Manish Gupta, EVP Engineering at Coinbase - Increasing Economic Freedom in the World

(Intro Narrator at 00:00:01) Hello, my friends. Today, Joel is talking to Manish, the executive vice president of engineering at Coinbase. And they discuss Coinbase's mission to increase economic freedom in the world, building the infrastructure to support future innovation in crypto, and exciting future use cases for blockchain. All of this right here, right now, on the Modern CTO podcast.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:28) Here we go. This is the Modern CTO Podcast.

(Manish at 00:00:41) Yeah. While growing up, I was into watching my dad put together things that were broken. So I grew up in India, Bombay, Mumbai, and things would break all the time. And the idea would be to repair them. And my dad, being the handyman of the house, he would put things together.

(Manish at 00:01:01) And that's when it got drilled into my head that you should be an engineer and how to build and just learn to build things, right, and fix things and build things. And then I went into engineering school, gravitated towards computer science because I just felt it was something that I was good at, understanding logic, instructing the machine in a way that would make sense. And then the rest is history. I got sucked into engineering, the computer engineering, got my bachelor's there, and then ended up in the US for my master's.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:34) Oh, that's pretty cool. Were you working on any cool projects for your master's?

(Manish at 00:01:38) So the bachelor's, actually, I was working on what we call, at that time, it was artificial intelligence. This was very early, pre-AI becoming such a big thing. Handwriting recognition was one of the projects that I worked on, which was fun, very exciting. When I came here, yes, there were a bunch of very interesting projects in terms of networking. But UIUC, again, I went to Urbana-Champaign, and that's a phenomenal school.

(Manish at 00:02:06) Learned a lot from great people around me. And yeah, lots of cool things, just being exposed to this massive institution with so much funding in computer science. That was very foreign to me, right, coming from India. And then that, I think, just opened up the aperture that there is so much you can do here. So yes, there were things in, I think, simulation and AI. UIUC is great at that.

(Manish at 00:02:37) So lots of exposure in that space. Absolutely.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:39) And then what was your first job after college?

(Manish at 00:02:42) So from UIUC, actually, my first job from UIUC would be probably my internship. I interned at Microsoft. But then after graduating, I decided that I wanted to be in the Silicon Valley because there was this calling, right? Everything at that time, at least, happened to be in Silicon Valley.

(Manish at 00:03:04) So decided to come here. I worked at a company called Excite@Home. Most viewers and listeners may not even remember the name, but that was one of the pioneers in providing internet over broadband cable. Yeah. So that was a lot of fun.

(Manish at 00:03:20) However, that did not last too long because that company went under with the dot-com bust in 2002. And that's when I stumbled upon Google. I can go on and describe to you my journey.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:34) Yeah. Tell me about Google.

(Manish at 00:03:37) So at Google, when I joined, it was just 200 people. We were around 80 engineers. Did not quite know who my manager even was. So a bunch of engineers working on great things. I was responsible for building billing and payment system.

(Manish at 00:03:53) So that was one of my first projects. The company grew very fast and joined as an IC, of course. But then over time, started to take on tech leadership, over time management. And then worked on a variety of things in advertising. We tried TV ads actually, and that did not go too far.

(Manish at 00:04:13) But then we bought YouTube and that was a fun journey, helping YouTube monetize, coming up with various ad formats that worked for it. So that was fun. And that got me into advertising overall. So display ads, video ads. And over time, I became responsible for what we call the advertiser platform.

(Manish at 00:04:34) This was everything that advertisers would need and use to set up their marketing campaigns, get the best ROI. And yeah, it was being responsible for the crown jewel of Google because most of the revenues flowed through AdWords. And that was what I was responsible for with an amazing team. And towards the last four years there, we ended up rehauling the entire stack that advertisers would use and building it ground up, all the way from the database to the API layer, to the UI layer.

(Manish at 00:05:10) And that was fun. So that was a marathon. It was landing pretty well in 2018 when I decided to entertain a phone call from Lyft.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:21) And then I want to talk before we go into Lyft, I want to know. All right, so you were at Google, I think, 16 years, right? It's quite a while. How did you go from just getting there right after your Microsoft internship and how did you get to the top?

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:35) Looking back on it, what made you successful there?

(Manish at 00:05:40) It was never something that I felt I want to do, as in continue to climb the ladder or something. What made me successful? I think every time I would work on something, become good at it, then the question would be, okay, how do I amplify my impact? How can I make this impact be broader around me? And those are the kinds of things that I think naturally made me want to seek opportunities to just amplify what I do.

