Aug 20, 2025 · 1 hr 17 min · 14 segments
Brian Armstrong joins John Collison to talk about what’s happening behind the scenes at Coinbase: battling North Korean hackers, war stories from early scaling, confronting people who won’t use AI to…
Brian ArmstrongGuest
John CollisonHost
I think one thing people don't realize is they think when a startup isn't working that it's bad and stressful because no one's buying your product.
But when a startup really is working, it is also bad and stressful in a way because you're being pulled along by forces.
The first version of the app, I had created this simple hot wallet that was live on the servers, right? And I remember telling people, this app is an alpha, don't store any money here, you're not willing to lose.
And the company had raised about 150K or so at that point from Y Combinator.
And so... as early users came on the site, they kept depositing more money even though despite these warnings all over the app and it was getting closer and closer to being like 150K.
And I felt like if we lost all the money, I would want to be able to pay it back or else we'd be insolvent.
versus like how much money the company had versus user deposits and you didn't want user deposits to outstrip how much money Coinbase had.
And I calculated at one point the growth of the deposits and how much money we had.
And I was like, hey, we have about eight weeks to put this onto some new system.
I had the vague sense like we need to move the money off the internet, like cold storage.
How would you architect it? I remember asking one of them like, how long do you think it'll take to build this? And he said, a team of like 10 people would take probably a couple of years to really validate it and everything.
I think one thing people don't realize is they think when a startup isn't working that it's bad and stressful because no one's buying your product.
But when a startup really is working, it is also bad and stressful in a way because you're being pulled along by forces.
The first version of the app, I had created this simple hot wallet that was live on the servers, right? And I remember telling people, this app is an alpha, don't store any money here, you're not willing to lose.
And the company had raised about 150K or so at that point from Y Combinator.
And so... as early users came on the site, they kept depositing more money even though despite these warnings all over the app and it was getting closer and closer to being like 150K.
And I felt like if we lost all the money, I would want to be able to pay it back or else we'd be insolvent.
versus like how much money the company had versus user deposits and you didn't want user deposits to outstrip how much money Coinbase had.
And I calculated at one point the growth of the deposits and how much money we had.
And I was like, hey, we have about eight weeks to put this onto some new system.
I had the vague sense like we need to move the money off the internet, like cold storage.
How would you architect it? I remember asking one of them like, how long do you think it'll take to build this? And he said, a team of like 10 people would take probably a couple of years to really validate it and everything.
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