alt Hacker NewsToday I've made the difficult decision to reduce the size of Coinbase by ~14%
Comments
> Over the past year, I’ve watched engineers use AI to ship in days what used to take a team weeks.
No, you didn't. You watched engineers use AI to ship in days something that looks like what used to take a team weeks. After enough rounds of feature evolution, you'll realise that what they actually shipped isn't at all the same. Anthropic's C compiler, which also seemed like a good start that would have taken people much longer to deliver, ended up being impossible to turn into something actually workable.
In a year or so, software developed by "AI-native talent who can manage fleets of agents to drive outsized impact" - which is another way of saying people who ship code they don't understand and therefore haven't fixed the architectural mistakes the agents make - will become impossible to evolve, and then things will get very interesting.
AI can help software developers in many ways, but not like that.
The reality is that Coinbase earns on trading volume, and since we are in a crypto bear market, revenue is down. So they have to cut to keep the company profitable (or in line with what the investors expect).
While AI is likely a productivity boost, the underlying reason is not AI.
> We’ll be concentrating around AI-native talent
Is this code for "we're firing all the old people"? As I understand it, I can say I'll only hire proficient English speakers (a "bona fide occupational requirement"), but I can't say I'll only hire native speakers, as that would discriminate against various protected groups. This seems like the same thing—proficiency may be a bona fide requirement, but expecting they learned this year's workflow first is age discrimination.
I don't expect ethical conduct from crypto companies and will not be sad if they are sued into oblivion.
> Leaders will own much more, with as many as 15+ direct reports.
As someone who did have 15 direct reports for a while, it’s a joke.
You basically are their manager in name only. Your time is so split you can’t give any one direct reports the attention they deserve. Quarterly and annual reviews are a farce because you genuinely don’t really know how people are doing except the signals you can receive when you’re not in a meeting with one of your 15 reports.
Just goes to show how far up their own asses some CEOs are. Meanwhile real people just want a boss who cares. Hope Brian feels happier with an extra billion dollars or whatever this year!
> We’ll also be experimenting with reduced pod sizes, including “one person teams” with engineers, designers, and product managers all in one role.
What happens when this person inevitably leaves and they have no one who knows even a little bit about the process or tools used?
I'll probably get some flack for this, but this is about as good of a layoff email as he could have sent.
* explains the reasons (financials, AI enablement)
* talks about what folks who are leaving get in detail (first) and thanks them
* talks to the folks who are staying
Layoffs are hard, no doubt, and I am not sure he's making the right choice. I see plenty of doubt about some of the actions in other comments that echoes mine. I certainly wouldn't want to have 15 direct reports and also ship production code regularly. But as CEO, it's his job to make these kinds of choices.
The proof is in the pudding as they say. We'll see how Coinbase does with this new orientation in the next year or so and that will determine if this was a wise or foolish move. Is there a flood of talent leaving? Major breaches? Business as usual with better than expected profits?
Time will tell.
> employees will receive a minimum of 16 weeks base pay (plus 2 weeks per year worked), their next equity vest, and 6 months of COBRA
As someone who lived through multiple rounds of layoffs at big tech companies this seemed quite generous.
To put the 14% into some context, per Google, Coinbase headcount has had the following headcount each year
+ 2021 | 3,730 employees + 2022 | 4,706 employees + 2023 | 3,416 employees + 2024 | 3,772 employees + 2025 | 4,951 employees + 2026 | 4,250*
*Estimated following May 2026 layoffs.
So the reduction gets them closer, but still higher than where they were in 2024. Given the fact that the crypto business doesn't seem to be growing much over the last few years it can be argued that they over hired in 2025 and going back to 2024 numbers just makes sense. And as others have said in the comments, they haven't turned a profit so likely this makes business sense and the AI shine is trying to make the news less ugly for investors.
> No pure managers: Every leader at Coinbase must also be a strong and active individual contributor. Managers should be like player-coaches, getting their hands dirty alongside their teams.
What's the theory on this? It seems to be common conclusion, but I don't understand why AI changes the situation here.
I understand that AI means you can do more with fewer people. Fewer people means less coordination overhead and fewer managers and fewer layers. What I don't get is why you want your managers to be doing IC work more so with AI than before. I don't see why anything changes about needing roughly 1 first line manager for every 6-8 people, or why it would be more beneficial now that the managers have production programming responsibilities.
Both before and after AI it's important that managers have real technical knowledge of the codebase. Having managers do actual production IC work in my experience has been a bad allocation of resources, though, and I don't see why AI changes that.
(a) Someone has to do the management tasks. Why do we think that isn't a full time job anymore?
