Coinbase Global, Inc. (NASDAQ:COIN) Morgan Stanley 2022 Technology, Media and Telecom Conference March 9, 2022 2:30 PM ET
Company Participants
Brian Armstrong – CEO
Alesia Haas – CFO
Scott Kupor – Investing Partner
Conference Call Participants
Andreessen Horowitz – Morgan Stanley
Andreessen Horowitz
[Call Starts Abruptly] joining us today, I’m here. This is the Coinbase panel, just to make sure everybody’s in the right room. Before we start, I do have to read a little bit of a safe harbor statements. So please forgive me. I’ll try to do it quickly. I’d like to remind you that today’s chat — during today’s chat Alesia and Brian will — may make forward-looking statements.
Actual results may vary materially from today’s statements, information concerning risk, uncertainties and other factors that could cause results to differ from these forward-looking statements is included our SEC filings and shareholder letter available on the Coinbase Investor Relations website. Our discussion today will include references to non-GAAP financial measures, a reconciliation of non-GAAP financial measures is included in the Company’s most recent shareholder letter.
So, Brain, do you want me to repeat that?
Question-and-Answer Session
Q – Andreessen Horowitz
Got it. Okay. All right. So before we jump in I thought I was telling Brian, for the closure, we are obviously have — our investors and have been investors in the Company for a long time. And I went back to kind of look at a little bit of the history of our engagement of the Company. So I have a Coinbase Investor newsletter here from January 2, 2013, actually from Brian, and I thought I had some funny stuff, so I would mention it.
On the very positive side, so he reports weekly growth of 5.3% revenue, 10% transaction volume of 4.5% total users. So, even back then, we were seeing very significant growth here. On transaction volume, he was telling the fact that they went from 400 transactions per day in November of 2012 to 800 transactions per day in December. My understanding from the Company is that roughly that number is kind of tens of millions per day. So you guys have graduated from small numbers. Congratulations.
You had just submitted your iPhone app to the app store too, as of January, 2013. And the funniest part I thought was Fred Ehrsam who many of you know who was a long-time executive the Company. Fred Ehrsam completed his two-week contract periods successfully and joined as employee number one. So I’m curious, I didn’t really know this existed, but apparently in the early days, everybody had to kind of audition for a period of time. Is that how it worked?
Brian Armstrong
Yes, we decided to de-risk the hiring process and have everybody do a two-week work trial. So, we just wanted to try working with him, see how it went. And at the end, we have them give a presentation. So Fred gave a presentation to the whole company, which was just me at the time about how he won the national championship for this particular video game in high school. And we just — it kind of became a fun tradition. So, I think the first couple hundred people who got hired. They all did a one to two week work trial as a way to just de-risk it, but —
Andreessen Horowitz
That was paid or unpaid, or it didn’t really matter?
Brian Armstrong
It was paid.
Andreessen Horowitz
All right. That’s awesome. Well let’s jump in. So, you guys just reported, numbers not too long ago 11.4 million monthly transactions, 4x growth year-over-year, significant amount, I think more than 50% of trading volume now in non-Bitcoin and Ethereum assets. When you think about kind of where the business is, like, where do you think the business is today? Where do you think it can be over the next 3, 5, 10 years? Is this a bank? Is it a technology company? Like what is the broader kind of vision and how do you think investors should think about kind of that journey as you’ve laid it out for your company?
Brian Armstrong
Yes, I’ll start off and Alesia feel free to add anything. So, we don’t really want to be become a bank. We even don’t necessarily want to be a tech company. We want to even beyond that and be a crypto company. And what I mean by that? Well, I think, tech companies have built a lot of what’s out there in Web2. Web3 is kind of this next-generation of how applications are being built. And we want to be a major player in that space and help that come to the world and create more economic freedom, which is the mission of Coinbase.
So we think the cryptocurrency industry going through these three stages or three pillars. The first one is really about crypto as an investment. Many of you’re familiar with that. People are trading it. Then in the second pillar was crypto as a new set of financial services. And we’re seeing that being built out now with lending and yield generation and all kinds of new things.
