How to become a CTO by Balaji Srinivasan CTO of Coinbase

Hi, I'm Balaji Srinivasan, CTO of Coinbase. Let's break in.

Yo, yo, yo.

This is Reuben Harris. I'm here with the homies, Art and Timo Meister. And this is the Breaking Stars podcast. Timor, can you please tell the people what we're doing today?

Yes. So it's a Thursday night, and tonight's episode we're recording out of Coinbase. On the podcast, we've had a lot of guests who broken into tech. We've also brought on hiring managers and VPs of engineering. Tonight we have a very special guest who's the CTO of Coinbase. And I'm really excited to hear his story and definitely tune in. Ruben, can you please introduce the guest?

Yeah. So for those of you that have read the Breaking Stars blog post, the original one, you'll know a name. Balaji Srinivasan. And this is really a surreal moment because this is the second time I've actually seen him. First time that Arch and Timor has seen him. And for those of you that don't know, not only was he. Is he the CTO of Coinbase, but before this he was the founder of Council Earn Teleport, and he was a general partner at Andreessen. And now he's. He's doing a lot of amazing things. Today we're going to talk about a few things in addition to education and his thoughts about things in the future work. But for now, let's just say welcome biology.

Thanks, guys.

So we've. This is the second interview that we've done with somebody as senior as you. Can you explain to the people what a Chief Technology Officer does in tech?

Sure, yeah. So, you know, the CTO's role is to use technology to advance a business. And that sounds really generic, but it means you're not just, let's say, you know, the head of it. Right. The head of IT is using computers as a tool internally and, you know, making sure that people's software updates are refreshed and getting the MacBooks ordered on time and so on. That's a very important job. But the CTO's job is, okay, look at where technology is today or it's going to be tomorrow. Figure out how we can adopt it, figure out, like, what our architecture looks like, and use technology as the guiding principle of the business. And it's a particularly important role in a technology company because in many ways it defines kind of the future of the business, and it intersects with lots of other things. It intersects with business development, and it certainly intersects with comms and you do a lot of public speaking and a lot of recruiting and so on and so forth. You're basically like the senior most engineer often at a company in a sense.

Got it. And so if someone is entry level engineer and is thinking about getting up to this role, what's the typical path to get to that level? And what kind of things do you have to do and learn along the way?

Well, there's, there's two ways to do it. One is to just start your own company and call yourself cto. That's, that's what I did, starting out. Right. And, and then you have to grow into the role and build that into, you know, multi hundred person company. We sold that for a few hundred million dollars recently. So that was kind of okay, you take the title. Just like you start a company, you call yourself CEO, see if you can fill those shoes that you just made for yourself. And the second way is to, you know, work your way up within a large company, also totally legitimate, you know, kind of kind of thing. And you know, like if you look at Satya Nadella or Sundar Pichai, they started as just engineers within, you know, Microsoft and Google respectively, and work their way all, all the way up to CEO. So it's sort of similar, you know, to work your way up to cto.

So as a cto, and I'm actually also CTO of career Karma, like, how do you stay up to date with all the technologies? Because there's so many new trends. There's serverless, there's like react, the completely like new way to write front end and just kind of like, how do you stay up to date with all the technologies and decide what's the right fit for your company?

Well, that's a really good question, I think, you know, so first is to be a good cto, you actually need to enjoy technology as a hobby. Like, you know, when somebody else might go to the club, you're like, hey, let me stay home and mess around with this new, you know, piece of software or this new like 3D printer or something like that. And that can't feel like a job. It's actually just something you want to do, right? So that's kind of one aspect of it where you really need to, you know, live and breathe it 24 7. And then kind of another aspect of it is sort of the taste and when to know, hey, this is bleeding edge and it's cool to know about versus okay, this is ready to start rolling in to our products. It's actually Firm enough to base something on. Steve Jobs actually had a good one liner on this where he said that Apple invests in technologies that are in their spring, right? Not their infancy, but in their spring. So usually that means somebody else has taken some risk on the technology and now it's functional enough that you're not the very first company to ever have tried to make money with it or to do something real with it. And I think that's a good rule of thumb. You wait for somebody else to have taken the hit. So let me give you an example. Like with Rust, I'm sure there's been a lot of good programs written in Rust, but within the blockchain community, Parity, one of the major Ethereum clients, was written in Rust. And you know, while Parity has had some bugs or what have you overall, you know, like Rust has proven itself, at least within the blockchain community, because everyone's seen, okay, you built a massive project, a blockchain, which is really hard thing to build. It's like a database and a protocol and it's in this case also got a, you know, quasi little compiler in the sense of something that takes solidity and turns into something and that's, that's complicated to build. And you can build that all in Rust. Okay, someone else is taking the hit on Rust. You can do something real in it, right? And I think the third thing is to make sure that you're not, you're not just not too early and not too late, but that you're always thinking about how each of these pieces fit together, right? And it's very easy to just, you know, have shiny object syndrome where, oh, you see something in hacker news, let's put that into the, into production tomorrow, right? That's, that's like, you know, beginner CTO kind of thing, right? Where it's tempting to do that. Oh, the thing, all the engineers are talking about it and so on, but usually what you want to do is bookmark that and then like set a calendar event for yourself six months in, 12 months in, 18 months in, when people are not talking about it, you go and you assess the state of it and then you say, hey, is this, you know, trending up? Is, are there things happening that are kind of, you know, quieter but aren't in the news per se. So I set my own kind of cadence so that I'm checking in on something as opposed to it checking in on me. And often like by playing offense rather than defense, then you can really monitor technologies and kind of control you know, what things you introduce at what time.

Got it, got it. And so, given that you're in this leadership role and you've done it as a founder and you're doing it at a larger organization, something that we haven't really unpacked on the podcast is technical debt. So can you talk a little bit about technical debt and what committing to the right code base means and things like that?

Sure. So you know the concept of technical debt, it's a good phrase because basically what it means is that you are getting something done today that you're going to have to pay for tomorrow. And often what that means is, okay, we need to ship the product tomorrow or later this week. Therefore, we're going to copy paste this bit of code because it's too much work to factor it out into a proper library and make it an API call. We're just going to copy paste it. And we know that's introducing so called. And Claudette, we're going to go back in the future and have to do more work to clean it up. But it's expedient, it will get us our launch, it'll be functional, customers will be fine with it, et cetera. There's many, many different forms of technical debt. That's one of them, copy paste, but there's others like, oh, we're going to use this old MySQL database rather than migrating to Postgres, or we're going to run analytics on the prod site rather than moving to redshift or whatever. A lot of different ways that you can do something suboptimal that's expedient, that will cost you in some ways later.

Right, Got it. Got it.

So how do you manage as a cto, how do you manage technical debt and what type of principles do you try to follow to make sure your teams and people that report to you follow in regard to technical debt?

Well, one thing is it's always tempting to just stop future work and pay off technical debt. And that almost never is the right answer because maybe once in a while, but the big bang, switch over the big bang cleanup. You know, the problem with that is it's usually not something that's visible to customers, number one. And number two, it's always more complicated than you think. Right. There's a reason that those old hacks happen the way they did. So I'm a big fan of like incremental pay downs on technical debt rather than trying to just do a big bang work stoppage and pay it off.

Got it.

And As a cto, you also do a lot of hiring. When you look at candidates who are just like getting their first job out of college or they're getting like maybe they went through a non traditional path and they're kind of knocking on the door wanting to get a seat on your rocket ship, what kind of qualities or what do you look for in those candidates? And how does someone make themselves stand out?

