>Second, if you have no confidence in the execs or CEO of a company then why are you working at that company? Quit and find a company to work at that you believe in!
This comment is really, really tone-deaf. People can believe strongly in the vision and mission of a company while also feeling strongly that upper leadership is steering it in the wrong direction and/or making decisions that negatively impact the company's mission.
Exactly. I remember when ponytail became the CEO at Sun. Most of Sun employees loved Sun to a level that hasn't been experienced anywhere else, while hating the new CEO.
Interesting. When I learned about Ponytail (Jonathan Schwartz, possibly spelled incorrectly), I perceived him as the guy who would rescue Sun. I still remember his presentation of Looking Glass - it felt so modern. Little did I know...
> People can believe strongly in the vision and mission of a company while also feeling strongly that upper leadership is steering it in the wrong direction
Clearly that is the case here. CEO really comes off as if he’s living in a fantasy world here.
Which isn’t surprising given he started a crypto company.
It's wierd tho because it's not ENTIRELY tone-deaf. When i was reading it i would agree wholehearitly with some, and wince at others.
If he would have left it at these two points and immeditaly called a company all hands:
>First of all, if you want to do a vote of no confidence, you should do it on me and not blame the execs. Who do you think is running this company? I was a little offended not to be included :)
> Our culture is to praise in public, and criticize in private. Posting this publicly is also deeply unethical because it harms your fellow co-workers, along with shareholders and customers.
> But wait, you bluster, the custodial agreement clearly says that I am the owner, that it’s my property, that I retain title to it. Yup, but that’s not how the law actually works. Just because they wrote that doesn’t mean it’s true.
> In fact, the exchanges are lulling the consumers with language claiming that the consumer "owns" the coins, when in fact the legal treatment is quite likely to be different in bankruptcy. In bankruptcy, it is likely to be treated as a debtor-creditor relationship, not a custodial (bailment) relationship.
> Not only are the customers likely mere creditors, but they are also likely general unsecured creditors, which means they will have to wait at the back of the line for repayment with everyone else. They will share on a pro rata basis whatever assets are leftover (if any) after the secured creditors and the priority creditors (including the expenses of running the bankruptcy) get paid, and any payment might not be for quite a while. That’s not a happy to place to be. Recoveries could be pennies on the dollar.
Your citation refers to the status of customers with respect to other creditors.
It says diddly squat about shareholders, who are below creditors in the event of a bankruptcy. Because, in a corporate bankruptcy, shareholders generally lose their investment.
Absent bankruptcy, fiduciary duty to shareholders is prioritized over creditor's interests. In bankruptcy, customers will be screwed over to benefit the other creditors, not to benefit the shareholders as I mistakenly said.
Absent bankruptcy, fiduciary duty to shareholders is prioritized over creditor's interests.
No, this is still wrong. Shareholders are not prioritized over creditors, at any time. Shareholders are the least important stakeholders in a corporation, because by virtue of their limited investment, they have the least at risk.
Probably gonna get blacklisted by someone for this, but it’s astonishing to me that people can (with a straight face) say this at one moment then at another claim there’s no reason software engineers should ever unionize since they get paid well.
That argument really falls flat when you realize that this guy is the co-founder and CEO, i.e. he was already there and in charge when these people decided to join him.
If you don't like a company's leadership, obviously don't go work there. If you do, then decide you don't like them, obviously you quit. A 5-year old could understand that. Though it's beyond the anarchist collective on HN, apparently.
When you have poured your life energy out creating technology for a business you believe in and find to be a force for good, it is hard when business people come in and systematically uproot all the good. Yes, one must leave, but one leaves behind a lot of good work.
Yikes. Insulting your employees is not a good look.
> We praise in public and criticize in private
But you’re criticizing employees in public right now? As the CEO and founder I think you need to be receptive to criticism and take it on the chin. This tweet reads as if it was written in a frustrated, spontaneous episode. That’s also not a really inspiring look for outsiders or investors.
Best of luck, I’m moving over to Kraken. Treating and talking about employees like this isn’t okay.
