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A place in the Guinness World Records might have been a just reward for Olaf Carlson-Wee, Coinbase's first employee. Upon graduating from Vassar College with a degree in Sociology, Carlson-Wee decided to send a cold email to Coinbase, attaching his 90-page thesis.
Fortunately, that thesis was about “Bitcoin and the broader implications of open source finance.” Coinbase's future number one employee explains:
“I literally sent a cold email to jobs@coinbase and said, 'I love bitcoin. Here's my thesis. I'm willing to do any job.'“
The result: Fred Eshram, one of the two founders of Coinbase, had given him “a really brutal math problem” to solve. Once that problem was solved, he was asked to meet with the famous Brian Armstrong for an hour-long interview.
The interview was intense, according to Olaf Carlson-Wee:
“Brian's questions were really intense: 'What do you want to do with your life?' 'What motivates you as a person?' 'Name one belief you have that is extremely unpopular?' He really wanted to know me.”
After that successful job interview, Olaf Carlson-Wee had been hired as Coinbase's first employee. He was assigned customer service for the irreplaceable American exchange long before it registered 250,000 users.
I did customer support on my own until we had 250,000 users. It was a marathon. It was 12-hour days of rapid response,” he said in an interview with Y Combinator.
Naturally, Coinbase's first employee was paid in Bitcoin
Carlson-Wee, who is a strong mathematician, a valiant sociologist and a fine communicator, admitted that he was paid a starting salary of $50,000 when he started at Coinbase. Except that at that time, the Eshram-Armstrong duo had decided not to pay him in fiat currency but ... in BTC.
Let's take our calculator: if Bitcoin was trading at $13 in 2013, he could have earned the equivalent of 3,800 BTC in one year. Let's also not forget that the price of Bitcoin has fluctuated. A year later, it had reached $1,100 only to fall back to $1,000 a pop in 2016, the year Carlson-Wee ended his venture at Coinbase.
Ultimately, it's difficult to estimate the amount of cryptocurrency holdings contained in Olaf Carlson-Wee's wallet. But it is quite certain that his crypto wallet is among the most affluent of the time. Some sites like How Worth value this man at $900 million currently.
From the first COINBASE employee to the founder of Polychain Capital
Surely, many of you are envious of his status as the first employee at Coinbase paid in BTC. Even he didn't know that BTC would be valued at $69,000 at its November 2021 ATH.
Note that Carlson-Wee had a succession of promotions also at his first employer. We knew him as the head of customer service at the exchange without any help from subordinates. Then he was given the title of Coinbase's Chief Risk Officer.
His talent naturally led him to start his own project. Armed with three years of experience at Coinbase, but more importantly, many BTCs, Olaf Carlson-Wee decided to set up Polychain Capital, a hedge fund dedicated to cryptocurrencies that successfully completed a $600 million round of funding in 2018.
Obviously, Carlson-Wee did not stop there as he is also the co-founder of Filecoin, Inchain, Boost VC and Protocol Labs. An incredible success story that found its origin at Coinbase with this bold cold email. This is a great life lesson for those who are hesitant to take action in life.
Taking action is your best chance to achieve great things. Add to that sass and boldness, and you can change your life forever like Olaf Carlson-Wee did with his experience at Coinbase.
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