351–360 of 533 posts
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…
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>Coinbase is a weird company, because it's got such an obvious comparable: CME Group. CME Group has about 3500 employees, [...] Firstly, I don't see how Coinbase needs as many people as CME. Coinbase isn't a direct comparable to CME because CME only does the exchange function. Coinbase combines several different types of financial institutions in the crypto space: + exchange : order matching engine of buy & sell -- a…
CME isn't just "corn commodities"; they're CME, CBOT, NYMEX and COMEX, and they're a clearinghouse, they operate an electronic trading system, they're a colo provider, and a minter of new derivative products like S&P futures and SOFR. I'm sure I'm missing a bunch of other things. They probably have much more code than Coinbase. It's not all code you'd want to work on, but, from passing experience, there is a lot of i…
It's an interesting idea, but don't think you can segregate their exchange role from their authorship or standardization of financial instruments. Any exchange is either creating products to trade or licensing them. Any commodity exchange is naturally interested in setting contract standards related to delivery and quality.
They are an exchange, through and through. Everything else is a side project in support of that one role.
“ All Coinbase personnel will be given proper notice and terminated. But make no mistake. Though they're the ones leaving, it is I who must remain and bear the heavy burden of their failure.”
..."and as a result I have decided to step down and hand the company over to someone more capable of navigating today's challenges" /s I think we'd all like to imagine a world where company's are run like sea faring ships- the captain gets paid the most to be accountable for the whole operation, and when things go wrong must be the last one off the ship. To the point where any selfish behavior by the captain in an em…
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..."and as a result I have decided to step down and hand the company over to someone more capable of navigating today's challenges" /s I think we'd all like to imagine a world where company's are run like sea faring ships- the captain gets paid the most to be accountable for the whole operation, and when things go wrong must be the last one off the ship. To the point where any selfish behavior by the captain in an em…
The emergencies you're talking about in seafaring are situations where people might die. Conventions and rules appropriate for that kind of situation are very different than for lower stakes situations, and I don't think the analogy is very illuminating.
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That little experience makes it hard to judge applicant quality well and means they probably aren’t answering questions accurately. It’s a dead tell of a company which has a shortage of experienced staff and is growing too quickly — very strongly reminiscent of the dotcom bubble where people had the same “number go up!” mentality & some would openly say they were just looking busy until the IPO.
Plenty of wildly successful companies (Google, FB, etc.) have all had junior engineers interviewing people.
Note also that I would draw a distinction between 1-2 years of total experience and, say, someone transitioning from academia to industry. Someone who was, say, a successful grad student likely also accumulated a fair amount of other life experience that a 22 year old is unlikely to have.
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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.
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I think everyone was completely caught off-guard by the ferocity and pace of the crypto drawdown. Volumes have atrophied completely . It's not a cooling of retail interest vis-a-vis the stock market, but complete apathy and/or hatred. See the volume data for OpenSea as an example.
If you were caught off-guard then you've been sitting in a massive bubble. There has been open distrust and hatred of cryptocurrencies since long before NFTs were a thing. I would argue that NFTs did more to spread the word that cryptocurrencies are a farce than they did to create "value" for those behind them.
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I think everyone was completely caught off-guard by the ferocity and pace of the crypto drawdown. Volumes have atrophied completely . It's not a cooling of retail interest vis-a-vis the stock market, but complete apathy and/or hatred. See the volume data for OpenSea as an example.
If you were caught off-guard then you've been sitting in a massive bubble. There has been open distrust and hatred of cryptocurrencies since long before NFTs were a thing. I would argue that NFTs did more to spread the word that cryptocurrencies are a farce than they did to create "value" for those behind them.
In 2019, no one was saying it would crash in 2022; they were saying it would crash in 2019 or just "it will crash eventually"
In 2020, they weren't saying it would crash in 2022, they were saying it would crash in 2020 or just "it will crash eventually"
In 2021, they weren't saying it would crash in 2022, they were saying it would crash in 2021 or just "it will crash eventually"
In 2022, they said it would crash in 2022 or just "it will crash eventually", and people who didn't realize it would actually happen in 2022 were in a bubble?
It turned out that 2022 was different, but the predictions weren't any different, which means they weren't actually meaningful predictions.
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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.
I've seen teams of 10-15 people that do absolutely nothing. Have 10 meetings about specs but space them out over a year, so that by the time the next meeting happens, everyone forgets the entire context of the project... so you have to cover everything again. By the end of year, its gone absolutely no where due to 2-3 layers of bureaucracy. Coinbase _can_ hire good talent... wonder if managing it is the/a problem.
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CME isn't just "corn commodities"; they're CME, CBOT, NYMEX and COMEX, and they're a clearinghouse, they operate an electronic trading system, they're a colo provider, and a minter of new derivative products like S&P futures and SOFR. I'm sure I'm missing a bunch of other things. They probably have much more code than Coinbase. It's not all code you'd want to work on, but, from passing experience, there is a lot of i…
The "colo provider" role is just rent collection from HFT customers. It's 100% derived from their exchange business. It's an interesting idea, but don't think you can segregate their exchange role from their authorship or standardization of financial instruments. Any exchange is either creating products to trade or licensing them. Any commodity exchange is naturally interested in setting contract standards related to…