>If you're unhappy about something, work as part of the team to raise it along with proposed solutions (it's easy to be a critic, harder to be a part of the solution).
Yet all his thread does is criticize this petition without trying to understand and work with the person who wrote it. I understand that a CEO would be very unhappy at something like this and I can't fault him for feeling that way, but he'd do well to listen to his own point in this instance - "be a part of the solution".
The petitioners publicly called for the ousting of senior executives, while airing confidential dirty laundry. The idea that this deserves to be met with a receptive and empathetic response is absurd. If you want collaboration, approach collaboratively. You might not get what you want, but at the end of the day, a company needs to be led by somebody, and I would much rather be led by a designated leader than by public pressure campaigns brought by whatever employees are most willing to escalate their grievances to the public square.
Do you have backchannel information to suggest that the collaborative approach wasn't tried first? In my experience, going public never is the first step people take.
I have no inside info about this, but it wouldn't change my opinion if there had been an internal ask first. It's a fact of life that sometimes you will lose the argument, and fail to convince others of your ideas, even when you care deeply. I have been there, and it sucks. At that point, you can chose to stay and live with it, or decide it's a dealbreaker for you and move on.
The third option -- to escalate the argument to the public square and enlist the public as allies -- is available, but think what would happen if everybody did this. In a company of thousands of people there will always be passionate disagreement. If companies tolerated this kind of public escalation, it would erode the trust that is necessary for any organization to operate. It would be its own kind of toxic culture.
It's not a political stunt. The people who haven't left clearly want to remain their for various reasons asides from the issues they expressed. It's an attempt from those employees to actually improve the company and address the issues they have.
It's a publicly traded company. The shareholders have a right to know if the company is being mismanaged, so they can take action to improve management of the company they own.
There is a middle ground between saying nothing and raising it to the general public. The public square is a terrible place to litigate what are effectively unsourced, one-sided allegations.
Brian has an exceptionally long history of holding himself to a dramatically lower standard than he holds his employees. It is hard to imagine a reason that he would change.
I get where you're coming from - this response seemed overly harsh. But I do think there's an important difference - this petition is anonymous and criticizes three people by name. Armstrong's response criticizes nobody by name (he couldn't!)
If he knew their name(s), he would have just fired them. Posting anonymously is the only real option they have if they love the company but think leadership has gone astray.
Yeah, but the employees aren’t exactly in a position of power here. He already indirectly said “it’s good I can’t name you, because you’d be fired now”.
This will probably never be read, but I'll say it anyway.
Not an employee or shareholder, but a Coinbase user here. The CEO responding to petitions like this on Twitter in a childish and heated manner is reducing my confidence in Coinbase as a company. The same might be true for other users who are watching.
You are the CEO of a public company, and will have to see many such petitions over the course of your career if things go well. Lashing out on Twitter is a shortcut to achieving much worse outcomes that will not end well.
I suggest apologizing publicly to your employees for your heated Tweets, and cite that you will definitely not use Dot Collector in the future. If it's such a non-event, why not take the win and admit that it was a bad idea? It is well-known as controversial anyway from all I have heard about it.
Also not an employee or shareholder, but a Coinbase user. I don't know that Brian's set of tweets does anything to my confidence in Coinbase as a company. These tweets are trivial.
The biggest threat to my confidence about Coinbase is the structural parts of it, the fact that they are a growing centralized for-profit company responsible for a large amount of assets.
On this trivial (to me, maybe not to Coinbase) Twitter matter: I can see how both sides would go public like this. If you are an internal employee and you think there are C-level personnel changes that should be made, the odds are definitely not in your favor to propose such a thing internally. The risk is high that there will be retribution (whether direct or indirect). Going public is a way to drive attention to the issues, and incentivize that execs act in a legal manner in their responses.
I can also see why Brian would want to address this. Employees are airing their dirty laundry publicly. Shareholders and users can see this. If all you saw was this petition, it would certainly raise a lot of questions. It needs to be addressed in the arena in which it was surfaced by leadership. Where I think Brian is going wrong is he is being 100% defensive and 0% open-minded/empathetic. What about Coinbase's environment led to employees feeling the need to go public like this? This should be a time for some introspection, to hopefully ensure this doesn't happen again.
