Brian Armstrong, Coinbase Co-Founder and CEO at a conference in October 2019 in Beverly Hills, California.Matt Winkelmeyer / Getty Images for Vanity Fair
Brian Armstrong, co-founder and CEO of Coinbase, a digital wallet for storing bitcoins, is not just the latest newcomer to the billionaires club - he's also the rising tech star.
Armstrong (38 years old) gives an air to Marck Zuckerberg: that beard and visionary image of young prodigies with a mission that goes beyond business and enters the revolution of customs.
Like Facebook's chief executive, he is also willing to radically transform an inveterate habit, in his case the use of money, giving it a still unfathomable dimension.
Coinbase, the largest cryptocurrency trading platform based in San Francisco, is going public, and Armstrong will be one of the largest beneficiaries: the value of his stake is estimated between 7,000 and 15,000 million dollars (between 5,800 and 12,450 million euros), according to the level of sales of the virtual currency, in a bullish streak.
A meteoric career for the company, created in 2012, and for its co-founder, a graduate in Economics from the exclusive Rice University who is leading a revolution in a sector, that of cryptocurrencies, still viewed with suspicion by many, but to which they ascribe more and more people, from US congressmen to large companies, like Tesla.
No data on his life
Armstrong has developed powerful leadership in record time.
Little is known of his life, except his previous passage through Airbnb;
not even your birthplace or your views on the world around you.
Because outside of bitcoin and, above all, your company, nothing seems to catch your attention.
It is not surprising, therefore, that a harangue from his to employees urging them to focus on work —that is, on the company's goals— and to put aside any social concerns has caused a stir on the networks.
Where will your apostolate develop, if not in them?
Last September, in an exceptionally politically intense one-year hiatus - when protests against racial injustice had barely abated, and on the eve of a decisive presidential election - Armstrong published a post that was also a messianic manifesto. and a roadmap for its 1,420 employees.
The slogan was unappealable: nothing to support political or social causes;
whoever disagrees, better leave the ship.
About 60 workers accepted the incentive, a pay equivalent to a salary of between four and six months, depending on seniority, and signed the settlement.
"Life is too short to work in a company where you do not feel comfortable," he personally encouraged them by email.
In the publication that created the commotion and in the message that he later addressed to the staff, Armstrong alluded to the activist effervescence in the big companies of Silicon Valley, constituted almost as progressive references against sexual abuse (Google), racial discrimination (Facebook ) or other compelling causes.
Against social participation
So, unlike many other companies, which encourage and even invite their workers to active participation - for example, great business leaders in New York, who have encouraged nearly 100,000 employees to vote in the next mayoral elections - Armstrong has anatemized all social concerns by considering that any interest outside the business detracts from efforts for success.
"Although I believe that these efforts [supporting social causes] are well-intentioned," he wrote to heal in health, "they have the potential to destroy a lot of value in most companies, both because they are distracting and because they are divisive."
Armstrong's social resentment seems to have its origin in an embarrassing incident that occurred in June, during a company convention, when the Coinbase chief executive would have refused to speak publicly in favor of the Black Lives Matter movement, according to employees cited, anonymously, by the The Business of Business portal (other sources, however, indicate their explicit support on Twitter for the mobilizations).
Last October, according to the aforementioned portal, tennis player and investor Serena Williams deleted all mention about Coinbase from the website of her venture capital firm, Serena Ventures.
So, while for some Armstrong adds to his nose for finance a management model destined to set precedents, for Silicon Valley - an example of greater liberality, at least ideological - he is a prudish leader, as well as clumsy and myopic in his efforts to ignore the innumerable demands in progress.
But that Armstrong will do school, both in management and doctrine, there is no doubt.
That some of his employees consider going back to the catacombs, either.