Episode #414: Tim Laehy – All About Coinbase (COIN) With The Company’s Former CFO

Episode #414: Tim Laehy – All About Coinbase (COIN) With The Company’s Former CFO

 

Guest: Tim Laehy is the CFO at Crexi, a marketplace for buying, selling, and leasing commercial real estate online. He was previously the CFO at Coinbase and has extensive experience as a public & private company CFO, leading three successful IPO’s and over $3b of capital raised.

Date Recorded: 4/7/2022     |     Run-Time: 1:04:01

Summary: In today’s episode, we’re talking all things Coinbase! Tim was previously the interim CFO for Coinbase so we thought it’d be fun to hear from him about the investment case of the company. We talk about the business model, regulations, security, revenue streams, and the whether or not the company will face margin compression going forward.

As we wind down, we spend some time talking about Tim’s role at Crexi and the potential for blockchain technology to disrupt the commercial real estate industry.

Comments or suggestions? Interested in sponsoring an episode? Email us Feedback@TheMebFaberShow.com

Links from the Episode:

  • 1:11 – Intro
  • 1:53 – Welcome to our guest, Tim Laehy
  • 4:40 – How one gets into the CFO role in the mid 90s
  • 7:47 – How today feels compared to prior cycles Tim has experienced
  • 11:13 – An overview of the CFO role
  • 16:14 – What led Tim to join Coinbase
  • 22:08 – An overview of Coinbase
  • 27:32 – Coinbase’ competitive advantage
  • 35:56 – Other products offerings that are unique to their business
  • 45:01 – A particular moment or experience that really stuck with him from his time at Coinbase
  • 48:28 – Tim’s decision to join Crexi and try to disrupt commercial real estate
  • 56:12 – Tim’s most memorable moment across his career
  • 59:10 – His bucket list ski destination
  • 1:00:32 – Learn more about Tim; LinkedIn; tim@laehy.com

 

Transcript of Episode 414:  

Welcome Message: Welcome to “The Meb Faber Show,” where the focus is on helping you grow and preserve your wealth. Join us as we discuss the craft of investing and uncover new and profitable ideas, all to help you grow wealthier and wiser. Better investing starts here.

Disclaimer: Meb Faber is the co-founder and chief investment officer at Cambria Investment Management. Due to industry regulations, he will not discuss any of Cambria’s funds on this podcast. All opinions expressed by podcast participants are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of Cambria Investment Management or its affiliates. For more information, visit cambriainvestments.com.

Meb: Hey, hey, everybody. We got a really fun show for you today. Our guest is Tim Laehy, a long time startup CFO, including a stint in Coinbase. He’s taken three companies public and raised over $3 billion in funding in his career. First off, we talk about what a CFO actually does. Then we hop on over to his time at Coinbase, where we talk about business model, regulations, security, revenue streams, and whether or not the company will face margin compression going forward. As we wind down, we spend some time talking about Tim’s new role at a recently series B funded startup, Crexi, and the potential for blockchain technology to disrupt the commercial real estate industry. Please enjoy this episode, with Crexi’s Tim Laehy.

Meb: Tim, welcome to the show.

Tim: Hey, how’s it going?

Meb: The last time I saw you, I think, may have been on the streets of Japan, in a snowball fight. Where do we find you today?

Tim: I live in the Bay Area, just south of San Francisco. And thanks to COVID, I’m still working at home.

Meb: You and I were kind of BS-ing before the episode starts, and we’re going to talk about all sorts of fun things, blockchain, Coinbase-related real estate as we get into the show. But you’ve kind of been a CFO for a lot of companies in Silicon Valley, the Bay Area, but I want to hear a little bit of your origin story. In particular, you mentioned there’s a completing the circle. One of the companies was Covad. Not COVID, Covad. But pretty close, right? Was this a biotech company? What were they doing?

Tim: No, no. Covad, I was the number five employee. Got my offer on a park bench, kind of interesting. And there was no room in the little shared space that we had at the time. And it was quite an idea. It was a competitive local exchange carrier, so telecommunications company that helped bring broadband to people’s homes. This was when you used to be able to get one megabit per second connection in the office. But when you’re at home, you had a dial-up modem, and you’re getting 19 kilobits per second, and the computer screen would paint slowly. We brought megabit into your home over copper lines. So that was really the genesis and the background behind Covad. Today, if we had that name, I’m sure the stock would have tanked.

Meb: You never know. I mean, you know, some of these tickers, sometimes, it’s always fun to watch the inefficiency of markets where the wrong ticker will get a ton of interesting volume, intentionally or not.

Tim: Yeah, yeah. Well, interesting, that company was a startup. Warburg Pincus was the primary sponsor, and they rarely do seed round investments, but they did this time and made a huge return. When I joined, it was $5-million market cap. When I left, it was over $12 billion. The company grew from 5 when I joined to, when I left, it was over 3,000 people, nationwide. We had done over about $2.7 billion worth of financing in every kind of financing structure you can imagine. In fact, we went public with debt before we went public with equity, which was really interesting. So we did something called 144A transaction, which was a high-yield debt deal that we had 6 months to then register with the SEC. So unlike a lot of IPOs these days where you’re kind of caught on the blocks, with the SEC giving you kind of the account reviews and legal reviews of your S-1, and you’re kind of up against the wall, and you have to make a lot of concessions at the last second, we had six months to do it. So when we went public with equity, and we had public debt, but when we went public with equity, we had no comments, because we’re already trading. So that was a super fun time. Like I said earlier, that was my first once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, and I’ve had a couple since.

Meb: You might be one of the only…could be the first, I’m not even sure, but certainly very few CFOs that had been on the show over the years. You’ve done this a number of times at this point, but back to the early days, like, how does one get into the CFO role? Is it, like, you’re at a small startup is what I’m referring to, and they’re, like, “We need a CFO, we’re just going to promote you, Tim?” But, like, how does one start being a CFO?

Tim: Great question. A lot of people think CFOs come up through the CPA ranks or public accounting. Actually, about only 25% of all CFOs really kind of cut their teeth that way. I’m not a CPA. I’m not an accountant. I understand accounting. I’ve managed accounting departments over the years. And I rely on having a chief accounting officer or a very senior CPA that’s supporting me. But how I came up, got my MBA after business school, worked for a large chemical company called Union Carbide, in Danbury, Connecticut. I was on their M&A team, doing global restructurings and M&A. Long story there. There was a gas product explosion in Bhopal, India, and that whole company kind of turned on its head.