And then the third is really crypto as a new application platform. That’s what I mean by Web3. It’s no longer just people reading and writing data on these web apps. They’re actually reading and writing and getting to own a piece of it. And so we’re seeing people build totally new applications in this paradigm, even things like social and gaming, and new forms of identity and governance, things that are completely outside the realm of just financial services.
So, we don’t want to be a bank or tech company. We want to be a crypto company, which helps bring Web3 to the world. And hopefully that creates a lot of access to financial services and economic freedom and build the next-generation of applications.
Andreessen Horowitz
And when you talk to your users, I mean, what is it like, why Web3 now? Like, what is it about it? Why is there a need or at least desire among developers and users of the platform to have kind of a different application platform on which to build new types of services?
Brian Armstrong
Yes, I think if you look at the traditional way that these were built in Web2, users were often kind of giving their data to these platforms and there was advertising based business models, which honestly, that was pretty good. It helped give access to these applications for free to a lot of people. But in this new — imagine a world where I guess Airbnb or Uber, the early users of these platforms could have owned a piece it.
So, the first post to list their homes on Airbnb or the first drivers on Uber to list to sign up for the service like — they could have owned a piece of that in some sense, whether that was a reward token or having access to the — some governance on the platform or maybe even security tokens in the future.
And so, in Web3, this sort of model is being explored in all kinds of new ways. And basically, the top entrepreneurs and developers are rushing into this space. If you look at what’s the activity on GitHub, and computer science electives that are happening at top universities. The youngest, smartest people are all excited about cryptocurrency as the most important technology trend kind of happening right now.
Maybe, you could argue its AI, computer science — sorry, AI, cryptocurrency, and maybe one other or something, but it’s certainly up there in the top three. And so that just bode very well for the next generation of companies that get built.
Scott Kupor
Yes. It’s interesting. Obviously, Chris Dixon, who’s a partner of ours on the crypto side, and that’s kind of the biggest matrix that he tracks, which is what is the kind of level of developer traction in the ecosystem and by any metric when you look at obviously growth in terms of developer interest in the ecosystem it’s growing very significantly.
Andreessen Horowitz
So maybe we shift gears a little bit and Alesia maybe you can kick us off here. So, obviously, we’re living in very interesting times here. There’s a lot of broader macro things going on the world, of course, lots of discussion around here, domestically about what happens with supply side and demand side from an inflation perspective, and then of course the conflict that we’re all unfortunately living through here between Russia and Ukraine. How do you think about kind of at least kind of both near term as well as longer term, like how is that all to 80s macro trends play into your business on the Coinbase side?
Alesia Haas
Yes. It’s a great question. We’ll address it short term. And then we can talk about long term, because I think what we focus on a lot at Coinbase is what this generation of development will do over the long term. But near term and we had talked about this in our shareholder letter is we’re facing a lot of uncertainty at this point in time. And it’s because we have two trends. We have the adoption of crypto, which is growing. We now have one in four households that own some form of crypto asset. We have growth in utility of crypto, which is we’ve seen new growth in NFTs in DeFi, which all give us a lot of hope that we’ve moved beyond speculative investing as Brian talked about into the next generation of crypto, which is the utilization of these exciting assets and the use cases.
And so while we see these great crypto fundamentals, we are also then facing the headwinds of macroeconomic uncertainty. We’re thing, a general market that is risk off, as I’m sure many of you in your funds are deciding like this is a very crazy time. And so crypto and Coinbase are still in our risk category as we’re a young industry. And so I do think we’re going to go short term through looking at these two trends, kind of butting heads against each other, which may then lead to uncertainty in the short term horizon and gave us the wide range of our monthly transacting users that we shared in our shareholder letter.
That said, if we then look at what this environment shows us at least, and what our views are for the long-term adoption, is there couldn’t be a better reaffirmation about the potential of decentralized finance. And so maybe you can just share views on what you think about the long-term potential and how all these signals are really affirming our views.
