The number of Coinbase employees who liked this tweet is telling. (Don’t worry, won’t doxx you!) Often when startups grow rapidly, especially in a mission driven company in a niche industry, they develop a lot of group-think. When they clamp down on some values, or encourage other ones, you can get a chilling effect of employees who don’t want to rock the boat as they worry about their job or advancement. This creates disconnected monocultures, where you get behaviors celebrated internally that don’t make sense to the customer. (Celebrating 4H candles in marketing, “coin it”, weird listings, design layouts no one likes, privacy standards that would make users riot) It’s really easy for founder led companies in hypergrowth to want to streamline for efficiency and build teams that are unified in behaviors or outlooks. But the best founder led companies have executive teams that can respectfully rock the boat - and that include someone who is deeply, morally, and often painful the advocate of the customer. And if that’s not the founder themselves then you need it all the more. You need to have other execs where you go “ugh fuck I hate you, you annoy me, but dammit you’re probably right!” Because it is so easy to create an org where people don’t advocate for the user. And that increasingly disconnects you from your userbase, and erodes the magic touch that made a startup successful in the first place. And it’s why so many startups begin to fray and decline as they transition to massive scale corporations, and become soulless banks focused on the numbers. I like Coinbase, I know a lot of the senior team, I consider them capable people, and I believe they want to build good things and not just nickel and dime people. But, it’s increasingly clear over the years the growing disconnect from the customer, and a culture where even employees don’t feel they can challenge decisions and advocate for users (perhaps some people can, at some levels or in some divisions - but not nearly enough) So I hope Coinbase, for the sake of what it means to this industry, also realizes this, and self-reflects on what it is about its culture that caused no one to stand up and go “hey what the fuck are we doing here?!” Because without that, you’ll just make another mistake! 🤷‍♂️