So I actually was looking for a job on the East Coast. I found a role in the corporate finance department of a large insurance company, Liberty Mutual, in Boston. They eventually moved me to Los Angeles to be their division controller for the Pacific Division. At that time, it was about a $0.5-billion business. Now, it’s probably tens of billions. I was really a student of corporate finance. I love corporate finance. That was just my favorite topic, that and the money system. And so I’ll make this quick, but that led to an engagement in a small boutique venture firm that was doing, actually, backing LBOs, and that then led to…it was back when Milken was doing, you know, Drexel, doing a lot of LBOs. We were a small firm supporting that. And then I got a call from one of the equity providers that was investing in several of the deals that we sponsored, and they recruited me to the Bay Area.

That’s how I moved to San Francisco. And it’s, then, Silicon Valley was kind of the panacea of places I ultimately wanted to live, and I got fortunate enough to work for a private equity firm here. And that just led to introductions to lots of modeling, forecasting, understanding controls process, everything needed for acquisitions. And then, ultimately, I got a call from a business school buddy at Intel who…they were breaking out of Intel. Three people came out of Intel and started this telecommunications company. They asked me to be CFO, and that’s how it started.

Meb: For a little timeline perspective, I’m just curious where to place you in the majority of your CFO ventures in the Bay Area. Was this in the ’90s? Was this post-internet Boston, the 2000s? I imagine it was both.

Tim: This was, just to put it in a time horizon, this was in the mid-’90s. The company Covad went public in 1999 and then, ultimately, did seven follow-on offerings over the next three years, both equity and debt.

Meb: So you’ve seen a fun perspective of, you know, Silicon Valley, obviously, the late ’90s. So I used to come out and visit when I was in university, late ’90s, and it was just, like, champagne flowing freely. I lived in Lake Tahoe when Google was still a private company, and they used to rent out the entire mountain there in the early 2000s, got to see that craziness. And then here we have now, like, I don’t even know which Silicon Valley, 3.0, 4.0, whatever it may be over the past few years. What are some of the similar rhymes you’ve seen over the years? Like, where we are now in 2022, does it feel normal? Does it feel like total boom times? We’re recording this in April. Any rhymes to the ’90s? From someone who’s been in it, give us the lay of the land.

Tim: Yeah. I’ve seen my fair share of boom-bust cycles. They called it the go-go years, I remember, back in that boom cycle. There are a lot of similarities to the frenzy behind equity investors and debt providers jumping on board of high-growth companies. The similarities are that it seems like there’s this wave that takes place every six to eight years of new technology that no one ever thought of six to eight years ago. Six to eight years from now, there’s going to be another wave. We’re talking about the metaverse and NFTs, and things that people just can’t even wrap their minds around today. It’ll be commonplace, I’m sure, in 10 years.

So what I’ve seen consistently over my career and working with capital markets, investment banks, technology providers, venture capital firms, you name it, is that there’s this kind of up into the right trend, there’s more and more capitals supporting more and more ideas. The way that ideas get germinated really has changed quite a bit. And you know, that’s the beauty of living in Silicon Valley is, unlike, say, L.A., where you live, the backyard barbecues, we talk about venture ideas and the next play. And maybe L.A., they’re talking more about the next movie script. So it’s a fascinating time. There’s always that cycle where things go dark. I recall driving through San Francisco in 2008, every other building had a “For lease” or a “For sale” sign. Kicking myself now that I didn’t buy a few of those buildings for peanuts. But, yeah, I would imagine that there’s another one of those cycles ahead of us, or more.

And I would say COVID and work-from-home, that has slowed things down, but I don’t think it’s disrupted it. Obviously, we’re all seeing limitations on travel and the ability to grow, but the venture community is alive and thriving. Although this quarter, the company I’m with now, we just closed a series B. And that was fortunate, given Q1 has been a significant downturn in venture investing. And venture investors, there are more of them. There’s, what, 9,000 of them or so today. There’s so much capital that’s on the sidelines ready to be put to work, and there are so many great ideas. The hard part is finding people, operators to run these companies, and we’re experiencing that now on the tech side. Even accountants, they’re hard to find. So I would say that the rhymes, as you say, are many. It’s a fascinating time. I don’t care about Silicon Beach or venture firms in New York, Israel, or wherever. Most venture investing is still in the Bay Area, and the beauty of being able to telecommute is you can hire people anywhere. So current company, we have people all over the country.

Meb: Before we dive into blockchain and Coinbase, one last question. The CFO role, to me, always seems, from my perspective, fraught with anxiety. I’m always panicking that someone’s doing something wrong, and, like, I’m going to be at the risk from somebody mocking something up. I mean, the CEO role, same thing, but in a different way. How much of, like, the CFO role in some of these bigger companies is kind of templated? Meaning, like, “Look, here’s the rules, follow this stuff. It’s just black and white.” And how much art and creativity is there? And what I’m thinking about is, like, you talked about the company going public with debt earlier or the decision some of these huge levers which impact these companies for years, if not decades, survival versus going belly up and not making it. The old book, “The Outsiders,” talked about this, like, everyone’s always focused on the sexy part of running a business, developing new products and your product/market fit, and research and development, but they’re, like, at least half, if not more, of the success of the company is determined by the financing decisions and how you kind of manage that side of the business. Tell me a little bit about, from someone who’s been in a CFO role so many times, any general thoughts, misconceptions when it comes to what you do versus how popular people think about it.

Tim: Sure. Well, that’s a broad question. I think the answer is there’s a lot of different dimensions there, depends on really what type of company you’re with, what stage they’re at, what their growth opportunities are, what the market size is, and just where they are in that whole financial sponsorship, etc., growth rates. And if you’re an earlier-stage company, then you’re not bound by public scrutiny, being public with Reg FD and other disclosure requirements, certification of financial results, and all of that. That’s what kind of puckers you up and puts your hair on end. The CFO, like the general counsel of most companies, are typically the last hires in the tech companies because, like you said, the initial thought is germinating idea, pitching it to an investor, bringing on a product team, typically, engineering team to build the product, then it moves into kind of pre-revenue, marketing, getting the word out, and then moving into revenue and identifying the product/market fit. All this time, they’re inviting all this debt, this administrative debt, both on the finance, and accounting, and people or HR side, as well as legal.