(Manish at 00:06:13) So I think as an engineer, I first became expert in billing then in parts of advertising. And over time, I could then gravitate towards a little bit of leadership and management because it was a funny story actually. When I was about to build a very new project, and one of the junior engineers comes to me and says, Hey, Manish, tell me, what should I do next? I'm done with my task.

(Manish at 00:06:41) And I'm like, well, go figure it out. But then I stopped myself and then said, no, you know what? I think this is something that maybe you will not be able to do. Why don't you do this exciting project that I was about to embark on? I will go figure out what we need to do as a team next.

(Manish at 00:07:01) And I think that honestly is a light bulb moment because the lesson I learned from that is that it's a good idea to be able to focus your time on things that only you can do, right? Yeah. And whatever you think other people around you can do, even if they are not fully ready for it yet, it can provide stretch opportunities for others.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:30) Yeah. Somebody had told me once, can't remember who, but they had said something along the lines of take your most important task and put your best person on it. And I was like, at the time of hearing it, I was like, that sounds odd. Shouldn't I be doing the most important task? And he's like, you should be coming up with the next thing and your most important thing should have your best person on it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:51) And I was like, oh, that's actually really hard to argue with. That sounds better. And then I adjust how I think, you know?

(Manish at 00:07:57) Yeah. Yeah. I think ambiguity is not something that everybody is comfortable with, right? And I think that comes with experience.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:04) You mentioned ambiguity in your job post on Coinbase that you like to... They do. Okay. Yeah. Yeah, they do. They literally said that in the, under the engineering leadership section, because I was looking, I was just browsing the jobs.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:18) I find that you can often tell a lot about company culture by looking at the job postings. So I was looking at engineering leadership and there is actually a bullet point saying something along the lines of being comfortable with ambiguity or understanding it or something along those lines.

(Manish at 00:08:31) Yep. 100%. Yes. I think as leaders, we have to be able to find the path in ambiguity, right? If it is purely mechanical, then I think that other people can do, but for leaders, they have to navigate uncertain, unforeseen circumstances.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:50) Like COVID, right? And I heard you guys went completely remote first as an org. Was that during COVID?

(Manish at 00:09:00) Yeah, it was actually in the early days of COVID. This is before I joined Coinbase and Brian made a bold pivot of the company to embrace remote first instead of trying to fight remote. And with that, there is just so much opportunity if you think about it. Being remote first and leaning into remote, you get access to so much talent. Talent is everywhere.

(Manish at 00:09:26) Right? We leaned into it heavily. We said we are going to be a fully remote company or not fully remote. Maybe the best way to say is remote first because we do intend to have some physical spaces for people if they really want it. But the idea is that we should be able to hire anywhere.

(Manish at 00:09:42) Right? People will no longer move for opportunities. I think that's the future of work. Opportunities can be available to people no matter where they are. So I think that has played out really well for us, honestly.

(Manish at 00:09:57) If we were to go back to the office or try to go back to the office, we don't even have the physical space. We have grown so much in the last two years.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:06) That's pretty cool. Yeah. That's, um, I think we're making, as humans, I think we're making a full circle, right? We started off as migratory.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:16) Right? And then we stopped and planted roots. And I think now that we have food and shelter and everything, everywhere we want to go, we're going to start to see an uptick in people migrating around again.

(Manish at 00:10:30) And unless you ask someone where they are, you never know where they're dialing in from.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:35) Yeah. And it's hard because where's the best place to live? It's dependent on the season. So why not have a life where you can go wherever the best season is?

(Manish at 00:10:44) Exactly.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:45) Yeah. I'm biased. About a month ago, my wife and I, we sold everything we had in our house and everything, and we went full time in our RV. Isn't that crazy?

(Manish at 00:11:00) That is crazy. Where do you live?

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:02) So we're spending a different season in a different place. So right now we're in Asheville, North Carolina. And then for winter, we're going to be back in Florida where we're both from. And then spring, we're going to be in Austin, Texas and summer, we're going to be in Denver.

(Manish at 00:11:19) That's awesome. I'm assuming you can do this until your kids go to school or maybe by the time even school will be all remote first.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:27) Yeah. Well, we're actually homeschooling the kids.

