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Coinbase tried to recruit me last summer. I politely told the recruiter that I felt it was all bubble speculation mania. Also the amount of equity sold by the C

Coinbase tried to recruit me last summer. I politely told the recruiter that I felt it was all bubble speculation mania. Also the amount of equity sold by the CFO at the public listing indicated little confidence in the long term prospects. I guess I was right? Not trying to brag or anything. Just a tip to everyone job hunting I guess. Watch what executives do (not what they say). Well, and human history of speculative bubbles. I didn't think it was a coincidence Coinbase did a direct listing rather than an IPO, since an IPO has a waiting period for insiders to sell. I think insiders knew they had a limited window of cheap money froth.

Overtonwindow 4y ago
Might be a bubble, but I paid off my student loan and a car by investing in bitcoin. I’m certainly glad I ended up on the right side of the bubble.
- aaaaaaaaaaab 4y ago
  Some people also win the lottery. But I would hardly call it a sound investment.
  - serf 4y ago
    investment is a pretty strong term for what a lot of us did to make money at btc. I made quite a bit of money by throwing my ex-gaming 4870x2 radeon machine into a closet for a year. my investment was a few bucks in energy, and an old computer that was going to become e-waste, and a few minutes time. I got lucky that at the time this was a feasible strategy before ASIC domination -- but this 'investment' wasn't anything like the rest of my portfolio by any means.
    - epgui 4y ago
      Growing tulips isn’t any more of an “investment” than buying tulips… Regardless of whether or not it’s profitable, it’s a speculative endeavour.
      - eigenvalue 4y ago
        Tell that to the Dutch companies currently making tens of millions of years growing and selling tulips of all colors! See https://scitechdaily.com/dutch-tulip-fields-come-into-bloom-in-stunning-satellite-images/ https://scitechdaily.com/dutch-tulip-fields-come-into-bloom-...
        epgui 4y ago
        It's a reference to the tulip bulb mania.
    - bityard 4y ago
      Mining can be an investment, if you can stomach the volatility and have a plan to mitigate the risk. But buying a currency with the mere hope that it will go up is just speculation, pure and simple.
- toddmorey 4y ago
  That's how bubbles work and why they are so alluring. Where people get burned is when they confuse that kind of luck for smarts.
- turzmo 4y ago
  "investing"
riotney 4y ago
>Also the amount of equity sold by the CFO at the public listing indicated little confidence in the long term prospects. Where do you find this information? I'm really new to this. Is it using stock charts or something similar?
- jelling 4y ago
  It's part of most stock listing pages under "Insider Transactions". Here's one for Alphabet: https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/GOOGL/insider-transactions/ https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/GOOGL/insider-transactions/
- boeingUH60 4y ago
  SEC Filings - https://investor.coinbase.com/financials/sec-filings/default.aspx https://investor.coinbase.com/financials/sec-filings/default.... Look out for "Statement of Changes in Beneficial Ownership" to see stock grants/ sales for insiders (executives and directors). But, scouring SEC filings can be demanding, so there are several websites that specialize in extracting and displaying such information, for example - https://www.marketbeat.com/stocks/NASDAQ/COIN/insider-trades/ https://www.marketbeat.com/stocks/NASDAQ/COIN/insider-trades...
- kylestlb 4y ago
  https://www.sec.gov/edgar/search-and-access https://www.sec.gov/edgar/search-and-access
- vimda 4y ago
  You can find the puically filed SEC form 4s online
- FinanceAnon 4y ago
  I think OpenInsider has a good interface for this: http://openinsider.com/COIN http://openinsider.com/COIN
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- seibelj 4y ago
AviationAtom 4y ago
Crypto has boom and bust cycles. It will be back again, and mania will happen again.
- paulryanrogers 4y ago
  Past booms are no guarantee of future booms. Fundamentals of crypto don't appear sound to me. So I wouldn't put much stock in them.
  - mlyle 4y ago
    Yah. I think distributed ledgers are here to stay, as are some tokens of stored value. But I don't think the insane bidding up of many tokens will ever happen again.
    - la_fayette 4y ago
      Haha, I lived through so many of these cycles im crypto, e.g., the ICO scams of 2017 and yet everybody said, now crypto is dead...
      - geerlingguy 4y ago
        How many of those cycles were decades-long?
    - paraph1n 4y ago
      > I think distributed ledgers are here to stay What exactly makes you think that? As far as I can tell, it's still unclear if distributed ledgers are really effective tools for much of anything. What real problems have they solved?
      - st34m 4y ago
        It's quite useful for buying drugs.
_jal 4y ago