And so what I end up doing, having been CFO of, now, nine companies, I typically have been the first CFO in a company, but I come in after they’ve proven their revenue and they’ve actually got a focus on the market. There’s growth there. I can see a path to growing. But the general counsel and CFO are the goalies on the soccer team. We’re preventing goals from being scored against us. Everybody else is out there scoring goals, and it’s great. But there’s a lot of CYA that we have to do, and as you get closer and closer to being a public company, I came up with my own axiom, which was Tim Laehy’s confluence of interest between investors and operators. And you sit in board meetings at an early-stage company, and the board members and investors have lots of ideas on how to help you, and they have issues on compensation dilution, “We got to work all that out.” And as you get closer and closer to an IPO, at the moment you go public, you have complete alignment on interest. The minute after the IPO, you start diverging again. And within three months, all those investors are off your board.

And so it really depends on where you are in the lifecycle, and the areas that pre-public companies that want to be a public company…some companies don’t, they want to stay independent or want to be acquired, but if you want to stay independent and go public, there’s a lot of reasons to go public. You have to go through a control build process, and actually, I’m going through this right now. This is now the fourth time I’m doing it. And it’s a two- to three-year process, and it’s between $3 million and $5 million for a typical tech company. You usually have to bring in experts in systems design, process design, control design, and all of this comes together. Over time, you move beyond an evidence-based audit to more of a systems-based audit, so where the controls are built into the systems themselves. So there is art, and there’s science. A lot of times, leadership teams at these early-stage companies have never been through this before. And so part of my job is to educate them on just what it takes and how it’s going to impact their world. And then, ultimately, investors, hopefully, they’ve been through enough cycles where they have invested in early-stage companies that eventually do go public, and they know what has to happen. I say, the way I look at it is, if you know what the end zone looks like, and you’ve been there, and you’ve scored touchdowns before, it’s a lot more comfortable than the first time you had the ball at the one-yard line.

Meb: So you did a few CFO gigs, worked in all sides of the spectrum on taking companies public, from tiny size all the way to, what we’d call today, a decacorn. What came first if we think about this in terms of, like, chicken and egg? Did Tim getting seduced by the blockchain and crypto come first and that led you to Coinbase, or was Coinbase the entry drug that got you to blockchain and crypto? What was the origin story with syncing up with Coinbase?

Tim: That is a great story, and it’ll be part of my book when I write it. The Coinbase experience was so fascinating. I literally levitated my way to work every day in the Financial District in San Francisco. But I got a call from a recruiter, and I get calls several times a week, and this one just asked, “Do you know who Coinbase is?” And I said no. And they said, “Do you know anything about Bitcoin?” And I said no. “And do you know anything about crypto exchanges?” And I said no. So, obviously, I’m a perfect fit. So I’ll spare you the details, but I had a couple of intro calls with their head of operations, then, ultimately, their chief legal officer. They both liked me.

So the interesting thing about being a CFO is our skills, especially tech CFOs, our skills are fungible, and typically, tech CFOs don’t stay in a company more than three to four years just because there’s a sweet spot. Like, my sweet spot is late-stage private to early public. And then there’s hand it off to people that love being public company CFOs. But the thing is my skills are very fungible and transferable. And I would say, with Coinbase, just like where I am now, knowing the industry is probably between 10% and 20% of the role. The rest of it is all of the other operational mechanism and plumbing that has to be put in place. And so I was quite confident that I could help Coinbase fix its finance department.

And I met with Brian Armstrong. Funny story around the interview, I was late because there was an accident or whatever on 101. I thought, “That was it. I’ll never get hired here.” But apparently, I was so out of breath, by the time, I ran to the office, and Brian really likes people that listen versus talk, and because I was out of breath, I couldn’t do much talking. And so, at the end of the interview, he told me how much he liked how we communicate, which was just fascinating. But anyway, I made it through the interview process, and this was in late 2017. I was there a year in change, and I was brought in to Coinbase, specifically, to build and manage their global financial operations and help them build their financial initiatives.

And interestingly, when I was there, its top line grew over 60. The year before I got there, they’re at $17 million in net revenue. When I left, it was nearly a billion. And so truly an exceptional time. The leadership team had never been through that kind of scale before. There were all kinds of early-stage issues. So I helped transform that company and the control environment from a startup, just a raw startup, to a well-run, mature organization capable of continued profitable growth, and they were profitable at the time, which is really interesting, throwing out free cash flow at the rate of…we probably shouldn’t get into it…but think of it like a series C financing every day going into the bank.

When I arrived there, the state of the finance department was not in existence. Really three people want it done. None of them are qualified for the job. I helped organize and develop robust accounting controls and accounting capabilities, built and grew an international tax function. The company was international. I established a global treasury function. We worked in multiple fiat currencies and had billions of dollars of our customers’ cash, as well as our own cash, to invest. There was no treasury function. I developed their first comprehensive budgeting and reporting capabilities. There was no FP&A or budgeting. And also, during that time, I helped build global banking relationships. And people probably don’t know this, but banks didn’t want us. We got de-banked by one bank, I won’t mention who.

When I joined, we’re working with shopping mall banks, with very small capital bases, and we were represented a large part, probably bank regulators wouldn’t have liked that. So part of my goal was to build banking relationships, and to do that, I needed to understand crypto compliance, security, the regulatory restrictions, all of that to be able to talk to the bank AML and KYC teams that were onboarding companies. Ultimately, we were able to, and I probably shouldn’t mention the names, but sign banking relationships globally with large money center banks.

The other thing I did was build their global insurance coverage. So we were not only providing FDIC insurance to fiat balances held but also insuring our customers’ crypto balances that were not in cold storage or hot wallet. Think of a hot wallet as a bank teller’s tray and cold storage is the vault in the basement of the bank. So we were insuring that hot wallet, and that hot wallet grew from $20 million when I joined, it grew to $50 million within a month or 2, and then it was well over $100 million within 6 months. And the insurance market just couldn’t support us. So we actually went out and built our own capital insurance company. So I had to learn a lot about crypto regulations, security, compliance, etc. It was quite a fascinating time. But that’s how I got introduced to the company, and I mean, I became just a student of crypto. It was fascinating.

Meb: I was going to say, because, like, that time period, you talked about the rules being written. I mean, it’s like the rules were being written in real-time. It’s not like you had a playbook for a lot of these crypto regulations, which still, today, I feel like it’s an ongoing work in progress from a lot of the sovereigns but also everything from banks, state governments, all in between. So it’s pretty magic when you see a company service or product have that sort of product/market fit, and it just does that rocket ship moon shot growth. And it’s just magical to watch when everything is hitting, and it seems like this was very much the story kind of as you were there and helped this build-out. For the two people listening that don’t know what Coinbase is and what its, like, main business today is, give us a little overview of maybe then to now but anything that’s different today than versus a few years ago, but what the company really does.