(Manish at 00:11:29) Oh, that's awesome.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:30) Yeah. Yeah. We had a couple friends that were doing it and they get together. So you would imagine that they're isolated, but everyone that does the homeschooling comes together in these groups and they meet at the library and stuff. So I was like, yeah, let's try it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:46) And if we don't like it, then we won't do it.

(Manish at 00:11:50) Yeah. I will say though, doing remote first is not a straightforward thing also, right? Because you can have people from all over the world in a given team, and that can create other challenges, which is how do you ensure that you're all able to effectively collaborate, right?

(Manish at 00:12:07) So we had to think through that as we scaled, by the way. So what we came up with was that we will identify three broad regions in which we will have teams. And these are pretty big regions. Honestly, they cover the entire globe. So it is Americas, EMEA, and APAC.

(Manish at 00:12:23) And within that region, you can be in any latitude, right? You can be in Canada. In Americas, you could be all the way from Canada to, let's say, the southern tip of Argentina once we start hiring there. And it almost doesn't matter.

(Manish at 00:12:39) Right? You can be aligned on the time zone without staying up late in the night and have a regular life and be part of a team that is fairly diverse even, right? Because there are all these different backgrounds that are coming together to build an amazing team. And then you have to think about how you make sure that each of these regional teams also have autonomy.

(Manish at 00:13:03) So that way they can execute on their own. They can be independent decision making as much as possible. So I have to say we are early in our journey on that as we are scaling. But those are the principles we have aligned on. And we hope to learn from it as we build our company in a very global fashion like this.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:22) Now, how seriously do you take the remote first? Like if you have a group of people in the office, like four or five of them, but then another four of them are remote. Do you make everybody in the office go into separate rooms and they all get on their laptop?

(Manish at 00:13:41) That is the intent. The intent is that everybody dials in from their own desk or a phone booth. However, we have not enforced that yet. So because until now, we have not created any of these office spaces catered towards this, right?

(Manish at 00:13:56) We still have these big conference rooms with massive presentation screens. And it's natural for people to huddle in a single conference room, but the intent is to get to a world where we have whatever office space we do create, we'll have ample phone booths or desks where people can just put on the headsets if they want to and dial into the meetings from their desk, from their separate phone booth.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:22) I love it. Oh, and for the maybe 1.0001% of people that don't know what Coinbase is. Can you tell us what it is?

(Manish at 00:14:31) Coinbase. Oh my God. So that's a long, it's gonna be a long answer.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:37) It's okay.

(Manish at 00:14:38) Yeah. Okay. So Coinbase, it started off with a very simple idea, right? It was a radical idea that everybody should be able to buy Bitcoin and hold it and do some basic things with it. So this was the very first crypto asset that was started in 2012, and that's how this became a company.

(Manish at 00:15:00) Just letting people buy something that was kind of growing, becoming popular at the time. Now our mission has evolved since then. So what is our maybe that's the pithiest description of what Coinbase is. So our mission is to increase the economic freedom in the world. Now you might say that's very broad.

(Manish at 00:15:18) Well, yes. It is. It is a very long term, very broad vision. But we think the way to accomplish that is by actually providing an open and freely available global financial system, right?

(Manish at 00:15:32) So that's what we are actually working towards. And we think that once you provide access to financial services, people end up using them to uplift themselves, get a better lifestyle. It improves their financial well-being overall. They can take better care of their families. So essentially, that's how economic freedom grows once they have access to financial services.

(Manish at 00:15:54) So then the next step would be okay, fine. That's a good thing. But how will you actually accomplish that? And the way we think about this is that we have three prongs to our strategy.

(Manish at 00:16:06) So one is the first one is the most obvious one, which is crypto as the investment. So this is currently the core of our business today. It is the first use case that every crypto user ends up encountering, right? So it enables simple things like buy, hold, sell, trade.

(Manish at 00:16:26) So in that first prong, we want to actually get to becoming the Amazon of assets. Anything that you want to be able to buy in terms of crypto, as long as it is legal, we should be able to provide you access to that asset through Coinbase. We are not there yet, but that's a journey. That's one of the most important things we can get to in our first prong. And then the second thing that we are doing is using this foundation to build what we call the new financial system.

(Manish at 00:16:59) So what does that mean? Well, once you have enough users in the crypto ecosystem, new financial applications will tend to emerge. You have products like borrow, lend, payments, direct deposit, debit card, credit card, P2P—bunch of things.

