Company Profile: Coinbase
Origin Story
Coinbase is a cryptocurrency exchange platform, that was founded in 2012 by Brian Armstrong and Fred Ehrsam. Brian came up as an entrepreneur type and Fred was a professional video gamer in high school. They started Coinbase together after meeting on a crypto Reddit thread. Over the next 6 years they received around 500 mil in funding, including money from Duke University’s endowment fund.
Funding
May 7, 2013 - Series A - 6.1 mil
Dec 12, 2013 - Series B - 25 mil
Jan 13, 2015 - Series C - 75 mil
Jul 7, 2016 - Series C (not a typo, they had 2 C rounds) - 10.5 mil
Aug 10, 2017 - Series D - 108.1 mil
Oct 30, 2018 - Series E - 300 mil
Dec 21, 2018 - Secondary Market - 22 mil
Today
Coinbase went public on April 15 under COIN at $381/share. HELLO MONEY.
Details
Number of Employees 2,016 (per LinkedIn)
Employees Open to Opportunities: 12% (per LinkedIn Recruiter)
Location - Remote First Company
Compensation - Location based pay
Web Says
HRC - no rating
InHerSight - no rating
Three Interesting Things
The Email/Culture - In September 2020, Brian sent out an email to Coinbase in which he discouraged the talk of activism and politics at work and encouraged people who didn’t like this idea to take an exit package they were offering. This email made headlines across the globe.
CEO - People seem to have mixed feelings about Brian, but it’s not all bad. Brian was the first crypto executive to sign The Giving Pledge, which encourages those who are very wealthy to commit to giving back a portion of their wealth to philanthropic funds (Brian is worth over 6 billion at this point). He also co-founded Give Crypto which is a nonprofit that distributes cryptocurrency to people living in poverty.
Leadership - Although Coinbase has been around almost a decade, they have a fairly new leadership team. Since they last received funding in 2018, everyone on the team is new, except for Brian (this is also around the time when Fred left the company). I assume this was getting the right people on board to prepare to go public, but it also means that the culture over the last 3 years has likely changed a lot!
Leadership
Brian Armstrong - Co-Founder & CEO - 9 years @coinbase
Emile Choi - President & COO - 3 years @coinbase
Surojit Chatterjee - Chief Product Officer - 1 year @coinbase
Alesia Haas - Chief Financial Officer - 3 years @coinbase
L.J. Brock - Chief People Officer - 2 years @coinbase
Paul Grewal - Chief Legal Officer - <1 year @coinbase
Manish Gupta - Executive Vice President, Engineering - <1 year @coinbase
Board of Directors
Fred Ehrsam - Co-founder of Coinbase