Tim: The Coinbase business, at its core, it’s very simple. It’s an online platform for buying, selling, transferring, or storing digital currency. When I joined Coinbase, its mission was to create an open financial system for the world. I don’t know if it’s still their mission, but it’s an important theme when we talk about valuation because it’s kind of contrary to where the company is going. But the company is founded in 2011 by Brian Armstrong, a former Airbnb engineer who worked in the fraud group at Airbnb. It was funded by Y Combinator. In 2012, it launched its first service. And the concept was super simple, to make it easy to buy, sell, and store Bitcoin. That was it.

So at the time, buying and selling crypto through exchanges was really difficult and required a level of expertise that many people didn’t have, and Brian did something really simple. He read the Satoshi whitepaper for Bitcoin, got fascinated by it, and he built a simple software interface. Think of it as a wrapper that allowed customers to trade crypto on different exchanges. Now, he wanted trading of Coinbase to be an extremely easy process and geared toward a beginner. That was how the company started. It was a simple Buy Crypto button. Really easy on your smartphone. You can enter a dollar value or place a market order for whatever crypto asset you choose to trade on their platform. And at the time, there were only four cryptocurrencies that traded on Coinbase, Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin, and Bitcoin Cash, which was kind of a rocky rollout. But that Buy Crypto button gave the customer an option to buy or sell or convert crypto or even set up recurring orders. So it was super easy and geared toward the beginners.

So their main product at the time, which is now called Coinbase Consumer, it not only offered a simple trading interface, but there was no downloadable software. It was all browser-based. And then they banded that platform into a more advanced trading platform called Coinbase Pro, and Coinbase Pro was built for a crypto day trader that was more sophisticated and wanted more charting options, that type of thing. But users have the option to send and receive cryptocurrencies from other exchanges or unto a storage device, or you can write down your private key on a piece of paper, but you could transfer your crypto in and out for free into your Coinbase Wallet. And so users, they send crypto out of their Coinbase Wallets, and they receive crypto, like I said, from other exchanges into their wallet.

And the other thing that’s really separated Coinbase from others at the time, and I still think it does, is that they were an on-ramp and an off-ramp from fiat to crypto and then from crypto back to fiat. So a lot of people are making millions of dollars in cryptocurrencies, but good luck getting it deposited into your Bank of America account. That’s extremely difficult, and many firms, like Binance, won’t allow that. You have to actually only trade on the Binance platform, and then you can move your crypto to another platform to off board it or off-ramp it into fiat. So at the core of that, that sounds simple, but compliance and security are so important. Coinbase has never been hacked. You might have heard the Mt. Gox debacle where a couple hundred million of crypto was stolen. In fact, I think, there was one, recently, I’ve read about in “The New York Times” a couple of months ago, a couple got arrested. They stole, I don’t know, a few million dollars of crypto and then held it for so long it became worth $4 billion or more. And then they tried to move it around, and that’s how they got busted.

But security is extremely important. It’s really embedded. Compliance and security are embedded into Coinbase. And then, on the business side, there’s a product called Coinbase Prime. When I was there, we acquired a prime broker, and the reason we did that was we were worried that the FCC was going to determine that Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies were, in fact, securities. And if they deem that, and we thought, at the time, you know, the ruling was going to come out momentarily, but if they deem that, we were going to shut down. And so what we did is we built a prime brokerage operation that met all the requirements, regulatory and compliance requirements as a prime broker, and I actually put that business case together. There’s also an exchange, and there’s a difference between a brokerage and an exchange. And then there’s also a commerce product.

On the developer side, they have Coinbase Cloud, which uses…and this, I think, when you ask the question, and you probably will, which is, “Okay, here’s what Coinbase does today. What are they going to do in the future?” I think the way they’re going to diversify their revenue stream is becoming the OS for web3, and that’s going to be done through Coinbase Cloud. I think they’ve put their money in the right places, plus international expansion. But there’s a lot to unpack in what I just mentioned.

Meb: Yeah. I mean, we could go a million different angles. I mean, the one that I was thinking about, in general, is you shepherd the company, it goes public, it hits almost $100-billion valuation, I think, around 30, 40 today. Still, that’s a very large company market cap. And if we know anything about markets, it’s that success invites competition. And so, what is it, particularly, about Coinbase today that really, or in the last few years, that differentiates itself from potential competitors, incumbents, like big shops entering? Because a lot of these early adopters have had pretty fat margins on the revenue model. What is sort of the main pieces that really drive it being unique and, more importantly, an entity that will survive and thrive?

Tim: Sure. Make no mistake about it. Coinbase is the most extensive platform out there, and you touched upon just a simple economic phenomenon, which is pricing and quantity is inversely related. So the more expensive you are, the less you’re going to get. But the thing is Coinbase, really, the reason I think that they’ve been so successful is, I think, just…that’s a terrible word. They’ve been wildly successful. When I was there, they spent $0, $0.00 on sales marketing. Nothing. There was no performance marketing. There was no awareness, campaigns. This was all done word-of-mouth. And when I joined, we were getting maybe 10,000 new user signups per day, and it started growing, and growing, and growing. And at our peak, we got over 400,000 user signups in one day. It’s the number one finance app on the App Store for maybe a year running.

And I mean, these were when dinner conversations…I was a participant, and many of these dinner conversations were dominated by this crypto fantasy and people wanting to know all about it. People didn’t know what they were doing. It was, like, the tulip boom in the Netherlands. People didn’t know about it. They still think that it’s not legal tender, and it’s intangible, you can’t touch. But what Coinbase did is they played nice with the regulators, and they were the only U.S.-based exchange or broker that people here in the United States could go to, knowing that they went through the regulatory hurdles, like, obtaining their New York DFS BitLicense, which is probably the most restrictive of all states. They’re a money transmitter at the core, and they have to get licensed in every state, separately, each state. But get back to regulations, it’s patchwork at best, but then they also got their BitLicense in the U.K.

So they were a trusted provider. They took security and compliance very seriously. It’s embedded in the culture. You go through training when you start as an employee. And when customers are looking for…they’re examining and comparing various options, they look at really five or six different dimensions. One is fees, of course. On their Coinbase Consumer side, they’re extremely expensive, 4% to 6% of the trade is a fee. When customers think that Bitcoin’s on a run, and they’re going to make 4,000% return or 10x their money in 2 days, they don’t really care about this fund’s 5%. And that’s really what is benefitting Coinbase is that high volatility and the speculative nature of the asset that’s being traded. Coinbase probably won’t talk about it publicly, but they’re benefitting from that substantially.