That's a great question. So personally, at least I always try to and I advise other entrepreneurs and you know, folks I invest in and so on. I always try to hire for ability over experience typically because, you know, that's, that's something where it's better. For a younger startup, you want someone who's hungry and has the ability and wants to prove themselves. In terms of what I'd look for on a cv, I would like to see that someone has rung the bell at least like once or recently. And yes, that could be, oh, you know, they went to MIT or Stanford. It could be that they worked at Google or Facebook. Those are kind of like name brands. But it could also be that did a really great open source project or they've got an amazing portfolio on their website and they're out of the middle of nowhere or they did well on like a programming competition or HackerRank or something like that. And so there are these avenues like HackerRank, like also HackerOne, which is different. HackerRank is like programming exams. Hackero One is like for, you know, security people, right. And there's folks who are coming out truly the middle of nowhere like Mexico or you know, India, Brazil, etc. And they're just crushing it, you know, and they don't have any training. There's Google things and I can tell they're really smart but by what they've done there. So they have to have shown something that's world class and then you hire them. But it doesn't necessarily have to be a traditional credential like Stanford or MRT or Google or Facebook.

Got it. And speaking of googling things and learning, I think it'd be helpful to talk a little bit about how you learn how to code. I know you recently tweeted something about YouTube education and things like that. So how did you learn how to code?

Yeah, that's a good question. So I think my background is actually more in math than computer science per se. I did my B.S. mSN, Ph.D. in electrical engineering and Ms. In chemical engineering at Stanford. And that actually focused a lot more on statistical signal processing, computational statistics, you know, complex, complex Analysis, partial differential equations, all that type of stuff. Right. And I think that strong foundation in mathematics made computer science, I think relatively easier. There's certainly obviously computer science is challenging and whatnot, but if you really understand math cs, a lot of CS can be reduced to math. And so then given that mathematical foundation, I was able to basically self teach a lot of computer science. You had to learn a lot of it for double E. You know, when you're programming a circuit board or you're programming a robot or something like that, you're learning to program basically. At Stanford, a double E would be able to program as well as anybody else other than a computer scientist because you'd have like enough CS classes. But then there's like what you learn in school and then what you actually learn when building, building something, and those are quite different, like computer science and software engineering. It's the difference between, you know, understanding how fast this algorithm is going to run in theory, and then actually implementing it in practice, deploying it on Amazon, writing clean code, writing multiplayer code that others can edit maintainable code and making money on it. Like now you start getting out of software engineering and into business. Those are actually less overlapping than you might think. And that stuff is almost entirely self taught.

Got it, got it. And something that you and I have spoke about historically, and we'll talk a little bit more about how we connected later on, is like your thoughts on like teaching the people worldwide how to code and you've actually taken steps towards that through the most popular course on Coursera, startup engineering that I think Artur and Timor were able to take. So can you talk a little bit about, you know, your thoughts on massive open online courses, the state of education and where things are today?

Yeah, so I think it was, was the most popular course on Coursera or one of the top five or 10 in 2013. I don't know if it is still. I doubt it actually because it's been offline for a while. But yeah, the course hit about 250,000 people and what I wanted to try to do is fill that gap in between. Okay, you know, I know academic CS or I've kind of heard of this thing and I can put up a website and I can set up payments and I can actually make money doing that. And that's kind of a wide gap where a lot of the stuff in the middle is not thought of as it sort of has basic stuff by the software engineers and sort of is not important enough to teach often by academics. And so it falls into this Gap over here where it's hard for people to bridge that gap. So yeah, so it's like how to set up your terminal and the UNIX command line and configure Emacs and git, and how do you expect to do version control and deployments and rollbacks and blah blah, blah, all that stuff. And that stuff which you kind of pick up lesson by lesson by being around people who know how to do that versus being taught in an ABCD kind of way. And that's what I tried to do. I tried to teach that in a systematic way.

Yeah.

And it actually is coming full circle like Ruben said. Artur and I, we started taking your courses and a bunch of other courses back in 2013, 14, and then we ended up continuing to learn, did coding boot camps, and then ended up working as engineers for three years before starting career karma. What is your thought on like boot camps since they're fairly like new, they've been around for five years. What is your thoughts in terms of the types of topics that they color and kind of the future of where alternative education is heading?

It's a great question. So I like kind of the, I like the concept of boot camps in the abstract. You know, I think I like where Lambda School is going, where they have a lot more skin in the game. You know, where they are basically giving, I believe, something like free tuition and then they take a percentage of income. And that is really impressive if they can pull that off because it means that they're completely aligned with their students. Right. And, and that's actually quite unusual because if you think about how, you know, traditional higher education works, they just get the money up front and, you know, they charge basically the same price whether they're teaching you art history or computer science. And Even if those 2 degrees may be radically different in terms of their monetizability, because it's no longer the college's problem, they pass it on to the debt collector, you know, and, you know, maybe, you know, if you're somebody who's really making a rational decision about those two things and you're okay with the debt load and so on, that one might impose versus the other, fine. But often 18 year olds aren't in a position to do that. So I think it is, it is good that we're starting to move towards a model where at least people have a choice of a lower cost, more vocationally oriented education. I'm not saying it's for everybody, but I'm glad there's that choice.

Yeah, yeah. And so given that some people are still going the traditional education route. What are your thoughts on like college student loans, things like that?

What are my thoughts on that? So, you know, on the one hand, I understand the appeal of academia. It's great. There's like basically no deadlines for anything. I mean, there's deadlines for homework, but that's, that's like kind of nothing relative to like a product deadline or, you know, a shipping deadline. You know, people expect real results, not just, you know, just like problems and so on. So I understand the appeal of it. And you know, colleges are very plush. You know, nowadays they were even 20, 30 years ago with, you know, the gym and the racquetball court and the pool and all this stuff. But all this stuff is really expensive. And in many ways college is sort of like front loading your life with a four year vacation. Right. And then you pay for it for the rest of your life. And so, you know, that's not. That may or may not be the appropriate tactic. Right. Like what I'd like to see is something where you graduate with $500,000 in profit rather than, or in savings rather than $500,000 in debt and, or 120 or whatever the number is nowadays. And I think that's possible to do, but it's a little tricky to do because there's so many cultural forces that still push people to say, oh, go to college. If you're not going to college, it's bad, et cetera. I think it might be easier to kind of start something like that, at least partially, either outside the US or outside the demographics of people who've traditionally gone to college. And hopefully stuff like, you know, as I mentioned, lambda school, stuff like that is a step in the right direction.

Got it, got it. So something that we talk about as well is that how tech has taken over every industry and how tech is no longer an industry anymore. Everything is either tech or tech adjacent. So we always reference, or we tend to reference Marc Andreessen's piece about software's eating the world. But you also wrote a piece called Software's Reorganizing the World. And then you also launched something with Sten called Teleport. So can you talk a little bit more about free people moving cloud cities, cloud countries, and your thoughts about like borderless countries and things like that?

