I Watched the Coinbase Documentary So You Don’t Have To
‘Coin’ is the latest frontier in corporate propaganda
One might imagine that, if you gave a documentary team unfettered access to a large, well-funded, and controversy-prone cryptocurrency-exchange company over the same three-year period that bitcoin reached its highest price in history and crypto hype broke into mainstream culture, it’d be easy to produce a film that, at the very least, entertains. Crypto’s rise is a story ripe for cinema, one that features endless scammers, newly minted billionaires, flashy startups, gobs of venture capital, fortunes gained and lost overnight, marketplaces for illicit substances, and a technology that looks to replace the global financial system. Given the subject matter, what is most impressive about Coin: A Founder’s Story, the Coinbase documentary, is how bone-grindingly dull it is.
Over 84 monotonous minutes, the viewer follows Coinbase’s CEO Brian Armstrong through the tumultuous adolescence of his cryptocurrency company. What we see isn’t dramatic. In fact, the film—perhaps unintentionally—does an admirable job showcasing the least-sexy aspects and daily grind of entrepreneurship. Most of what we see of our billionaire protagonist is a series of shots as he works (often alone) from his various homes and offices, or gets into and out of chauffeured cars and private jets. There’s no partying or lavish living—just prep calls, Zoom meetings, onstage conference interviews, and executive coaching sessions. At one point in the documentary, Armstrong says that Coinbase aims to be the “adult in the room” in the wild crypto ecosystem, and the film seems to channel this notion as its own mission statement. We see lots of adults doing adult things, like meeting with senators and arranging calls in advance of an IPO.
But Coin also wants you to know that these adults are people, too. The film charts Armstrong’s life from young childhood and focuses a great deal of attention on his relationship with his Coinbase co-founder, Fred Ersham, who left the company in January 2017 (though he remains on the company’s board). At one point, the duo’s executive coach tells them that despite all the money they’ve made and value they’ve created, he’s most proud that Ersham and Armstrong have remained friends.
We get a shot of the two executives giggling while watching a video of a Goldman Sachs managing director announcing their IPO pricing. “I used to sit right there,” Ersham, a former Goldman Sachs trader, points out—the subtext being that he’s come full circle, from a lowly six-figure Wall Streeter to a Silicon Valley billionaire. Around the same time, we get an interview with Ersham’s father, who fights back tears talking about how proud he is of his son and his not-quite rags-to-riches path. The music swells. It is at this moment where I wrote down in my notes, “SERIOUSLY WHO IS THIS MOVIE FOR?”
The answer to that question is, thankfully, quite simple. The film—which was commissioned by Armstrong—is for Armstrong and for Coinbase. And, as far as Silicon Valley marketing goes, it is a reasonably clever attempt to try and humanize not just Armstrong but the idea of Coinbase, the company, as an ultimately altruistic endeavor: an engine for “economic freedom,” a phrase the CEO repeats constantly in the film.
But when the subject of the film is also its intended audience, the end product is both profoundly uninteresting and more than a little uncanny in the way that obvious propaganda tends to be. Outside of Armstrong’s eccentric dot-com-era childhood and a post-college trip to Buenos Aires during times of hyperinflation, and Ersham’s love of video games, the audience is given extremely few personal details of the founders to latch onto. And yet by its end, the film supposes that its audience has fallen for these men and their vision just as Coinbase’s investors have.
As a piece of corporate propaganda, the documentary wants you to know it will not shy away from some of the company’s scandals. The film mentions Coinbase’s controversial acquisition of Neutrino, a blockchain company that employed members of Hacking Team (an organization that sold its services to law-enforcement agencies and governments with atrocious human-rights records). It also covers Armstrong’s internal disputes with employees over his decision to declare Coinbase an apolitical company in the aftermath of the George Floyd protests. But these moments end up feeling like the video equivalent of a company blog post, skipping straight to the founder issuing bromides like “We’re trying to learn from our mistakes” or suggesting that it was a painful, but necessary, part of clarifying the company’s mission.
What is billed as intimate access or radical candor is really just a one-sided examination of Coinbase by those who believe in the company’s mission and its founders. Missing from the film almost entirely are crypto skeptics, or anyone who might be willing to poke holes in Armstrong’s logic that a company built to advance interest in a technology that challenges the monetary power of world governments is somehow not a political project. (That logic is further undermined by Armstrong himself, who spends a decent chunk of the documentary trying to persuade federal lawmakers of crypto’s utility and importance.)
Similarly, Coin makes no real attempt at balancing its techno-utopian talking heads, who predictably extol the virtues of bitcoin and Ethereum as engines of economic inclusion. For all the film’s breathless commentary about crypto’s ability to level the economic playing field, the audience never hears or sees any data to the contrary, like this 2020 report that suggests 2 percent of accounts control 95 percent of all bitcoin wealth.
Perhaps the best example of the film’s faux-radical candor comes during an interview with Annie He, an engineer who left the company after Armstrong’s handling of the politics issue. “I do think I felt some anger, that his position is what made me want to leave,” she says, before adding, “but he did what he needed to shape his company in the way he saw best fit.” Even the gentle criticisms paint Armstrong and Coinbase as deeply principled. You may dislike it, but you have to respect it.
The film’s attempts to humanize Armstrong occasionally offer something revealing. Throughout Coin, Armstrong appears to grapple with what it means to be a CEO and a leader. It’s clear that his true interest is always rooted in the technical challenge of Coinbase. He likes to iterate on the company’s product. The happiest we see him during the documentary is in archival footage of Coinbase’s stressful early days, when he and Ersham would spend their day coding to keep the site up. The most strained we see Armstrong is when he’s forced away from product management and into the people-management side of the job.