(Manish at 00:17:16) And you also can have advanced services like margin derivatives. So overall, what we think is that users should be able to use their Coinbase account as their primary financial account. So that's what we are developing towards. Started with just as an investment, but then building a fully capable financial account that you can access many things through it.

(Manish at 00:17:42) And then finally, the third prong is super interesting. This is making crypto as an app platform. So we have had now around nine years, eight to nine years, of building the primitives that are very complex in terms of key management and storage of assets.

(Manish at 00:18:02) So we want to expose these primitives, and we continue to build many more primitives all the time. How do we expose these primitives and enable the crypto ecosystem to flourish? So how can we become the cloud provider equivalent, the AWS for crypto? And that is fascinating. Developers and enterprises don't have to reinvent the wheel. They can build their applications on what we provide as a service. And then on top of that, we can provide distribution of their applications to the millions of users that use Coinbase to access the primary financial account.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:44) That's pretty interesting. You got my mind turning now. You guys going to have some bots on there? Licensed trading bots?

(Manish at 00:18:54) No, we don't have any trading bots. But yeah, I think it's a very compelling overall prospect. If you think about it, I feel the entire crypto ecosystem is just at the beginning right now. And what it can deliver is amazing.

(Manish at 00:19:10) Who knew in the nineties that you and I could be having this conversation on what we call the Internet? And similarly, at this point, I think what is getting built is the next layer of Internet on top of what we have today, which is the Internet of information. So the thing on top of that—this is the Internet of value. And the applications are just starting to emerge.

(Manish at 00:19:34) So this is going to be fascinating, and we are in the very early days.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:38) I'm excited. What's a typical day for you at Coinbase?

(Manish at 00:19:44) We have worked on aligning our meetings to a smaller portion of the day. So nine to three in Pacific time zone—we end up using that time for check-ins, for reviews. So that ends up filling the day. And then there is lots of async work that happens. There's lots of Slack that happens. And I will say it is challenging to prioritize the things that are most important. So you have to be very disciplined about it on the things that you want to accomplish on a given day. Otherwise, you can get sucked into everything that is coming at you. So you have to be able to prioritize things that only you can do, as I said earlier. And make forward progress on that. Even if a little bit at a time, continue to push on that. So that's what I try to balance: unblock others and push forward.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:40) Is that what you use those three pillars to help figure out prioritization?

(Manish at 00:20:46) They help. They are not necessarily in particular priority order. I think they all three need to happen. They are just in different time horizons, I would say. So crypto as an investment will be more of a short-term time horizon. We are currently on this path to add as many assets as fast as possible, as long as they're legal. Then there are these other businesses we are building, which is more next longer-term horizon, like medium term I would say, which is crypto as a financial system. And then the third one is a longer-term horizon, which requires us to kind of rethink how we have built our software, build them in an API-first way so that all the services that we are building can be exposed externally in a way that we use it ourselves. Now just because it's a longer-term horizon doesn't mean it is less important.

(Manish at 00:21:40) It actually is longer-term horizon because it probably requires a lot more investment in it. So it makes it even more urgent to start sooner than later. There was this advice I'd heard long ago that things that are going to take the longest are the most urgent to start now. So we will not try to be arbiters and judges of what users should use. Users should decide.

(Manish at 00:22:05) We will give them all the information so that they can make decisions on their own on what they should invest their money in. Our job is to make sure that they have access to everything that crypto economy has to offer and that they should be able to do it all through Coinbase.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:21) Yeah, no, I agree. What's the deal with Ripple? Because I love Ripple. It was there, and then one day it's like, you can't buy it anymore. I know that they had some issue, but how do you guys—do you have a team that helps make these decisions?

(Manish at 00:22:36) Yeah. So for Ripple specifically, what happened is the SEC said that it is a security.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:43) Oh, okay. They ruled it was a security at some point in time, and then that made you change accordingly. Got it.

(Manish at 00:22:49) Yeah. So we had to comply. And that's our stance in general. So there are many things that are going to be in the gray, and we don't want to be making decisions on behalf of the government.

(Manish at 00:23:01) So we think, as long as it is not being deemed that thou shall not list it, we will list it. And then if we are told that this is not something that is viable, that is legal from their perspective, our job is to comply.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:17) Who is doing this? Is there a specific cryptocurrency task force in the US government?