Sure. So first let me speak to the first piece which is why is tech a part of everything? So in like the early 20th century, physicists basically took the equations that they had now mastered the like electricity and magnetism and mechanics and thermodynamics in particular, and then a little bit later, quantum mechanics, and they just went into field after field and sort of kicked in the doors and revolutionized these fields and said, oh, you don't know what you're doing. Let me write down like the physical equations. And now we'll actually mathematize everything, right? And so a lot of things sort of got revolutionized that way. And physicists were these great generalists. Like, you know, one example is Luria and Delbruck went into biology and they were able to just apply some relatively simple, you know, mathematical techniques from physics to the study of, you know, microbes and so on. Okay? And then what happened was somewhere mid century, every discipline kind of fragmented and there wasn't as much, you know, sharing of information. Somebody in, let's say the, the analysis of, you know, traffic on, on the road would not have too much to talk to with somebody who was, I don't know, looking at finance or whatever, right? And then what happened was that towards the end of the 20th century, you started to have computer science. And so, you know, you, you had the deployment and the, you know, mainstreaming of computers. So algorithms became important everywhere. And those algorithms computed on data and databases became important everywhere. And so the thing is that in any field that you go into, there are algorithms and there is data. So you go into taxis and there are algorithms to route the cabs around and there's data, data on their trips. You go into finance and there's algorithms to, you know, like calculate your order book and there's data on what the past order book status was, or you go into, you know, hotels or into movies or music or whatever. And all of them have A, algorithms and B, data. And what that means is if you're good at computer science and statistics, you can be like the physicists of 100 years ago and just walk into any room and immediately, you know, add value to that company. It can be Walmart, it can be Best Buy, it can be Starbucks. They have data and they're going to have algorithms, right? So that's kind of why every industry has become a tech industry. There's always some underlying logic to that industry, whether you call it a business process, whether you call it an algorithm or what have you, you know, an algorithm sort of like an upscale word for a business process. You know, like, okay, there's some math, we, we can do some analysis here. Business process. Just I do X and then Y and then Z or whatever, right? And so that's why if you have that firm foundation, you can go in and be like, okay, show me your database. Boom. Okay, here's some column statistics. I calculate some row statistics, some correlations, some this, some that, right? So that's why every industry is now tech driven. And another way of thinking about it is, all right, so you're sitting at your computer, you're typing in these magic symbols, things are happening, and then what that does is basically it means that you're sort of crafting the order in the cloud like this, and then you're exporting it to these actuators. So, concrete example, like, you visualize drones, right? You program the drone's flight path, and then you push it out, and then they all just pick up and go, right? But whether that's. It could be 3D printers, it could be taxis that you're moving around the world. It could be door locks that you're opening and closing. It's just basically you hit enter and then the world vibrates and does what you just asked it to do in exactly the way that you asked to do it, even if not necessarily the way you intended to do it, right? So in this fashion, you can sort of decouple a lot of the process of generating value from the. From the location where that value is actually delivered, right? So that's like a really important concept. You start to, you know, you pull it away from exactly where the actuators are and think about how different that is than, like, mining or, you know, like oil. These traditional businesses, even those are becoming software eyes, or, you know, software is eating them. Even five years ago, like a company like Rio Tinto was running mining trucks, like trucks to move the ore back and forth from a remote control center in Perth. Interesting, right? So they're running them remotely, they're hitting enter, and these things are moving around. So even these traditionally very physical businesses are actually also getting eaten by software, right? So that's like the macro of, like, why this thing is happening. Okay, and so then what is one of the consequences? Well, so as you start divorcing value creation from location, right? Then, you know, the specific site at which you're assembling becomes maybe less important, right? And so people become more mobile, they become more nomadic. They have the ability to pick up at the drop of a hat and, you know, call an Uber and get an Airbnb and be working remote. And, you know, even the question, where are you? Is actually sort of a neologism, right? Like back in 1800 or 1700, you know, before the telephone, like where are you? Well, I'm sitting across the table. Right. Like, like it's like a very modern question, right?

Yeah.

Even, even, like, even 20 years ago, like most people, if you, you know, unless you're calling from a payphone, where are you? Is like an unusual question. But now happens all the time. You're constantly communicating because there's more uncertainty in it. And why is there more uncertainty? Because people are changing their location more. Okay, so one observation is this, is that mobile has made us more mobile. Right. Second observation is that because of social networks, we have all these folks who we started to meet online, who we know better than the person who's next to us in an apartment building. Right. There's lots of folks. There's thousands of people I've met from online, from Twitter, from Facebook, whatever, that, more from Twitter maybe than Facebook, but that are. That I've met in person, but that live very far away. Right. But they just share similar interests. They're interested in, you know, some of the same, you know, technical topics or whatever. And so that combination of A, massively increased personal mobility, B, you know, the ability to kind of sort of separate value creation from location, and C, people from far away that share your values that, you know, like, can now move to be in person, I think over time is going to lead to a wave of mass migrations where folks start to concentrate more according to their shared beliefs and interests and hobbies and stuff like that than to geographic proximity, per se.

Yeah, yeah. No, that's amazing. And so speaking about shared interests, beliefs, and revolutionizing industries, one of the first talks that we saw you do while we were still in Atlanta is Voice versus Exit. And I think it's an important concept to talk about because a lot of people don't know that they have these, these opportunities at their disposal because. So can you elaborate a little bit on Voice vs Exit and the power that people have?

Sure. So, you know, voice versus Exit, another term for it is like voice versus choice. Right. Which kind of rhymes, right? Bars, right? Yeah, exactly. So the basic idea is that if there's something and you want to change it, let's take a few examples. Let's say that you're a customer of a company and you don't like the product. Voice is submitting a complaint form and Exit is taking your business somewhere else for an open source project. Voice is submitting a patch and Exit is forking the code base and doing something else. If a country is going in the wrong direction, you know, Voice is casting your vote and Exit is immigrating and so on and so forth. Like basically in, you know, in the context of many different situations, you can try to change the thing from within, which is voice, or you can say, okay, I'm not going to be able to change it, but I do really feel strongly about this issue, so I'm going to leave and I'm going to do my own thing. Right. And whether you call that exit, whether you call that choice, it is something that actually is a complement to voice and gives voice its strength. And what I mean by that is, you know, if you, you know, like, like as a company, right, you will hear lots and lots of customer complaints, but the thing that customers actually leave for to another company is what they really cared about, right? And sometimes they will complain about something that's not actually what they cared about or the, the volume may not be as high as what they're actually taking their business to somewhere else. Right. So the person who takes their business, someone else is actually in a way voicing something by exiting. Right. You know, same with a country. Like, you know, you may say, okay, I don't like this, that and the other, but you'll put up with them. But then this thing really is what makes you leave. And then folks should pay attention to that or will pay attention to them. Yeah, so, so that's how I think about these two forces. And a very important thing about technology is it is increasing the ability to, increasing choice, increasing the ability to exit in many, many different ways. From making us more mobile so you can change your location, to having lots of source of information to choose from so you're not restricted to just one information source, to having many different choices of career opportunity with search engines and so on. So like, it's just massively expanding choice and microeconomic leverage in many, many different ways. And so that's like the macro technology is really increasing the ability to exit to choose if you don't like your current arrangements.

So we talked a lot about immigration, exercising your voice through exit. And Artur and I, we were born in Ukraine and our parents chose to exercise their right and exit Ukraine and bring us to the United States. I wanted to ask you your thoughts on kind of immigrations and how immigration is the fuel of this country. And we have a lot of examples of founders like the founder of Pioneer, which is a startup that recently launched, which invests in human capital coming to the United States. The founder came from Israel, went through Y Combinator and now he's able to start businesses in this country. I know you're one of the advisors. What is your, I guess, thought on the immigration and why you decided to advise Pioneer?

