The guest
Brian Armstrong: Co-founder and CEO of Coinbase, the crypto exchange he founded in 2012; also funder of biotech startup New Limit and scientific platform ResearchHub
What this episode covers
Tim Ferriss interviews Coinbase co-founder and CEO Brian Armstrong about the company's origin story, including the pivotal 'buy Bitcoin button' that gave them product-market fit. Armstrong reflects on his year in Buenos Aires witnessing economic decline, his thinking on the macro environment and crypto's long-term role, and the regulatory and scalability inflection points he sees ahead. He discusses his controversial decision to make Coinbase a 'mission-first' apolitical company and offer severance to dissenting employees, and how he cultivated resilience to public criticism. The conversation closes on his self-improvement habits, hiring a biology tutor, and his two new science ventures: New Limit (epigenetic cell rejuvenation for longevity) and ResearchHub (open-source-style scientific research with a reward coin).
Recommended on this episode
BookRecommended
Principles for a Changing World Order
Ray Dalio
“I thought he did a really good job... I found the book convincing... I've gifted that to a handful of people”
“Ray Dalio's recent book you know principles for a changing World Order and I thought he did a really good job of just kind of looking back at history”— Brian Armstrong
BookRecommendedISBN verified
Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman
Richard Feynman
“That's a classic on my bookshelf that I revisit pretty often”
“one of them is surely you're joking Mr Fineman that's That's a classic on my bookshelf that I revisit pretty often”— Tim Ferriss
MediaRecommended
The Top Idea in Your Mind
Paul Graham
“I have one bookmarked that I reread often... that I revisit with some regularity”
“the top idea in your mind... that's one since I have a creative project that I'm focused on at the moment that I revisit with some regularity”— Tim Ferriss
MediaRecommended
How to Make Wealth
Paul Graham
“it just really nicely explains the idea... I think that's really important for people to understand”
“there's one about how to build wealth or something it just really nicely explains the idea where people think money is zero sum”— Brian Armstrong
MediaRecommended
Haters
Paul Graham
“that's a good one to go back and read too”
“I go back and read his essay I think it's called haters whenever I'm feeling down like people are whenever I accidentally read the comments online”— Brian Armstrong
BookRecommendedISBN verified
Getting Things Done
David Allen
“I like David Allen... has a good book getting things done... I roughly follow some kind of a process like that”
“I like David Allen I think his name is has a good book getting things done right I mean I roughly follow some kind of a process like that”— Brian Armstrong
ProductRecommended
Khan Academy
“KH Academy stuff like that gets me really excited”
“if you look at education it's like KH Academy stuff like that gets me really excited it's like okay let's make a free world-class education available to everyone”— Brian Armstrong
The guest's own work
BookBy the guest
Start Breaking Free
Brian Armstrong
“So I wrote a book called start breaking free and then after I wrote this I didn't have a publisher or anything I was doing a self-publishing thing”— Brian Armstrong
MediaBy the guest
Coin (documentary)
Brian Armstrong / Coinbase
“I hope people go check out the documentary it's called coin and I partly I created it because I wanted to show people what it's like to try to create something new”— Brian Armstrong
ProductBy the guest
Coinbase
Brian Armstrong
“I had launched an early version of coinbase just on Reddit and places like that you know I'd gotten a couple hundred people to come sign up”— Brian Armstrong
ProductBy the guest
Coinbase Wallet
Coinbase
“with coinbase wallet we recently set this up where anybody can go in there and claim a free ens name you can get like tim.cb at the end”— Brian Armstrong
ProductBy the guest
Coinbase Card
Coinbase
“things like coinbase card have been really useful in terms of getting people using crypto in the real world brick and mortar or online anywhere that Visa is accepted”— Brian Armstrong
ProductBy the guest
Coinbase Earn
Coinbase
“coinbase earn is like another one that we've seen that's driven a lot of that activity so yeah peer-to-peer payments it's a bunch of things”— Brian Armstrong
ProductBy the guest
Coinbase Prime
Coinbase
“we had to launch an Institutional product and coinbase Prime and we have actually been successful at getting more and more of these large institutions to move”— Brian Armstrong
ProductBy the guest
Coinbase NFT
Coinbase
“with coinbase nft we've now launched that the very first version of it is out there which nf.coinbase.com”— Brian Armstrong
ProductBy the guest
New Limit
Brian Armstrong
“I encourage people to check it out beautiful website very nicely designed new limit.com yeah so easy to remember so I encourage people to check that out”— Brian Armstrong
