Brian Armstrong tells the founding story of Coinbase: “Nothing was working”

Back in 2010, I had read the bitcoin white paper. I had tried doing a startup in the tutoring and education space. It was kind of like a base hit. Didn't really go very well. And I had joined Airbnb as an early employee to try to learn more about how to do a startup. And so I kept thinking, I really want to do another startup. I want to do another startup. And I eventually read that bitcoin white paper and I started to think more and more about it. So nights and weekends I was kind of working on a prototype. I. I wasn't sure about myself. I didn't really know if this was the thing I wanted to go do. But I applied to Y Combinator and that's the first time somebody actually told me, maybe you're not crazy. Like this whole bitcoin thing is not completely nuts. Maybe we'll write you a little seed check and get off the ground. This was probably 2012. I decided to quit my job, joined Y Combinator, and maybe some of the feelings are very similar to how you're feeling right now. I definitely didn't feel like anything was for sure. I felt like this was a very high risk endeavor. I didn't really know if any of it was going to work out. I felt like maybe I have a shot at something working here, but a lot of cards are going to have to flip over the right way and a lot of hard work is going to have to happen. I was struggling to find anybody who would join my team and work with me. You know, the early stages, it's impossible to find people to join you on these crazy journeys sometimes. I almost co founded it with one person and that all exploded in dramatic fashion. You might have had co founder issues. That's like kind of the norm. Finally found the right co founder, Fred Ersam. We got off to the races. Someone sued us like three months later. So startups are moving from one setback to the next with enthusiasm. And if it's a complete shit show and it's chaos and nothing is working, that's kind of the default state. So you're doing it right. If it feels like that, just don't give up. That's the main thing. A lot of times I've seen people, they have an idea, they have a team that comes together, they launch their first thing, it doesn't work. Four months later, they have some big co founder fight and they blow up and they all go home and it's like, well, you didn't really try it because there's no idea that works on the first try. You have to put something out there and then grind it out. Two or three years, usually to sort of talk to your customers, improve the product. Talk to your customers, improve the product. And sometimes it never works, and sometimes you break through after n number of years. If you look at almost every successful startup, it feels like it was an overnight success, but really that's just how history gets written in hindsight. If you talk to most of those founders in the early days, there was a period where any reasonable person would have quit. Nothing was working. They were in credit card debt, they were being sued, and all of them somehow persevered and pushed through and finally found something that started to get working. And then the next thing, and then the next thing. There was no way to buy and sell crypto, by the way. In the first version of Coinbase, it was just a hosted bitcoin wallet. And I remember I put it on Reddit or something like that. We got like a couple hundred people who came in and used it, and then they would all leave and nobody was using it. That's kind of the default state of every product that you ever launch is, you know, you get the techcrunch of initiation and then flat. So following the advice of Y Combinator, I was like, all right, talk to your customers. So I just emailed 5 of the people who'd signed up. I was like, hey, I built this app. Can I get your feedback? So I got on the phone with like, three or four of them, and I was like, I noticed you didn't come back. Why didn't you use the app? And the guy was like, well, I mean, I thought the app was pretty cool, but I don't actually even really have any bitcoin. I just wanted to check it out. And I remember this light bulb kind of went off in my head and was like, well, if there was, like, a simple way to buy it in the app, would you have done that? He's like, yeah, probably. And so I hung up. And the next few months, I had to start to think about, how do we build a simple buy button? And there was a million things that had to go into that and bank partners and legal, like, licensing and all this kind of stuff. But that's when we finally got product market fit. And that was just one example of, like, hundreds of times where I did that. And I was trying to find something that works, something that works, something that worked. So talk to your customers, improve the product. That's all we did. And that was one of the things I would recommend.