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Coinbase is a decentralized company, with no headquarters
- SlipperySlope 6y agoEspecially important... It has helped us attract top talent. One of the best parts about being a decentralized company is that we can hire more of the best people. Previously, less than 1% of the world lived within commuting distance of one of our offices. Now we can cast a much wider net. Over the last nine months, we’ve onboarded hundreds of employees from locations outside of the commute range of any of our existing offices. In Q1 of 2020, only 28% of new employees lived outside of California. In Q1 of 2021 to date, 58% of our new hires are from outside of the state.
- arkitaip 6y agoI can see a future where office work is so rare that it's considered to be a major benefit only afforded by large corporations.
- samr71 6y agoThis will almost certainly be bad for most everyone but company shareholders, unfortunately.
- almost_usual 6y agoWhich most tech workers who get paid in RSUs are?
- samr71 6y agoUntil they're replaced with a team in Jakarta or Dhaka making 10% of what they made.
- almost_usual 6y agoYou really believe an in office work environment was the only thing preventing this from happening? Top talent gets paid the most.
- samr71 6y agoIf a tech company is sourcing engineers in an office work environment, they need to pay salaries competitive for the location of said office. (You can find great engineers in Jakarta, but you have to relocate them to SV and pay SV rates) If everything is remote work, you hire the same worker, and pay them Jakarta rates (you can sub Jakarta for any very-low COL city).
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- tdfx 6y agoIt wasn't possible before because companies couldn't figure out how to effectively manage a workforce remotely. Now that they've been forced to learn, this will be explored with renewed vigor. There are a lot of highly talented foreign workers who will work for a fraction of US salaries. Companies that are good about integrating foreign workers into their existing teams are already reaping the benefits of this. Fortunately for Western tech workers, the majority of companies are terrible at integrating their offshore workers and have very outdated concepts of "outsourcing" where trusted local workers send robotic tasks to offshore teams being paid ridiculously low salaries. This model will continue to fail and should slow the enthusiasm for offshoring for a lot of companies.
- alteria 6y agoBut they also have to live without an office and may not have meaningful stakes to make the tradeoff worth it for most.
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- tshaddox 6y agoWhich again is only large corporations, right?
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- setpatchaddress 6y agoWhy would it be a benefit?
- tshaddox 6y agoBecause you don’t have to cram 2 new desks into the expensive 1 bedroom apartment you share with your partner.
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- yao420 6y agoWell that’s offset by the fact you no longer have to get a small one bedroom near a large city downtown. Without the commute suburbs or smaller cities offer much bigger and better spaces for less. Why pay $4.5k for that one bedroom in SOMA when you can get a 4 bedroom home in Sacramento for the same price.
- samr71 6y agoI can't help but feel that this is going backwards. Cities are effective engines for value generation. Being in a city is valuable due to network effects, density, and overall efficiency that suburbs lack. Increased urbanization has gone hand-in-hand with increased prosperity for centuries. People don't pay $4.5k for a one bedroom in SOMA (just) to be close to the office. It's too early too say if the historic value of cities will be replaced by the internet, IMO. YC makes each batch move to SV for a reason.
- ghaff 6y agoSV isn't a city; it's mostly suburban sprawl. In most metro areas, you can get to reasonable property prices while still being in the gravitational well of a city even if you wouldn't want to commute into the downtown every day day.
- tshaddox 6y ago
- agumonkey 6y agosocially it's gonna be weird seeing all these business center full of empty skyscrapers
- MichaelRazum 6y agoHeadquarter or not. What matters only in my opinion is where they pay their taxes.
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- cblconfederate 6y agowherever they pay less, as all of tech does
- brink 6y agoThey pay the US government with censorship.
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y ago>In Q1 of 2020, only 28% of new employees lived outside of California. In Q1 of 2021 to date, 58% of our new hires are from outside of the state. This has huge implications for California. The state of California is horribly mismanaged, but the tremendous amounts of money that is bought in by tech, covers a multitude of sins. However, if that money starts drying up, California will be in a world of hurt.
- setpatchaddress 6y ago> The state of California is horribly mismanaged Compared to what? Texas? Edited to add: Wikipedia: > The economy of the State of California is the largest in the United States, boasting a $3.2 trillion gross state product (GSP) as of 2019.[9] If California were a sovereign nation (2019), it would rank as the world's fifth largest economy, ahead of India and behind Germany.[10][11]…
- samr71 6y agoWhat does a large GDP prove? It is the largest state after all. A smaller state, that doesn't happen to contain some of the country's best real estate and most productive industries (say, New Hampshire) could be better run, but of course with a smaller GDP to show for it. California's large GDP could then be in spite of its management, not a product of it.
