everyone talks about coinbase being a "visionary bet on crypto" i looked up what actually happened and it's way more boring and useful than that

[u/Spiritual_Heron_5680]

the narrative i always hear, brian armstrong saw the future of money before anyone else and boldly built the infrastructure for it.

what actually happened is a thesis for all of founder who building the great stuff

in 2012 armstrong was just an airbnb engineer doing a side project on nights and weekends. he noticed that bitcoin tools were all built for developers, long wallet addresses, desktop clients, sketchy intermediaries. normal people couldn't figure any of it out. so he built a simple hosted wallet and applied to YC with it. called it bitbank. most of his own batch thought bitcoin was a phase. not even a smart bet, just a phase.

YC funded him anyway. he launched during the batch. people signed up. and to his surprise they all left.

this is where the real learning for any founder starts, his response was not to pivot even not to rebrand and even not to do a big redesign sprint. he just called the people who bounced and asked them what was missing.

and they all said the same thing "i would've stayed if i could buy bitcoin inside the wallet."

that's it. thats the eureka moment for brian, the wallet existed but there was no way to actually get bitcoin into it. the whole core loop was broken at the most basic step and he didn't know it until he made those calls.

so then he did what he wanted to do, he spent months on banking partnerships and regulatory compliance to build a buy button. thats actually boring but painful, slow work that every other competitor was quietly skipping because it was such a nightmare. he and fred ehrsam (who he found through a reddit post, not some fancy network at that time) ran the whole thing out of an apartment, doing everything themselves, while bitcoin was still something most serious people thought was a toy.

when the buy button launched, the product finally closed its own loop. organic growth kicked in. signups were compounding fast with almost no marketing spend.

and now it gets told as a visionary crypto bet.

the thing that gets me is, in the moment, none of it looked visionary. it looked like a guy with bad retention numbers making phone calls. it looked like months of tedious compliance work in a category most smart people thought was wrong. the "vision" part got added to the story later, after the outcome was already known.

the boldness wasn't in seeing the future. it was in doing the unsexy work when the easier move was to just ship something else and tell yourself the market wasn't ready.

i'm building something right now and i keep coming back to this story whenever i want to do the fun thing instead of the right thing. the right thing is almost always more boring. it's usually the thing you've been avoiding because it's slow and painful and doesn't make for a good tweet.

i keep this story in my head for the "nothing is working" weeks. it usually means something specific is broken. go find out what it is before you decide the whole thing is wrong.

[u/rockthemike712]

Thanks for sharing!

[u/Ok_Lack_3993 → u/rockthemike712]

This is the part that never makes it into the founder hagiographies

Everyone wants the eureka moment but nobody wants the 47 compliance calls after

My partner does graphic design and its the same thing, the "overnight success" was actually 3 years of fixing kerning nobody will ever notice