…While planting seeds for the future
When you commit to achieving something revolutionary like creating economic freedom for the world, which is our vision at Coinbase, the length and breadth of vision can be daunting. We strongly believe that the way to achieve more economic freedom for everyone is to create an open financial system on top of crypto. These are ambitious goals and the exact steps to reach these are not all completely defined. We are on a multi-decade journey towards this goal. And when we reach it we’ll be disrupting all of finance as we know it today.
Disruption can only come from breakthrough innovation and for breakthrough innovation you’ve got to plant many seeds and not just tolerate, but celebrate failure. That is why we follow a 70/20/10 allocation model to help plant the seeds for the future. We call it Core (70%), Strategic (20%) and Venture (10%). There have often been internal requests to reallocate our 10 or 20 percent efforts to the top ranked 70 percent. This confusion isn’t something unique to Coinbase, or even a smaller start-up. This is a perennial confusion in many tech companies. Prioritization does not mean killing all high beta efforts, it means allocating the right amount of resources to each type of effort. Innovation is a core part of the career framework for our product team at Coinbase. In fact, we expect and encourage our senior staff to step out of their comfort zone and incubate more zero to one projects. No idea is too radical!