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Why they need these many people for an exchange is puzzling. I’m sure there are many things to do, but shouldn’t they grow their headcount organically and slowl

Why they need these many people for an exchange is puzzling. I’m sure there are many things to do, but shouldn’t they grow their headcount organically and slowly?

julianlam 4y ago
When you have obscene amounts of money, your perception of what is normal goes out the window.
- jstummbillig 4y ago
  Do tell. On a more serious note and the likely answer to the question: customer support for 100000000 customers (as has been pointed out elsewhere in this thread)
- hintymad 4y ago
  I thought people would have learned from Uber’s gross failure of overhiring by now and taken a few pages from Netflix’s playbook
  - azemetre 4y ago
    What is Netflix doing differently? I know they had some internal struggles between different media faces (prestige content versus chasing the masses), are you referring to them paying high salaries but having a smaller workforce?
    - hintymad 4y ago
      They used to have small teams to build great systems, like 4 people taking care of a very sophisticated monitoring infra[1] [1] https://www.quora.com/Are-Netflix-employees-really-that-good/answer/Yong-Yuan?target_type=answer https://www.quora.com/Are-Netflix-employees-really-that-good...
greggsy 4y ago
They have a few different service offerings, ranging from compliance to web3 infrastructure: https://www.coinbase.com/cloud/blockchain-infrastructure https://www.coinbase.com/cloud/blockchain-infrastructure They also presumably have hefty cyber, legal and financial audit teams to protect their assets, and position themselves in preparation for any changes in the landscape (which has been pretty rocky to say the least).
- hintymad 4y ago
  Still, why thousands of engineers?
  - greggsy 4y ago
    Didn’t see any mention of engineers, or any specific part of their workforce. Could have been regional regulatory experts, marketing, admin, gardeners…
hardtke 4y ago
Is it an exchange or more like a lead gen company? I thought coinbase's business model was to advertise heavily to get newbie crypto investors on their platform and then to charge wildly inflated commissions compared to other exchanges. Kind of like a Rocket mortgage for crypto. Unfortunately in that business model gross revenue directly tracks the price of bitcoin.
bsuvc 4y ago
> shouldn’t they grow their headcount organically and slowly? You would think so, but a lot of companies who are/were venture backed don't think this way. There is a tremendous pressure to use funding to accelerate growth, which can work fine in a good economy, but can be a disaster in a recession when no amount of capital can speed up growth.
- mrzimmerman 4y ago
  Blitz-scaling is still the primary mindset at a lot of startups (at least where I've worked or the companies I've come into contact with). They may use some other term but the "grab market share as fast as possible and worry about profitability later" is the general strategy. I think this leads to a lot of companies making bad calls like over hiring or building awkward products. I'm not saying blitz-scaling can't be a strategy, I just think it's treated as the only strategy that matters and people end up in hammer/nail situations.
  - bombcar 4y ago
    In a rapidly growing company you also have the new layer of managers jostling for position - if you get three new engineers (which we badly needed to keep the servers running) then I will want three new engineers to match (to do God knows what, but hell if I'm gonna let your headcount get bigger than mine).
734129837261 4y ago
Well, sure. I think they were going with the wave of success and simply didn't stop. I've seen companies grow very self-indulgent because of their success many times over. The fun bit is that in the USA, you can (almost everywhere) whimsically fire anyone without cause and without any transition pay. So what's to stop a company from just hiring a bunch of people while they're growing, and just kicking them out whenever? I think they already realised it was out of proportions, but you look really (REALLY!) bad if you fire 1000+ people when business is going well. You only look slightly less really bad if you do so with an implied reason that you then simply don't communicate to anyone.
Ekaros 4y ago
Spend lot of money trying to come up with something else to justify the price and growth...

Why they need these many people for an exchange is puzzling. I’m sure there are many things to do, but shouldn’t they grow their headcount organically and slowly?

julianlam 4y ago

When you have obscene amounts of money, your perception of what is normal goes out the window.

jstummbillig 4y ago
Do tell. On a more serious note and the likely answer to the question: customer support for 100000000 customers (as has been pointed out elsewhere in this thread)
hintymad 4y ago
I thought people would have learned from Uber’s gross failure of overhiring by now and taken a few pages from Netflix’s playbook
- azemetre 4y ago
  What is Netflix doing differently? I know they had some internal struggles between different media faces (prestige content versus chasing the masses), are you referring to them paying high salaries but having a smaller workforce?
  - hintymad 4y ago
    They used to have small teams to build great systems, like 4 people taking care of a very sophisticated monitoring infra[1] [1] https://www.quora.com/Are-Netflix-employees-really-that-good/answer/Yong-Yuan?target_type=answer https://www.quora.com/Are-Netflix-employees-really-that-good...

greggsy 4y ago

They have a few different service offerings, ranging from compliance to web3 infrastructure: https://www.coinbase.com/cloud/blockchain-infrastructure https://www.coinbase.com/cloud/blockchain-infrastructure They also presumably have hefty cyber, legal and financial audit teams to protect their assets, and position themselves in preparation for any changes in the landscape (which has been pretty rocky to say the least).

hintymad 4y ago
Still, why thousands of engineers?
- greggsy 4y ago
  Didn’t see any mention of engineers, or any specific part of their workforce. Could have been regional regulatory experts, marketing, admin, gardeners…

hardtke 4y ago

Is it an exchange or more like a lead gen company? I thought coinbase's business model was to advertise heavily to get newbie crypto investors on their platform and then to charge wildly inflated commissions compared to other exchanges. Kind of like a Rocket mortgage for crypto. Unfortunately in that business model gross revenue directly tracks the price of bitcoin.

bsuvc 4y ago

> shouldn’t they grow their headcount organically and slowly? You would think so, but a lot of companies who are/were venture backed don't think this way. There is a tremendous pressure to use funding to accelerate growth, which can work fine in a good economy, but can be a disaster in a recession when no amount of capital can speed up growth.

mrzimmerman 4y ago
Blitz-scaling is still the primary mindset at a lot of startups (at least where I've worked or the companies I've come into contact with). They may use some other term but the "grab market share as fast as possible and worry about profitability later" is the general strategy. I think this leads to a lot of companies making bad calls like over hiring or building awkward products. I'm not saying blitz-scaling can't be a strategy, I just think it's treated as the only strategy that matters and people end up in hammer/nail situations.
- bombcar 4y ago
  In a rapidly growing company you also have the new layer of managers jostling for position - if you get three new engineers (which we badly needed to keep the servers running) then I will want three new engineers to match (to do God knows what, but hell if I'm gonna let your headcount get bigger than mine).

734129837261 4y ago

Well, sure. I think they were going with the wave of success and simply didn't stop. I've seen companies grow very self-indulgent because of their success many times over. The fun bit is that in the USA, you can (almost everywhere) whimsically fire anyone without cause and without any transition pay. So what's to stop a company from just hiring a bunch of people while they're growing, and just kicking them out whenever? I think they already realised it was out of proportions, but you look really (REALLY!) bad if you fire 1000+ people when business is going well. You only look slightly less really bad if you do so with an implied reason that you then simply don't communicate to anyone.

Ekaros 4y ago

Spend lot of money trying to come up with something else to justify the price and growth...