Imagining how other founders such as Jack Dorsey or Reed Hastings would have reacted to these with tact. If the company has a transparent culture, they isn't much harm or fear for non MNPI to be discussed publicly.
it's nice to see you haven't changed in the sense that you're responding here directly and address the issue without mincing words. The content is less nice though, very misguided even. I don't have inside knowledge and can't speak for the employees but I can tell you that other shareholders also aren't happy with the way things are going and what's been said in the petition largely resonates with me.
It's not because of the downcycle, no one who's been in crypto long enough cares about that. Most long term investors don't care about the current share price either, but we're worried about the future value of the company. The out of control hiring was completely incomprehensible after you and other execs for months repeated the mantra that Coinbase is well prepared for the bear market. Spending has been out of control lately as the Q1 figures showed, especially on administration and employee stock options, wherever that money went. The company is quickly turning into another Silicon Valley bureaucratic monster, eating up funds with little real world gain in terms of productivity. (Foreign) acquisitions don't seem to be going great. And neither do you communicate any of the "challenges" to the shareholders, you seem to be treating us the same way as the employees. One day you announce the plan to hire thousands of new employees, a few weeks later that gets completely scrapped and a hiring stop put in place. This isn't good leadership and doesn't look like there is sufficient foresight.
Lastly in terms of investments, one of the great opportunities Coinbase has at the moment is investing aggressively in startups in the space, given the cash reserves. Having a chief people officer who doesn't understand crypto hire more and more people who don't know what they're doing at Coinbase isn't needed at this point, it would be better to invest in talent that does understand the space and actively builds solutions.
And while of course the leadership should lead and the employees should follow, not the other way around, it doesn't hurt to listen to them once in a while. Publicly dismissing their concerns in an arrogant and aggressive manner is not helpful!
It's not because of the downcycle, no one who's been in crypto long enough cares about that
It absolutely is and there is a lot more of this blame game to come as people’s illusions are crushed. BTW it’s not a downcycle or a season, it’s a crash and cryptocurrencies will not recover because:
Nobody is using them as currencies - the experiment has failed, instead they are vehicles for speculation
The supply of greater fools in the world population has been exhausted, and after they lose all their money they will never return
That’s not to say coinbase and Armstrong don’t deserve criticism but let’s be clear about why it is happening now - his actions haven’t changed, the context has, and a lot of people have lost money they’re never getting back invested in coinbase itself and cryptocurrencies so they are angry (esp employees who probably invest in crypto, in coinbase and depend on the company).
When crypto was rising there was a lot of back-patting about how the cryptocurrency industry was slurping up talent from other sectors.
Granted, maybe the crypto aficionados celebrating the hiring spree are different from the ones now demanding labor austerity, but it strikes me as quite the heel-turn.
“If you're unhappy about something, work as part of the team to raise it along with proposed solutions (it's easy to be a critic, harder to be a part of the solution). If you can't do that and you're going to leak/rant externally then quit. Thanks!”
The amount of blatant hypocrisy in this tweet is mindblowing. If I knew I wasn’t smart enough to run a company I’d at the very least get someone to proofread my tweets before exposing my lack of logical consistency and awareness.
This whole leak/rant is something that should have been addressed internally. Shot in the foot.
This response reminds me of a company in the cannabis software space where recently the engineers put together a letter essentially saying they were not happy with the work environment, that the company was focused on the wrong things and that the CTO was not doing a good job. It was signed by 10 out of 12 engineers I think. They got no response. 2 weeks later they had layoffs and got rid of every engineer that signed the letter. I think they have 2 engineers left. This happened a few weeks ago. This is the second time the engineers have expressed something like this, the last time, every Sr. engineer just quit in a ~6 month period (7 total I think).
Well that's a sinking ship, people seem to think replacing software developers is like hiring for a fry cook where you can get going in a day but in reality it's months to get up to speed and it a rotating door of devs makes for some really bad code.