I told them something similar (didn't know about the CFO, I don't care enough to pay attention). I'm also amused by the headhunter I heard from who apparently was trying to specialize in whatevercoin/NFT/etc. startups. I politely told him I would entertain any non-"web3" plays, and he started telling me how I was making the worst career choice of my life and turning away money, etc. Wonder how he feels about his career right now. I will admit to a little schadenfreude, but more generally it just saddens me. Idiot greed is eternal, I know, it is just a bit depressing to watch the destructive nonsense play out.
- mlyle 4y ago
  > ...amused by the headhunter... > Wonder how he feels about his career right now. Pretty good, for all the money he collected placing developers in these crap bubble jobs. A little sad, that recruiting is going to be down for a couple years before he can start cajoling developers to take some other kind of new-fangled job that he doesn't understand.
AlbertCory 4y ago
Note that Ted Gioia (in his interview with Rick Beato) said the same thing about Spotify: insiders had no lockup period, so they dumped the stock right away.
yieldcrv 4y ago
> Also the amount of equity sold by the CFO at the public listing indicated little confidence in the long term prospects. As you note, since it was a direct listing and not an IPO, there isn't really an analog to many other companies. My opinion about why they did a direct listing is because institutional investors didn't want to touch it, and that memetail traders (a portmanteau of meme and retail) are undiscerning at any valuation. The company didn't sell any shares or make any money from the direct listing itself, so that means the only people that could make money or provide any shares for making a market at all would be existing shareholders that have a lot of shares. It's impossible to levy criticism both ways simultaneously, just to smugly pat yourself on the back, but there are other reasons to. The other benefit of an IPO (to a trader looking for earliest exposure) is the stabilizing bid from the syndicate, a brief period of more legal market manipulation where a consortium props up the price. A significant reason I avoided Coinbase's attempt at a 100 billion dollar direct listing is because there would be no stabilizing bid and retail doesn't have enough capital to simulate one.
- hiq 4y ago
  > The other benefit of an IPO (to a trader looking for earliest exposure) is the stabilizing bid from the syndicate, a brief period of more legal market manipulation where a consortium props up the price. Do you mean that you would have gotten the shares and would sell your shares at this point with a certain guarantee on the price, or something else?
  - yieldcrv 4y ago
    In an IPO, the company sells a bunch of shares to banks, and this is a funding round for the company. The banks then immediately try to sell the shares at a slightly higher price to retail, and also collude and post a bunch of money on the buy side of the order books to give the illusion of demand. Psychologically this is commonly effective at getting retail to hop in front of these orders and purchase at higher prices and feel like they can sell at any time, leading them to be less discerning about what price they'll purchase at. And yes, they can sell directly into the stabilizing bid. It doesn't guarantee a price, thats too strong of a word for what this is. The bid can be removed at any time, the only thing exceptional is that the bid can be placed at all, as this would otherwise be sanctionable activity by the regulator or private litigants. https://www.investopedia.com/terms/s/stabilizingbid.asp#:~:text=A%20stabilizing%20bid%20is%20a,or%20be%20shaky%20in%20trading https://www.investopedia.com/terms/s/stabilizingbid.asp#:~:t....
codegeek 4y ago
I honestly don't get the point of Coinbase. Isn't it a centralized system to manage what is supposed to be decentralized and that kinda defeats the purpose? I may be dumb.
- puranjay 4y ago
  More and more serious investors and traders are moving to decentralized platforms That’s where the biggest money and the highest yield is achievable anyway. And the quality of decenttalized offerings is rapidly improving.
  - cuteboy19 4y ago
    As we all know our beloved Terra offered 20%, and this is definitely on the lower side! Pls buy into it now while it is on discount and don't ask where the money is actually supposed to come from.
- thehappypm 4y ago
  It lowers the barrier of entry for retail buyers
- solveit 4y ago
  Email is a decentralized protocol and the fact that you use a centralized provider such as gmail only somewhat defeats the purpose of email being a decentralized protocol instead of Google Messenger.
  - ralston3 4y ago
    Email is _a bit_ similar, but the analogy doesn't work too well. While email might be a decentralized protocol, participation in the protocol requires quite a bit of technical effort. Whereas in crypto (e.g., Bitcoin) you can participate by just downloading a simple client and sending transactions via a nice little UI. In your example, Google actually provides a pretty huge value add by abstracting the complexities of participating in the email protocol away from the user. Crypto protocols (insofar as the assets provided by Coinbase) don't really get _that_ complex
bingohbangoh 4y ago
I think Brian Armstrong downsized his stake from ~300k shares to ~30k late last year. Has any company ever done well after such a sell-off from insiders?

