Brian Armstrong

I wear the same thing to work every day, unless I'm at Davos or the East Coast, I wear a suit.

It's like anybody evolves.

I was a software engineer early in my career.

Kind of shy and introverted, to be honest.

And I had never managed anybody before starting Coinbase.

And then, you know, but you start off and you've got three people and 10 people and 25 people.

And there were periods where we went through hyper growth, where I felt like I was in way over my head, you know, and I had a great board around me.

I hired some great executives.

I had some good executive coaches.

you know, but building a company is stressful.

We now have about 5,000 people.

I certainly, I learned from a lot of the great people that were around me and the board and the executives that I hired.

I guess there were certain moments as well where I felt like I had to send something was the right thing to do, but I knew it would be controversial.

And that's actually where I think I grew the most as a leader.

So

A couple examples of that where we put out this Mission First blog post back in the height of that activist area, and we said that we're not gonna do political activism inside the workplace, we're gonna focus on our mission, which sounds kind of obvious now, but at the time that was incredibly controversial.

When the SEC unlawfully, in our view, came out and tried to kill the crypto industry, we sued them.

A lot of people told me, oh my gosh, do not sue your federal regulator.

That's a terrible idea as a public company.

But I knew that the alternative was it would essentially have killed the industry in America, and I couldn't allow that.