Brian Armstrong
Yes, sure. Well, I mean, DeFi is really exciting for any of you who aren’t familiar. It stands for decentralized finance and basically people are recreating aspects of the traditional financial system in this totally decentralized way because blockchains are really decentralized global computers and you can publish codes to them and they run globally on this computer in a way that is accessible to everybody. So we’re seeing people recreate for instance exchanges. We now have decentralized exchanges. We’re seeing people create borrowing and lending marketplaces. So you could have a global order book of borrowing and lending happening. That’s kind of cross border and transnational.
And there’s a whole bunch of other Lego pieces that are being built that are all kind of interoperable. Each of these new types of financial services is kind of like plug and play. They can talk to each other, adding onto that we’re seeing stable coins. So people are actually wrapping Fiat currencies and putting them into these systems. So you now have kind of an order book with the U.S. dollar and some cryptocurrency that might be more volatile. So it’s really exciting seeing this new financial system come together and all the other pieces of this remittances and everything are just being redone in a totally new way.
And as I mentioned before, that’s just one piece of what’s happening in crypto, it’s new financial services, there’s a whole kind of Web3 application with gaming and social and everything being built in as well. So it’s kind of just came from explosion of new ideas and talent coming into the space. And it’s really — it feels like the early days of the internet, honestly, like the early days — the early 2000 or something like that, where there’s tons of people rushing in, lots of ideas, a lot of them work, some of them won’t, and that’s exciting.
Andreessen Horowitz
Why don’t we turn a little bit to talk specifically about kind of earnings and some of the guidance and just kind of overall trends that you all talked about in the call. Brian, you made a special kind of comment at the beginning of your earnings call that you didn’t think we were going to see in other crypto winter. Maybe you can explain a little bit kind of what that means from your perspective? So kind of, if not winter, does that mean that volatility goes away or kind of, how do you think about kind of how people should think about the macro landscape for crypto more generally?
Brian Armstrong
Yes, so I mean, I don’t think volatility is going away. We don’t really know what’s going to happen next quarter or two in crypto. Just like we don’t know what’s going to happen to the S&P 500. But the long-term trend is very good. And I do think they’ll be less of any kind of crypto winter at this point, because basically the use cases are here.
I remember five years ago I would go to conferences and one of the common questions I’d get offered from journalists or whoever would be like, well, where are the use cases? Everyone’s just trading this stuff, speculatively thinking about how it might be useful in the future. It kind of reminded me of like the early days of the internet, people would buy diapers.com and hope maybe someday it’ll be valuable or something like, I got domain names were kind of the original digital — scarce digital asset.
But now, nobody asked me that question about where are the use cases? It’s like DeFi has something gotten something like $60 billion in that range, in value accumulated into to it just in the last couple of years. NFTs had enormous growth and unlocked an entire new segment of people interested in crypto who are more like creators and even people who have no interest in finance.
And then Dallas is another decentralized autonomous organization, another big area of growth. You can go down the list. There’s so many really exciting adding things happening that the use cases are there. And so I just think any kind of winter or like these bigger cycles are getting more moderated now.
And you can see it basically every — over the last 10 years, kind of every — almost every year, I think you’d seen like the volatility of crypto sort of decline. And it actually, if you compare it to — yes, currencies, it’s kind of moving up the rankings in terms of more stability. Like I think it’s probably more stable than the Ruble at this point. So, where is that going to be in five years? I think it gets really interesting.
Andreessen Horowitz
Interesting. Alesia, you talked also about, if we go back to earnings call, this is going to be a pretty big investment year for the Company 2022. So I think, the guidance you all gave was roughly $4.25 billion to $5.25 billion in OpEx for the year, hiring kind of like order magnitude 6,000 people from your current levels.