(Manish at 00:23:23) There is. I think there are a bunch of agencies. So SEC is probably one of the biggest ones that is very active in this space. I don't know who else there is. There's, I think, CFTC is another one. And there are a few other agencies that are taking active interest in this.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:42) They're probably just doing it à la carte as things come up, right? Some issue arises, they put out some memorandum that says, you know, no longer XRP is officially. But there's not necessarily a table of acceptable and unacceptable currencies on some government website somewhere. Got it. It's kind of gray. It's hard.

(Manish at 00:24:05) It is hard. It is new. And I think it's very natural for these things to happen. Things get ignored for way too long initially. And then once they become real, that's when I think people end up reacting. So I would say, I don't know if you've heard this framework, but almost all technologies end up going through these phases. They are initially a joke until they become a threat, and then eventually they become obvious. So I would say, if I were to say something—I mean, that's probably true with things like Amazon, right? Books. It was probably a joke and then became a threat to all the booksellers, and then it became obvious. Probably true with YouTube, true with Spotify, any technology that you want to apply it—even microwave. I think that probably holds. So I would say crypto economy and crypto ecosystem is no longer a joke. It is—people acknowledge that it is likely here to stay. But it is being perceived as a threat. Okay, we ignored it for too long. We now need to figure out how to actually make it viable.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:17) I was reading about kids that are getting their first-time jobs, that they're taking all of their paycheck and converting it to crypto the moment they get it, because they're like, this is the future. And so when I see the 16-year-olds doing that, I'm like, uh-oh, I better keep up with them.

(Manish at 00:25:34) Yeah. There you go. So it is clearly on its way to becoming more and more mainstream and obvious.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:40) So any interesting—I don't know if we had this planned or not—but do you have any interesting upcoming announcements or anything that just came out for Coinbase?

(Manish at 00:25:49) I'm actually very excited about a recent change in how we think about our product strategy. Would that help?

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:57) Yeah, let's do that.

(Manish at 00:25:59) Okay. Let's do that. So the one thing that we are doing is, at the summary level, I would call it embracing decentralization, but I have to give you some context before that. So until now, the way we have built products is that we have said, you know what? We want to take all this crypto complexity and hide it for the user and let the user just access Coinbase as if they're accessing a very regular traditional account.

(Manish at 00:26:26) They buy something, they hold it, and that is it. And of course we build all these features for them as crypto economy develops. But then by doing that, what you have to do is as the crypto ecosystem comes up with new applications, we have to make changes in our entire stack because we have hidden away the complexity of crypto, so to speak.

(Manish at 00:26:48) So we have to continue to work on hiding that additional complexity that is getting invented so that users can use the new protocols, the new applications that are being built in the crypto ecosystem. So an example would be something like a lend or a borrow, which is being built in crypto using a decentralized protocol. But to make it accessible to the user, we have to kind of hide that complexity. So that's how we have been working on it until now. The insight here is that we need to shift how we build our products and not worry about hiding that one piece of complexity, which is called segregated wallet, which is a way for a user to have direct access to a wallet on the blockchain.

(Manish at 00:27:36) That's what we were hiding so that the users don't have to worry about that complexity. But now we are saying that, you know what? We will actually have to embrace that. It creates other problems in the sense that it creates challenges, I would say, which is to create an amazing UX despite exposing this capability. But once you expose this idea that a user has direct access to the wallet, it essentially opens the doors for enabling any application that is being built in the crypto ecosystem and having the user have access to it day one.

(Manish at 00:28:14) So that is a massive change in how we are thinking about our products. And it brings us closer to a more open platform in some sense. It's very exciting for the engineering team because you are building the crypto aspects into the entire stack in some sense. You're not trying to hide the complexity of—if you were to draw a comparison, it is like comparing the AOL walled system previously to a Chrome or a browser that gives you access to anything out there. And you use your own judgment as a user. What do you want to participate in or not?

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:53) Give the power to the people. That's a good strategy.

(Manish at 00:28:57) Right? It also speaks to the ethos of decentralization in some sense, because why should we decide what applications the user can access or not? We should let the user decide, give them access to everything that is out there day one.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:13) Yeah. And then you handle the security side of things and some basic infrastructure concepts and allow them to—there's a button in the app that says borrow. You can borrow based off of your currency. So that's not the Coinbase bank. That's just using the decentralized loan-type protocols, decentralized finance.

