Brian Armstrong (businessman)

Armstrong was born on January 25, 1983, near San Jose, California; both of his parents were engineers.[5] During his years in high school he attended Bellarmine College Preparatory, a Catholic, all-male, private secondary school. Armstrong attended Rice University in Texas, and earned a dual bachelor's degree in economics and computer science in 2005, followed by a master's in computer science in 2006.[5] While at Rice, he started a business matching tutors to students, and after graduating, spent a year in Buenos Aires while working for an education company.

Brian Armstrong (center)

Armstrong's early career included working as a developer for IBM and consultant at Deloitte. In 2010, he came across the Bitcoin white paper published under the alias Satoshi Nakamoto.[5] In 2011, he joined Airbnb as a software engineer, and was exposed to payment systems in the 190 countries Airbnb operated in at the time.[6] While at Airbnb, he saw the difficulties of sending money to South America.[5] He began working weekends and nights to write code in Ruby and JavaScript to buy and store cryptocoins. In 2012, he entered the Y Combinator startup accelerator and received a $150,000 investment, which he used to fund Coinbase.[5][7] His post on Hacker News[8] looking for a co-founder to get into the Y Combinator program later became a viral post in Hacker News. He eventually met his co-founder Fred Ehrsam on a reddit subgroup[9] and is quoted to have done fifty plus dates to find that perfect co-founder.

Armstrong wrote a blog post [21] in September 2020 calling Coinbase a "Mission Focused Company", discouraging employee activism and discussion of political and social issues at work.[22][4] He offered severance packages for Coinbase employees uncomfortable with this policy;[3] as a result, sixty employees (amounting to 5% of the company) left Coinbase.[23] Prior to this, Armstrong supported the Black Lives Matter movement and tweeted when George Floyd was murdered: "I've decided to speak up. It's a shame that this even needs to be said in this day and age, but racism, police brutality, and unequal justice are unequivocally wrong, and we need to all work to eliminate them from society."[3]

In 2017, at age 34, Armstrong was ranked #10 on Fortune's 40 under 40 list.[24]

In 2019, Armstrong was named to Time magazine's 100 Next list.[25]

In 2021, Forbes named Armstrong #1 on its Crypto Rich List, with an estimated net worth of $6.5 billion as of February 2021.[26] He was also listed 60th on the Forbes 400 list of the richest people in America.[27]

In 2018, Armstrong was the first cryptocurrency executive to sign the Giving Pledge, when he pledged to give away the bulk of his wealth to philanthropic causes.[10] He also set up a philanthropic effort called GiveCrypto.org, to allow people to make public or anonymous donations to help others living in poverty.[10]

• Official website