Background and career
Brian Armstrong (born January 25, 1983) is an American businessman and investor who is CEO of cryptocurrency platform Coinbase, which he co-founded with Fred Ehrsam. He received media attention for his policy of keeping the workplace free of political activism. He is also co-founder of NewLimit, an anti-aging startup.
Armstrong was born on January 25, 1983, near San Jose, California; both of his parents were engineers. At early days, he keeping a tarantula named Anansi and other animals like a green iguana named Spike helped spark his early enjoyment of caring for living creatures at home.He attended Bellarmine College Preparatory. Armstrong attended Rice University in Texas, where he earned a dual bachelor's degree in economics and computer science in 2005, followed by a master's in computer science in 2006. While at Rice, he started a business matching tutors to students, and after graduating, spent a year in Buenos Aires working for an education company.
Armstrong's early career included working as a developer for IBM and a consultant at Deloitte. In 2010, he came across the Bitcoin white paper published under the alias Satoshi Nakamoto. In 2011, he joined Airbnb as a software engineer and was exposed to payment systems in the 190 countries Airbnb operated in at the time. While at Airbnb, he saw the difficulties of sending money to South America. He began working weekends and nights to write code in Ruby and JavaScript to buy and store cryptocoins. In 2012, he entered the Y Combinator startup accelerator and received a $150,000 investment, which he used to fund Coinbase. His post on Hacker News looking for a co-founder to get into the Y Combinator program later became a viral post in Hacker News. He eventually met his co-founder Fred Ehrsam on a Reddit subgroup and is quoted to have done over fifty meetings to find a perfect co-founder.
In 2012, Armstrong and Fred Ehrsam co-founded Coinbase, as a way for cryptocurrency enthusiasts to trade bitcoins and other digital currencies. Armstrong was its first CEO. Coinbase's first wallet iteration was called "Toshi", named after Satoshi Nakamoto; Toshi is also the name of one of Brian Armstrong's cats. A 2018 funding round valued the company at $8.1 billion, and in December 2020, the company filed with the SEC to go public through a direct listing. Following a direct listing in April 2021, Coinbase's market capitalization rose to $85B, and according to Forbes, as of May 2022, Armstrong has a net worth of $2.4 billion.
Armstrong self-funded and founded the scientific research site ResearchHub, modeled on the GitHub code repository, as a way of making research papers available to the public.
Armstrong co-founded NewLimit to increase human health span by targeting the biology of aging. NewLimit's primary research focus is epigenetic reprogramming. In May 2023, the company raised $40 million in a Series A investment round.