(Manish at 00:29:37) Yeah. So what we have today is—this is still trying to hide the complexity, honestly. But you could imagine opening the doors for the user to say that I want to use the protocol provided by Compound or Aave, some particular protocols that actually provide this capability. And the user can decide which ones they want to use in addition to Coinbase potentially also providing their own services alongside, which could be built in a decentralized way, like a protocol on the blockchain, or it could be built in a centralized way where we actually are directly providing that service to the user and the user decides what they want to use.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:16) I want to talk a little bit about security because I've had a number of really interesting security people on the show in the past couple months. Specifically one was called NowSecure with David Weinstein. That was a good episode. But we were talking about app security, their whole thing, their whole company that's built around the concept of app security specifically. And then I was like, all right, well, I've got my money at Coinbase.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:43) I know you're not the CISO, and I know you probably have teams of teams of people. So I'm not looking for that type of answer. What I am curious about—and we can talk about security as a whole, as far as funds—what I am curious about is, how do you think about your engineers? You have a lot of them, and they need the flexibility. And a lot of them come from cloud-first type environments. They need the flexibility to do their job and what they need to do. But we're also in this highly regulated banking thing.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:19) How do you make it easy for the developers, but also secure for them to do their jobs?

(Manish at 00:31:26) So I'll share my experiences from the past and compare it to Coinbase. So at previous companies, I felt security was a layer that had to be put on top. People were not thinking about security as a security-first mindset. It was considered a tax. So it was honestly painful to go through security reviews as new products are launching. Now in hindsight, all for good reason. But that's how the mentality was. And of course, when you have that kind of a mindset, let's say an adversarial one, it creates a lot of friction.

(Manish at 00:32:06) But at Coinbase, it has been built from the ground up with the security-first mindset. It was built in a time when it was not clear whether it was going to be even safe for people to be able to buy into crypto. So Coinbase's promise was to build the most trusted way to buy and hold crypto. So with that mindset, I would say security is in the DNA, is in the fabric of how the company is built, which is amazing. So it actually makes the job pretty easy in terms of—from a culture standpoint, the culture just supports the investment in security.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:49) I like that. That's awesome. I heard something similar. I think his name is Bryson Koehler. He is the CTO at, I think, Equifax. I could be wrong. But he came on and I was—they had that big security breach several years ago and he was the person that came in after. And when I was asking him about how that was, coming in, he said that they shifted from a culture of bolt-on, like bolting security on, to baked in. And I was like, oh, that sounds nice. From bolt-on to baked in.

(Manish at 00:33:25) Yeah. I like that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:25) Yeah. It sounded good. And I was like, that makes sense, right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:30) It's like gummy vitamins, right? If you make the healthy thing good, then you're going to get a bunch of people that enjoy that, and it's going to be in the root of it, and then it'll express itself as the organization grows.

(Manish at 00:33:46) Yeah, and trust is at the foundation of what we have built as a company, right? So that is, in some sense, I sometimes say that that is the key product that we have built, which is trust. And how do you do that? Security, right? Security is the most important aspect. I would say even more important than reliability. So that's the one thing. We did this major push internally in terms of shoring up the reliability of our infrastructure, but I'll say one thing that is more important than reliability is security.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:16) You guys have been really reliable. I mean, I've been a customer for a couple years. You're always, I know this is not you, but the company is always really direct. They let you know when there's issues that you can look at. You have status pages. You can see all the things and how everything's working, and when there are open issues, you can watch how they're resolving them. And so I think you guys have done a great job as far as communication, and I'm definitely a happy customer.

(Manish at 00:34:46) Great. Thank you, Joel.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:48) I just recently joined Coinbase Pro. I started writing some scripts and getting interested in that, and I was like, I need the API. And then I was like, oh, go over to Coinbase Pro. You can get an API, and then you can start learning about how this stuff's working at a lower level than me just being a consumer.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:06) What's Coinbase Cloud?

(Manish at 00:35:10) What is Coinbase Cloud, you mean? So yes, that essentially is the third prong of our strategy, right? How do we become the app platform? I should say it's part of the third prong. So essentially, building, using, or creating, using crypto as an app platform. Maybe that's how I should say it. So there are two aspects of this, of that strategy. One is to get to a place where we can have many other applications be exposed through Coinbase for users to use. But Coinbase Cloud specifically, that is a way for us to expose our products as APIs, as platforms for other companies and developers to build applications on top.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:59) Is this out yet? Like, is this visible publicly?

(Manish at 00:36:01) Yes. Yeah. So we actually, we did acquire a company called Bison Trails. Have you heard of it?

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:06) No, no, no. I want to look this up. How do I find this Coinbase Cloud thing?

