4 ms·

> If the product hadn't been successful, it would have been worth nothing. It's not a mystery at all. The stock is down -84.99% from IPO, seems like so far (ac

> If the product hadn't been successful, it would have been worth nothing. It's not a mystery at all. The stock is down -84.99% from IPO, seems like so far (accordingly shareholders and the financial market), the product is indeed not very successful because if it was, the price would go up, not down. So he did a poor job, and now when sold his part of it, he got $105M.

dcow 4y ago
The entire market is down. Sounds like every product person everywhere is doing a bad job, then.
MuffinFlavored 4y ago
> So he did a poor job Or (at least partially) the surrounding market conditions have changed into unfavorable conditions for a company like Coinbase Should a product officer be judged on whether the economy/financial markets change their mind on the value of risky things like crypto? Plus the FTX thing most likely isn't a product officer's fault
- capableweb 4y ago
  Ok, bypassing anything regarding the macro-economic situation, how has the Coinbase product (successfully) changed since he was introduced in the company? As far as I know, the only change visible to users is the NFT thing, and we all know how that went.
  - MuffinFlavored 4y ago
    A more interesting question I have is "why was this chief product officer granted stock worth $100m"? Somebody (one person? multiple people? a large collective group) thought they did a good enough job to grant them whatever they negotiated.
- wpietri 4y ago
  > Should a product officer be judged on whether the economy/financial markets change their mind on the value of risky things like crypto? Yes, absolutely. The whole point of product management is to find sustainable locations in the product space to create lasting value. People have been warning for years that the rise of crypto was unsustainable, a grift supported by locating dumb people with dollars to cash out the people who had large supplies of magic beans to sell them. It's not like FTX was an outlier. FTX was the largest and most spectacular failure so far. But it's part of a rich tradition of crime, grift, and plain old collapse going back at least to Mt Gox in 2014. And it's part of a large network of other failures and soon-to-be failures: https://www.mollywhite.net/etc/ftx-contagion https://www.mollywhite.net/etc/ftx-contagion
- robocat 4y ago
  Chart comparing COIN versus BTC-USD: https://i.ibb.co/cJ3sZhD/D896-C78-E-DB0-F-48-DD-93-BB-4-D76-CCE10153.jpg https://i.ibb.co/cJ3sZhD/D896-C78-E-DB0-F-48-DD-93-BB-4-D76-... (screen capture of yahoo finance). Yes, you can see Coinbase price appears to be highly correlated with Bitcoin price. However it is clear that Coinbase has still done very poorly: BTC is down 63% and COIN is down 84% since the IPO.
  - MuffinFlavored 4y ago
    Devil's advocate: why was this chief product officer granted $100m in stock then?
    - robocat 4y ago
      Most comments here are completely missing the point, because they are looking at whether he deserves the money. One primary goal in a capitalist society is to maximise your own earnings, at whatever level you are playing the game. Most people seem to play this game to some extent (almost certainly if you are involved with a software startup). Most people seem to get very annoyed when someone plays it better than they do. Most natural born Americans are also blind to the fact that they get a massive head start at the capitalism game just from the luck of being born in the USA, which gives a huge number of handicap advantages. Surojit Chatterjee mentions his background in the blogpost he wrote when he gained the position at Coinbase: “Growing up in India in a poor middle class household”[1]. That cuts out the usual baloney excuse of being born into wealth. It is just as unfair that the median person in the USA gets to spend $65/day (@2017) while the median person in Mexico gets to spend $10/day[2] ($100M$ is a difference in order, not a difference in kind). I met people in Vietnam working for $50 per month, when a developer in the USA could easily be on $5000 per month, a 100x difference. 33M$ per year is 100x a Google developer at $300k, so we can find examples where the differences are proportional. We can question whether the rules of the game of capitalism are sensible for society, but there is not much to be gained by saying “not fair” when somebody plays the game extremely well. He was employed as Chief Product Officer in February 2020, and the Coinbase IPO on April 14 2020. A capitalist question is: did the VCs receive more than $100M by employing him? IPO valued Coinbase at $99.6bn, so if he managed to increase the IPO price by somewhat more than 0.1%, then the VCs would be in the money, which is all a good wee capitalist really cares about. I would guess him doing his actual job would make zero difference to the IPO (one month is not enough time to develop the product significantly). It would be interesting to know what they were negotiating: the financial incentives they gave him were more “pump-and-dump” rather than work hard to build product. Pump-and-dump may have been aligned with the VC objectives of getting a wildly good IPO (depending on details of non-trading periods etcetera). [1] https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/new-beginnings-surojit-chatterjee https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/new-beginnings-surojit-chatte... [2] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/daily-median-income?tab=table https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/daily-median-income?tab=t...
yreg 4y ago
> Implying that the IPO valuation was reasonable.
jahewson 4y ago
Stock price is not a measure of product success.

dcow 4y ago

The entire market is down. Sounds like every product person everywhere is doing a bad job, then.