- tadfisher 6y agoCalifornia is ahead of India, a country of well over 1 billion people, which pretty much refutes the size argument.
- buzzerbetrayed 6y agoNo, it really doesn't refute that argument at all. Nobody is arguing that size is the only factor. India being ahead of California would refute _that_ argument, but no argument that anybody here has actually made.
- BitwiseFool 6y agoThis reminds me of how Valve Inc. touts a flat-hierarchy where no one has a boss and you can work on whatever project you'd like. But in reality Valve employees complain about constant office politics and de-facto team structures. Conceptually a decentralized structure sounds great but it creates power and process vaccuums. And in those vaccuums centralization manifests itself based on office politics. I predict some high profile Coinbase employees are going to coalesce around some location and that will start turning into a de-facto headquarters.
- cblconfederate 6y agono headquarters doesn't mean no hierarchy
- destitude 6y agoI'm not clear why you think all remote companies can't have processes in place that allow them to work the same as those working in a physical office space.
- ghaff 6y agoYeah, the two things are pretty much orthogonal to each other. Though, if anything, I'd probably argue that absent clear communication channels and roles, remote work is much harder if you're dependent on self-organization.
- dmurray 6y agoI agree, it's natural that new structures emerge in this kind of power vacuum, but it sounds like Coinbase are explicitly taking measures to fight against it. > The executive team should lead by example... even after people can safely return to offices, the executive team has no plans to be “in-office” on a regular basis, and none of them currently live in San Francisco. This is one of the most powerful things we can do to keep Coinbase from inadvertently returning to an in-office culture. If they're serious about this, how far do they have to go? Would an official or unofficial policy of not promoting employees who come in to the office too much be enough incentive?
- 6y ago
- samr71 6y agoWe've only been doing mass WFH for a year. Many companies have been saying things very similar to Coinbase, but I'm not sure if long-term mass WFH will prove to that great (for the company, I'd argue it certainly won't be great for the average worker).
- destitude 6y agoOne thing the average worker should watch out for is companies who perform geographically adjustment pay scales. Some WFH companies now even list that as a benefit that they do not do these type of adjustments. I'm not sure what the best answer is to that but feel many are using it as an excuse to pay workers less.
- pinkybanana 6y agoWhy wouldn't companies use WFH for their own benefit? They are businesses. I find it weird that western workers somehow imagine that WFH means that they can happily work remote but not compete with other remote workers. The fact is that their big value-add has been the physical contact with the employer, as employers want to interact with their employees f2f for god knows what reason.
- whimsicalism 6y agoI think the big value add is time proximity and lack of language barrier. Moreover, the large majority of high-level technical talent remains in the West (and the west coast of the west-most country of the West, at that), although that gap is closing.
- throwawayboise 6y agoThe west coast is heavy with tech talent because the tech companies are there. And tech companies are there because the tech talent is there. It's been a self-perpetuating feedback loop until now. With remote work normalized and proven to work to whatever extent it has, that feedback loop will start to break down.
- throwawaysea 6y agoI am really looking forward to a future where we can all spread out to the locations we want and live the way we want. The trends of the past few decades towards big urban destinations means that people come to cities and encounter political strife trying to each make it how they want it, and no one is ever really happy. We already have a fix for that in our political system, which is to limit the amount of governance at higher-levels of the government (state, federal) and let local jurisdictions decide how they want to manage themselves. But taking full advantage of that requires more distributed economies. Hopefully this economic revolution (decentralization away from offices and expensive cities) also lets us decentralize politics next, so we can lower the temperature and be happy.
- warkdarrior 6y agoThis is probably the final blow to unions. Without sharing a physical place and with many distinct jurisdictions, employees will not get a chance to unionize. Enjoy your serfdom!
- paulpauper 6y agoToo bad coinabase\s approach to crypto is centralized. They operate a blocklists to prevent people from sending funds to certain addresses . Even paypal does not do this.
- bondarchuk 6y agoWhich addresses?