Overtonwindow 4y ago

Might be a bubble, but I paid off my student loan and a car by investing in bitcoin. I’m certainly glad I ended up on the right side of the bubble.

aaaaaaaaaaab 4y ago
Some people also win the lottery. But I would hardly call it a sound investment.
- serf 4y ago
  investment is a pretty strong term for what a lot of us did to make money at btc. I made quite a bit of money by throwing my ex-gaming 4870x2 radeon machine into a closet for a year. my investment was a few bucks in energy, and an old computer that was going to become e-waste, and a few minutes time. I got lucky that at the time this was a feasible strategy before ASIC domination -- but this 'investment' wasn't anything like the rest of my portfolio by any means.
  - epgui 4y ago
    Growing tulips isn’t any more of an “investment” than buying tulips… Regardless of whether or not it’s profitable, it’s a speculative endeavour.
    - eigenvalue 4y ago
      Tell that to the Dutch companies currently making tens of millions of years growing and selling tulips of all colors! See https://scitechdaily.com/dutch-tulip-fields-come-into-bloom-in-stunning-satellite-images/ https://scitechdaily.com/dutch-tulip-fields-come-into-bloom-...
      - epgui 4y ago
        It's a reference to the tulip bulb mania.
  - bityard 4y ago
    Mining can be an investment, if you can stomach the volatility and have a plan to mitigate the risk. But buying a currency with the mere hope that it will go up is just speculation, pure and simple.
toddmorey 4y ago
That's how bubbles work and why they are so alluring. Where people get burned is when they confuse that kind of luck for smarts.
turzmo 4y ago
"investing"

riotney 4y ago

>Also the amount of equity sold by the CFO at the public listing indicated little confidence in the long term prospects. Where do you find this information? I'm really new to this. Is it using stock charts or something similar?

jelling 4y ago
It's part of most stock listing pages under "Insider Transactions". Here's one for Alphabet: https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/GOOGL/insider-transactions/ https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/GOOGL/insider-transactions/
boeingUH60 4y ago
SEC Filings - https://investor.coinbase.com/financials/sec-filings/default.aspx https://investor.coinbase.com/financials/sec-filings/default.... Look out for "Statement of Changes in Beneficial Ownership" to see stock grants/ sales for insiders (executives and directors). But, scouring SEC filings can be demanding, so there are several websites that specialize in extracting and displaying such information, for example - https://www.marketbeat.com/stocks/NASDAQ/COIN/insider-trades/ https://www.marketbeat.com/stocks/NASDAQ/COIN/insider-trades...
kylestlb 4y ago
https://www.sec.gov/edgar/search-and-access https://www.sec.gov/edgar/search-and-access
vimda 4y ago
You can find the puically filed SEC form 4s online
FinanceAnon 4y ago
I think OpenInsider has a good interface for this: http://openinsider.com/COIN http://openinsider.com/COIN
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
seibelj 4y ago

AviationAtom 4y ago

Crypto has boom and bust cycles. It will be back again, and mania will happen again.

paulryanrogers 4y ago
Past booms are no guarantee of future booms. Fundamentals of crypto don't appear sound to me. So I wouldn't put much stock in them.
- mlyle 4y ago
  Yah. I think distributed ledgers are here to stay, as are some tokens of stored value. But I don't think the insane bidding up of many tokens will ever happen again.
  - la_fayette 4y ago
    Haha, I lived through so many of these cycles im crypto, e.g., the ICO scams of 2017 and yet everybody said, now crypto is dead...
    - geerlingguy 4y ago
      How many of those cycles were decades-long?
  - paraph1n 4y ago
    > I think distributed ledgers are here to stay What exactly makes you think that? As far as I can tell, it's still unclear if distributed ledgers are really effective tools for much of anything. What real problems have they solved?
    - st34m 4y ago
      It's quite useful for buying drugs.

