Delete Week

Tl:dr: I sent the following note to employees recently. Hopefully it helps us operate even more efficiently in the new year. Feel free to borrow this idea if you think your company would benefit from it.

Legal note: At the risk of stating the obvious, and as stated in the note to the company, we will continue to follow all requirements to preserve documents as required by law. That's not what this post is about.

Hey team, in Q1 between January 8th to 12th we will be testing out a new concept: Delete Week.

Companies, just like any organization, trend toward complexity over time because it's easier to add something than delete it. In psychology this is known as the endowment effect, or loss aversion. Our board member, Tobi Lütke (co-founder and CEO of Shopify), has observed that "The best thing founders can do is subtraction. It’s much, much, much easier to add things than it is to remove things." At Coinbase, let us aspire to spread this superpower throughout the company.

Starting the second week of January, our Delete Week experiment will kick off. It is optional for any employee or team who would like to participate.

As you find areas to reduce complexity and delete items, share them in the #delete-week channel. Here are a few categories to spark ideas:

• Features or products: What features or products are rarely used and accumulating debt? Can we gracefully wind them down?

• Lines of code: What large sections of code can be removed or simplified?

• Backend services: What services are no longer used or can be consolidated, that are taking up resources and are no longer maintained?

• Security: What attack surfaces or duplicate systems can we eliminate across the company that are no longer worth keeping?

• Meetings: What recurring meetings can be eliminated, or added ad-hoc only when needed?

• Slack channels: Can we delete every slack channel without at least a few messages in the past 30 days?

• Policies: What policies are no longer relevant, or can be consolidated?

• Internal Documentation: What Confluence pages can be removed or are out of date?

• External Documentation: What support pages are out of date or can be removed?

• Vendors: Which seats or licenses are no longer needed? Which vendors can be consolidated or removed entirely?

• Expenses: What do we no longer need to spend money on as a company?

• Trainings: What trainings can we eliminate?

• Miscellaneous: What other types of deletions have we not considered?

At the end of the week, we'll give out awards for "Best Deletion" across a variety of categories inspired by the list above, and a "Best Overall Deletion" award.

If you're not sure whether it's worth deleting something, my push is to try it, as it's OK if we need to add it back later. If we don't end up adding back at least 10%, we didn't delete enough. 

Let's all think on some fun areas to streamline in the new year. Head on over to our Delete Week Slack channel and let the games begin January 8th!

Important legal reminder: Do not delete any documents that must be retained as part of our record-keeping requirements and legal obligations. Thank you.