“Why do you want to work at Coinbase?” — how to answer it well

“The mission is the reason, but specifically the boring part of it. My family sends money abroad and I've watched 7% disappear into a transfer that takes three days; the interesting problem is making the alternative safe enough that a non-technical person can use it without losing everything to a mistake. That's a systems problem — custody, key management, irreversible transactions — and irreversibility is what makes it the hardest engineering environment I could pick. I want that constraint. On culture, I read the culture doc, and the directness suits me; I'd rather get a blunt no in a review than a polite maybe for a quarter.”

“Because Coinbase is trying to do the hard version. It would be easier to build this offshore with fewer rules, and the strategic bet is the opposite — build inside the regulatory perimeter so institutions can actually participate. That's the work I'm good at: turning an ambiguous regulatory expectation into a control that engineering can actually implement without stalling the roadmap. I've done that in traditional fintech and the crypto version is the same discipline with much higher stakes and much less precedent.”

“Because the usability gap is the whole ballgame. Self-custody is the most user-hostile experience in consumer software — one typo and the money is gone forever, with no support line. Whoever makes that safe for a normal person unlocks the mission, and Coinbase is the only company at scale with both the trust and the regulatory position to try. I want to work on the part where a good default prevents an irreversible mistake.”