Last week, I started working at Coinbase in San Francisco. My new job is to lead the core consumer app product team. We are working to make cryptocurrency more useful for everyone.
This is a huge change for me. I spent the past nine years building marketing products at Facebook and Google. I had a courtside seat to so many innovations in digital advertising. This includes real-time bidding, cross-device targeting, and data-driven measurement.
But for the past six years, I’ve become obsessed with cyptocurrency. It all started when I bought my first bitcoin in 2013, on Coinbase. On nights and weekends, I find myself gravitating towards new projects in cypto like Lightning Network. I’ve spun up a handful of cryptocurrency nodes as fun side projects.
After several weeks of configuring and syncing, I now operate 3 full #bitcoin nodes.
— ⚡️Scott Shapiro⚡️ (@scottshapiro) May 9, 2019
A) Odroid HC2
B) Raspberry Pi 3
C) EC2 t2 instance
Two of them run #LightningNetwork. ⚡️⚡️
What should I do with the third?
I listen to crypto podcasts during my commute and workouts. I read about how companies across the crypto ecosystem are moving the ball forward. I watch news about how macroeconomics are evolving. And I believe that the financial system will begin to look a lot different over the next decade.
Crypto today feels a lot like Social in 2010, when I first interviewed at Facebook. At the time, friends and family were skeptical of social networks. Facebook had only a fraction of the users it has today and an even smaller fraction of its revenue. Very few marketers put real effort into digital, let alone, social advertising. A passing fad was how most of the world saw these innovations. Innovations that I believed in, deep down.
Many people express those same skeptical feelings about cryptocurrency. There’s a general awareness. And some friends and family have even dabbled. But most raise an eyebrow.
So when the opportunity to have a front-row seat to crypto presented itself, I couldn’t look the other way. Coinbase is one of the few companies in the world that has the potential to bring crypto mainstream. And this is a chance for me to expand into consumer products and turn a passion into a career. An opportunity to grab a seat on this rocket ship is not something that might ever present itself again. So I jumped on board.