Yeah, sure. So Pioneer is interesting because the goal is to try to find smart people anywhere in the world and then back them with these micro grants. And Daniel and I and some other folks involved that have been talking about this idea for some time, I actually want to do something like this all the way back in 2013, 2014. So I think the Internet's a very powerful thing to find that kind of talent out in the middle of nowhere. For example, all the way back in either 2013 or 2012, there was a kid in Ulanbaatar, Mongolia who got one of the highest scores on the circuits exam of mit. But he wasn't an MIT student, he was just someone who was taking the courses online. And so is this really remarkable talent kind of in the middle of nowhere who deserved a shot on the world stage? Right. And there are so many folks like that. You know, places like Nigeria or Brazil or you know, the Middle East, India, you know, places like that where the 20th century kind of left them out in some ways. Right. Like the, the countries were poor and their parents were poor, maybe through no fault of their own, you know, just because like, you know, they just didn't have the opportunity. And now we can give them that kind of opportunity with the Internet, potentially. We take that cell phone and that's a skyhook, you know, that, that brings them to where they deserve to be.

Yeah, yeah. And, and speaking of like these giving people opportunities on the world stage that are really talented and the power of the Internet to collaborate with each other and meet each other. Something that you've talked about is massively collaborative mathematics and the ability to put a lot of intelligent people or talented people solving a problem at the same time and being able to solve things quicker than it would have taken historically, that might have taken like 100 years and it might be done in like 50 years versus like, or like even a year. So what are your thoughts about like collaboration online?

Yeah, so massively collaborative mathematics is super interesting because it's not, it's not obvious that it would work. So for example, what are the best examples of online collaboration? Wikipedia articles on non contentious topics are pretty good. Where a bunch of folks, the collective intelligence will update articles on eigenvalues or the Rust programming language and it'll get pretty darn good with just this distributed intelligence updating it. And you know, with something like math, you might think, oh, this is too recondite it's too, you know, abstruse. You know, folks are not going to be able to necessarily contribute versus you know, on a more mainstream topic like I don't know, the catalog of every Simpsons episode ever or something like that, which Wikipedia is really good at. It's got a lot of comic book nerd type people. But it turns out that if you build that community of mathematicians following like Terry Tao's blog or Tim, I think Tim Gowers's blog, well, you have that critical mass and in the comment section you can just go at it and just start proving things. And that's really interesting and kind of non obvious that you know, even in specialist areas of math you might be able to have 100 or a thousand mathematicians that are smarter than together than any one of them. So I thought it was very cool.

Yeah, yeah. And speaking of like the world stage and location, can you talk a little bit about like people's thoughts on Silicon Valley? Like I know when you and I met through Twitter actually, you know, everybody kind of like was talking about move to San Francisco. That's the best way to break in tech. You have to move there. That's the only way. And so now people are starting to have a different conversation. So can you talk about that conversation, how we're moving towards like decentralization and what that actually really means?

Yeah, I'd say today my advice would be for someone just starting out, that technology is way, way, way bigger than San Francisco or Silicon Valley even or Silicon Valley plus Seattle technology is now this absolute global phenomenon and there's, you know, San Francisco and Silicon Valley will always, well, for a long time will be very important. Cloud capitals. Right? Like, you know, it'll be major tech centers. But if I was advising somebody today, you know, I mentioned this a few times. Here's what I do. For someone who's like, you know, 21 years old, just starting out, I'd say a get the. I know this sounds sound funny or like really obvious advice, but hear me out for a second. So get the highest paying job you can as an entry level engineer at a Google or a Facebook or maybe a large company that is going to go public soon and optimize for basically cash compensation. You know, I mean equity is fine, but it should be equity that is close to cash, like very, you know, very likely to go public soon or already public. Right. Work incredibly hard that first year, like leave nothing on the table, you know, really make work the focus. Obviously take care of your health and whatnot. But, but really work Hard make yourself indispensable, right? And then at the end of one year or whenever your promotional period comes up, ask to work remote, right? Do not ask for promotion to a manager job. Do not even actually accept that. Because if you accept the promotion to a manager job, then you're now a hub. And if you're a hub, it's much, much harder to, to work remote, right? A spoke can work remote much more easily, right? Because you just don't have to coordinate as many people. You don't have to have as many like in person, face to face conversations. It's less of a person management thing and more of it just an execution thing, right? So the reason that's really important is if you've got this now, you know, high paying cash job and you work remote well, you can slash your cost of living by like 5x deterministic, right? If you go to like teleport.org or nomad list, you can find places that are 1/5 or 1/7 or even 1/10 the price of San Francisco and they have an Internet connection, right? So you find basically the place which is the cheapest in the world, subject to the constraint of, you know, maybe you want a safe city or maybe you want a warm city or whatever your preferences are, right? Maybe you do want a club there or maybe you don't, right? Okay, Just focus, right? Like ashram, you know, just, just meditate almost. And the thing about this is it's completely within your power, right? So you get like, it doesn't have to be obviously an engineer job. It could be a designer job or even a lawyer job or anything that allows you to work remote basically, right? And focus on the ability to work remote with a high base as like the most important thing. Because now once you're out there, okay, now you're only spending, I don't know, let's say 20k a year all in on your living expenses and everything else, you know, after taxes, your banking. So every year that you're working there, like, you know, you are saving two, three years of personal Runway. And so now after just, let's, let's say you're getting three years per year. After two years of working, you have six years of personal Runway, right? And you don't need angel investment. You are financially independent. It's like a deterministic path to financial independence. If you can get a remote work job that pays enough, you know, cash compensation, frankly, you know, it doesn't even have to be like, you know, an engineer job paying like 100,000 or way more than that. It can just be something that allows you to work remote because an American salary at a, you know, non American living condition price point can give you this huge arbitrage. Right. And one of the things about that is that's a relatively recent phenomenon. It's the last 10 or 20 years that a huge amount of the world has become pretty livable. Right. Because the Internet, you know, like it depends on what you like to do. But if you just like to read and you're kind of quiet and you're like, okay, I don't want to, you know, be in like a dangerous area. But if I've got Internet and I've got a bed and I don't know, like Starbucks or whatever it is that you like there nearby you got some basic kind of things and you don't like to go to expensive restaurants or the opera or what have you, but almost anywhere in the world kind of will suffice. You're really flexible. And so this is actually a deterministic way to get years and years of personal Runway.

Yeah.

And it's so much easier to cut your expenses by 5 or 10x than to make 5 or 10x more money. Yeah, right. Like an exit, like in the sense of, you know, like selling your company is possible but just really, really hard to do. But an exit in the sense of like leaving to a lower cost jurisdiction is like 100% achievable.

Yeah, yeah.

So how would you go about potentially like starting your own company? So if you are living, let's say, somewhere in broad where your costs were like five times less, how would you go about building a team, starting a company and potentially competing with other startups that are based in Silicon Valley? Like what do you think would be the advantages that you would have based out of there?

Well, I think new things are opening up. So, you know, as, as much as I like tech and I like startups and I like, you know, you know, I have founded companies and so on, I would definitely just not call it for everybody. It's like, it's just, it's just very challenging and stressful and non deterministic. And I think what most people actually want is financial independence, which is very different than, you know, the motivations required to found a company. I think to found a company, I cannot speak for everyone, but I think for a large percentage of founders, including myself, it is to get something that you cannot buy, that you must build. So for example, for Elon Musk, why SpaceX? Because he could not buy a Trip to Mars. He had to build a trip to Mars. Right. Okay. So for me, like I, you know, why do we do councils? Like I really wanted to build like make the genome useful. Like to take all this theoretical stuff and actually make a genetic thing that was actually useful. And I couldn't buy that because it wasn't out there. Right. So had to build it and you know, so. Whereas at least personally, I'm sure there's other folks who have done this, but I could never motivate myself to start a razor blade company or a clothes company or something like that because there's plenty of good options out there. I just not passionate enough about it. And like a company is so hard to do. I mean you guys, you guys are, you know, I'm about talking about, right. It's so hard to do that. Like in many, many cases in the, in the interim it's like not economically rational to continue. So you have to have an irrational decision to persist. And what's, it's weird about that. It's like it's one of those things where that those troughs, the only way you get out of those troughs is you're just irrationally persistent. And then like long, long term, if you're successful. Oh, it was a rational decision, but in the middle it was irrational.