Midway through the film, during a one-on-one meeting with Armstrong’s executive coach, the adviser confronts the CEO with an actual bit of radical candor: “The elephant in the room is that you don’t love to manage people, and my prediction, therefore, is that you’re not good at it.” The adviser suggests that Armstrong is part of a streak of introverted Silicon Valley founders who are excellent programmers and product visionaries, but less skilled in the art of navigating messy human relationships. But, because it’s their company, these founders end up taking on the role of chief executive—even though they flounder at the job.
The film’s admission—that the person in charge of a massive company perhaps lacks the ability, and desire, to attend to the very human needs of his employees—is immediately spun into a virtue when, seconds later, Armstrong’s coach praises his ability to hear and accept this kind of criticism. Unlike other CEOs, the coach remarks, Armstrong appears able to step aside from his ego. “All he cares about is improving,” the coach says. “And therefore feedback is the most precious gift.” Precious, indeed.
In the grander scheme of the documentary, watching Armstrong receive this feedback is not very flattering. Two-thirds of the way through the film, the pandemic hits and Coinbase’s offices are forced to close. We are treated to archival footage of Zoom calls from the spring of 2020, in which Armstrong’s executive team explains to him that “Everyone is working hard or harder than they have and in the face of this change feels less productive than they have.” His workers, like so many during the early months of the pandemic, are struggling.
Armstrong, for his part, seems unable to understand this. “This may be just me out of touch or something,” he says, noting that, while he doesn’t have kids, he is equally productive at home as he is at work. He muses that this might be because he is simply just good at dealing with stress. “What am I missing here?” he asks. For the next minute, we see footage of Armstrong’s executive team (led primarily by the women on the call) trying, as kindly as possible, to explain to their CEO that many families are cooped up in small apartments and dealing with the emotional distress of the pandemic. “I suspect you have the single best setup in the whole company, right?” one executive tells Armstrong, who lives alone in a high-rise apartment with a panoramic view. “I think we need to think of ourselves as in the vast minority.” “Totally fair,” Armstrong replies, stoically.
The exchange is helpful for understanding how Armstrong manages to blunder his way into news cycle controversy so frequently, as he did this summer when he responded to a petition inside his company to replace key executives; his 15-tweet thread started with the words “This is really dumb on multiple levels.” Armstrong’s issues with emotional intelligence cast a large enough shadow that the film has the CEO address his shortcomings head-on. “I do feel emotions,” Armstrong assures us, about 25 minutes into the documentary. “I don’t express them the same way as other people.”
It is understandable that leaders will have varying levels of empathy and interpersonal awareness. One could make an argument that the film’s recognition of this fact suggests that Armstrong has hired a team that’s savvy enough to help him navigate his weaknesses. But what is most troubling about Coin is the way that it seems to recast the CEO’s poor people-management skills as part of a focused and relentless commitment to Coinbase’s greater mission of innovation.
The film quietly supposes that Armstrong rubs people the wrong way or is obtuse about his employees’ emotional needs because he’s after something greater: He’s trying to harness the revolutionary power of cryptocurrencies to democratize finance. This, of course, is a dominant theme in the larger myth of the tech founder: to valorize the asshole. As Business Insider’s Adam Rogers put it recently, there’s “a creepy, almost Randian undercurrent that suggests that only a certain kind of person can really build a multizillion-dollar business—someone of unusually vast creativity and intellect.” And that person tends not to care much about feelings. The argument is that this attribute is not just okay, but necessary, because the asshole creates value. The asshole, you see, builds.
I’ve spent a fair amount of time this year writing about Silicon Valley’s Builder Brain mindset, of which Armstrong is an excellent example. Part of the reason that the documentary feels so drab, so flat, and so boring is because Armstrong is relentlessly focused on constructing. At the end of the film, just after the Coinbase IPO has made Armstrong into a billionaire, we cycle through shots of the CEO toiling alone on his laptop and unsmiling in various locations of his gorgeous house as he tells us this much. “I’ve never been good at celebrating things,” he says. “I just like building things. I’m always thinking, What’s next, what’s next, what’s next.” In a different documentary, this would be a melancholic or maybe even tragic moment—an example of the pathologically driven man unable to enjoy his success. But Coin treats this numbness as a virtue. I get the argument: To create something truly revolutionary means giving everything and forgoing short-term satisfaction for long-term focus. I just don’t buy it.
Coin is a feature-length argument for the power of cryptocurrency, dressed up as a journalistic exploration. The idea is that, once you buy the premise that blockchain technologies are the new rails that will power an internet-like expansion of commerce, connectivity, and opportunity, then you will see the value behind Armstrong’s vision. The viewer will then, ideally, understand that preserving and tending to the vision is far more important than, say, alienating one’s employees.
According to Fortune’s Jeff John Roberts, Coin is Armstrong’s attempt to avoid being painted as a Zuckerbergian tech villain by a media with a “malicious agenda.” He’s hired people to tell his story in order to take control over it. What’s most interesting about the documentary, then, is that it doesn’t shy away from showing him as a robotic, Zuckerberg-esque founder. Instead, the film leans into this portrayal, because the ultimate point of Coin is to position Armstrong’s shortcomings as an executive as the necessary traits of a revolutionary builder.
All of this comes back to the earlier question of who this documentary is really for. So far, on places like Twitter, the chatter around the film is pretty much exclusively driven by current Coinbase employees and crypto accounts with .eth addresses in their display name. In their view, the film is a nuanced and (at last!) balanced look at the company. Like so much crypto marketing, Coin is not really an attempt to convert people to see the light with crypto (that’s what the FOMO tweets are for). Instead, it’s a way to rally the current true believers and remind them why it's important to keep one’s head down and build, at all costs.