Degen

We have an exciting Farcaster AMA from @barmstrong, cofounder and CEO of Coinbase, which starts in ~1 hour at 10am PT / 1pm ET.

Reply with your questions below!

A sufficiently decentralized social network. farcaster.xyz

can you share a personal or business story that has shaped you, but hasn't been publicly shared before?

Worth mentioning: I'm glad I got that experience at that age! Invaluable really - and well worth the cost of tuition.

Sure - when I was in high school I started a small business with a friend reselling computer hardware. We were just learning how everything worked.

Two things I learned from this that stuck with me.

First, we had our PayPal account shut down, and I realized the pain customers feel on the other end of a regulated financial service business, that is just trying to meet its obligations. AML rules can really harm customer NPS scores, as companies try to make regulators happy. In some ways Coinbase has struggled with this like any other financial service business. It also made me more bullish on self-custodial wallets.

Second, the person I started the business with ended up stealing about $3,000 from the company and later went to jail for fraud. It taught me to be less naive about other people, and that there are people with different values in the world (I was quite sheltered as a kid).