_jal 4y ago

I told them something similar (didn't know about the CFO, I don't care enough to pay attention). I'm also amused by the headhunter I heard from who apparently was trying to specialize in whatevercoin/NFT/etc. startups. I politely told him I would entertain any non-"web3" plays, and he started telling me how I was making the worst career choice of my life and turning away money, etc. Wonder how he feels about his career right now. I will admit to a little schadenfreude, but more generally it just saddens me. Idiot greed is eternal, I know, it is just a bit depressing to watch the destructive nonsense play out.

mlyle 4y ago
> ...amused by the headhunter... > Wonder how he feels about his career right now. Pretty good, for all the money he collected placing developers in these crap bubble jobs. A little sad, that recruiting is going to be down for a couple years before he can start cajoling developers to take some other kind of new-fangled job that he doesn't understand.

AlbertCory 4y ago

Note that Ted Gioia (in his interview with Rick Beato) said the same thing about Spotify: insiders had no lockup period, so they dumped the stock right away.

yieldcrv 4y ago

> Also the amount of equity sold by the CFO at the public listing indicated little confidence in the long term prospects. As you note, since it was a direct listing and not an IPO, there isn't really an analog to many other companies. My opinion about why they did a direct listing is because institutional investors didn't want to touch it, and that memetail traders (a portmanteau of meme and retail) are undiscerning at any valuation. The company didn't sell any shares or make any money from the direct listing itself, so that means the only people that could make money or provide any shares for making a market at all would be existing shareholders that have a lot of shares. It's impossible to levy criticism both ways simultaneously, just to smugly pat yourself on the back, but there are other reasons to. The other benefit of an IPO (to a trader looking for earliest exposure) is the stabilizing bid from the syndicate, a brief period of more legal market manipulation where a consortium props up the price. A significant reason I avoided Coinbase's attempt at a 100 billion dollar direct listing is because there would be no stabilizing bid and retail doesn't have enough capital to simulate one.

hiq 4y ago
> The other benefit of an IPO (to a trader looking for earliest exposure) is the stabilizing bid from the syndicate, a brief period of more legal market manipulation where a consortium props up the price. Do you mean that you would have gotten the shares and would sell your shares at this point with a certain guarantee on the price, or something else?
- yieldcrv 4y ago
  In an IPO, the company sells a bunch of shares to banks, and this is a funding round for the company. The banks then immediately try to sell the shares at a slightly higher price to retail, and also collude and post a bunch of money on the buy side of the order books to give the illusion of demand. Psychologically this is commonly effective at getting retail to hop in front of these orders and purchase at higher prices and feel like they can sell at any time, leading them to be less discerning about what price they'll purchase at. And yes, they can sell directly into the stabilizing bid. It doesn't guarantee a price, thats too strong of a word for what this is. The bid can be removed at any time, the only thing exceptional is that the bid can be placed at all, as this would otherwise be sanctionable activity by the regulator or private litigants. https://www.investopedia.com/terms/s/stabilizingbid.asp#:~:text=A%20stabilizing%20bid%20is%20a,or%20be%20shaky%20in%20trading https://www.investopedia.com/terms/s/stabilizingbid.asp#:~:t....

codegeek 4y ago

I honestly don't get the point of Coinbase. Isn't it a centralized system to manage what is supposed to be decentralized and that kinda defeats the purpose? I may be dumb.

puranjay 4y ago
More and more serious investors and traders are moving to decentralized platforms That’s where the biggest money and the highest yield is achievable anyway. And the quality of decenttalized offerings is rapidly improving.
- cuteboy19 4y ago
  As we all know our beloved Terra offered 20%, and this is definitely on the lower side! Pls buy into it now while it is on discount and don't ask where the money is actually supposed to come from.
thehappypm 4y ago
It lowers the barrier of entry for retail buyers
solveit 4y ago
Email is a decentralized protocol and the fact that you use a centralized provider such as gmail only somewhat defeats the purpose of email being a decentralized protocol instead of Google Messenger.
- ralston3 4y ago
  Email is _a bit_ similar, but the analogy doesn't work too well. While email might be a decentralized protocol, participation in the protocol requires quite a bit of technical effort. Whereas in crypto (e.g., Bitcoin) you can participate by just downloading a simple client and sending transactions via a nice little UI. In your example, Google actually provides a pretty huge value add by abstracting the complexities of participating in the email protocol away from the user. Crypto protocols (insofar as the assets provided by Coinbase) don't really get _that_ complex

bingohbangoh 4y ago

I think Brian Armstrong downsized his stake from ~300k shares to ~30k late last year. Has any company ever done well after such a sell-off from insiders?