Yeah, for sure. And I think when, when you look online now and on Instagram and social media, there's like this hustle porn where everyone wants to hustle, wants to start companies. Anyone can have a website, anyone can have an Instagram account with a thousand followers. And there's a lot of folks spending their resources and their time becoming influencers or becoming YouTube celebrities instead of focusing on the future opportunities, Maybe tech, maybe other industries. And how could they create a competitive advantage for themselves that requires skill that's going to be super valuable? I think it kind of relates to your point of like starting companies is really hard. It's a lot easier to be employee number 10 or employee number 50 at one of the like mission driven companies that you, you're passionate about. And then you could also surround yourself with a team and maybe even work remotely like you're suggesting and then you could save money. But I guess what are your thoughts? Like if you're starting out again and you were, let's say 18 or 19.

Years old.

Would you do anything differently? Like would you go into tech or would you do something completely different? Like what are your thoughts on like what, what would Balaji do if he was 18 again?

Sure. So. Well, maybe a Better question is, what would I do if I was like, 21? If I just graduated?

Yeah, okay, let's say 21.

Fine. So. So let's, let's assume that I did Stanford or whatever. Fine. Okay, fine. And then I can give one. If I was 18, I wasn't doing that. Okay? So I would go and get this remote work job, as I mentioned. I would go and save a bunch of money by working remote. And then maybe I start a company because I'm interested in that. Or the choices that have been on the table so far that we've discussed are founder and employee. But there's now a third which has become massively more mainstream just over the last year, which is investor. Anyone can become an investor, right? And it's again, I want to, like, underline how much easier it is to, like, put $10,000 into something rather than to pass an interview and then work for weeks or months or years on. On trying to turn that into something. Like, maybe what the future of the world is, is like. Like think about Twitter, right? There's, you know, it's actually, even though everyone has followers and everybody is following some accounts, the actual Twitter structure is there's a few gigantic celebrity accounts that have hundreds of thousands of followers and then lots of folks who follow those celebrity accounts, right? And. Or, you know, hundreds of millions or some cases tens of millions of followers, right? And maybe what, like, the future is. Is something where there's lots of people who are investing in a small, relatively small number of entrepreneurs, but everybody's getting wealthy together, right? So, like, that's the kind of thing I'd like to see is like a social network where, you know, okay, it's great to make friends. It's not as great, like, what, you know, the public war zone that some social networks have become. But how much better if, you know, every time you check in, it's a notification that's positive sum. You just made some money, right? You just back somebody who was promising and you made some money doing that, right? You took some risk with capital and you got some return in reward. That's something that anybody can do. And so, like, I've been thinking a lot about this topic because I've always felt there's something kind of lacking in a lot of the startup mantra and jargon over the last 15 years, because not everybody can be a founder or employee, but everybody can be an investor. And I think that's where the thing goes over the next 10, 20 years.

So, yeah, so now that people are essentially having this Time based off what you just shared with us, people are talking a lot about jobs being created and destroyed because of technology. And they're floating this idea of basic income, which essentially, like, providing everybody the basic needs that they need with food and shelter, things like transportation, in order to, like, do what they want to do in life. What are your thoughts about basic income and things like that?

So I think basic income is an interesting idea. I know that Y Combinator had some interest in studying it from, like, an execution standpoint. I think it would be easier to implement with cryptocurrency should people choose to implement it.

How come? Just curious. Why would it be easier with cryptocurrency?

Because you would just be able to hit enter and then everyone would get it on their computer. I mean, of course, this is postulating like a future time in 10 or 15 years when blockchain wallets are even more widespread than they are. And it would sort of be like saying, well, airdrop. Yeah, like, like, one way of putting it is, okay, you can, for the most part assume that almost everybody has an email account or a phone number at this point in the U.S. right. Or not just a phone number, but a cell phone number, because. Right. And I'm not saying everyone, but it's like, it's like 80 or 90% of folks, I think, have. Have that. Right. And probably even higher than 90%. It depends on the stats. So of course you're going to have to have something to serve those folks who are that remaining few percent. But many forms, government forms, assume there's an email address, assume there's a phone number. If you could get to that level of ubiquity where you could sort of assume that most people are going to have, or the vast majority of people are going to have a blockchain address, cryptocurrency address of some kind, then it'd be, you know, it'd be more uniform, it'd be easier to quote deposit to their accounts than it would be to 50 different banks with 50 different routing numbers and all that type of stuff. It's like one address that captures everything.

Got it. And before talking about the investing thing and like the clarifying questions that, that we have in our heads about that, something that you talk about a lot in startup engineering, just in general, it's just like, it's not about the idea, it's the execution. I think it'd be good to elaborate about that and not apply it to just the entrepreneur perspective. But how would you apply the idea maze concept to a Career path in the future.

Sure. So first let me explain the idea maze concept and then the idea of first execution. So idea maze concept is just that a lot of people tend to put maybe too much weight on just the idea. Like, oh, I've got an idea for a photo sharing site on the Internet. Right. But then you get to like the entrance of what I call the idea maze. And then there's a bunch of decisions to make. Okay, is uploading photos free or does it cost you something or okay, if it's free free, then, you know, is it private or is it public or is it like only to your friends and so on and so forth. Right. Each of those is a turn in the maze that leads to a different solution. And you know, another one is do you do it before mobile or after mobile? And some of those turns lead to Flickr or to Instagram, and other turns lead to photo sharing sites that you haven't heard of because they shut down and they made the wrong decisions. Right. And so that's the difference between an idea and the idea maze. And one of the things about the idea maze is that sometimes a good idea can become a bad idea or vice versa, because new phenomenon happens. Like mobile appears and now a new door opens and something that was like a pretty good exit in, you know, like 2005, which was Flickr, like I think about 35 million becomes a really big exit in, you know, six years, seven years later with Instagram 2012. Right. And you know, I'm not, obviously, I'm not saying they're the same apps. You know, there's differences, but like probably the single biggest difference is the introduction of mobile. Right? And so, so that's how like a good idea could become a very good idea. Right? Or another example is like Zipcar versus Uber. Right? Zipcar was good company, is still a good company, but it was pre mobile. And you know, when with Uber, Uber was born on mobile, molded by it. Right. You know, and so, so is, so is Lyft. So just a different company with a different trajectory. Conversely, sometimes, you know, a door that was open, like build a search engine in the late 90s, kind of arguably isn't as open now. And you could counter, argue that, you could say DuckDuckGo and so on, but it's pretty hard to compete with Google. Like, they're really good and they put a lot of energy into core search and whatnot. So it's hard to beat them on their core. So that may be a door that's close and you can Argue with me on that. Maybe, maybe there's a different solution. So that's like the idea maze concept. Now on ideas versus execution, the. The way to think about that is, you know, it takes a few seconds to write a billion dollar idea on a napkin. And frankly, sometimes that's actually the core of it. Like, you know, if it is, hey, I've got this equation for how I can put a payload into space that no one else has done. All right, well, actually, that equation is like the core concept, right? You put Maxwell's equations on a piece of paper that actually packs a lot of really useful information in there. Right. And there are things like that in math and physics that are really compact, where really the idea is everything. But there's other things, like, oh, I'm going to build a social network for dogs where it's all in the execution. It's all in those many micro decisions that you make through the idea maze. And the other aspect of why there's a distinction between the idea and the execution is you can imagine a pyramid where, okay, the idea takes you a few seconds. All right, so now let me build a slide deck on it. All right, that's going to take you a few hours at least, or maybe a day. They build a prototype, okay, that's a weekend, you know, to get like, like the first thing working. All right, now let me build a product or actually let me build a, like a program out of it. Like a really robust program. Not a prototype that'll just fall down and do one thing, but like a real program with options and whatnot. Maybe a front end, maybe, you know, like a mobile app. All right, that's like probably a few weeks, like if we're honest with the design and iterations on. All right, now let me make that into a product that people will actually download and pay money for. People, people have high standards for what that means. There's a lot of polish that goes into a real product. So that's like at least a month, probably multiple months, probably like a quarter or two quarters. All right, now let me actually start selling that and getting revenue. All right, well, that's so much harder. You've got. You've got to make it a company, you know, you've got to incorporate and you've got to maybe hire and you've got to sell. All right, now you've got revenue. All right, and now let me get profits. Well, that's even harder. And so the thing is that the, the stages, as you go from like a few seconds to you Know, a few hours to a few days to a few weeks to a few months to a few years to, like many years. It's like so easy to say, oh, I had that idea back in 2010, you know, and. And then there's somebody who's just like, been working really hard for seven years to turn that into reality. And people really down weight how much work that is, because they only see the successes and they don't see all of that sweat in the middle.

