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I love Balaji and honestly, he is very eloquent and charismatic, but being honest here...I still think that Coinbase buying earn.com was a pretty clear and obvi

I love Balaji and honestly, he is very eloquent and charismatic, but being honest here...I still think that Coinbase buying earn.com was a pretty clear and obvious bail out by his SV friends in high places (A16Z etc). That company was going nowhere after raising $120m 4 years ago and the best they came out with was email spamming crypto payments that coincidentally got bought for $100m by his other friends' company that was doing well. I mean let's call a spade a spade. With that said though, he is right on a decent amount of his blockchain ideas and predictions (just not predictions when they involve his own company apparently).

simonebrunozzi 8y ago
Unfortunately I have to (mostly) agree with you. It feels exactly that way. The "email spamming crypto" part you were referring to has never worked in a good way (in fact you call it spam for a reason). For several months I observed Earn.com and guessed that it was not going to end well.
SkyMarshal 8y ago
Yeah I don't know why people listen to Balaji, he's gotten everything he's done in crypto wrong. Terrible track record.
swyx 8y ago
if you believe that (and I'm not saying you're wrong), why take him on as Coinbase CTO? that's not at all a position you "bail out" someone to.
- deleted 8y ago
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temporary3792 8y ago
I heard that Earn was actually making a lot of revenue at the time of acquisition. This guy posted a shot of his Earn inbox: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DYy--NiWkAA_E1U.jpg:large https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DYy--NiWkAA_E1U.jpg:large They are kinda spammy looking, but then again that's a lot of paid emails, and you are getting paid to read that spam. You can count $15.50 in that screenshot alone. Multiplied across a userbase somewhere between 100k-1M (based on the quoted numbers of "hundreds of thousands of users") and assuming that most of those emails came within 1-2 months time, that's $90-180 per user x 100k-1M users. On the low end that is $9 million per year in total paid email volume. On the high end it is in the tens of millions per year. There aren't too many public numbers beyond "hundreds of thousands of users" and "millions in revenue". We have to see what Coinbase does with the Earn.com product and where it is in a year before judging this acquisition.
- endangered 8y ago
  Keep in mind that it's very very easy to edit HTML in webpages.

simonebrunozzi 8y ago

Unfortunately I have to (mostly) agree with you. It feels exactly that way. The "email spamming crypto" part you were referring to has never worked in a good way (in fact you call it spam for a reason). For several months I observed Earn.com and guessed that it was not going to end well.

SkyMarshal 8y ago

Yeah I don't know why people listen to Balaji, he's gotten everything he's done in crypto wrong. Terrible track record.

swyx 8y ago

if you believe that (and I'm not saying you're wrong), why take him on as Coinbase CTO? that's not at all a position you "bail out" someone to.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

temporary3792 8y ago

I heard that Earn was actually making a lot of revenue at the time of acquisition. This guy posted a shot of his Earn inbox: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DYy--NiWkAA_E1U.jpg:large https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DYy--NiWkAA_E1U.jpg:large They are kinda spammy looking, but then again that's a lot of paid emails, and you are getting paid to read that spam. You can count $15.50 in that screenshot alone. Multiplied across a userbase somewhere between 100k-1M (based on the quoted numbers of "hundreds of thousands of users") and assuming that most of those emails came within 1-2 months time, that's $90-180 per user x 100k-1M users. On the low end that is $9 million per year in total paid email volume. On the high end it is in the tens of millions per year. There aren't too many public numbers beyond "hundreds of thousands of users" and "millions in revenue". We have to see what Coinbase does with the Earn.com product and where it is in a year before judging this acquisition.

endangered 8y ago
Keep in mind that it's very very easy to edit HTML in webpages.