(Manish at 00:36:12) Just search Coinbase Cloud. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:16) For because you're on the call, I'll use Google. There we go. There it is. It's right there. Build the crypto economy with Coinbase. Our APIs make it easy to build and connect your app to 40 million Coinbase customers, integrate cryptocurrencies and more. And you got documentation. Look at that. I've got something new to read tonight, my friend.

(Manish at 00:36:37) Perfect. So, yeah, I mean, there are underlying APIs that we could provide, right, which are like basic crypto primitives for you to build applications. And then, of course, we could also expose APIs of the products so that you could build value-added features on top of what we already provide.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:59) I like it. I'm excited. I'm excited to explore that. You guys are leading the future. Do you ever talk with Shree over at, he's the CTO over at PayPal?

(Manish at 00:37:09) No, I have not spoken to him.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:11) Oh man, you should. I think you guys would have interesting conversations. He was talking with me about the future of payments, and he used this example of when's the last time you paid for a Lyft? And the answer is you don't pay for the Lyft. Your payment method's there. It's these transparent payments, or ambient payments is what he calls it. The payment just kind of happens.

(Manish at 00:37:34) Payment happens.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:35) Yeah. And I was like, that is so cool. And he made my list as one of my favorite brilliant people.

(Manish at 00:37:44) The other thing, Joel, actually, payments is just one of the first applications, right? But just think about blockchain. What are they? Essentially, they are a distributed database, right, which is decentralized. They're permissionless. And what can you do with it? So one next obvious thing that is very, very, very valuable is identity. So you could actually be storing all the information about your capabilities, the attestations that you have, or the certifications you have. So let's say you're a US citizen, your age, or your credit rating, all those things, they can all be on the blockchain. And you could participate in certain products without sharing your entire PII. Because today, what you have to do is you have to give your entire life story to a particular product if you want to get something in return, if you want to participate in that product. But here we are talking about using the blockchain as a way to share only the specific attributes that are necessary that can be shared with the service provider. And they can believe you because it is on the blockchain.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:52) It's interesting. It's like, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of the web, he's working on, I don't know, some people call it like a second internet, but he came on the show and he explained to me everything. But the way you just described how you could do that with your information sounds a lot like the technology they're building. And when I hear things that are similar like that from different groups of people, you can kind of feel like as a group, we're all moving in this sort of direction. And that makes me happy.

(Manish at 00:39:23) Yeah, totally.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:24) This is great, man. You're brilliant. I love it. This is so much fun. I've got some leadership questions. Can we talk a little bit about some leadership stuff? Okay. So if you could design the perfect leadership training program for your direct reports specifically, not just for everybody at the company, for your direct reports, what would the most important two or three things be?

(Manish at 00:39:51) Maybe I'll pick the things that I have benefited from the most, right, and share those. So one phrase I had heard was, no transaction is worth a relationship. And I think that has really sat with me, resonated with me. So what is the takeaway from that? I think one is obviously people are the most important asset, right, for the company. We say that, I think we should mean it. But even more importantly, the relationships are key. That's how things get done. Relationships are important because that trust is important between people to be able to actually, as teams, work on something. I don't know if you are familiar with the Five Dysfunctions of a Team? And one of the first foundation layers in there, which Patrick talks about, is trust. Without that, you can't have an effective team. So I'll go back to that, right, which is trust, relationships. So no transaction is worth the relationship. The other one is resilience and being able to lean into the ambiguity, right? Embrace ambiguity, not fear it. So one phrase that is pretty guideline, guidelines, not rules.

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:11) I like that.

(Manish at 00:41:12) So I think it's very easy for us as engineers to want to distill everything down to a very specific algorithm, right? Like an if-then statement, like a flowchart that you can just follow through because that's how our minds work as engineers. However, as leaders, we have to embrace ambiguity all the time, right? There is nothing. I mean, there's going to be many things that come at us, and we don't have the protocol predefined. Whatever we had works maybe for 80%, but not for 100%. So leaving that room open for judgment is pretty important, but it creates nervousness amongst people sometimes.

