Brian Armstrong

Brian Armstrong (born 1983) is an American entrepreneur who co-founded Coinbase in 2012 after a stint as an Airbnb engineer, building it into the largest US cryptocurrency exchange and taking it public in 2021. Long comfortable with contrarian management — his 2020 “apolitical workplace” memo triggered a wave of resignations — he brought the same bluntness to AI adoption.

The mandate

In 2025, after Coinbase bought enterprise licenses for GitHub Copilot and Cursor, Armstrong was told onboarding all engineers could take quarters. Instead — by his own account, he “went rogue” — he posted in Slack requiring every engineer to onboard by the end of the week, and summoned those who had not to a Saturday meeting. Engineers without a good excuse were fired. Recounting the episode on the Cheeky Pint podcast in August 2025, he acknowledged the move was “heavy-handed” for some, but framed it as the cost of moving at AI speed.

Armstrong said at the time that roughly a third of Coinbase’s code was AI-written, with a target of 50 percent — a striking claim for a security-critical financial exchange, and one that drew warnings from developers about auditability and risk. The episode became a touchstone in the broader wave of executive AI mandates, alongside Tobi Lütke’s Shopify memo, marking the moment AI tool use shifted from encouraged to compulsory at major tech firms. Coinbase also runs monthly “AI speedruns” where employees demo their best AI workflows to the company.