The other things that customers look at are currency selections. They might want to have access to Polkadot, you name it, Uniswap, or some esoteric coin or NFT that they’re interested in, and if that platform doesn’t support it, obviously, they’re going to have to go somewhere else. But there’s a currency selection process, which is very detailed. And if anybody’s interested, they can go right into their Coinbase website and look at their digital asset listing framework, which I actually helped prepare.

But the other thing is trading volume. So you want to work with an exchange that has enough liquidity and velocity and enough access to liquidity pools to command the market. While I was there, it was interesting. Now, if you trade in any stock globally, if it’s traded on multiple exchanges, there’s instant price verification or discovery. At the time, there could have been fractions-of-a-cent differences between Coinbase and other exchanges, and people were writing algorithms of how effective traders were taking advantage of that. That’s gone now. But again, Wild West days, that was there. So trading volume is important.

So fees, currency selection, trading volume, payment methods, these will shut us down when I was there. It was kind of a difficult relationship at best, and now they’re completely supportive of crypto, which is interesting how things change. But ACH, wire, no one can write a check and send a check to Coinbase. But what are the payment methods to onboard and off board fiat?

And then the last, I think, people are…and by the way, I don’t think this is the last in the order of priority, but security. They want to know that their crypto is going to be safe. It’s not going to be hijacked. I keep all my crypto at Coinbase. It’s free. Their wallet services are free. And basically, Coinbase is paying and fronting their cost. They’re supporting my wallet. Now, they’re probably staking my Ethereum and other digital assets. I actually haven’t participated in their staking product. But security is super important.

So customers are looking for a large variety of cryptocurrency choices, a very simple user interface, high liquidity, and quick trade supplement. And they’d like to avoid high fees. They can, obviously, go to Coinbase Pro, which has a lower fee structure. But they also want to avoid having to control their own user wallet, which is cumbersome, cede that responsibility to somebody else. And then they like to avoid working with a firm that doesn’t have access to a lot of altcoins or cryptocurrencies or digital assets that could be endless on other exchanges.

Meb: So is Coinbase a principal or agent in their offerings? And does it differ between consumers and institutions?

Tim: Coinbase acts as a principal in its consumer offerings and an agent in its institutional offerings. And for the two people that don’t know the difference, principal trading is when a broker completes a consumer’s or a customer’s trade using their own inventory, and this is an extremely important component of Coinbase, is trade execution strategy. So it provides instant clearing and settlement, along with eliminating transaction and mining fees since there’s no blockchain activity that took place. So that’s called an off-chain transaction. And how Coinbase limits its cost is to avoid going out to the blockchain every time Joe or Sally want to buy $100 worth of Bitcoin. What Coinbase does is have a treasury of digital assets, and you buy from them, you sell, you sell to them. And so it’s instantaneous trade, so there’s price discovery, transaction, there’s deep liquidity. They can move quickly.

On the agency side, that involves a broker finding a counterparty to the customer’s trade, which can include customers at other brokerage shops. So principal trading allows brokers to also profit from that bid-ask spread, because there is a bid-ask spread. But because it’s not an agency model on the consumer side, Coinbase benefits. So when you’re looking at their financials, they’re avoiding mining costs and transaction costs, which are extremely expensive, especially in a market that’s rallying, because under a proof of work structure for Bitcoin, for example, everybody is competing for miners to solve your problem, to mine your block of the blockchain. And Coinbase, like others, if they want to speed up execution and not make it a 10-minute wait, they want to get a miner to transact quickly, they’ll pay more transaction fees or mining fees. And that’s a super interesting point.

Also, that provides for gains and losses on trades. So when you look at their financials, and we’ll talk about their revenue, how they make money, when I was there, we were fortunate enough to make…I shouldn’t probably talk about it…but a lot of money on the gain on digital asset sales, because, overall, the market was expanding. And when they were selling, they were selling digital assets they had bought from others at a lower price. So in agency trading, the broker is going to find someone else willing to buy or sell that security or that asset at the same price as the counterparty, which is a slower process, and Coinbase would only make money off the bid-ask spread.

Meb: All right. So any other parts of the business we haven’t touched on but are important to chat about?

Tim: Oh, their products they have, and this happened just while I was there. I was just exiting. But they offered, along with Circle, USD Coin, which is a stablecoin backed by the U.S. dollar, and it functions like cryptocurrency and can be sent anywhere in the world for no fees. And so USDC represents fiat or government money on the blockchain, and it’s redeemable on a one-to-one basis for U.S. dollars. And it’s issued by regulated financial institutions backed and fully reserved by assets, which are audited by large accounting firms. And then we talked about the free service of Coinbase Wallet, which just helps users manage their own private keys and store their crypto assets so that they don’t have to do it themselves.

Also, Coinbase, after I left, launched a debit card, supported by Visa and lets consumers spend any asset in their Coinbase portfolio with any merchant globally and can earn 4% of crypto back. So I’m kind of tempted to do it myself. There are no annual fees. There are no signup fees. Coinbase does charge a flat roughly 2.5% transaction fee for all purchases. So it’s a concept, because, effectively, what they’re doing is they’re trading crypto on your behalf. So for example, if you spend $100 of Bitcoin with your Coinbase card in the United States, you’d be charged a fee of roughly $2.50. So those are the consumer offerings. That, by the way, represents most of their revenue and not most of their trading volume, most of their revenue.

But on the institutional side, they have Coinbase Prime and Coinbase Commerce. And Coinbase Prime, like I said, it’s a platform designed specifically to provide a suite of tools and a suite of services for institutional investors or the day traders even when they’re trading cryptocurrencies. So it fills the missing piece of a critical infrastructure that institutions need. This is a prime offering. They attract corporate customers and liquidity providers. So Coinbase Prime for corporate customers is an institutional-grade solution. Companies are looking to add or manage digital assets as part of their corporate treasury strategy.

On the liquidity provider side, Coinbase Prime provides APIs and a trading platform to get these market makers and other high-frequency traders the tools they need to trade crypto. So they have lending and margin products for qualified clients. That takes several days to get qualified and go through the AML/KYC process. And through that offering, Coinbase offers high-touch execution services, like their OTC trading desk. They give their customers ability to process algorithmic orders, as well as provide them with market data and research products. They also, recently, introduced platform improvements to allow things like multi-user permissions and whitelisted withdrawal addresses, that type of thing. Coinbase OTC, like I mentioned before, which is part of their exchange offering, is their only agency-only trading desk, and that allows smart order routing, advanced algorithms, post-trade transaction analysis, and it really helps these investors manage their execution needs.