Also referenced (named, not recommended)
BookReferencedISBN verified
How to Market Your Book
“I read a book called How to Market your book and you know I basically realized that I had to go make a blog or something to try to market the book”— Brian Armstrong
BookReferencedISBN verified
Free to Choose
Milton Friedman
“Milton Friedman has this book called free to choose I actually have never read the book but there was a TV series he did on PBS”— Brian Armstrong
MediaReferenced
Free to Choose (PBS TV series)
Milton Friedman
“there was a TV series he did on PBS back in the day that was also called free to choose and I thought that was kind of interesting”— Brian Armstrong
BookReferencedISBN verified
Hackers and Painters
Paul Graham
“how to make wealth from May 2004 which originally came from his book hackers and panters so I will put both of those in the show notes”— Tim Ferriss
BookReferencedISBN verified
The Coddling of the American Mind
Jonathan Haidt
“Jonathan Height's book about cing the American mind and all these things that kind of started on college campuses I had sort of loosely read a few things”— Brian Armstrong
BookReferenced
Seven Days to the Perfect Puppy
“I think it was seven days to the perfect puppy on the top yeah and then another one that it was hard to get a full read of”— Tim Ferriss
ProductReferenced
Pokémon Go
Niantic
“did you ever see like Pokémon go how people had these like AR experiences and they could kind of like geocache things and go find them”— Brian Armstrong
Big reveals from this episode
- Before adding the buy Bitcoin button, Coinbase had no traction and was flat; Armstrong got the idea from customer feedback calls where users said they signed up but had no Bitcoin and didn't come back.
- Building the simple buy button was very difficult: Armstrong had to find a bank partner, integrate with the ACH network, convince them of the anti-money-laundering policy, and source the Bitcoin; launching it was the moment they hit product-market fit and growth became 'a boulder chasing downhill.'
- Armstrong describes Coinbase becoming a 'mission-first' apolitical company after a BLM-related employee walkout; he offered a generous severance package and about 5% of the company left.
- He says the activist faction felt like 50% of the company but was actually a 'very vocal tiny percentage,' and calls the apolitical decision one of the best things he ever did for the company.
- After Coinbase's 2021 IPO created over a thousand millionaires, Armstrong used his liquidity to fund hard-science ventures, hosting dinners with biotech experts that surfaced epigenetic cell programming as a focus.
- New Limit is a longevity company aiming to radically extend human health span using epigenetic reprogramming, exposing cells to transcription factors to rejuvenate them, with machine learning to search the roughly 10^15 combinatorial possibilities.
- ResearchHub aims to make scientific research more like open-source software (GitHub-style), addressing the replication crisis and academic silos, with a ResearchCoin reward and governance token.
Worth remembering
- Armstrong's first project was a self-published book called 'Start Breaking Free' and a blog of the same name; he later concluded he should have started with the blog and packaged posts into a book.
- In Buenos Aires (around age 27-28) he observed a culture of pessimism, people kept their heads down expecting things could be taken away, which he attributes to roughly 100 years of mismanagement after Argentina was one of the world's largest economies in 1900.
- Armstrong cites Ray Dalio's 'Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order' as convincing him America is in slow (not imminent) decline.
- He recommends 'Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman,' Dalio's book, and Milton Friedman's 'Free to Choose,' and rereads Paul Graham's essays 'How to Make Wealth' (2004) and 'Haters' (Jan 2020).
- An early Bitcoin Android wallet Armstrong built nights/weekends at Airbnb ran a full Bitcoin node on the phone, taking minutes to sync; he instantly knew it was built wrong, which sparked the idea for a cloud-based company.
- Coinbase has closed institutional deals with BlackRock and the largest sovereign wealth funds; Armstrong notes about 90% of the world's wealth is locked up in institutions.
- He cites transaction throughput as a scalability bottleneck: Bitcoin ~7 tx/sec, Ethereum ~25, PayPal ~500, Visa ~4,000.
- Armstrong's motivation hack when he doesn't feel like exercising is to type 'David Goggins' into YouTube and watch a random video.
- Instead of grinding through dense biology textbooks, Armstrong hired a (typically underpaid) grad-student biology tutor he meets for an hour on Sundays.
- In the documentary 'COIN,' Armstrong appears in dinosaur onesie pajamas he wore around the house and to early Coinbase hackathons.
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