Coinbase Founder: The Crazy Journey Of Building A $100 Billion Company: Brian Armstrong

1. Shift Motivation to Joy

Transition your core motivation from fear or anger to joy and love for your work. This shift is crucial for long-term sustainability, preventing burnout, and remaining engaged as a founder or leader.

2. Delegate Energy-Draining Tasks

As a leader, identify and delegate tasks that deplete your energy or are not your strengths. Focusing on activities that bring you joy and leverage your unique abilities improves company performance and sustains personal engagement.

3. Schedule Regular Recharge

Proactively schedule regular time off, such as a week every quarter, and stick to it. This ensures consistent rest and renewal, preventing burnout and allowing dedicated time for learning and personal growth.

4. Engage Diverse Executive Coaches

Utilize executive coaches, recognizing the value of both tactical advice from former CEOs and the deeper, often more valuable, insights from therapist-like coaches. This comprehensive support helps navigate both business and personal challenges.

5. Adopt Phone-Free Mornings

Avoid checking your phone immediately upon waking to prevent stress and irritability. Instead, prioritize a morning routine that includes exercise, breakfast, and meditation to start your day with a calmer, more focused mindset.

6. Prioritize Core Happiness Pillars

Recognize that happiness is largely composed of health, financial security, and strong relationships (family, romantic, friendships). Actively prioritize and nurture these areas in your life for overall well-being and fulfillment.

7. Implement 70/20/10 Innovation

Structure resource allocation (e.g., 70% core business, 20% adjacent bets, 10% venture bets) to foster continuous innovation and self-disruption. This strategy ensures long-term company sustainability by maintaining a startup culture and a diverse product portfolio.

8. Foster Failure Tolerance

Encourage innovation by cultivating a culture that tolerates failure, recognizing good execution even if the idea was wrong. Ensure that such failures do not negatively impact career advancement, thereby promoting risk-taking and learning.

9. Hire ‘Hell Yes’ Talent

Adopt a hiring philosophy where you only hire if the candidate is clearly exceptional, brings new insights, and energizes you. Avoid hiring simply due to the absence of negatives, as this leads to suboptimal teams.

10. Conduct Work Trials for Hires

Supplement traditional interviews with practical work trials, allowing candidates to collaborate with your team for a week or two. This provides a more accurate assessment of their ability to deliver useful results and advance the mission.

11. Transparently Address Over-hiring

If you’ve made the mistake of over-hiring, take responsibility and communicate transparently with your team. Make the difficult decisions necessary to re-align the company’s cost structure and focus on long-term mission accomplishment.

12. Practice Vulnerable Leadership

During difficult times, be authentic and vulnerable with your team about your feelings. This builds trust and allows you to collaboratively seek solutions, rather than carrying the burden of problems alone.

13. Filter Media Noise

Develop the skill to tune out excessive media noise, both positive adulation and negative criticism, as it’s often driven by headlines and can distort reality. Treat news consumption like ‘sugar,’ consuming it in moderation.

14. Shield Team from Narratives

Continually encourage your team to be independent thinkers and develop their own sources of truth, curating media consumption. This helps them avoid being swayed by short-term, often half-true, external narratives.

15. Cultivate Disagreeableness

Accept that you won’t make everyone happy and lean into authenticity by doing what you believe is right, even if it’s polarizing. This requires thick skin and allows for more impactful work, rather than seeking universal approval.

16. Mandate Rest for High Achievers

Actively encourage or even ‘force’ high-achieving employees to take time off, as they often push themselves to burnout despite unlimited vacation policies. Leaders must explicitly grant permission and encourage rest to prevent attrition.

17. Motivate Beyond Ego

Your chances of entrepreneurial success dramatically increase if your motivation stems from a deep passion or bigger purpose, rather than just ego or making money. This intrinsic drive helps you endure inevitable setbacks.

18. Define Long-Term Passion

Use frameworks to identify what you’d still be passionate about doing 10 years from now, even without success. This clarity helps you eliminate distractions and go ‘all in’ on your most meaningful ambitions.

19. Strategize Location for Growth

To maximize opportunities in your chosen field, consider moving to a geographic center where talent, funding, and inspiration are concentrated. This strategic choice can significantly accelerate your personal and professional development.

20. De-risk Startup Ventures

Reduce the perceived risk of entrepreneurship by ensuring you have marketable skills and a fallback plan, such as the ability to secure a job if your startup fails. This confidence allows you to take bolder steps.

21. Identify Early Passions

Pay attention to activities that genuinely excite you and feel like a ‘superpower,’ even if they seem small or simple. These early glimmers can reveal your true passion and guide your long-term career path.

22. Prioritize Value Creation

If your business model is struggling with customer retention, pivot to creating more value for users, even if it means offering free services with optional premium features. This can lead to organic growth and long-term success.

23. Cultivate Startup Determination

Recognize that building any startup, especially a marketplace, is inherently difficult and requires immense determination. Be prepared to power through prolonged periods of struggle and setbacks, as persistence is key to success.

24. Ethically Pursue Side Projects

When pursuing a side project while employed, ensure you work on your own time and use your own equipment. This practice helps avoid intellectual property disputes with your employer and protects your ownership.

25. Act for Information

When unsure of the next step, take any action to produce information and clarify your path. Don’t wait for perfect clarity; doing anything helps you discover the right direction and overcome inertia.

26. Progress Attracts Co-founders

If you can’t find the right co-founder, focus on making progress on your idea and publicly showcasing signs of success. This ‘bat signal’ can attract the right person to join you, rather than endlessly searching.

27. Iterate with Customer Feedback

In the early stages of a startup, prioritize talking to customers and iteratively improving your product based on their feedback. Avoid distractions like conferences or extensive fundraising until product-market fit is clearly achieved.

28. Leverage Introversion with Technology

Embrace introversion by leveraging technology to scale your ideas and impact, especially if direct public interaction is challenging. This allows you to exert influence and build without needing to be a charismatic public speaker.