As part of their prime offering, they also offer Coinbase Custody, which, actually, I built this as a model around. And Coinbase Custody is part of their prime offering. It was launched in 2018, and it was really geared to provide secure digital asset storage for institutional investors. It’s a critical service because large institutions are not allowed to self-custody crypto assets in the amounts above, I believe, it’s $500 million. So this service is super important and opens a secure gateway to allow these institutional investors and hedge funds and others that want to be in the cryptocurrency space, but they can’t self-custody. So, like I said, I prepared the business case, came up with the pricing. I believe they have over $7 billion in custody today, and that was, I believe, through the acquisition of another player called Xapo’s.

And then Commerce, like I talked about, it’s an enterprise blockchain service. So it takes cryptocurrency transactions between customers and merchants, like Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, etc. There are not a lot of companies taking crypto these days. You’ve probably read about Tesla and others, Dell, others accept crypto, but the problem is, how do you process the return if you’re a consumer-grade product? So that’s still being ironed out, so I think that’s…some of this is going to happen in the future.

Meb: So a lot of the products we’ve talked about so far are transactional revenue in nature. Anything that they could build in the future that might be more reoccurring in style?

Tim: We had quarterly strategic meetings when I was there. And here I was, the newcomer to crypto, and we were all tasked with, “What’s the next thing? What could we do next?” And I, like a dummy, said, “Hey, we’re really good at security and custody and compliance, following regulations. Why don’t we do what Amazon does and build AWS for crypto?” And that was, you know, people kind of took notice, I guess. And now, they’re actually doing it. I don’t want to say that I started it, but it’s an interesting product. All of the revenue today…not all of it, roughly 80% of it is nonrecurring, as transaction fees, and most of that stems out of the consumer side.

But Coinbase Cloud gives them not only a recurring revenue stream through a subscription model, but it does it through offering developers an on-ramp for building these crypto applications and services and speeds up their development timelines and allows their development teams to focus on improving their product instead of managing a crypto infrastructure, which Coinbase is really good at. So Coinbase launched Coinbase Cloud to be the AWS for cryptocurrency, providing blockchain infrastructure in the same way that AWS provides hosted cloud computing and APIs for the web. So users can do a lot. They can trade with their Exchange API, developers can power high volume crypto trading with Coinbase Exchange API, you know, accessing deep liquidity pools, managing accounts, getting market data, that type of thing. They can also…users can accept crypto payments with their Commerce API, we just talked about, providing convenience and speed of crypto transactions and accepting crypto payments. It clearly requires secure and reliable infrastructure, which makes no sense for other companies to build, want to lever what Coinbase has already built.

Crypto asset issuers can also simplify how they interact with multiple blockchains, and for those that aren’t familiar with just blockchain technology, there’s a lot of different blockchain technologies, and they’re very difficult. These cross-chain products and services are quite complex, and they need to be integrated. And that’s probably the most challenging task for these altcoin or crypto or digital asset developers, is blockchain has a different set of rules that governs the transactions. And Coinbase users can use this open-source project, I believe it’s called Rosetta, and they get access to integrating their blockchain and crypto products that any other blockchains that touch or interface with Rosetta.

And then developers can also easily connect their wallets to their dapps using their Wallet SDK. And this is an open-source SDK and allows developers to connect their dapps to millions of Coinbase Wallet users. So that includes all their digital assets, their NFTs, and it just makes a simple onboarding and transacting method for both mobile and web. And last, Coinbase Cloud makes it easy to onboard customers. So you can sign in with Coinbase, which lets developers use the Coinbase APIs and take things like permissionless actions on behalf of their customers. This is for buying and selling, depositing, and withdrawing crypto, and that just delivers a seamless customer experience.

You mentioned other things like Coinbase Ventures. That was something that started when I was there also. And Emilie Choi, who’s now their president, came in from LinkedIn, and she ran corporate development at LinkedIn, and now kind of moved from corporate development at Coinbase, and she built Coinbase Ventures. It’s not a separate legal entity. It’s an on-balance-sheet investment arm of Coinbase, and they invest in early-stage cryptocurrency and blockchain startups. One thing that’s super fascinating here, Meb, is that Coinbase plants its flag in every corner of the crypto sector. They plant a flag in competitive sectors even. We’ll talk about decentralized exchanges. They bought one. We’ve talked about investing now into other players than the crypto sector, and why that’s fascinating is all boats rise on a rising tide. They like to see not only all these other startups grow, and they typically were following, or at least when I was there, we were following Andreessen Horowitz’s lead. But I think they went further, and they’re investing much more broadly. I don’t know exactly how much they put to work, but that also acts as an incubator for future acquisitions, which, by the way, my new company, we’re going to take a page out of that playbook and probably set up…the company I’m with now, it’s called Crexi, we’re probably going to be setting up a Crexi Ventures.

Meb: Well, good. I want to hop over to Crexi next. Before we wind down the Coinbase chapter, is there a particular moment, experience, good, bad, in between that you recall from your time there that really just kind of, like, burned in your brain or that you think is, like, as you reflect back a moment that you, either with fondness or anxiety, I don’t know, but anything, in particular, a story that you remember from your time at Coinbase? I’m sure there’s a lot.

Tim: Oh, there’s many. Some, you know, make your hair curl, and some, we’re, like, just in awe. I didn’t know what a fork was or an airdrop. And that creates all kinds of custody and ownership issues when, just randomly, someone decides, for every owner of Bitcoin, you’re going to be an owner of TimCoin or a CLAM, or whatever. And now, how do you trade and track that? Who owns that? Does Coinbase own it, or does the customer own it? I don’t want to get into the details there, but that created a lot of legal headaches.

The other thing is getting audited. No bid for auditor want to audit us, because they didn’t know how to determine the gain or loss on digital assets. They didn’t know if it was real. What they ended up doing is setting up their own nodes on the blockchain infrastructure to be able to actually validate, “These are the auditors to validate that these trades actually took place.” And so the auditors now, I think, have grown quite a bit, and firms like Deloitte and EY are really leading the charge there. But those are some super interesting things.

Banking and access to capital, those were some hair-raising moments. While, one, we were the…I remember us approaching the end of the year in 2017, and these shopping mall banks called us and said, “You’ve got to take your money out of our bank.” And we didn’t know where to put it. We tried and tried and tried. No one would accept it. None of the big money center banks would accept it. So we were freaking. And this is 1 of 100 stories, but what we ended up doing was setting up an account with the Federal Reserve. And the U.S. government had no problem taking it. This was about $4 billion of fiat. And so we went from not making any money with these little shopping mall banks to getting Federal Reserve interest on one, two, three, and four-week laddered treasury.