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:54) And you're exactly right. That is how my mind works. And I learned really quickly it doesn't work well when you're with your spouse or with my wife. I can't predefine stuff, and I have to learn to embrace the ambiguity of being as late as she wants us to be. But that's what we like to do though. I like this ambiguity conversation because I haven't had it much, and it makes a lot of sense and it feels right to me. But you're right. Part of the fun of projects and solving problems is taking the ambiguous thing and sort of piecing it apart and making it tangible and bringing imagination into reality. And once I heard John Mayer, he's a musician, talk about writing songs, and he's like, sometimes you can feel it and you know it's there, but you just don't tease it apart too quickly. It's like knowing how quickly to tease apart the ambiguity is actually like an art form. And because it has to go with time, you can't just do it all at once. Like you can't solve the entire problem just at once. And so I thought that was really enlightening to hear.

(Manish at 00:43:05) Yeah. And the other thing, more recently I have come across this a few times. I think this is about strengths and weaknesses, areas of development, right, that kind of stuff. And what does feedback do for people? So I feel we need to, I think, rethink how we give feedback, right, and how we build upon strengths. So I think very traditional, again, very engineering mindset, right. When you get told that, hey, this is an area of development for you, or a weakness, you just want to go fix it, right? But it's important to realize that if something is not coming natural to you, you are likely going to, at best, become mediocre at it, not great at it. And what makes a team work is that you have people with different skills that they are great at put together, right? And the way you want to think about areas of development is more about, hey, is this area of development coming in the way of me accomplishing the greatness I could accomplish with the strengths, and remedy it only to that part. Don't try to become great at that area of development because it's not going to be natural, right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:22) I'm a big fan of doubling down on your strengths. And for me, it's an interesting process because it's a journey of you're growing and you're finding the areas where you're better. And so you're saying, okay, let's spend some more time over there. And they kind of like a tree, it kind of splits and branches, and then you slowly get better and better and better at one thing. And those are the people who are known. I mean, the people who are ridiculously good at one thing are the ones that go really far because they have so much trust across people. They have so much social capital for being good at that. You can employ them quickly to solve an issue in that area and have a high level of confidence it's going to get done the first time.

(Manish at 00:45:07) Right. Yeah. So if I were to have a training material for my directs or the leadership team as you said, right, it will be about look at the positives, look at the strengths of the team members, and double down on them, right? Build a team that collectively has all the strengths the team needs. An individual may not have all of them.

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:32) I love it. I love it. And then last one, as we wrap up here on the leadership, what's the most difficult, impactful leadership lesson that you've had to learn?

(Manish at 00:45:43) There are a few that come to mind. I think the most important one, it wasn't necessarily difficult, but it's something that you learn early. And I learned early is really putting the company ahead of the team, ahead of yourself. And I think it definitely is one of the most impactful lessons because it is, again, very natural as coming into the industry, you want to just, okay, optimize for what you want to get done. It may not be the best thing for the company, right? So really zooming back out and thinking what is right for the company overall and working backwards from there.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:26) That's deep because one of the people that I listen to, what do they say? They say, if you help people get what they want, you'll get what you want. And so by you having that mentality and making sure the company is successful, you are taken care of as well.

(Manish at 00:46:45) Totally.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:47) Dude, that's good. That's good stuff. Are there any other topics, Manish, that we want to cover while we're here? We've got a few more minutes if you'd like.

(Manish at 00:46:56) No, I'll say one thing I'll say is to the viewers and listeners, if you have been avoiding learning crypto, right, I'll just share my story, right? So I came across crypto and Bitcoin early when it started, in 2010, early 2010s. But then I ignored it for the most part until I got reintroduced to it more recently before joining Coinbase. And I would say that if you are a technologist and you are in this space, you're an engineer, we are just at the beginning of a massive transformation, right? And crypto is going to be one of the key vehicles to make that happen. This is like the dawn of day one of the entire crypto journey. It's a very exciting journey. So if you have been avoiding it, I would say now is the time. Do it. You owe it to yourself. Learn something about crypto because it is actually a very revolutionary change. And we are just at the beginning.

(Joel Beasley at 00:48:01) Any good YouTube channels or visual resources that helped you understand crypto?

(Manish at 00:48:10) There is a lot. So I would say the one source that I picked up some information from early on is from a16z, Andreessen Horowitz's website. It's called the Crypto Canon. And if you just search for it, you should find that as one of the top links.

(Joel Beasley at 00:48:29) Thank you so much for listening. And if you found this episode useful, please share it with a friend or colleague who you think would get value from it. And if you have topics that you'd like to hear discussed on the podcast, either add me on LinkedIn or send me an email, [email protected]. Every time I get an email or LinkedIn message, it absolutely makes my day and inspires me to keep going.