A first-person monologue by Brian Armstrong describing how he built the early Coinbase prototype while still working full-time at Airbnb. He explains practical legal/ethical cautions (don’t use employer time or hardware), details his personal schedule (evening and weekend coding totaling roughly ~20 hours/week), recounts applying to and being accepted by Y Combinator which enabled him to quit, and reflects on the personal sacrifices (strained friendships) and the role of determination and action in building a startup.
Chapters
So first of all, you need to make sure that if you are currently employed, like, don't build it, you know, on company hours and don't build it on the company laptop. If you build it on company time, on the company hardware, the company probably owns the IP. So anyway, I would often work till like 7pm or something like that. I'd come home, eat dinner and then I would work from like 8pm to midnight. I would do that maybe three or four days a week on weekdays, and then on the weekend I'd work maybe like Sunday afternoon for like seven or eight hours. So I was, I was probably doing like 20 hours a week or something like that on what would eventually become Coinbase in my personal time. And it was, and it was hard, it sucked. I mean, I was like tired after the full day of work. It's like 7pm but this is where that some of that determination comes in, right? And I was like, okay, well my co workers, like going out drinking or whatever, and nothing wrong with that. I did plenty of that. But like, at that moment in that time, I was know, my late 20s, I was like, I really want to try to build something important in the world. Like, I'm going to have to take my own determination and turn that into this fuel to go try to build this thing. So I probably did that for like a year, year and a half to try to build the prototype of what would become Coinbase. And then I applied to Y Combinator. They, they eventually accepted me and wrote me the initial seed check. That's what gave me the confidence to quit my job and go full time on it. How did you maintain friendships in that time? When you're working full time during the day and then coming home and writing code? I was pretty intense about it. I. I would say I sacrificed friendships for it. It's not like I wasn't like, you know, just like never responding to people, but I've seen this happen to various people. Like they, they get to a certain point in their life, sometimes they're like turning a certain age where they always thought they would have more done by then. Or maybe someone in their family passes away and they're like, oh my God, like, time is finite, it's precious. And something happens where they're like, I'm gonna get this done. What? No matter the cost. And they just start really buckling down. They find this source, you know, find whatever that is for, for you, like the listener out there, and then go hard at it, you know, finish your book, launch your thing, whatever it is the app, the startup. Just. Just start doing stuff like, and even if you don't even know what to do, just do anything. Because, you know, action will produce information and you'll find you'll. It'll help you get to the right thing.
