“Everybody thought I was crazy.”

That’s Brian Armstrong, CEO of Coinbase. When he started the company in 2012, it was a small and quirky startup. Bitcoin had only been in use for three years and remained relatively obscure.

But now, it’s safe to say not many people think Armstrong is crazy. His company just went public yesterday and its valuation currently sits at $66 billion. Coinbase holds $200 billion in cryptocurrencies, around 11% of all crypto in existence. So how did Armstrong go from lunatic to visionary?

Armstrong had to build interest in his new product. He settled on a cost effective and attention getting marketing tool: send people free money. But not just any money; bitcoin, of course! He sent tiny amounts of the cryptocurrency to countless people. One of them was angel investor Garry Tan, who became one of Coinbase’s first backers. His $300,000 bet turned into $2.4 billion yesterday.

In an interview with Jason Calacanis on This Week in Startups, Armstrong emphasized the importance of entrepreneurs being scrappy and doing whatever it takes to get the job done. His original approach to investors, repeated countless times, paid off in a major way and Coinbase was accepted to Y Combinator, the most prestigious startup accelerator in Silicon Valley. Armstrong’s resourcefulness and persistence definitely inspire me.

To build a major business, Armstrong had to make sure not to run afoul of regulators. Unlike, for example, a social media app, finance is heavily regulated. Armstrong ditched the anonymity most people expect from cryptocurrencies, abiding by “know your customer laws.” In turn, he offered users a much more secure way to store their cryptocurrencies:

The selling proposition here is security—security conspicuously lacking at some of the exchanges with which Coinbase has competed. The Mt. Gox exchange in Japan went bust in 2014 after hackers spirited away coins worth $480 million. Customers of QuadrigaCX, which was one of Canada’s largest exchanges, have been unable to retrieve $150 million in crypto since the founder supposedly died suddenly in December 2018, holding the only set of keys to unlock their money. They now want the body exhumed.

Armstrong wasn’t afraid to reimagine the crypto business in a way that could grow big, and he doggedly pursued anyone who he thought could help him do it. I find his extraordinary career quite instructive.

For more on Coinbase and crytocurrencies, check out these posts:

• The Ultimate Score: Turning $300k into $2.4 Billion on Coinbase
• NBA Top Shot: An Overnight Succcess 8 Years in the Making
• This One Fact Could Drive Dogecoin Up 100X

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