Yeah. And how would you apply that to a career path versus a company?

Well, so what I'd say, actually, going back to that earlier theme of just, you know, not everybody can be a founder and employee, but everybody can be an investor. Investing kind of is just about the idea in the capital, right. If you've got the capital. And the critical thing with crypto is the capital threshold has come way down. Right. There's people who have put 10 bucks into Bitcoin that have 10,000 or $20,000. Right. There's people who put 100 bucks in there that have like $100,000 or $200,000. Right.

I mean, that's what we did back in the day with Bitpay, you know, put in a little bit of money into bitcoin when Bitpay was run, actually, when we connected with you about the Bitcoin 101 with the Stanford Bitcoin, Stanford Group. And so we just put. I think it was $250 at the time. I think I just put $1,200 in. It's like 30,000 now.

Yeah, it's pretty good. Right. Obviously, not everything is bitcoin. Obviously, there's a lot of risk. Obviously, a lot of things can go to zero. But the cool part is that the opportunity was available, right? Like, if you could wind back the clock. There's nothing preventing almost anybody from doing that. Right. And today, with cryptocurrency exchanges being out there and so on, it's interesting. So investing is the area where if you have the idea and the capital, that kind of is it. Right. You just click a button, you take a risk, you put in your capital, and someone else can take care of the execution risk. Now you're taking capital risk. You're. You know, I'm not. I should want to be very clear about two things. First is, I'm not saying everyone should do this.

Yeah.

I am saying everyone can do this, which is different. Right. And so if you choose to take a lower risk, life and just, you know, like, just. Just a stable kind of thing, Fine, more power to you. Great. Right. But if you're the kind of DNA that may want to be a founder or employee, I say you've got a new path, which is investor or crypto investor. And that's like the high risk, high reward path. Okay, so that's number one. I'm not saying should, I am saying can. Okay. And the second point I just want to underline is I'm also not talking about like flipping the investment and day trading it and so on. I think it's very, very hard and often a fool's game to try to time the market, especially in a bear market. And, and you're arguably, and this is an argument, but you're arguably not adding any value by doing that versus I think, buy and hold, where you're long term investing with an eye towards holding the asset for years or even longer than that, then you arguably are adding value because you know, you're backing the entrepreneur or the developer early on. You know, you've given them probably some capital if it's a primary sale in particular and you're loyal for a while. Right. You're taking a risk alongside them as they're building the thing. And I would say that, you know, and again, people, this is definitely an arguable point. I think personally it is easier to identify smart, hard working people who are relatively underestimated and take a risk with them than it is to time the ups and downs of a market where you know, just crazy things can happen. Right. Like, like the long term. You know, you can, you could predict the climate but not necessarily the weather.

Yeah. And like, given that you've been able, I mean, before going to the lightning round that you've been able to see like crypto as this emerging early phenomenon. I know you've done things with Vijay Pan to see like things like genomics and all these things in healthcare happening and like academics are like starting to switch careers. How does someone that's in a quote unquote traditional industry think about, you know, how to decide when to switch or what's the new market that's coming, like how do you pay attention to trends or like what are your thoughts on like staying ahead of trends? Because even though we're optimizing for these big salaries or these different cash to give us this time in the future, you know, how do we think about what's coming next to be able to like make that switch and jump in and think about company. How you think about company selection?

Sure.

So.

A couple of different things. One was kind of how do I keep on top of all these different trends? Second is company selection. So how to keep on top of different trends. Well, you know, one of the things I was saying earlier was just that you have to just naturally be interested in it. It's hard to force yourself to be interested in a topic, you know, like I'm, I'm not that interested in, in marshmallows or whatever, right? So I'm not going to be like googling on that, you know, and, and maybe now I am, but, but like, you know, the genomics, biotech stuff has always fascinated me. It is like the code that underpins us and you know, mistakes in that code lead to mistakes and it's like a really interesting concept. And so, you know, there's like Nature Reviews Genetics, there's various like kind of review journals that give you a good summary with nice graphics of what's going on. I'm not saying they're easy to read for the non specialist, but you know, you, you can get up to speed if you subscribe to those. And you know, that's what I'll do. Like whenever I've got downtime, right, I will just like in the, in the Uber, I'll be like, okay, what does Nature Reviews Genetics got for me, right? Like, and one thing actually that, that I think is good is to have a bunch of like useful stuff on your phone that's downloaded so that even if you don't have an Internet connection or whatever, you've got like, I don't know, a thousand pages of reading that you want to do should be like 10. You do 10 pages here and 20 pages here and whatever. And it adds up, you know, it's like, it's like offline Twitter and much better than Twitter itself, right? Because Twitter is what's now, not necessarily what's useful. And I also say another thing that I do is I make a list of skills that I want to build up and I'm constantly updating that list. And I have that almost as a mantra or whatever that I'll just repeat to myself, like, okay, I want to learn Rust. And the newest just get through the DeepMind paper and X and Y and Z. And so I'll just have like Rust, DeepMind XYZ, right? And then maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but if I keep like saying that to myself, I'm like, okay, yeah, let me look at that now. You know, so just sort of like a reminder to myself to build those skills and then I'll kind of roughly update that Once a quarter.

Yeah.

Right. And then you asked another question. Can you remind me?

Yeah. So essentially, like. So now that. That you're thinking about these different things, like, how do you think about company selection?