So that’s just a taste of a few things that we uncovered, but just the amount of capital and cash that we’re receiving, I told Brian one day, I was joking, we were the last two people in the office, and he said, “What are you doing here so late?” And I said, “Well, I’m trying to find a truck.” And he said, “Why do you need a truck?” And I said, “Well, do you know how much $1 million in cash weighs in $100 bills?” And he kind of thought about it for a while, and he said, “No, I’m guessing 50 pounds.” I said, “It’s 22 pounds. And my estimation, we’re going to need four semis.” And we rolled this money to some bank, and I’m joking, obviously. That was not a real activity. But those are the kinds of things that we were faced with then.

Meb: As you were talking about Armstrong late at night, I thought you were going to be the one that was just talking politics, and he’s like, “You know what, I’ve had enough of this. I’m going to write this memo,” and being, like, “No one talking politics any more at this company. Tim’s been in my ear too much about it.”

Tim: No, that wasn’t me.

Meb: Yeah, I’m just kidding.

Tim: Although I did have to make an appointment to talk to the CEO. That was the first time in my history of being a CFO that I actually had to make an appointment.

Meb: Well, if you ever come to my office, I have a couch in my office. So people come in there just to take naps more than anything, I think. So you decided not to just go full sabbatical and ski for the rest of your life. You decided to look south, to the land of milk and honey, here in Los Angeles, to a little company up the road in Marina del Rey. Tell me what drew you to these guys, what they’re doing, and if there’s any similarities to this Coinbase story.

Tim: Yeah, there actually are. It’s a totally different asset class. It’s much larger. I think, globally, digital assets are valued, have a market capital of roughly $2 billion, depending on the volatility of the day. I’m working on a company called Crexi now, based in L.A. It’s an early-stage company. We just closed a series B financing. And I can’t get into the details, but it was quite a win. And it’s a marketplace for buying and selling and leasing commercial real estate. Think of it like Zolo for commercial real estate, but it’s not like Zolo at all, but it’s easier for people to think about that. The reason that I joined was, through my time at Coinbase, I just got excited about the exchange business. Exchanges make money when people buy and sell, and people are always buying and selling. Every piece of commercial real estate is up for sale at some point.

So let me kind of step back. This will take about two minutes. Globally, this value, that global wealth, that’s the wealth of every person alive, is about $380 trillion. Two hundred and eighty trillion, 75% of that, is real estate. That’s bigger than the M1 and M2 money supply combined. It’s massive. It’s the largest asset class. A large portion of that is residential. So take away residential, globally, plus or minus $100 billion it’s about a $70-trillion global asset class. And it’s paper-based. It hasn’t gone digital. And if you look at that, what is the United States? It’s about $16 trillion, $17 trillion. So commercial real estate is one of the world’s largest asset class. It’s currently illiquid. It’s underserved. It’s not digitized.

And so what Crexi has built and is continuing to build, it’s, call it, a new age marketplace for commercial real estate. If you were one to buy a piece of commercial…commercial real estate, as broadly speaking, is everything that’s not residential, so assisted living centres, mobile home parks, self-storage units, hospitals, post offices. People just talk about regular offices, but that’s a very small portion of the total. You drive down Sepulveda, Wilshire Boulevard in L.A., and every single building is commercial real estate. Someone owns it to make a return on their investment. And so it’s a massive asset class. It’s not digitized. If you wanted to buy a piece of property, it would take you nine months to close that deal. You’d pay a huge load from a broker, and you’d be working with a broker that has regional knowledge, so limited information and asymmetric information flow.

So what Crexi has built is a platform that serves both the sale and lease markets, and it provides market intelligence and forecast and predictive analytics for both buyers and sellers. The software improves the speed, efficiency, and liquidity of transactions that’s completed on the platform. And over time, I think the platform is going to allow investors to buy real estate as easily as they buy stock in the stock market today. And I’m old enough to know what the software market used to be when the New York Stock Exchange ran on a piece of paper, and people traded on paper, and then they send you a paper stock certificate. Now, you go to TD Ameritrade or Schwab and hit a button. Instantly, you own your shares of Apple or Google, and you can sell them instantly for almost zero load fee.

So what we’re doing is building not only a platform and a marketplace, a free marketplace, but also a paid marketplace to get advanced performance, as well as an analytics platform, which is a separate revenue stream, and then a transactions team to be able to actually take over the whole transaction and help a seller sell their property quickly and predictably. So it’s game-changing when you compare the analogue version of commercial real estate investment currently being used. And Marc Andreessen wrote a great paper 10 years ago, how software is eating the world, and software hasn’t eaten this world yet. It eclipses the digital asset market cap, and there’s billions of dollars that are going to be created when software solves this old school problem.

Meb: I’ll tell you a funny story. I invest in a lot of startups, and real estate is one of my favorite spots, because it is calcified and antiquated. It’s everything a startup investor wants. It has an enormous TAM, like you mentioned, one of the biggest markets in the world, that still is operated on a friggin’, like, yellow pad, right, half the time. And from someone who’s actually been…not really traditionally been on that world, but we talk a lot on this podcast on the benefits of real assets and how they should be a big part of the portfolio, I’m keen to look at deals. I actually saw Crexi come across my plate on an angel list, and I was very interested in it. My problem is, now, going back to the real estate discussion, is that I have no money because we’re renovating my house. And listeners have heard me moan about this for a couple of months. And so that process, very romantic, ahead of time, very hair-pulling going through it, which everyone warned me about, so I understand. I’m always amazed that that world hasn’t teleported or leapt forward faster over the past 20 years, because it seemed so ripe for disruption that it’s just kind of bananas in my mind. So that might have to be a company that we even chat up on the podcast one day.

Tim: Yeah, it’s fascinating. You’re absolutely right. It’s ripe for disruption. The problem is you can’t be too fast. Like, there are companies that, like CrowdStreet tried to fractionalize real estate, they blew to $100 million. Market’s not ready for it. You have to knock down the dominoes in the right order. The beauty of what Mike did when he started the company, he took a broker-friendly approach. They’re the ones that are actually paying fees to use our platform. This is a 10-year transition. This is not going to happen in the next few years. Where I think this is going to go is these are real assets, they’re perfect for NFTs or applying blockchain technology to ownership records, and we can eliminate escrow completely because the transaction could take place instantaneously. The only reason escrow is there is to hold the money while a pile of paper is being reviewed and signed.