So, maybe let’s just take those apart for a second. Let’s talk about the people side of it first, which is that’s a 6,000 by any stretch of imagination is a very, very big number. How do you approach that? How do you think about kind of managing that as an organization? And how do you kind of make sure that as you bring people on? Obviously, you maintain the level of calling consistency that you’ve had throughout the organization.
Alesia Haas
I might let Brian talk about the culture elements first, that’s the most critical part. We always start every discussion about when our economics sources and then how do we ensure that we onboard people into our culture successfully, keep the bar high. So why don’t you talk about that? And I’ll talk about the nuts and bolts of extra parts of it.
Brian Armstrong
Yes, right. Sure. I mean, so what our first cultural attendant is top talent and every company says that, but I think you have to really live it and breathe it every day and sort of continually be tending the garden both in terms of being very rigorous about hiring on the way in, and then performance management. It’s every time you going to grow that quickly, it’s going to be hard to keep the bar that high. And so, that’s the number one culture tenant for a reason. It’s something we try to really drill in there.
Now we’ve done this in the past where we’ve had to grow very quickly, because crypto has gone through big up cycles in the past. And generally, what breaks down when you kind of bring in a ton of new people like that is communication gets harder. It’s unclear. Who’s the decision maker, somewhere in the org. The culture gets a little bit diffused because it’s like someone who’s been there three months of training somebody new. And so what do we do to solve that?
I mean, well we introduced new communication systems, right? So, it’s less about me going around and having lunch with groups of 25 or 50 people. It’s going to have to be more broadcast mechanisms and screaming to thousands of people and reinforcing those messages. I remember a long time ago I talked with Meg Whitman as a CEO and she was — she had like a whole almost like a TV studio in the HP Executive Office where they were like producing videos. And she’s like, that’s how we get the message out to 300,000 people. And I was like, wow, maybe someday we need a TV studio.
So yes, better communication channels, more clear decision making processes. We — I won’t bore you with the details, but we’ve introduced really good decision-making processes I think in the Company that we’ve followed from different firms. Basically, we try to make it really clear in the room who is the decide in any of these situations. And I actually — I set up like a hotline at one point, because people were having meetings where they’re like. We don’t know who is the decision maker and so. I made this hotline like where they could email the whole exec team and get an answer like who is the decision maker within 24 hours.
So, we do things like that and just repeating the culture, like cultural tenants over and over again, telling some of those origin stories, which really drilled in at every town hall meeting. So that’s some of the cultural aspect.
Alesia Haas
I think what I want to leave you with is, our growth is very intentional. We have a lot of intention around how we communicate what the onboarding is? What the performance management culture is? And that we’re looking for continued efficiency and continual operational improvements. And so, we aren’t just going on from hiring 6,000 people and just like seeing what happens.
It’s a very intentional growth pattern. And all of our growth is conditioned on long-term forecast. Can we afford this? Can we think about how we’re going to integrate these into our products? Where do we see the opportunity to invest and very intentionally tied to our roadmap? We are — and maybe we can talk about it was appropriate. We transition to talk about where we’re investing these dollars —
Andreessen Horowitz
Yes. It’d be great to hear, number 1, where you’re investing and then number 2, I know there was a lot of discussion around earnings call about kind of what’s the near — how should investors think about near term revenue potential for some of these significant 2022 investments? So feel free to address.
Alesia Haas
Yes. That would be the number one question we’ve had as follow-up from earning, so I also had the opportunity to share with you all. So one of the things that we think about is we want to be a company of repeatable innovation, which means that we’re always investing on the frontier. We’re always taking measured bets, and we want to have a lot of bets, because we don’t know exactly how the shape of the future of crypto economy will emerge.
So we know what we’re good at. We know that we’re a great, safe place to buy your first Bitcoin to trade to safely store. We’re now generating the ability to provide yield on assets to our saving products. And so we have a lot of products that we consider in our core, that we’ve seen good user adoption and growth. Those we’re trying to scale.