The initial petition alleged problems at exec level. Brian's response confirmed it. And he wonders why the employees wouldn't bring this up internally..
Aside from the fact that his response is likely illegal according to California labor code, threatening to fire employee for discussing workplace conditions, it blows my mind how ignorant and illiterate he is when it comes to understanding power dynamics, and even the basic history of labor.
How do you go from being a startup founder to a public company CEO without deeply reflecting about workplaces, employee happiness, dysfunction, power dynamics and history of all of that?!
As others said this tweet feels childish for a CEO of a public company. Also, responding to it on Twitter this way can't be in the best interest of shareholders because you are making it way more heated and thus accelerating the spread of the bad look of your company.
Employees took a massive risk to organize (which you confirmed by threatening to fire them in this tweet) to try to help the company. I believe this should be rewarded, and you should apologize for creating an environment where the only workable solution for employees to make their voices heard is to stage something like this.
Or, you could hope that people will stop having emotions and acting irrationally based on those emotions. I seriously doubt that will pan out well.
> an environment where the only workable solution for employees to make their voices heard is to stage something like this
So much this. I’ve worked at a couple companies that at some point had a lot of leaks. In every case it was because employees had become disgruntled because there was no way to affect change inside the system.
> 2/ First of all, if you want to do a vote of no confidence, you should do it on me and not blame the execs. Who do you think is running this company? I was a little offended not to be included :)
My first thought after reading that - maybe your employees actually believe that their execs are the ones running the show?
Honestly surprised he even responded to it, and every single tweet is a red flag there. Not a good look, and he didn't even address the rescinded offers which I think is dragging coinbase's rep down the most.
Responses like this from C-levels in crypto make me glad I moved from the space after 4 years. Everyone is so egotistical. Blaming it on mental patterns of the employees without accepting it could be some really shitty management from your colleagues instead is toxic. Have a good hard look at the people named in this petition.
Brian, you have legitimate points. Here are my edits to your tweets to help people receive them better (i've tried to not change the message, just the tone):
2/ First of all, if you want to do a vote of no confidence, you should do it on me and not blame the execs. I was a little offended not to be included :)
3/ Second, let’s separate the problems that you perceive to stem from a few execs, and those that you believe are core to the company's mission. If you don’t like the mission, your decision is easy: you should leave. If a few unpopular execs, my decision is hard.
4/ Third, making suggestions on how to improve the company is a great idea (in fact, we expect everyone to be a part of that). But our culture is to praise in public, and criticize in private.
5/ Fourth, our culture is to retaliate against whistleblowers. Instead of negotiating with you, if you get caught you will be fired.
"""
>Brian, you have legitimate points. Here are my edits to your tweets to help people receive them better (i've tried to not change the message, just the tone):
>5/ Fourth, our culture is to retaliate against whistleblowers. Instead of negotiating with you, if you get caught you will be fired.
That's just terrible advice - whistleblower retaliation is illegal, and you're suggesting he retaliate publicly? I'd argue that your post could best be condensed to, "Speak with your legal team before you publicly respond to something like this."
You can't just leak anything you want and claim you're a whistleblower. Whistleblower protection is for leaking illegal actions, not for posting a petition that you don't like some executives.
Not a great look for the cofounder to be berating small groups of employees externally - the irony of the power dynamics at play seems to be lost.
Coinbase seems like a dumpster fire. Heed the warnings of the recent announcements that your assets can be considered the company's in bankruptcy proceedings - and move your assets into hardware wallets.
That email about bankruptcy seemed to be a call to action to move funds off platform. Not sure why it was framed that way or sent to account holders — was it supposed to be a shakedown (“support us, or else…”)? Either way, Ledger just got a new customer.
A generally apathetic and sometimes condescending attitude from the CPO, COO, and Chief People Officer
Which you replied to with a very apathetic and condescending:
Second, if you have no confidence in the execs or CEO of a company then why are you working at that company? Quit and find a company to work at that you believe in!
