As companies scale, they usually slow down and become less efficient. It takes more dollars, more people and more time to get anything done. Coordination headwinds increase, vetocracies emerge, risk tolerance fades, and teams become inwardly focused instead of staying focused on their customers.

While this trajectory is natural, it is not inevitable. Every great company, from Amazon to Meta to Tesla, found ways to retain their founding energy in conjunction with appropriate controls, even as they scaled to be much larger than Coinbase is today. Great companies maintain their insurgent mindset, for fear of becoming complacent and irrelevant over time.