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Today I've made the difficult decision to reduce the size of Coinbase by ~14%

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Re: Today I've made the difficult decision to reduce the size of Coinbase by ~14%

#221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

What a sad way to think about other people

It is, but it’s the only way for a company to succeed and scale over time. A pet approach works well in the early days, but you can’t become a VC-backed success without drastically reducing bus factors throughout the company.

That could be an incentive to keep companies small, but high-scale companies do have unique benefits to society.

Re: Today I've made the difficult decision to reduce the size of Coinbase by ~14%

#222
post #74
post #51

I'll probably get some flack for this, but this is about as good of a layoff email as he could have sent. * explains the reasons (financials, AI enablement) * talks about what folks who are leaving get in detail (first) and thanks them * talks to the folks who are staying Layoffs are hard, no doubt, and I am not sure he's making the right choice. I see plenty of doubt about some of the actions in other comments that…

This email was 100% AI generated. I just edited a similar sentence from a claude code doc I'm writing - "we're not just X, we're fundamentally Y" is an obvious tell. I guess he's putting his money where his mouth is

> To get there, we are not just reducing headcount and cutting costs, we’re fundamentally changing how we operate: rebuilding Coinbase as an intelligence, with humans around the edge aligning it.

For sure this part screams LLM

Re: Today I've made the difficult decision to reduce the size of Coinbase by ~14%

#223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My company is doing this too. Our marketing team can use cursor web agents to make coding changes to the marketing website/blog/landing pages. The agents make the code change and make PRs in github where our tech team reviews it before merging. The marketing team is almost entirely non-technical.

How’s this actually going? I’m sure there are issues, but is it actually fruitful?

Contrary to sentiment in this thread, I am seeing positive effects of designers and PMs using AI. Skilled designers can now own how their components look and feel with guardrails.

Re: Today I've made the difficult decision to reduce the size of Coinbase by ~14%

#224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My company is doing this too. Our marketing team can use cursor web agents to make coding changes to the marketing website/blog/landing pages. The agents make the code change and make PRs in github where our tech team reviews it before merging. The marketing team is almost entirely non-technical.

To be fair marketing vibing content pages is different from managers vibing code that powers a trading app for example.

Yeah this sounds pretty reasonable really, like instead of using a CMS directly they’re having Claude file PRs to make the same changes. As someone who likes static sites and change control, it actually sounds like an improvement.

Re: Today I've made the difficult decision to reduce the size of Coinbase by ~14%

#225
post #66

> Crypto is also on the verge of the next wave of adoption Since roughly 2018 I reckon, at least.

This REALLY is the year of the Linux Desktop

I've been using Linux as my desktop for years - I've yet to spend any crypto...

Re: Today I've made the difficult decision to reduce the size of Coinbase by ~14%

#226
post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because real world assets are heavily regulated and regulation has costs. The competition is also stiff with decades of experience and network effects The truth is these crypto shops have a pretty poor reputation in the traditional finance industry. Nobody in trading tech goes to work for them unless they offer insane salaries, because they (we) know it's an unstable place to be.

It's going the opposite direction. Those offering real world and tradfi assets are moving into the crypto space. That is going to eat Coinbase's lunch. The worst part of using something like Coinbase is having to do yet another bank transfer, waiting for it to clear, doing KYC/AML yet again, etc etc for what most people is just to buy one or two single asset (BTC or maybe ETH probably). Instead just click buy in Robi…

That makes sense, thank you for explaining. TradFi already offer access (direct or ETFs) to major cryptos who have demonstrated some utility like BTC, ETH, XRP, SOL and a few others.

If interest in tokens and altcoins wanes, Coinbase may be in a weak position.

Re: Today I've made the difficult decision to reduce the size of Coinbase by ~14%

#227
Bitcoin is down from its highs and the big boys are in. Tether collateral is handled by Lutnick's Cantor & Fitzgerald and moved to BFF Bukele's El Salvador. Previously the combo was Deltec Bank (CIA linked) in the Caribbean.

The Tether narrative has just been broken and Iranian assets have been frozen:

https://edition.cnn.com/2026/04/24/politics/us-freezes-crypt...

This of course means that the primary use case of Bitcoin, sanctions' evasion, is no longer secure.

It becomes clearer and cleared that Lutnick and Trump are actually the deep state and the big boys mean it. Further crackdowns on China and Russia are coming and it does not look good for Bitcoin.

But by all means, cite AI nonsense as a favor to fellow founders to pump up their valuations.

Re: Today I've made the difficult decision to reduce the size of Coinbase by ~14%

#229

"Non-technical teams are now shipping production code" Boy that's scary for a company that's effectively fintech...

I respected the "No Pure Managers" part. That's similar to what happened at our org. The question remains, if there are no pure managers, then is this CSM / Sales shipping production code? If yes, then it's indeed scary... > No pure managers: Every leader at Coinbase must also be a strong and active individual contributor. Managers should be like player-coaches, getting their hands dirty alongside their teams.

Can anyone think of a single successful player-coach in the entire history of sports? Why would this be a good model?
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