(b) When managers do production IC work, in my experience it increases the load on ICs in review, because the manager one would _expect_ to not be _as_ expert as pure ICs on the codebase, and yet they are perceived as "senior". ICs then have overhead in having to manage that power imbalance in review. I have known a few extremely productive manager/ICs… but the effect on their teams was not super great. It made the manager into something of a micromanager and the actual ICs lacked autonomy.
> Non-technical teams are now shipping production code and many of our workflows are being automated. T
Is Brian here? Can he speak more to this? What exactly are non technicals shipping to production code?
I've got no position in Coinbase but is that a wise thing to say as a public company? I'd be alarmed if I were a share holder
AI is the next big hype.
Crypto was a big hype of last decade.
Every year that goes by there are fewer people interested in an old hype, and therefore a smaller and smaller market for coinbase.
Coinbase is on a path to death. It might take 20 years, but the decline has already begun.
"Non-technical teams are now shipping production code"
Boy that's scary for a company that's effectively fintech...
Publicly traded companies get their stock price punished if they just announce layoffs, whereas if they say it is because of AI, they do not see the same treatment.
If you look at Coinbase in 2020 they had roughly 1,200 employees. By 2022 they had roughly 4,500 employees.
They over hired and now they are pairing back, this is all it is.
> We’ll also be experimenting with reduced pod sizes, including “one person teams” with engineers, designers, and product managers all in one role.
Experimenting or cost-cutting? Are these one-person "teams" you g to be paid more for having multi-domain roles regardless of how fast AI can churn out pseudo-MVPs?
We're going to see this become a trend beyond Coinbase, IMO. The idea that companies just want employees to be more productive is a farce. The C-suite would prefer to make no profit, have few to no employees, and get personally richer in the process.
> We’ll be concentrating around AI-native talent who can manage fleets of agents to drive outsized impact. We’ll also be experimenting with reduced pod sizes, including “one person teams” with engineers, designers, and product managers all in one role.
So it's a safe assumption there's literally no QA people at this point right?
This isn't the behavior I want from a financial institution. This is an albatross. I wouldn't trust vibe coding with my todo list let alone my savings!
I guess this is the push I needed to move to self hosted wallets.
Companies try to project strength especially when they’re vulnerable. Effectively this is sentiment control with the market. AI has given vulnerable companies the perfect thing for projecting strength when taking actions forced by weakness.
when we will see "we do not need CEO anymore. AI can do it better. we are sorry to let go CEO, we do not need him".
> Non-technical teams are now shipping production code
With the amount of tech leaders blabbering about this, I came to the conclusion that the profession of the future is going to be Security Engineer.
I keep seeing $x4% figures for layoffs. Is that right below the legal threshold for layoffs (e.g., 15%), or am I imagining patterns that aren't there?
> Rebuilding Coinbase as an intelligence, with humans around the edge aligning it.
Oof. That smacks of hubris and valley-buzzwordism.
> Leaders will own much more, with as many as 15+ direct reports.
> Every leader at Coinbase must also be a strong and active individual contributor.
So, a manager who's managing 15 people AND expected to ship -- that sounds awful for both sides.
At least the compensation package sounds nice for those layed off.
What I'm really intrigued by is the non technical staff deploying code to production. Now that's a gamble I want to see in the crypto space.
Consider this and I think it needs to be acknowledged:
If you're a leader and you've said that your company is too big and have to downsize by 10+%. This is a you're the problem.
Firstly, the business needs to have active business and new initives. If you are not supporting that: You've failed.
If you're so inefficient that you need that extra 14%, you made that mistake.
If you "overhired" and didn't find a way to use that extra capacity to find the business.. you are the problem.
If you say that AI has changed your business, that 14% more people means 14%*the AI lift of more capacity to accomplish greater things.
It's not the talent, and it's not the talents' fault for your issues. A lot of people assume that layoffs means removal of bad performers. The reality is not there.
Why spend any time thinking about the people at your company, when you could just prompt “make a heartfelt tweet announcing firing a bunch of people, make sure you pitch it in a way that we are seen as an AI company”.
> Crypto is also on the verge of the next wave of adoption
Since roughly 2018 I reckon, at least.
How does the “flattening” affect equity grants. With fewer employees, does each get larger equity stakes?
I usually feel bad for laid off engineers, but these guys profited off of pump and dump wealth-funneling to the rich. Sucks to suck. They all played a part in normalizing scams.
What I'm worried is the push fo AI here, for a software platform that handles money is troublesome, I use coin base because I can send money to my family in other countries with no fees
16weeks plus week or so per year of service is pretty good
3 years ago they were touting NFTs as the next big thing.
Today, not a single mention in that email.
