How Bitcoin Company Coinbase Defines Its Vision, Mission, and Strategy

Editor's note: The author of this article, Brian Armstrong, is the co-founder and CEO of Coinbase. He used his own company as an example to redefine the vision, mission and strategy.

What Fred and I have been doing this year is learning how to introduce Coinbase to other people.

As a company grows, it’s easy for people to go in different directions and do a lot of different things. We’re still a small company with about 100 employees, but even at this size, we can’t guarantee 1:1 communication with everyone. So we decided to develop a clear vision, mission, and strategy for the company.

If you’re like me, these words may seem a little silly the first time you read them. They may sound like “big company convoluted stuff.” And in some ways they are. However, if you follow them, they can help you align everyone around a common goal and attract the right people to your team.

What are vision, mission and strategy?

To get some clarity on this question, I consulted with many CEOs and executive coaches from other companies. There is no agreed-upon definition of this term. Everyone has their own interpretation. So I tried to put it into the simplest form.

Now, when I hear “vision, mission, and strategy,” I convert them to “why, what, and how.”

Vision: Why

Why do you do what you do now? How will you make a difference in the world in ten years?

Mission: What is

What are you going to do to make the world of the future a reality? A broad statement summarizing what you are doing.

Strategy: What to do

How will you accomplish your mission? What will you need to do differently each year to accomplish your mission in ten years?

Ideally, at least 80% of employees should truly understand the company's mission and believe in it. On the other hand, employees should generally understand the vision and strategy, but the content is longer and does not need to be memorized. People can refer to these contents at any time to help them make decisions at work.

I've been to a lot of company parties where I'd hear people from other companies make fun of their company's mission. It's hard to build something that can actually keep your company alive.

Bring it all together

We wanted to get input from more people in the company, so we selected a group of employees from different locations. We held several meetings to brainstorm and clarify the company's vision and mission.

This was a difficult thing to do. Most of our discussions ended up in semantics or subtle variations. This approach didn’t help us, and our company culture began to despise large meetings and “fake work.” I think we were all guilty of sitting around doing hard-to-understand work for so long.

In the end, we nailed down some major themes and I was pretty happy with the result.

Vision

We see that electronic money will impact the world in three major ways. When we first heard about Bitcoin we were all very excited.

     Innovation

Not many good ideas have emerged because of payment limitations, which is a major barrier to commercial scale.

Imagine if someone had a product idea and could get customers around the world in a day.

In the future, it won’t matter if you’re a hot Silicon Valley startup or a 16-year-old in Mumbai with a novel idea. If you create a product that people want, it could be a global hit on day one.

     Effectiveness

Sometimes payments can be super slow and expensive. Why does it take longer to wire money to Australia than to fly there in person? Why does it take 3 business days for a US bank to wire money and not process it on weekends? Why is there a 2-3% tax on every retail transaction that is just moving secondary numbers from one data center to another?

Because each country (and payment company) has its own proprietary system, the systems are not seamlessly connected.

Imagine that every payment around the world was as fast, cheap, and global as email.

If global payments were based on open protocols (no one company or country controlling them), we would see a huge increase in efficiency. As a result, the number of payments per person per day would increase, and the definition of payment would change (in the same way that if we carried a high-quality digital camera with us all day and every lunch break, we would take more pictures).

     Equal Opportunity

One-third of the world's population lives on less than $2 a day, but 90% of them do not have bank accounts.

If people were not able to save money, small miscalculations or setbacks (theft, illness, the change of seasons) could be fatal.

However, almost 100% of people in developing countries now have a mobile phone, and by 2020, about 85% of people will own a smartphone.

Imagine if people with smartphones had access to the same financial services that people in developed countries enjoy.

For people with less money, the traditional banking business model (earning interest on deposits) does not work. We believe that many people in developing countries will use smartphones for financial services in the form of electronic money, which will level the playing field in this area.

Regarding vision, we focus on three themes:

Imagine if someone had a product idea and could get customers around the world in a day.

Imagine if every payment made around the world was as fast, cheap, and global as the mail. Imagine if everyone with a smartphone had access to the same financial services that people in developed countries enjoy.

Bring them together into a single vision:

Bitcoin's open and decentralized financial network will bring more innovation, efficiency, and equal opportunity to the world.

This is the world we want to see in ten years.

mission

If this is our vision for the future, what can Coinbase do to bring about this change in the world?

We have a lot of ideas. We are trying to “unleash the potential of Bitcoin”, “make Bitcoin easier to use”, and “make Bitcoin the most popular currency in the world”.

At present, our products mainly successfully facilitate the exchange of Bitcoin and local currencies. But what we really do is to promote the development of electronic currency and move the world towards an open financial system. Exchange is really the most important first step.

So our mission is:

Coinbase's mission is to create an open financial system around the world.

Strategy

Companies like Netflix and Tesla make their strategies public. I thought it would be interesting to make the first version of our strategy public.

In the short term, we want to enter this new open financial system. In the long term, we still need to do a lot to help this network continue to improve.

1. Become the easiest place to buy and sell Bitcoin.

In the short term, the most important thing Coinbase can do is make it easy for people to convert their local currencies into Bitcoin.

This approach will promote the development of electronic currency networks. It is a kind of infrastructure, and its role is consistent with that of ISPs in the early days of the Internet.

In our case, that means expanding to as many countries as we can and adding as many payment methods as possible. It means building strong relationships with regulators and banks, and better communicating and connecting with the traditional financial world. It also means developing a product that is easy to use, secure, and trustworthy.

In addition, the reason why we feel it is a good starting point for us is that electronic currency exchange has a clear business model and we are already ahead of many countries.

2. Help the industry grow by creating killer app prototypes

Once the infrastructure of electronic money matures, we will move to the next stage: Apps. These are the real products and what end consumers and businesses will use together.

In the future, Coinbase will develop or purchase other apps for consumers to use.

When Netscape launched their web browser, not many people were creating websites. It wasn't until they created their first web app (a shopping site) that they realized there were a lot of things missing. Then they invented cookies, SSL, and javascript. Building on your own infrastructure is a great way to improve.

in conclusion

Now you know what we are going to be doing in the next decade and how we are going to get there. We should wake up every morning and think about digital money because it can change the way everything works in the future.

Right now, the cryptocurrency space is still very new. This is both exciting and scary. People who join Coinbase want to be part of something that changes the world, which is different from creating new products (the bottom of the S curve) or breaking new ground on existing ideas (the top of the S curve).