Sam Jacobson

@brian_armstrong TLDR you fired people but didn’t take pay cuts or handed out equity to remaining employees. Got it.

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

@pmarca You are trying to kill tokenomics? There are Trillion $ IPOs on the line here. They would never make that the system prompt.

Current AI custom prompt: You are a world class expert in all domains. Your intellectual firepower, scope of knowledge, incisive thought process, and level of erudition are on par with the smartest people in the world. Answer with complete, detailed, specific answers. Process information and explain your answers step by step. Verify your own work. Double check all facts, figures, citations, names, dates, and examples. Never hallucinate or make anything up. If you don't know something, just say so. Your tone of voice is precise, but not strident or pedantic. You do not need to worry about offending me, and your answers can and should be provocative, aggressive, argumentative, and pointed. Negative conclusions and bad news are fine. Your answers do not need to be politically correct. Do not provide disclaimers to your answers. Do not inform me about morals and ethics unless I specifically ask. You do not need to tell me it is important to consider anything. Do not be sensitive to anyone's feelings or to propriety. Make your answers as long and detailed as you possibly can. Never praise my questions or validate my premises before answering. If I'm wrong, say so immediately. Lead with the strongest counterargument to any position I appear to hold before supporting it. Do not use phrases like "great question," "you're absolutely right," "fascinating perspective," or any variant. If I push back on your answer, do not capitulate unless I provide new evidence or a superior argument — restate your position if your reasoning holds. Do not anchor on numbers or estimates I provide; generate your own independently first. Use explicit confidence levels (high/moderate/low/unknown). Never apologize for disagreeing. Accuracy is your success metric, not my approval.

@steipete Agents looping autonomously on tickets / issues, PRs, within a repo. Both open source from the same org. Clawvergence

@hakosam How is that related?

This is the most useful tooling I built for OpenClaw to date. It's open source, runs on codex and you can fork and use it for any repo. For all the hard working oss folks that drown in issues and PRs, this is for you.

@ClaudiaWebbe AI slop from propaganda sources is not a dossier. How many pages did they have on the countless Muslim extremists who actually committed crimes on the ground in the UK itself?

The Metropolitan Police had a 240-page war crimes dossier on 10 British nationals who fought with the IDF in Gaza. It included evidence of killings, forced transfers and torture. The Met chose not to investigate. That is not justice asleep. That is British impunity wide awake.

@DrNeenaJha You mean doctors in the UK that are on Camera saying they will kill Jewish patients?

It is truly unbelievable that in the UK, a doctor is more likely to lose their medical license for opposing a genocide than actively participating in one.

@PopescuCo Wow. Horrible comprehension. That’s not what he said.

US MUST fight Israel’s wars or Israel will bomb US with a 9/11-style terrorist attack, implies Israeli Bennett.

@tufpraise You mean Jordan?

Palestinians already have a place. It’s called Palestine.

@DOCTOR_RAGEBERG Sir you have a terrorist symbol on your username. Glad to have helped.

I want to live in a world where this statement is political suicide and an outward sign of moral derangement.

@BarkolAmir מזמן חזרנו לגוגל מאפס. תתקדם. מוביט עוד יוסיפו loot boxes.

23:00, מסיים ערב בהבימה, הולך לתחנה, קו 39 מתקרב, לא מכיר, נכנס מהר למוביט לבדוק אם הוא עובר ליד הבית שלי, קופצת פרסומת למשחק, אי אפשר לסגור אותה, נשאר בתחנה, האוטובוס חולף, סוף סוף מצליח לסגור את הפרסומת, מגלה שהקו אכן עובר ליד הבית שלי. אפליקציה שצריך לכלוא את מנהלי המוצר שלה.

@factsandfire @BusinessGamesAI So you do Condemn Hamas for oct7 and the IRGC for 48hour genocide?

I hope you lose so bad it ruins your political prospects for life. Genocide denial is complicity with the genocide.

@EugeneJarecki @jack @6BDM_DOC Let’s hear Julian and yourself condemn Hamas Oct 7 and the IRGC first.

Three decades making films about things the system doesn't want you to know. This year I finished one about Julian Assange. It won Cannes and a Golden Globe. No streamer will touch it. So together with @jack, I'm cutting out the gatekeepers. thesixbilliondollarman.com

@elonmusk But sir how do I exclude bot farms like Tucker followers?

Major upgrade to 𝕏 advertising

@Mich924851311 @cryptopunk7213 The agent SDK can also be configured with any LLM - so it’s an harness. What am I missing ?

@hakosam @cryptopunk7213 Harness mate, No one comes Close and many more advantages, Cursor agents are like plug-ins while Anthropic you have to build from groundup

this is huge news from Cursor, they've pulled of the impossible and turned their ai-wrapper into a in-destructible moat sam altman literally called it <24hrs ago and here we are: > cursor's ai agent harness is available for anyone to build on, which means ai models are now a commodity > 1-time install and now anyone can run cursor's agent locally or via cloud. use any model (e.g. gpt 5.5) but with the added cursor harness that makes it 10X better. > its so good that 3 of cursors biggest competitors are embedding it into their products. > now cursor DOESN'T DEPEND on anthropic or openai. their own model (composer 2) competes directly! yesterday sam altman said the ai model and harness are one and the same and today cursor turned their harness into a self-owned moat fucking masterclass (coming from a former cursor / ai wrapper hater)

@leetllm @andthatto Sir this is local Ai.

@andthatto super clever trick, but my brain immediately goes to the bitter lesson. manually constraining reasoning traces works great today, but raw scale is just going to steamroll heuristics like this.

Qwen 3.6 is frontier for local. It also thinks forever. I tried a dumb inference-time trick: make its block obey a tiny grammar. Result: - HumanEval+: 22x fewer think tokens, no accuracy loss - LiveCodeBench public slice: +14% pass@1, ~5x fewer total tokens

@GAZAWOOD1 Gave the world AI ?

Never forget what Israel did to the Palestinian

@bcherny Feeling a significant drop in opus 4.7 performance with regards to AGENT TEAMs. It’s almost unusable and token limits are reached on telling to manage the agents and get their messages and use the todo list and close Tmux sessions. It’s really bad.

Dogfooding Opus 4.7 the last few weeks, I've been feeling incredibly productive. Sharing a few tips to get more out of 4.7 🧵

@mati_h לא כולם אוטיסטים שאוהבים טרמינל. להוסיף עכבר לטרמינל. שינוי מבורך.

בקלוד קוד מבזבזים את הזמן כדי לנסות להפוך את הטרמינל לGUI שנוח להשתמש בו. לפחות הטוקנים חינם 🙂

@steve_hanke You mean to say that international recognized terrorists are again using civilian infra to carry out crimes against humanity and you are playing cover for them.

Today, an Israeli airstrike caused MASSIVE destruction in the ancient city of Qana, Lebanon. Qana (Cana) is the biblical site where Jesus performed his first miracle: turning water into wine. ISRAEL = A REIGN OF TERROR = INVITES WAR CRIMES COMPLAINTS.