking back now I'm kind of thankful it turned out how it did. From my limited perspective interviewing there, it seems like they started branching out into all things crypto. One manager I interviewed with explained that they wanted to become the "Amazon of Crypto" where any service related to crypto such as wallets, NFT's, etc are all on Coinbase. I…

> You hire a ton of people for these projects but end up letting them all go when they realized those projects weren't going to pan out. Which is weird, because they're not especially difficult projects. OpenSea was built by like five people.

Presumably the difference is that those 5 people really wanted to build OpenSea, where Coinbase staff were just assigned to projects.

Re: Coinbase cuts staff by a further 20%

#340

Post by cableshaft »

smt88 wrote: post #327
cableshaft wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They've already survived two crypto winters as well before this one, so they've already had experience and gotten to see what works and what doesn't, and have structured their company accordingly. I think if any crypto company deserves to survive this crypto winter, they're probably the most deserving.

I doubt their past experience applies. This is far more than a winter.

I didn't literally mean that past crypto winters lasted only as long as a physical winter. Past crypto winters have lasted as much as two years. If this lasts longer than that, sure, it can be considered worse than past ones. Currently we're just barely over a year from bitcoin's all-time-high, though.

As the other comment said, we're somewhat in uncharted territory with higher interest rates, but I don't think it will insure a longer winter. It might just keep it from getting quite as high as the ATH for a while, but I think as the rate increases slow down (and especially once they start being cut again) it will start rebounding significantly.

Also if that past experience doesn't apply, then it probably doesn't apply for any other non-crypto company that was founded since 2012 (when Coinbase was founded as well). You expecting all of them to go belly up, just because they only existed in the era of low interest rates?

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