Armstrong's Airbnb-Coinbase Journey

Garry Tan shares a story about Brian Armstrong's early days before founding Coinbase.

"One of my craziest wins was Brian Armstrong at Coinbase. He was a solo software engineer working at anti-fraud at Airbnb and had never started a company before. A lot of the things we worked on with him very early were just the basics. It's hard to believe now on the other side of him having built Coinbase, but there was a time when Brian Armstrong didn't know how to do a product launch or even raise a single dime from investors.

That's been that same profile we look for - highly technical people who are smart and earnest. That's mainly who we like to fund. I think it's unusually really important today in 2024 with large language models having basically opened everything up."