- rodonn 6y agoOFAC which manages US sanctions maintains a list of addresses that any entity complying with US regulations needs to block e.g. https://home.treasury.gov/policy-issues/financial-sanctions/recent-actions/20200916 https://home.treasury.gov/policy-issues/financial-sanctions/... Most exchanges also use a service like Chainalysis to help identify which addresses need to be blocked or are high risk and need additional due diligence.
- smeej 6y agoCoinbase even does their chain analytics in-house (and also on a contract basis for the U.S. government). They take compliance incredibly seriously.
- lxgr 6y agoAny regulated financial institution is required to do that. Where did you get the idea PayPal doesn‘t?
- redisman 6y agoAnti money laundering laws definitely apply to Paypal
- pinkybanana 6y agoYeah, because paypal doesn't allow sending and receiving bitcoins to begin with. For sure they block sanctioned individuals or customers from sanctioned countries like any financial institution. And if they implement crypto, for sure they will have as strict compliance as coinbase.
- danielrhodes 6y agoI can't imagine what Karl Marx would think of all this. :-) "You mean to tell me the factory owner said the entire factory is now distributed? And you must now put the equipment on your own property in addition to using your own equipment, and you still don't get a share in the wealth? And on top of that, they will pay you less?"
- almost_usual 6y agoNot everyone will be paid less, the best will get paid the most. I would take paying for my own home setup (which most companies will give you a stipend for) over commuting any day.
- DenisM 6y agoWell, you own some means of production, but not all of them. The copyright, the data centers, etc. But most importantly you don't own the distribution channels. In the days of Marx if you made the goods you were guaranteed to sell them, but we live in the world of Keynes and making the goods is the easy part but selling them is the hard part. Someone should upgrade Marx with some Keynes.
- almost_usual 6y agoBay Area tech scene jumped shark in 2016. Was a fun time to be there but that time has passed.
- blast 6y agoPeople have been saying that since at least the 80s.
- derptron 6y agoNo they haven't
- bigiain 6y ago"Gentrify like it's 1999."
- nostrademons 6y agoAlso jumped the shark in 2007, 2000, 1989, and 1972. Bay Area has always had boom & bust cycles, and the busts can last for 5+ years. They also seem to precede the recession by about 2-ish years. I'd agree that 2016 was effectively the end of the last boom, 2016-2018 we were coasting, and the crisis was COVID in 2020. So we'll probably see the next boom start around mid-2022, and really get going through 2023.
- azinman2 6y agoThat doesn't mean that 'this time is different' is wrong. Unfortunately without true oracles, only time will tell.
- nostrademons 6y agoIt's possible that this is the end of the Bay Area's tech ascendancy - there's no guarantee that whatever wave comes next will take off in the Bay first. But the region still has most of the ingredients that slant the odds in its favor: an educated and very hard-working population; a dense, diverse population to support chance encounters; lots of rich people to provide funding; and plenty of active research being conducted by the major corporations and universities in the region.
- cgb223 6y agoHow do you do taxes for something like this? Like lots of employees working in lots of different states/countries, no “home base”. Is there an easy way to do it?
- almost_usual 6y agoIf there isn’t that’s a business opportunity.
- pinkybanana 6y agoNo there is no easy way, you need few accountants to handle the payroll. Something coinbase as a 1000+ person company can probably easily afford.
- rojobuffalo 6y agothere are payroll companies like https://justworks.com/ https://justworks.com/ that have entities in each state to deal with the wage tax issue. that's the "easy" way as far as i know.
- ghaff 6y agoMy understanding is that it's not "just" handling payroll taxes, unemployment, etc. There can also be paperwork around establishing legal entities which, of course, gets even more challenging as other countries are involved. It's mostly not that big a deal for large employers but it can be a fair bit of overhead for a small company--with the result that they don't want employees just working anywhere. Mitchell Hashimoto has written about this some with respect to HashiCorp.
- gamblor956 6y agoThere is paperwork, but you don't need to establish a new entity in every state/country where you have an office or employee. You can simply register your existing company as a "foreign" business in all of the jurisdictions where it is not legally incorporated (and this is what most businesses do). Generally, you only have a location-specific business created if there are location-specific benefits acquired, or benefits avoided, by doing so. (Like say, access to tax credits, or avoidance of certain compliance responsibilities).
- gvv 6y agoIf they were truly a crypto friendly company they would've done an ICO instead...
- donsupreme 6y agoIndustries that rely heavily on business travel are basically fucked. Airlines (first and business class), hotels, ridesharings, car rentals and etc.