This is a very amateurish response, and honestly I'm expecting better from some exec of a publicly traded company. You should have used this as an opportunity to make your employees believe they made the right choice, share how Coinbase is always (supposed to be) looking for new ways to improve, and how there are more appropriate channels for this kind of feedback.
Instead you let your ego get in the way, shared some childish tweets (that you'll probably regret soon), and alienated the majority of your employees.
>Which you replied to with a very apathetic and condescending
Well, he did say he felt offended that he wasn't included in the list.
>You should have used this as an opportunity to make your employees believe they made the right choice
Brian is doing that here. Except he is appealing to the employees that aligns with him and his choice of people for exec leadership. You seem to assume that a vast majority of the employee base agrees with the petitioner, and Brian seems to assume that a vast majority agrees with his PoV.
There are a lot of people that agree with the petitioner, but employees aren’t given an open forum to talk about internal problems. If you talk about things that are wrong too much with your manager, you get marked down for not being positive. There’s no “free speech” internally and it is a pretty oppressive environment in that it doesn’t feel safe to express yourself to anyone.
Was Coinbase the company that paid-off employees to leave when it implemented the "no politics at work" policy? I had my suspicions that this would result in chilling /suppression of dissent as "politics".
Brian, I feel your urge to solve this huge issue. Though I think only Elon gets to do this (with a tweet storm) while getting away with it The mere mortals should probably solve it in meetings. Hope you can weather through this and wish you the best
Not really, you just degraded your employees who had a complaint and told them their jobs aren’t safe without assessing their concerns, you just dismissed the concerns offfhand. Kinda shitty, IMO, but I don’t have a dog in this race so my opinion is not really important. Good luck navigating the future.
This petition was created by one person (may or may not be a current employee) and posted to Blind. There were zero replies before they deleted it.
The creator of this petition then sent it to @Carnage4Life/@GergelyOrosz[1] on Twitter who perpetuated the idea that this had actually been signed by employees and was causing a rucks at Coinbase.
To me this is borderline misinformation because it is not representative of any reality.
I don’t care about the initial trigger much, mostly that the CEO’s first response to a possible employee problem was that it was dumb and to threaten his employees over it. Not a great look regardless of whether it was one employee, zero, or several hundred. Leaders should have much more compassion than this.
I guess I'm just frustrated at these "tech writers" for re-posting unverified information from Blind and then needing to walk it back later. It's unprofessional and risky.
Too bad Mr. Armstrong didn't choose to keep his mouth shut for a bit longer, to verify if the claims were from actual employees. Alternatively, he could have made a single tweet:
"I am aware of the open letter published today that was claimed to be from Coinbase empoyees. We will do our best to verify this and also respond to those employees internally to try and solve any issues they have with the direction of our company. I appreciate all feedback from Coinbase employees, positive or negative."
Sure, but not in an illegal way, I think its warranted. Its one thing to post the recall letter internally but to publicly bash your employer and call for the firing of others and expect to keep your job is insanity. They could have easily rewritten the letter to be less inflammatory, identified the problems, proposed solutions that did not target individual leaders and posted it on an internal board. We are at a strange time in industry where people don't think they will be fired for publicly torching their employer (see the recent Washington Post debacle). With that said, Brian's response was equally bad.
If your execs prevent your employees from interacting with the board of directors, their only option is to go public to get the board and investors' attention. Brian only wants this to stay internal because he can control the narrative, how people communicate about it, and what the board and investors are made aware of.
Now, I am no lawyer, but i am pretty sure that this would fall under "discussion of workplace conditions" - a type of speech in California protected by the labour code and not allowed to be retaliated against.
I'm not sure it's that clear cut, since they're singling out and attacking fellow employees in the process. Seems like the kind of complex labor case that would be heavily litigated.
I disagree with most of the comments here; this tweet chain was mostly fine. It seems like the biggest problem was not the petition, but the leak. Unnecessarily tarnishing the company reputation publicly would piss off any CEO.
If this same response were posted after an internal petition, it would have the wrong tone. Externally, I'm not going to condemn it so much.