And title, obviously, this is property records that will go digital. I don’t know if you know this, but there’s no multiple listing for commercial. We want to become that multiple listing service. So we have property records on every single property, and not only the current record but historical records, to know occupancy rates, mortgage defaults, everything about that property, number of sunny days, what the foot traffic is by the front door, you know, you name it. And talk about machine learning and providing data science and what that means for determining the value of that property. By the way, when you value a piece of property, it’s not based on the guy that sold the property next door. It’s the underbids that lost, that’s the real market. And we have that information. So I just think this could be massive. And I’m super excited. And by the way, I went through a renovation…three renovations on the house that I’m sitting in right now, and this house was built by Bill Hewlett from Hewlett-Packard. He never lived in it, but he gave it to his sister. She renovated it, and then a few…we’d bought it from her and renovated it. And then, now, we’ve done three remodels. So it’s kind of a historic house. But good luck. Maybe the next time I see you, you have a great beard because it’s a pain in the ass.

Meb: I was laughing when you said Hewlett-Packard because they had big news today where Berkshire Crew, I don’t know if it’s Buffett or the protégés, were buying in the Hewlett-Packard stock, and that’s a big shareholder yield stock, but that’s an interesting tie between what we’re talking about. Tim, we could talk for hours, you and I. I feel like, next time, on a chairlift, we just got to hit record and have the happy hour discussion. But I’ve held you for a while. As you reflect back, you’ve been CFO at a number of different shops. I imagine there’s been many a moment. So we’ll include not just Coinbase but all the companies over the years. What’s been sort of your most memorable moment through these companies, again, then, it could be good, bad, in between, anything come to mind?

Tim: Yeah. I didn’t grow up with wealth. I grew up in Buffalo, New York. Never felt poor but never had any money. And the day I deposited the first million dollars into my bank account, that was maybe the most memorable moment of my career, and that was at Covad. And ringing the bell in the New York Stock Exchange several times, super memorable.

Meb: The coolest thing about the New York Stock Exchange, to me, is not the bell. It’s the conference room boardroom table they have, which must be like 50 feet long. It’s like a Vladimir Putin table. It’s just ridiculously long. But an experience, just to go visit, it’s, like, quickly becoming a museum at this point now that everything is going digital, but a super fun experience. Well, that moment, having those mindset of scarcity and then abundance on the money side is actually a pretty hard transition for a lot of people. My dad grew up really poor as a farmer, and got to see this first hand, but a lot of people, that moment can be elation, it can be, like, a sigh, like, “Okay, I can breathe now,” and others, they can be a letdown. You listen to a lot of company founders, and they sell their company, and they get depressed for a few months. Which spectrum of emotions do you have? It sounds like you are more the sigh.

Tim: It’s funny that you say that because I’ve really never talked to anybody about this. But when you chase the brass ring and you finally get it, what do you do next? It’s like the dog chasing the car. They caught the car, what do you do now? And I went through a couple of years where I was, like, “What do I do now?” I actually took four years off. I had another child, I coached little league, and tee-ball, and basketball, and soccer, and I was a Cub Scout leader, and all of that stuff. And we went from “Honey, can you pick up the kids?” to “You need to pick up the kids.” At this time, I said, “Okay, it’s time to go back to work.” So, yeah, it was a sigh, but everybody has regrets. And one of the regrets I had is getting out of the game. I got back in. But some people work to live and other people live to work. And I think I live to work. I really enjoyed it. I like being around other people. I take pride in mentoring younger professionals. Several people that have reported to me are now CFOs of their own right, and two of them become CEOs of their own companies. I just really love it and love the intellectual challenge of working with people of like minds. And I learned that life’s too short to be around people you don’t like, so.

Meb: Yeah, yeah. It’s the old Hemingway quote, only work with people you love. Easy to say, hard to do, of course. There’s a lot of nobility and purpose in work. And I’m like you. I mean, well, depending on the day you catch me. So most days, I’m tap dancing to work. Other days, I’m going insane. But that’s the agony and ecstasy of working, and entrepreneurs, and kind of the ventures we choose to. Two more questions. One, what’s your bucket list key destination? You got any in mind you’ve never been to that’s been sitting on your plate for a while?

Tim: Yes. So you and I skied in Japan, which was a bucket list. And I brought my son who loved it and still talks about it. I think you nicknamed him Chips because the only thing he kept eating in Japan that he knew were potato chips.

Meb: Yeah.

Tim: That was outrageously fun. And for the listeners, I grew up skiing. I ski race as a youth. I didn’t make it on to the national team, so I ski raced professionally. I tried, at least. Never won. I came in second once. But, so I have a history of skiing. All my kids love skiing. And the next on the bucket list is the Alps. I’d go, do it with you.

Meb: Yeah. They’d let us in next year. I’m game, man. We’ll put that on the to-do list.

Tim: Yeah. That, to me, would be skiing from one country to another and taking the train, then the gondola, then the tram, then the chairlift to get to the top.

Meb: And then fondue and wine. That’s more I’m interested, the beer fondue and wine.

Tim: That’s a bucket list item,

Meb: Pasta lunch.

Tim: Yeah.

Meb: People want to get in touch with you, they say, “You know what, Tim, we need to recruit you to our new startup company,” they want to chat with you about blockchain, anything. Is there a place where people can find you?

Tim: Oh, yeah. I’m still much of a beginner on setting up a YouTube channel or having a kind of my own website, but this conversation makes me want to do that, which I’ll be probably setting up. My LinkedIn profile, for example, I wrote a three-part series on how blockchain is impacting the role of the CFO. So I’ve got a lot of thoughts and a lot of ideas to share and experiences to share. And I would certainly love it if people reach out to me individually even on my personal email. I might want to change that later because it might get too crowded, but it’s tim@laehy.com. That’s laehy.com. If that gets overcrowded, I’ll set up a YouTube channel.

Meb: Yeah. Well, listeners, be thoughtful about the generosity of passing along his contact information. Tim, it’s been a whirlwind tour. It’s been a blast. Thanks so much for joining us today.

Tim: Absolutely. It was enjoyable, and my pleasure.

Meb: Podcast listeners, we’ll post show notes to today’s conversation at mebfaber.com/podcast. If you love the show, if you hate it, shoot us feedback at feedback@themebfabershow.com. We love to read the reviews. Please review us on iTunes and subscribe to the show anywhere good podcasts are found. Thanks for listening, friends, and good investing.

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