- iujjkfjdkkdkf 6y agoIf WFH becomes more of a norm, I can imagine facilities / office budgets being re-purposed towards more travel for offsites, visits, and other activities to stay better connected. Work from home doesn't necessarily mean never seeing coworkers or clients in person.
- ghaff 6y agoPre-pandemic, most fully remote companies like Basecamp had people get together a couple times a year. I expect that to be the norm. (Also at bigger companies. I'm on a team that's very distributed and we fly to get together for offsites.)
- missedthecue 6y agoI don't see how business travel goes away. You just can't effectively build relationships over zoom, phone calls, and email. It's just not possible. Ask anyone who's been in a long distance relationship.
- abraae 6y ago> Ask anyone who's been in a long distance relationship. Hardly a fair comparison. You don't have to love, or even have any real feelings towards business colleagues, customers etc. The opposite to a long distance relationship.
- warkdarrior 6y agoIn business at a minimum you need trust and empathy, both of which are easier built in person.
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- SkyMarshal 6y agoDo workers who are employees of a company but are working from home get to write off part of their home or apartment as a business expense, the way contractors and self-employed do?
- baron816 6y agoI just looked it up. Employees cannot.
- leipert 6y agoDepends on the country. In Germany you can. You need to have a separate room that is mainly used for that job. Eg Teachers, IT Professionals etc can benefit from it. With the pandemic there is a flat amount everyone can deduct for 2020.
- tomlagier 6y agoThe real bummer about this write-off is that it's binary based on the usage of the space - if you use it for _any_ non-business activities, you are unable to write it off. Compare to assets, where you write off the portion that you use for business. It makes it a fairly difficult writeoff to achieve for renters and people in small homes - who might be working out of their living room, kitchen, or bedroom most of the time. Just a pet peeve of mine - it seems like it's well intentioned, but for many people who really could use it (people in small spaces starting their own business), it's not applicable. On the other hand, it can cut a nice chunk off of a big house's mortgage. I say this as someone who has never been able to take advantage of the writeoff despite working from a small home for years.
- nucleardog 6y agoDepends where you are (Coinbase hires in Canada now as well!). Here you can write off the entirety of the space if it's used for business purposes, or a pro-rated amount if it's used for any non-business purposes. Unfortunately, as soon as you step into "pro-rated" the value drops immensely. If you have a 1000sqft house with a 100sqft office for which you pay $2,000/mo in rent, for a dedicated space you can write off `100sqft/1000sqft * $2,000/mo` = $200/mo = $2,400/yr If you use that office for one hour once a week to join the video calls of your secret club or something, you can now only claim a fraction of the hours you used for work (160hours/mo) versus _total hours_ it exists (720hours/mo), not total hours you use the room. So the equation changes to `100sqft/1000sqft * 160h/720h * $2000/mo` = $44/mo = $528/yr Since the denominator is the total hours available for use, not the total hours you use it you're no longer claiming any value for the time you're not using the room. It's a little disappointing because I do have a spare room I could dedicate to an office, but I also have a nice desk with a nice chair and five monitors, speakers and mic set up for comfortable video calls, etc, etc. The extra tax refund would basically pay for me to re-buy a second copy of all this stuff after a year and I'd be saving money from there on out, but it's just so wasteful. This year they offered a "simplified" deduction of just a flat $2/day up to $400/yr and so I didn't even bother with the paperwork for the detailed claim... this actually pays me more even though my rent is several thousand dollars a month.
- SkyMarshal 6y agoShould probably qualify this as "geographically decentralized". As long as there are C-level executives, VPs, and the usual corporate heirarchy, they're not really decentralized in the sense that cryptocurrency itself is fully consensus-driven.
