Brian Armstrong (born January 25, 1983) is an American business executive, billionaire and investor who is CEO of cryptocurrency platform

Coinbase Coinbase Global, Inc., branded Coinbase, is an American publicly traded company that operates a cryptocurrency exchange platform. Coinbase is a distributed company; all employees operate via remote work and the company lacks a physical headq ...

. He received media attention for his policy of keeping the workplace free of

political activism Activism (or Advocacy) consists of efforts to promote, impede, direct or intervene in social, political, economic or environmental reform with the desire to make changes in society toward a perceived greater good. Forms of activism range fr ...

Early life and education

Armstrong was born on January 25, 1983, near

San Jose, California San Jose, officially San José (; ; ), is a major city in the U.S. state of California that is the cultural, financial, and political center of Silicon Valley and largest city in Northern California by both population and area. With a 2020 popu ...

; both of his parents were engineers. During his years in high school he attended Bellarmine College Preparatory, a

Catholic The Catholic Church, also known as the Roman Catholic Church, is the largest Christian church, with 1.3 billion baptized Catholics worldwide . It is among the world's oldest and largest international institutions, and has played a ...

, all-male, private secondary school. Armstrong attended

Rice University William Marsh Rice University (Rice University) is a private research university in Houston, Texas. It is on a 300-acre campus near the Houston Museum District and adjacent to the Texas Medical Center. Rice is ranked among the top universities ...

in Texas, and earned a dual bachelor's degree in economics and computer science in 2005, followed by a master's in computer science in 2006. While at Rice, he started a business matching tutors to students, and after graduating, spent a year in

Buenos Aires Buenos Aires ( or ; ), officially the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires ( es, link=no, Ciudad Autónoma de Buenos Aires), is the capital and primate city of Argentina. The city is located on the western shore of the Río de la Plata, on South ...

while working for an education company.

Career

Armstrong's early career included working as a developer for IBM and consultant at

Deloitte Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu Limited (), commonly referred to as Deloitte, is an international professional services network headquartered in London, England. Deloitte is the largest professional services network by revenue and number of professio ...

. In 2010, he came across the Bitcoin white paper published under the alias

Satoshi Nakamoto Satoshi Nakamoto is the name used by the presumed pseudonymous person or persons who developed bitcoin, authored the bitcoin white paper, and created and deployed bitcoin's original reference implementation. As part of the implementation, Nakam ...

. In 2011, he joined

Airbnb Airbnb, Inc. ( ), based in San Francisco, California, operates an online marketplace focused on short-term homestays and experiences. The company acts as a broker and charges a commission from each booking. The company was founded in 2008 b ...

as a software engineer, and was exposed to payment systems in the 190 countries Airbnb operated in at the time. While at Airbnb, he saw the difficulties of sending money to South America. He began working weekends and nights to write code in Ruby and

JavaScript JavaScript (), often abbreviated as JS, is a programming language that is one of the core technologies of the World Wide Web, alongside HTML and CSS. As of 2022, 98% of websites use JavaScript on the client side for webpage behavior, of ...

to buy and store cryptocoins. In 2012, he entered the

Y Combinator Y Combinator (YC) is an American technology startup accelerator launched in March 2005. It has been used to launch more than 3,000 companies, including Airbnb, Coinbase, Cruise, DoorDash, Dropbox, Instacart, Quora, PagerDuty, Reddit, St ...

startup accelerator and received a $150,000 investment, which he used to fund Coinbase. His post on

Hacker News Hacker News (sometimes abbreviated as HN) is a social news website focusing on computer science and entrepreneurship. It is run by the investment fund and startup incubator Y Combinator. In general, content that can be submitted is defined as "any ...

looking for a co-founder to get into the

program later became a viral post in Hacker News. He eventually met his co-founder

Fred Ehrsam Frederick "Fred" Ernest Ehrsam III, is an American business executive and investor who is the co-founder and managing partner of cryptocurrency investment firm Paradigm. He is also the co-founder of cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase. Education a ...

on a reddit subgroup and is quoted to have done fifty plus dates to find that perfect co-founder.