So we’re making significant investments in our infrastructure to have more reliable systems to scale up these products, to bring them international, and touch more and more users. Then we move on to what we think are strategic adjacent fees. A lot of those that Brian shared are sort of the crypto is a financial asset that next kind of killer in our strategy, where we’re adding the ability to do more global payments.
We announced in early Q1 of partnership with Remitly, where we’re now offering our users, the ability to send crypto to a customer in Mexico. And they can redeem that into a Peso in thousands of retail locations, which we think is a lower cost product than many of the current corridors. That’s a strategic adjacency, where it’s something that we’re really good at.
We’re good at sending and receiving crypto. It’s kind of core to our sales, but it’s a new product market fit including about 20% of our resources there. And then we’ve got 10% of our bets in the true frontier adventures. The best example that I can cite is one very public NFT is a venture product for us. We’re making a significant investment. We think that’s a great market for us. We have high hope, but it’s not proven for us. And so for us, that is still a venture bet. And so, about 10% of our resources are going there.
So the way that you should think about it is a lot investments we have are near-term revenue. We have line of sight into international growth line of sight, into staking growth line of sight, into things that we think that we just need to scale and get really good at. And then we’re making strategic BES in a lot of diverse areas. Derivatives, NFTs are probably the — biggest named examples of future growth, but that will take quarters if not years, as be significant on our financial statements.
Brian Armstrong
Yes, I love this topic because I think we’re really excited about being a multi-product company and having this portfolio that — and using this 70, 20 — resource allocation framework that Alesia mentioned to kind of be really rigorous capital allocators. And it reminds me a little bit of Google, right? Where they had this great ad business and that generated enough cash flow that they were able to kind of invest in other assets over time and build this portfolio.
And so anyway, our trading business has been this really great early business for us, but we also know that this industry is going to be massive. It’s not just trading is really just the first act. And we want to have many acts as a company and actually really diversifying our revenue into these more revenue streams with subscription and services. We bucket a lot of it into that under the financials, but there’s a portfolio of products under that. And so I don’t know, we can talk about some of the ones I’m excited about.
Andreessen Horowitz
Yes, give us a couple that you find yourself really excited about that you’re spending time on.
Brian Armstrong
Yes, well of course, I should mention front just the core business itself. I think we could easily 10x from here by just, there’s more and more people coming into crypto. They want to trade it. We can add more payment methods for them, more assets launch in more countries. And so I think there’s actually a pretty reasonable path to just 10x do core business, even if we didn’t do anything new, but the adjacent ones that Alesia mentioned with Coinbase Earn, and staking, and custody and things like that have turned out to be like already they’re on their way to being really great businesses on their own.
So I’ll talk about some of the green — the 10% bucket, like some of those greenfield opportunities that we’re really excited about. So, Alesia mentioned one of them Coinbase NFT, which I think — I think NFTs is going to be a huge segment. And I think so one of the other ones I’m really excited about is Coinbase Cloud. It’s kind of like our Amazon Web Services for crypto there’s a ton of things that we’ve built from an engineering point of view to integrate with all these different blockchains out there and figure out how to store crypto securely and enable staking and trading, and all these things.
So basically, going to expose those APIs to all the — I mean of the companies in the world are now thinking about how to integrate crypto somehow into their business. And they’re going to want to use our Coinbase Cloud product, I believe. There’s a handful of others Coinbase Commerce is kind of like accepting payments for like merchant processing. It’s kind of like Stripe for crypto, if you will. Coinbase Wallet is our self-custodial app. That’s helping people access these kinds of new applications and it’s really becoming more popular in emerging markets. We could go down the list there there’s actually a handful of those venture bets, which could be really exciting.
Andreessen Horowitz
So, since you mentioned emerging markets, maybe we spent a minute on kind of international expansion. So it’s another thing you talked about in the earnings call. Can you give us a sense of number one, like what are the priorities from international perspective? Like how quickly do you go to those markets? Anything else from an operational perspective that you think differently about how you think about markets outside the U.S. relative where your core business is say, maybe Alesia I don’t know if you want to?