- CharlesW 6y ago> As long as there are C-level executives, VPs, and the usual corporate heirarchy, they're not really decentralized in the sense that cryptocurrency itself is fully consensus-driven. Is that the best litmus test? My impression is that Valve is decentralized and self-organizing company[1] even though Gabe still has a "President" title. In any case, it's quite an achievement to lie twice in a relatively short title. It's also ironic considering that Coinbase's business model is built on centralizing cryptocurrency services. [1] "Welcome to Flatland [PDF]": http://dl.pcgamer.com/Valve_Handbook_LowRes.pdf http://dl.pcgamer.com/Valve_Handbook_LowRes.pdf
- tessierashpool 6y agotake a minute to look up the various "I was inside Valve and it had a hidden structure" war stories. that led to a lot of people reading "The Tyranny of Structurelessness" back in the day. TLDR: "Welcome To Flatland" is Valve marketing and it doesn't hurt to take it with a grain of salt. https://www.pcgamer.com/valves-flat-structure-contains-hidden-layer-of-powerful-management-claims-ex-employee/?utm_source=fb&utm_medium=emp https://www.pcgamer.com/valves-flat-structure-contains-hidde... https://medium.com/dunia-media/the-nightmare-of-valves-self-organizing-utopia-6d32d329ecdb https://medium.com/dunia-media/the-nightmare-of-valves-self-... https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm
- hypertele-Xii 6y ago"I finally discovered who my boss was when she fired me."
- yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
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- beambot 6y agoKeep in mind: The average tenure for big-tech employees is less than 3 years -- and usually more like 2 years [1]. We were all abruptly pushed into WFH due to the circumstances. It's perfectly logical to embrace this status quo, and then just gradually transition back to the office (in full or in part) as the dust settles. [1] https://www.businessinsider.com/average-employee-tenure-retention-at-top-tech-companies-2018-4#alphabet-the-parent-company-of-google-does-a-ok-with-a-32-year-average-employee-tenure-10 https://www.businessinsider.com/average-employee-tenure-rete...
- tessierashpool 6y agonot all, no. many people were pushed into this. but many people have been doing this for a very long time, and we do it very differently from the people who just got pushed into it.
- kamranjon 6y agoYa we work in our underwear!
- karmasimida 6y agoHard to tell. The future is hybrid. Not all people would go back to office that often, making office less important, and company would spend less on office benefits. This is a self-enforcing feedback loop.
- wpietri 6y agoYup. For work that can be done remotely, I think there are only two stable points. One is where you and your colleagues are in the same space almost all your working time. The other is full remote probably with occasional get-togethers for bonding and close collaboration. (Monthly to quarterly are the common frequencies I see.) I suspect anything in between won't work very well. "Come in when you like" is obviously untenable; if there's no knowing when your colleagues will be in the office, then there's not much point in going in either. (Except maybe to near-to-home cafes and coworking spaces, which I expect to become more popular.) All of the N-days-a-week compromises end up seeming pretty arbitrary. I honestly really enjoy close, collocated collaboration. But it seems so impractical to get all the right people close enough that the productivity bump is worth the commute. I expect I'll be working mostly remote from now on.
- vultour 6y agoWonder how their employees can be relocating worldwide when all their engineering jobs are listed as US/Canada.
- cmdshiftf4 6y agoI'm going to guess by not declaring a change of residency and keeping everything flowing through their American / Canadian SSN + bank etc.
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- elietoubi 6y agoThis is such a bad title for a crypto company. How can Brian Amstrong really think that Coinbase is decentralized?!?
- warkdarrior 6y agoI know, they did not even put their employees on the blockchain! /s There are many kinds of decentralization, and in this blog post it refers to decentralization of location -- there is not one place that is "Coinbase headquarters".
- dmode 6y agoWell, I guess I won’t be working for Coinbase then. I am probably of the rare breed, who actually likes to go to office (not everyday). I can’t imagine staying home all day everyday basically hopping zoom calls. I hope other companies use office presence as a competitive advantage at this point
- mac01021 6y agoNo HQ need not mean no office.
- dmode 6y agoI have worked in a mostly remote company. Eventually everyone just stops going to the office as they are not sure if anyone will be there. Eventually the real estate sits empty and the employer exits it
- mac01021 6y agoYou can have a company with many offices, and every employee in an office all the time, but no one office designated as the HQ.
- rorykoehler 6y agoDoesn't happen in our company.
- SkyPuncher 6y agoI worked mostly remote and we met up every Wednesday - unless we had reasons to move it to another day (client meeting, conference, etc). It worked out really well since everybody came together at the same time.
- sneak 6y agoThere are plenty of reasons to not work for Coinbase, regardless of whether or not they call one of their offices "headquarters".
- 015a 6y ago
- hyko 6y agoHa! The headquarters are wherever you’re typing this post, Mr Chief Executive Officer. No.
- kerng 6y agoBinance CEO said this a while ago: “Wherever I sit, is going to be the Binance office. Wherever I need somebody, is going to be the Binance office"