Coinbase

In 2012, Armstrong and

co-founded Coinbase, as a way for cryptocurrency enthusiasts to trade bitcoins and other digital currencies. Armstrong was its first CEO. A 2018 funding round valued the company at $8.1 billion, and in December 2020, the company filed with the SEC to go public through a

direct listing A direct public offering (DPO) or direct listing is a method by which a company can offer an investment opportunity directly to the public. Description A DPO is similar to an initial public offering (IPO) in that securities, such as stock or deb ...

. Following a direct listing in April 2021, Coinbase's market capitalization rose to $85B, and according to Forbes, , Armstrong has a net worth of $2.4 billion.

Book/Documentary

Armstrong appeared in the 2014 American documentary ''

The Rise and Rise of Bitcoin The ''Rise and Rise of Bitcoin'' is a 2014 American Documentary film, documentary film directed by Nicholas Mross. The film interviews multiple companies and people that have played important roles in the history expansion of Bitcoin. It first pre ...

''. He was featured in the 2020 nonfiction book ''Kings of Crypto: One Startup's Quest to Take Cryptocurrency Out of Silicon Valley and Onto Wall Street''. Armstrong and Coinbase were the subject of the documentary '' COIN: A Founder's Story'', directed by Emmy-winner Greg Kohs.

ResearchHub

Armstrong self-funded and founded the scientific research site ResearchHub, modeled on the

GitHub GitHub, Inc. () is an Internet hosting service for software development and version control using Git. It provides the distributed version control of Git plus access control, bug tracking, software feature requests, task management, continu ...

code repository, as a way of making research papers available to the public.

Political views

Armstrong wrote a blog post in September 2020 calling Coinbase a "Mission Focused Company", discouraging employee activism and discussion of political and social issues at work. He offered severance packages for Coinbase employees uncomfortable with this policy; as a result, sixty employees (amounting to 5% of the company) left

. Prior to this, Armstrong supported the

Black Lives Matter Black Lives Matter (abbreviated BLM) is a decentralized political and social movement that seeks to highlight racism, discrimination, and racial inequality experienced by black people. Its primary concerns are incidents of police br ...

movement and tweeted when George Floyd was murdered: "I've decided to speak up. It's a shame that this even needs to be said in this day and age, but racism, police brutality, and unequal justice are unequivocally wrong, and we need to all work to eliminate them from society."

Recognition

In 2017, at age 34, Armstrong was ranked #10 on '' Fortune'' 40 under 40 list. In 2019, Armstrong was named to ''Time'' magazine's

100 Next ''Time'' 100 (often stylized as ''TIME'' 100) is an annual listicle of the 100 most influential people in the world, assembled by the American news magazine ''Time''. First published in 1999 as the result of a debate among American academics, po ...

list. In 2021, ''Forbes'' named Armstrong #1 on its Crypto Rich List, with an estimated net worth of $6.5 billion as of February 2021. He was also listed 60th on the

Forbes ''Forbes'' () is an American business magazine owned by Integrated Whale Media Investments and the Forbes family. Published eight times a year, it features articles on finance, industry, investing, and marketing topics. ''Forbes'' also r ...

400 list of the richest people in America.

Philanthropy

In 2018, Armstrong was the first cryptocurrency executive to sign

the Giving Pledge The Giving Pledge is a campaign to encourage extremely wealthy people to contribute a majority of their wealth to philanthropic causes. , the pledge has 236 signatories from 28 countries. Most of the signatories of the pledge are billionaires, a ...

, when he pledged to give away the bulk of his wealth to philanthropic causes. He also set up a philanthropic effort called GiveCrypto.org, to allow people to make public or anonymous donations to help others living in poverty.

References

External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Armstrong, Brian 1983 births 21st-century philanthropists American billionaires American software engineers American technology chief executives Businesspeople from California Giving Pledgers Living people People associated with Bitcoin Rice University alumni