Coinbase CEO and Co-founder Brian Armstrong on Tuesday (July 12) wrote a lengthy blog post outlining his vision for the company, highlighted by a noticeable uptick in operational efficiency at a time when the cryptocurrency sector is feeling the pinch of economic instability around the world.
“As companies scale, they usually slow down and become less efficient,” wrote Armstrong on the crypto exchange’s blog. “It takes more dollars, more people and more time to get anything done. Coordination headwinds increase, vetocracies emerge, risk tolerance fades, and teams become inwardly focused instead of staying focused on their customers.
“While this trajectory is natural, it is not inevitable. Every great company, from Amazon to Meta to Tesla, found ways to retain their founding energy in conjunction with appropriate controls, even as they scaled to be much larger than Coinbase is today. Great companies maintain their insurgent mindset, for fear of becoming complacent and irrelevant over time,” he wrote.
Many of Coinbase’s internal tools and organizing principles “have started to strain or break” after 18 months of year-over-year employee growth of about 200%, wrote Armstrong, leading the company to slow its growth and lay off some U.S. staffers last month.
Coinbase also taps on what it calls directly responsible individuals to help it execute its plans more quickly. Armstrong said these people will now be directly responsible for single areas, rather than multiple parts of the business.
Product leaders will get increased visibility into their profit-and-loss statements and leverage their shared services to minimize duplication among other overhauls that Armstrong said will help Coinbase improve its operations in the short and long term.
Related: Coinbase Furthers European Expansion Following US Layoffs
Last month, Coinbase said it was seeking more licenses across Europe to go with the ones it has in the U.K., Ireland and Germany, targeting Spain, Italy, France, the Netherlands and Switzerland. Coinbase has already hired its first employee in Switzerland.
Coinbase also recently announced it was laying off about 18% of its workforce, or 1,100 employees of its almost 5,000 full-timers. Armstrong pointed to a possible recession, and a need to manage the company’s burn rate as the reasons for the layoffs.
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