Oh, how do I think about company selection? So, you know, there's. There's a lot of different ways to try to pick which companies to bet on. But, you know, the thing that has worked best for me are really two things. First is the obvious one that everyone's going to say, which is, you know, bet on smart, resourceful entrepreneurs. Never say die. And not necessarily the type who do really well in school. I mean, there's part of it, right. But there needs to be some degree of disobedience, right? So, you know, like Paul Graham calls it mischief, right. Maybe some degree of, you know, like, confidence as opposed to, you know, always necessarily taking the teacher's word for it. Sometimes teacher's wrong. Right. And so. So it's like, it's somewhat correlated with it, but not exactly identical to, like, the person who does well in school, which is why you have, you know, these famous dropouts like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates and Zuck and what have you, right? That's the first, like, look for this smart, resourceful entrepreneur. And the second bit is really important because there's folks who are smart, but they're not resourceful. They're not. They're fragile. You know, like when they get yelled at online or when, you know, they launch their product and everybody screams at them, they're like, oh, my God. And they just kind of like, quit or whatever, right? And the thing is that if you launch something, you know, usually people are yelling at you, you. And the reason they're yelling at you is. Well, if you've. I shouldn't say usually, I'd say often people are yelling at you. And the reason is you've gotten their attention. You've actually, you know, you've done something that is worthy of note. And sometimes if it's. If it's particularly polarizing, like, let's say Soylent, right. Or Bitcoin in its early days, that was something where there was very strong contingents for. And strong contingency against, especially like, you know, for Soylent, right. That's something where I always think it's really interesting. And I'll usually bet on something like that, right? And sometimes it goes to zero, but it has an outsized positive result because very few things early in their life have a huge community of boosters. And. And you need a lot of that to, like, pull yourself out of that kind of environment. Right. So. So that's kind of the second thing. First, you know, smart, resourceful entrepreneurs. And second, like, markets where there's people cheering for you because. Because the opposite of a polarizing product is a blase product.

Yeah.

Where nobody cares. Everybody's apathetic.

Right.

You have neither boosters nor haters. I'm not saying that when you launch, everyone hits you. It's more that when you launch, sometimes it feels like everyone hates you because all the people that like you are liking the tweet or buying the product or whatever, and you might have a hundred likes or, you know, 100 purchases, there's like three, like, really nasty, like, responses are like, you suck, whatever. Right. And that sticks out to you. It feels like you sort of ignore the positive, or it's not ignore, but it's quieter. The positive is often quieter and the negative is often louder. So it can feel like everyone hates you. Obviously, if you got a product that truly everyone hates, if it's truly everyone, 100% of people, well, then, yeah, you're out of business. Right. But often it'll feel like everyone hates you. But actually, you have to focus on the folks who do like it enough to buy it. As long as you have some community there, you can probably, you know, take that and turn that into something bigger and bigger.

Yeah, yeah. So going back to the.

That definitely makes a lot of sense. So we're sitting here at Coinbase and we covered a lot of topics. One of the topics we haven't covered is what is Coinbase? And on the topic of the idea maze, what kind of doors is cryptocurrencies and blockchains are opening up? And why should people take note of that?

Yeah. So what are. What doors is crypto opening up? Well, first, what is Coinbase? So Coinbase is, you know, America's largest cryptocurrency exchange. And you can think of it as the interface between the fiat banking world and the cryptocurrency world. And this interface is something where it's how you turn, you know, quote, buy Bitcoin is how it started. Right. So you turn US Dollars into btc, but now it's bigger than that. You can. You can turn Euros into Ethereum or to Litecoin or other kinds of things. And we're in the process of exploring the addition of more assets. We've talked about that. So it's like this interface between Fiat and crypto. Just like an isp, in some ways, is an interface between the offline and online worlds and that's what a crypto exchange does. But once you've got them into the crypto world, well then you can make crypto more useful. And we've got other products that do that, like Coinbase Wallet or, or Earn, you know, which lets you use crypto to send, you know, and get replies to emails or let you use crypto in dapps and other kinds of things. So that, that's kind of Coinbase in a nutshell. An interface between fiat crypto that also helps make crypto useful.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And we've actually been early adapters of Coinbase. I think back in 2013 there weren't a lot of places where you can even buy crypto. And Coinbase was one of the only, it was the only United States based exchange where you can connect it to your bank of America account and start buying cryptocurrency. And nowadays I think in the, over the last year the media picked up cryptocurrency for better or for worse. It's been like featured in every kind of publication and now even like my mom, who doesn't know a lot about technology, is talking about buying crypto. Outside of the hype, what doors do you see crypto opening up and similar to the idea maze, what do people should pay attention and how should someone outside the industry approach cryptocurrencies?

Well, so what should people pay attention about? It's a little bit like the Internet in the following sense, right? So in the late 80s, early 90s, most people spent zero percent of their time on the Internet, right? And then, you know, the median American start to spend a larger and larger and larger percentage of their time on the Internet. By, you know, 2018, a lot of people are spending 50 or more of their waking hours on the Internet. Whether that's you know, selfies on Instagram or, or Twitter or, or work, you know, Google Docs and Gmail and so on. You're just always online, right? And usually for many people, more than 50% they're waking hours. Right. And in the same way, what I think you can start graphing is the percent of net worth that Americans have in blockchain based assets. And so like you know, eight years ago, nine years ago is basically zero percent. You know, like before the invention, really 10 years ago, before the invention of cryptocurrency, nobody had anything in blockchain based assets. And now it's, you know, a non, like a, like a significant percentage. Well, let's say a non zero, let me be more precise, a non zero. Percentage of Americans have a significant fraction of their net worth in cryptocurrencies. Right. But the thing about the blockchain is it's going to not just be currencies, but it's going to be stocks and it's going to be bonds and it's going to be mortgages and it's going to be loans and derivatives and real estate and also video game swords and collectibles and baseball cards and anything else that's scarce. Right. So it's programmable scarcity. So in the same way that the Internet went from like basically 0% of your time to like 50% of your time, blockchain based assets are going to go from basically 0% of your net worth to like what your net worth is in like 20 years. It's like all the crypto stuff because it's just better when it's blockchainified. Now that's still in some ways what's funny is that's like a quasi controversial statement today because there's folks who are like, oh, the blockchain isn't good for much or whatever. But like a lot of the guys have been banks who know about this, have seen this thing coming for the last five years and will underline that. And it's certainly fairly obvious if you're in tech and you're looking at the hundreds of companies that are coming up in all these different areas and some of them will work today, some will work tomorrow, some will work in the future. For example, with the Internet, Webvan did not work, lots of delivery startups did not work. And then Instacart really worked. I'm not saying they're all going to work immediately, but I'm going to say over 20 years, pretty much everything scarce is going to be blockchain based. So that's like the long term potential of the space.

Yeah, yeah, that's really strong. So yeah, so I know like before we go into the lightning round, we like to highlight not just executive but also like people on the team. And you've worked with Haseeb, who went to App Academy, which is coding boot camp, and he joined your team, you hired him on your team at 21 that turns into Earn. And then you also work with, with Preeti, who's also been a podcast that was an investment banker, worked at Andreessen and worked with you there. So kind of like what were your thoughts about them given that they had non traditional backgrounds? Why did you hire people like Haseeb and things like that? And then we'll go into the lightning round.

Sure. So, you know, I know Haseeb and Preeti pretty well. Preeti. I met her when I was a GP at Andreessen and she was a junior partner there. And she, you know, struck me as being like very smart and hard working and whatnot. I was impressed with the fact that she had gone from USC to Goldman, which is a leap that it's actually kind of hard to make because Goldman's very selective about where they recruit from and then from Goldman to a 16Z. But I was even more impressed with the fact that she then self taught herself programming and computer science and got good enough to get a job at Coinbase, which has very selective and rigorous engineering interview process. And since then she's been involved with various cryptocurrency startups and now is, you know, running. True story. And yeah, I thought, I think she's just really a great example of tenacity and pull yourself by your bootstraps kind of, kind of energy. Haseeb is, you know, also very smart. Coming from a somewhat different path. He, you know, was like a really competent online. Not online, I'm so sure. Online, yeah.

