Ezhil Vendhan

This is an email I sent earlier today to all employees at Coinbase: Team, Today I’ve made the difficult decision to reduce the size of Coinbase by ~14%. I want to walk you through why we're doing this now, what it means for those affected, and how this positions us for the future. Why now Two forces are converging at the same time. We need to be front footed to respond to both. First, the market. 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, with stablecoins, prediction markets, tokenization, and more taking off. However, our business is still volatile from quarter to quarter. While we've managed through that cyclicality many times before and come out stronger on the other side, we’re currently in a down market and need to adjust our cost structure now so that we emerge from this period leaner, faster, and more efficient for our next phase of growth. 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. All of this has led us to an inflection point, not just for Coinbase, but for every company. The biggest risk now is not taking action. We are adjusting early and deliberately to rebuild Coinbase to be lean, fast, and AI-native. We need to return to the speed and focus of our startup founding, with AI at our core. What this means To get there, we are not just reducing headcount and cutting costs, we’re fundamentally changing how we operate: rebuilding Coinbase as an intelligence, with humans around the edge aligning it. What does this mean in practice? - Fewer layers, faster decisions: We are flattening our org structure to 5 layers max below CEO/COO. Layers slow things down and create coordination tax. The future is small, high context teams that can move quickly. Leaders will own much more, with as many as 15+ direct reports. Fewer layers also means a leaner cost structure that is built to perform through all market cycles. - 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. - 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. In short: AI is bringing a profound shift in how companies operate, and we’re reshaping Coinbase to lead in this new era. This is a new way of working, and we need to leverage AI across every facet of our jobs. To those who are affected I know there are real people behind these decisions — talented colleagues who have poured themselves into this company and our mission. To those of you who will be leaving: thank you. You’ve helped build Coinbase into what it is today, and I am sincerely grateful for everything you've done. All impacted team members will receive an email to their personal account in the next hour with more information, and an invitation to meet with an HRBP and a senior leader in your organization. Coinbase system access has been removed today. I know this feels sudden and harsh, but it is the only responsible choice given our duty to protect customer information. To those affected, we will be providing a comprehensive package to support you through this transition. US 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. Employees on a work visa will get extra transition support. Those outside of the US will receive similar support, based on local factors and subject to any consultation requirements. Coinbase prides itself on talent density. Our employees are among the most talented people in the world, and I have no doubt that your skills and experience will be highly sought after as you pursue your next chapters. How we move forward To the team that is staying, I know this is a difficult day. We’re saying goodbye to colleagues and friends you've been in the trenches with. But here’s what I want you to know as we move forward together: Over the past 13 years, we have weathered four crypto winters, gone public, and built the most trusted platform in our industry. We’ve made it this far by making hard decisions and by always staying focused on our mission. This time will be no different – nothing has changed about the long term outlook of our company or industry. And most importantly, our mission has never been more important for the world. Increasing economic freedom requires a new financial system, and we’re building it. The Coinbase that emerges from this will be more capable than ever to achieve our mission. Brian

Finally giving Codex a try today after typing so many "double check if you missed anything" with Claude Code. 😅 What are some tips for a heavy Claude Code user moving to Codex?

Looks like the entire African Tech / Dev community is frozen out from replying Levels … coz he don’t follow any and no-one he follows , follows any. But seems to have cured the Bot replies. Then with the incentive for more localised content being rewarded ; X is following the world trend of isolationism and nationalism. History will show if this is a good or bad thing I guess.

> Claude writes the code. > Supabase runs the backend. > Vercel handles deployment. > Namecheap gets you a domain. > Stripe collects the money. > GitHub tracks your code. > Resend sends the emails. > Clerk manages auth. > Cloudflare handles DNS. > PostHog tracks analytics. > Sentry catches errors. > Upstash powers Redis. > Pinecone stores your vectors. > OpenAI / Anthropic for AI brains. > Railway for extra compute. > LemonSqueezy for global payments. > Framer / Webflow for landing pages. > Canva for instant design. > Figma for UI. > Notion for docs. That’s your entire “tech stack.” No office. No investors. No 20-person team. Just WiFi, a laptop, and execution. You can literally build a $10k/month startup from your bedroom in 2026. It’s not that deep. Ship.

Cloning any random piece of SaaS is something that could already be done before agentic coding, and the economics of it haven't changed meaningfully. Before, writing the clone would cost 0.5-1% of the valuation of the legacy SaaS company. Now it might be 0.1%. It doesn't make a difference -- if you can pull it off profitably today you could also have done it profitably in the past. The code is a very small part of the process of making such a clone successful, and the reason legacy software has often bad UX is not because code was expensive to write.