MuffinFlavored 4y ago

> So he did a poor job Or (at least partially) the surrounding market conditions have changed into unfavorable conditions for a company like Coinbase Should a product officer be judged on whether the economy/financial markets change their mind on the value of risky things like crypto? Plus the FTX thing most likely isn't a product officer's fault

capableweb 4y ago
Ok, bypassing anything regarding the macro-economic situation, how has the Coinbase product (successfully) changed since he was introduced in the company? As far as I know, the only change visible to users is the NFT thing, and we all know how that went.
- MuffinFlavored 4y ago
  A more interesting question I have is "why was this chief product officer granted stock worth $100m"? Somebody (one person? multiple people? a large collective group) thought they did a good enough job to grant them whatever they negotiated.
wpietri 4y ago
> Should a product officer be judged on whether the economy/financial markets change their mind on the value of risky things like crypto? Yes, absolutely. The whole point of product management is to find sustainable locations in the product space to create lasting value. People have been warning for years that the rise of crypto was unsustainable, a grift supported by locating dumb people with dollars to cash out the people who had large supplies of magic beans to sell them. It's not like FTX was an outlier. FTX was the largest and most spectacular failure so far. But it's part of a rich tradition of crime, grift, and plain old collapse going back at least to Mt Gox in 2014. And it's part of a large network of other failures and soon-to-be failures: https://www.mollywhite.net/etc/ftx-contagion https://www.mollywhite.net/etc/ftx-contagion
robocat 4y ago
Chart comparing COIN versus BTC-USD: https://i.ibb.co/cJ3sZhD/D896-C78-E-DB0-F-48-DD-93-BB-4-D76-CCE10153.jpg https://i.ibb.co/cJ3sZhD/D896-C78-E-DB0-F-48-DD-93-BB-4-D76-... (screen capture of yahoo finance). Yes, you can see Coinbase price appears to be highly correlated with Bitcoin price. However it is clear that Coinbase has still done very poorly: BTC is down 63% and COIN is down 84% since the IPO.
- MuffinFlavored 4y ago
  Devil's advocate: why was this chief product officer granted $100m in stock then?
  - robocat 4y ago
    Most comments here are completely missing the point, because they are looking at whether he deserves the money. One primary goal in a capitalist society is to maximise your own earnings, at whatever level you are playing the game. Most people seem to play this game to some extent (almost certainly if you are involved with a software startup). Most people seem to get very annoyed when someone plays it better than they do. Most natural born Americans are also blind to the fact that they get a massive head start at the capitalism game just from the luck of being born in the USA, which gives a huge number of handicap advantages. Surojit Chatterjee mentions his background in the blogpost he wrote when he gained the position at Coinbase: “Growing up in India in a poor middle class household”[1]. That cuts out the usual baloney excuse of being born into wealth. It is just as unfair that the median person in the USA gets to spend $65/day (@2017) while the median person in Mexico gets to spend $10/day[2] ($100M$ is a difference in order, not a difference in kind). I met people in Vietnam working for $50 per month, when a developer in the USA could easily be on $5000 per month, a 100x difference. 33M$ per year is 100x a Google developer at $300k, so we can find examples where the differences are proportional. We can question whether the rules of the game of capitalism are sensible for society, but there is not much to be gained by saying “not fair” when somebody plays the game extremely well. He was employed as Chief Product Officer in February 2020, and the Coinbase IPO on April 14 2020. A capitalist question is: did the VCs receive more than $100M by employing him? IPO valued Coinbase at $99.6bn, so if he managed to increase the IPO price by somewhat more than 0.1%, then the VCs would be in the money, which is all a good wee capitalist really cares about. I would guess him doing his actual job would make zero difference to the IPO (one month is not enough time to develop the product significantly). It would be interesting to know what they were negotiating: the financial incentives they gave him were more “pump-and-dump” rather than work hard to build product. Pump-and-dump may have been aligned with the VC objectives of getting a wildly good IPO (depending on details of non-trading periods etcetera). [1] https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/new-beginnings-surojit-chatterjee https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/new-beginnings-surojit-chatte... [2] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/daily-median-income?tab=table https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/daily-median-income?tab=t...

yreg 4y ago

> Implying that the IPO valuation was reasonable.

jahewson 4y ago

Stock price is not a measure of product success.