I can't help but feel that there is a superficial chasing of trends at play here (adopting the same playbook that Block used earlier).
Question is, where will we all be in 3 years from now?
Ok I actually like the idea of flatter orgs and player-coaches a lot.
However, do we really need them to AI-wash the fact that as a lot of companies, this company over-hired during ZIRP? Do we really need them to AI-wash the fact that the crypto hype is gone, therefore their business is smaller? “Company as intelligence” and “AI productivity” are just buzzwords so their stock price doesn’t suffer.
Brian once came to Hacker News to comment on a thread I posted (about being made an offer then ghosted by Stripe for a leadership position), so if he has the time for that I'd love to see him here talking about the non-technical teams thing. Could be an interesting discussion.
Apart from "AI" making us productive talk.
Can anyone share how and when they see market is getting in a better shape?
Specifically I am curious, how we would be working with AIs even if market gets in a better shape
Coinbase famously rescinded offers days before people joined when they did a previously huge layoff. That's absolutely diabolical and I sometimes fantasize about accepting a job there and just ghosting them.
> Non-technical teams are now shipping production code and many of our workflows are being automated.
As a security engineer this statements fills me dread.
Bitcoin is down from its highs and the big boys are in. Tether collateral is handled by Lutnick's Cantor & Fitzgerald and moved to BFF Bukele's El Salvador. Previously the combo was Deltec Bank (CIA linked) in the Caribbean.
The Tether narrative has just been broken and Iranian assets have been frozen:
https://edition.cnn.com/2026/04/24/politics/us-freezes-crypt...
This of course means that the primary use case of Bitcoin, sanctions' evasion, is no longer secure.
It becomes clearer and cleared that Lutnick and Trump are actually the deep state and the big boys mean it. Further crackdowns on China and Russia are coming and it does not look good for Bitcoin.
But by all means, cite AI nonsense as a favor to fellow founders to pump up their valuations.
Lol “Non-technical teams are now shipping production code” definitely what I want my financial institution doing.
If I were an employee that got laid off with this email, I'd be really angry and sad.
I never much liked Coinbase. I like them much less now.
> Leaders will own much more
Heh. This is the kind of phrasing that just begs to be misunderstood.
Over the past year, I’ve watched engineers use AI to ship in days what used to take a team weeks.
And I suspect that over the coming year, we'll be watching the consequences of this unfold.
>I’ve watched engineers use AI to ship in days what used to take a team weeks. Non-technical teams are now shipping production code
Good luck to those (human) teams when the briefness stuff hits the fan thanks to an AI hallucination... oh wait, the Active Individually-contributing leaders will be there to lend a hand, right?
"Non-technical teams are now shipping production code"
> Second, AI is changing how we work. Over the past year, I’ve watched engineers use AI to ship in days what used to take a team weeks. Non-technical teams are now shipping production code and many of our workflows are being automated. The pace of what's possible with a small, focused team has changed dramatically, and it's accelerating every day.
As a reward, people driving the productivity have now received a reduction in their colleague pool.
> Coinbase is well-capitalized, has diversified revenue streams, and is well-positioned to weather any storm. Crypto is also on the verge of the next wave of adoption
Crypto is always about to take off. If the company is sitting so well, and is facing imminent growth, then they don't need to do layoffs, they want to. Or the company is not sitting so rosy and they're not too sure about their future.
> Non-technical teams are now shipping production code
What could go wrong?
Even his post is written by AI. Now that's efficiency!
What is going to be the event that triggers Wall Street to realize a lot of these companies have been lying about their financials?
ok sure good luck. more like conbase anyway
"Difficult decision" says billionaire sacking people, many of whom have families, so he can make even more money.
Coinbase has achieved "AGI" internally.
> - No pure managers: Every leader at Coinbase must also be a strong and active individual contributor. Managers should be like player-coaches, getting their hands dirty alongside their teams.
Geeks who didn't even stand near professional sports should really shut up about anything sport related, lol.
I would really like to see professional, established coach running around with young prodigies on a peak of their biology.
> - AI-native pods: We’ll be concentrating around AI-native talent who can manage fleets of agents to drive outsized impact. We’ll also be experimenting with reduced pod sizes, including “one person teams” with engineers, designers, and product managers all in one role.
And AI clowns will cheer and applaud this, not seeing that they're now doing the job of 5(!) people with the same salary. Why is nobody talking about this?
Also, I find it really bizarre that those neo feudal lords see their companies as just a life stock to count. They don't even count people, just see them as numbers to reduce/scale up. Modern tsardom, but instead of being tied via official decree you're now tied by your lifestyle and family.
"Some of you may die, but that is a sacrifice I am willing to make"