Online poker.

Was it online? I'm not sure if it's online poker or offline poker, but he's really competent poker player and won a lot of money with that and then self taught himself engineering and got a job at Airbnb and. And proved himself there as a pretty competent guy. And then after that then you know, he was. I actually met him at this like Ethereum, you know, kind of event and we got talking and he joined earn and now recently, you know, I he's a partner at Metastable, which is crypto hedge fund. And you know, it's run by a very good friend of mine, Naval. And you know, all those folks are my friends.

Nice. Awesome.

And just to highlight that they're also our podcast guests, Haseeb Story. He talks about how he got. Got his job at Airbnb, I think episode five or something. So definitely check out their stories.

Yeah, yeah.

So at this point in the podcast we do the lightning round and this is where Archer and Ruben will ask you questions. And these questions are meant to help our listeners get strategies and resources that you would recommend they use to get to their career goals based on what you've done in the past. So Artur, take it away.

Yeah. So this question takes it back to the basics. So imagine you just got dropped in a new city, you only have $100 and you're starting from scratch again. And you're trying to break into tech, so how would you spend that $100?

Oh, like, so I'm like at, at zero and the only asset I have is 100 bucks.

So yeah, let's say you don't have the skill yet, but you're trying to break into tech. So how would you spend a hundred dollars to level up and get a job in tech?

Zero assets. Let's say you have housing.

Okay, Yes, I have housing. Okay, fine.

Assume housing is taken care of.

Do I have a computer?

Let's say you have a computer.

Yeah, let's say you have a computer.

Okay.

Public library.

What I'd probably do is I would see 100 bucks. I guess I would buy a domain name and then I would learn to code from free online tutorials and I would post up that stuff there and I would spend the money on like, you know, maybe aws. Even though AWS has a free tier, it's got like EC2, Google Cloud has free tier stuff and so on. And so what I try and do is actually there's a lady who did this a while back called 100 days of code, where she just was like, okay, look, it's like a painter who draws the same portrait, but does it like 100 days in a row and eventually just gets better and better, right? And so you do something like that where you've got the domain so you kind of show you're serious. So it's like you can get it from Namecheap or something for a few dollars. And then pretty much everything else is free other than maybe the computer time. And you just do the kinds of projects you can do on an EC2 micro instance and all of that would be free. And then you just as you built that portfolio of all this open source code that you've got, you just like, you know, you've got 200 startups that you've got in a Google spreadsheet and you find an engineer there and you say, hey, is this cool? You follow them on Twitter, you reply to their comments, you know, you comment on their blog and you try to add value. That's like really important. Your first interaction with somebody generally shouldn't be an ask, it should be a give. And I do believe that if you kind of do that enough, then folks will be like, wow, that guy was really helpful, right? And you know, this of course assumes you have time, right? You, you have a roof over your head, you have food. Like, I'm not able to solve those problems. You know, that's, that's hard, but. But if you have time, if you have food, if you have, like, this public library computer, that's how bootstrap yourself.

Yeah, no, that's. That's good. It's good feedback. And, you know, given that the first ask on Twitter shouldn't be, you know, given that, it shouldn't be an ask. I've always wanted to ask you this because, like, I know I was following you for a long time before we connected, and then eventually you said you sent a DM that said we should get you into tech. Like, what actually got you to say that?

I thought you're a really resourceful guy. You know, I think I could sense that sort of spirit of, you know, resourcefulness that I see in good entrepreneurs. And I was like, yeah, you know, you're someone who would do well there. That's why I said it.

Yeah, no, I appreciate that. Appreciate that. And then you also talked about these monthly things that are in your head that you repeat. So we like to talk a lot about mindset as well. And so, you know, what are. What's your routine? Like, what's Baji's routine in the morning, during the day? What music do you listen to? What inspires you when you take breaks? Like, what. What do you do?

Sure. So, like, what's my routine like? Well, I'll usually come up with a few words that summarize what my priorities are, and I'll put them on my phone. So it's like A, B, C and D. Right. And, like, quasi rhymes or whatever. Right. And so then every time I open my phone, I'm seeing A, B, C and D. So even if I'm, like, not even consciously reading, it's going to my subconscious. So usually A is the most important project that I need to work on that day. Right. And so, like, okay, if I've done nothing else, I move the ball forward on A, then I've got some time. I move the ball on B and then C and then D in that order. And generally, you don't have the time to move things forward on more than three or four axes at the same time. So you also want to define what an endpoint is, because, like, if you're constantly doing the same thing, so that's like, how I kind of organize my time. And, you know, then in addition to that, I've got, like, the formal to do, like, list. Right. And you should use whatever to do list you'll actually use. Right. Whether it's a notes app or the reminders app on the phone. I use Emacs. Org mode, if you guys may or may not know what that is. But it's like a. It's like an engineer's to do list kind of app, right? And, you know, just, just something that you'll actually use is the to do list. So that's how I organize my time. And often it'll be things where I think I feel like on a daily basis or weekly basis, I'm not making too much progress. But then on a monthly basis or a yearly basis, I look back, I'm like, oh, you know, actually I kind of got a lot of stuff done. Because what I try to do is aside from those, like, major priorities, I set almost everything else to zero, right? Like, and that's easier if you don't have the desire to go to the club, right? Like, I don't have the desire to go to Florence, Italy or whatever. You know, I just, I don't care about traveling. It's good for some people. It's fine. I don't begrudge them it, right. And, you know, so then what will I do recreationally? There's like, there's a book that I basically like, a book and a half that I read and reread over and over again. And it's, there's. There's a Princeton guide to Pure Mathematics and Applied Mathematics. And these two books are like, they're like encyclopedias, but that are really wonderful because you can just like read one page at a time or you can read the whole chapter at a time and you can just like read and reread these. They're just like, you know, for, for that kind of person, they're fun, fun to reread. So that's like something I'll do.

It's like math proofs and things like that.

It's like math. It's like an introduction to various math concepts, right? And you know what it's like is just being in the middle of nowhere and being able to like pull ups with your brain, right? So it's like, okay, boom, let me knock out 10 or whatever, right? And yeah, so now what I, what I used to do is I used to actually work out all the time and it used to be in really good shape. And now with startups and like fatherhood and all the type of stuff that has obligate, especially as like an executive or CEO, you don't have as much control over your schedule. And so that's something that I want to get back into as like the first bit. But certainly on those days where you work out, you're in top mental condition as well. So I think that should be an ideal part of a routine, even if it's not necessarily on a daily basis.

Possible. Cool. And we're about to wrap up. This is the last question, so it's a bit of a doozy.

So if you could be born at.

Any time in history, either past or future, what time would you choose?

And why now? Yeah, no, I mean, like, you can learn. I mean, this is it. Given all the negative stuff, whatever, sometimes it's in the headlines. You know, I think the best is in front of us, right? Like so much better to have running water and Internet and, and all this stuff today than even like 150 years ago when you didn't have that stuff. And I think that's like, you know, assuming civilization continues, that's usually going to be the right answer. Like the best time to be born is now.

Awesome.

Cool.

What's the best way to stay in touch with you?

Twitter?

Beautiful Zs, everybody. So without further ado, thank you for taking time with us. And without.

Yeah, let's break it, let's break in.