Alesia Haas
To that, I mean, this is an area that Brent is very passionate about. If we want to bring a billion people into crypto and have economic freedom, it has to be going. So — but we’re going broad and we’re going deep and we have kind of articulated our strategy publicly. So, I’d encourage people to check out our blog posts on this, but some of our products are easy to grow rapidly internationally.
For example, the Coinbase Wallet products that Brian mentioned, which enables any user with an internet connection to get a self as wallet and get access to crypto. But we also recognize that there’s a lot of value in going deep and for what that means for us, that that’s where we have Fiat rails to onboard into crypto. And we provide full feature functionality to staking to earn. Most of these are then regulated products in many international markets, and so require some sort of license.
Regulatory timelines to get licenses, bank partnerships do take us longer integrate. So we are doing a broad and deep strategy with regards to the markets that we’re going deep in. We’ve already built a presence in India and Brazil, and you could see us going into some of those markets in the coming quarters. And then we’re looking to build the wallet product as quickly as we can and touch as many users globally as we can in the next few years.
Andreessen Horowitz
Brain, do you want to add anything to that?
Brian Armstrong
Not much. I think that was great. I mean some of the major economies of the world are going to be that that go deep strategy. And like Alesia said, get the licenses, get the bank partnerships, and it’s going to be a regulated financial service there. Our self-custodial app Coinbase Wallet can really expand more like a software product in sort of like WhatsApp or something like that in many of these emerging markets. And so, that’s going to give us a lot of coverage there as well.
And just going back to the mission of the Company is to create more economic freedom in the world. We do believe that crypto is this really unique invention, kind of like the, on the scale of the internet that is going to allow there to be a more global and fairer and free financial system.
And many of the people who can really benefit from that the most are in emerging markets where they — they’re unbanked or they just the currency is not stable. They don’t have any access to global financial markets. They have no credit, and so the self-custodial wallets and kind of the emerging apps, there could be really powerful for the 1.7 unbanked people — 1.7 billion unbanked people in the world.
Andreessen Horowitz
Yes, all right. We’ve got about five minutes. So let me try and hit a couple more topics before we wrap up. I want to come back to NFT. You mentioned NFTs a couple times say, and obviously, as you mentioned today, we’re seeing kind of use cases around obviously influencer communities and then gaming, which is an area that kind of I know you guys are also have some focus on as well.
How do you think about — how does that develop over time? So are those the canonical use cases? Or does this broaden out into some other broader set of use cases over time? Like how do you think about it from a strategic perspective at Coinbase?
Brian Armstrong
Yes. I think NFTs are going to be quite broad. So today people are sort of thinking of it as like, hey, this is kind of an art, like an artwork thing an art collectible thing like I’ll buy this eighth photo or whatever. And I think the potential of it’s actually quite a lot larger than that. And it’s actually already happening. It’s not just sort of a hypothetical.
So you can imagine NFTs just being the digitization of any type of item. And so think about the social networks of the past, and you’d post text or video on YouTube or TikTok or something like that, or maybe audio on Spotify or podcasts, and why isn’t every single piece of digital content out there sort of have a uniquely something that people could own, right?
If you happen to really like that song or that tweet or whatever, like you should probably be able to own it. And it’s a way for — or maybe even they could issue 100 copies of it or something and every time it changes hands, the creator of that content gets some royalty. That’s a totally new business model for music.
And some of these contracts that creative people have had in the past are really not that very good for them, but it goes beyond that too. I mean, concert tickets, right. I think we had to use the clear app or something like that to get in here like that this kind of passes it, get you access to certain groups and locations like those should be NFTs, digital good, research papers in science should probably be NFT.
I think identity is an interesting one. I recently bought an NFT that was — it gave me like a citizenship access to like this piece of land in Wyoming. I’ve never even been there. I don’t maybe I will go someday, but it’s getting to a place where even identity and at the station about your KYC information could be involved here. It actually covers a really wide set of use cases. And so anyway, I think NFTs are going to be really exciting.
Andreessen Horowitz
Let me shift gears one more time and Alesia feel free to jump in here. Biden put out today kind of this long weighted executive order around crypto. I’m sure everybody here has studied it very intensely. But basically it’s, it’s a panoply of things which says, hey, let’s do a better job of making sure that we support innovation and make sure that we think about kind of national security interest and kind of illicit activity and things of that sort. And I don’t want to minimize it’s a fairly broad statement, obviously with a lot of details to be worked at over time.
But if you think more generally, if you just kind of bubble up more generally, the conversations that you as an organization have with regulators at large. We’ve seen really a lot of what I would call kind of policy by enforcement from the SEC for the most part, this seems to be the first time with the Biden release. Maybe, hopefully we get some policy by actual kind of agency work. I’m just curious, like what’s the kind tenor of the conversations you’re having? How do you think about how the regulatory framework kind develops over time?
Alesia Haas
I want to give Brian credit here because Brian and Fred leaned into regulations since they found of the Company. And we’ve always used that in order for crypto to be the potential that we think it can be. It needs to be regulated, thoughtfully regulated, and to acknowledge some of the unique inherent benefits of crypto, but regulated.
And so when we saw the executive order this morning, one, we were incredibly pleased because there’s a lot we can all agree with in that order. I think the six tenants align with things that we’ve said publicly for years, where we want innovation, but we want to protect consumers. We protect against illicit market activity and manipulation, so much to support and align with.
And I think it’s great that we now have a White House level executive order that will hold us all the key tenants that we’re trying to achieve, but there’s a lot of work to be done. The current rules that exist were written at time period before blockchain technology existed, and there’s a lot that we have to weave through because what is written in existing law, it’s hard for crypto to comply with.
I mean, so we have to get into the wheels now with regulators and still work through it, which I think will take time, but I’m really encouraged. And I think there’s a lot of bipartisan support and a lot of awareness around the DC community about the potential for this new technology. And I think we can all work together and we hope to have a big voice in that.
Andreessen Horowitz
Brian, in the minute we have remaining, let me just give you kind of a chance, maybe just big picture. Look, this is incredibly nascent industry. It’s volatile. Obviously, we see price movements in assets kind of all the time. How do you stay anchored? How do you think, like investors approaching this space maybe for the first time? Like, what is the big picture here? Like what does — how do you think this kind of evolves over the next 15, 20 years, even in that timeframe? Like, what are you excited about? And like what do you think this world looks like over a long period of time?
Brian Armstrong
Yes. So to me, this is much like the early days of the internet. I make that analogy a lot and it’s really true. I think the internet really only got going maybe 25 years ago or so. And just in the last year, I think we maybe saw it hit like 15%, 20% of global GDP is happening in e-Commerce. And I think actually a very similar trend will happen in crypto.
I think that — I could imagine in 20, 25 years, actually we’re already sort of 10 years into it. It may be less like 10 or 15 years. We’ll see 15%, 20% of global GDP happening in the crypto economy. That might sound like a big statement. But I think when Amazon launched e-Commerce back in like 1999, people probably thought that we’ve never you’d never see 20% of GDP in e-Commerce. Like why would I put my credit card into a website, right? That was kind of the feeling back then.
And so the crypto economy represents this new emerging area. I think it’s probably one of the most high growth, high potential areas that’s going to happen in the next 10 years and Coinbase — our company really as one of the only public companies out there represents sort of an index on this whole space growing.
But hopefully, it’s not just an index, it’s actually — it’s outperformed because I think we’re a very well executing company, we’re attracting us and the brightest employees, and we have this portfolio of debts and we have rigorous capital allocation. So yes, I think that is the opportunity with Coinbase basically is to be that company that goes and helps bring the crypto economy to billions of people all over the world. And it’s just such a huge growth area of the economy. I think it’s very exciting.
Andreessen Horowitz
Great. Thank you, Brian. Thank you, Alesia, for your time. We appreciate it.
Brian Armstrong
Thank you.