Engr. Prince Obinna • Building AI for Africa.

Brian Armstrong on what he learned about management from Balaji Srinivasan “Balaji is a brilliant guy. He’s probably one of the top couple smartest people I’ve ever met in my life,” Brian begins. “He was briefly the Chief Technology Officer of Coinbase. He came in through an acquisition and did some amazing work. And he taught me how to manage a totally different type of person.” Brian continues: “Balaji is kind of unmanageable. He’s what some people might call a ‘free radical’ within an organization. He kind of bounces around, absorbing vast amounts of information — even things that aren’t his responsibility — and occasionally he would come back to me with these incredible insights.” Brian gives one funny example: “At one point he came back to me and said, ‘These are all the salespeople that are making more revenue than their salary, and these are all the people that are not.’ And the first thought I had was, ‘You’re not supposed to have access to anybody’s salary. How did you get that?’” Balaji replied, “Don’t worry about it. I found it in some database that I wasn’t supposed to have access to.” The next question Brian asked was, “How did you connect that all up?” The previous week Brian asked the data team to connect Salesforce to Coinbase’s salary data so they could start running some reports to have more accountability. But it was supposed to be a three-week project. Balaji responded, “Oh well I couldn’t sleep this weekend, and I just knew something felt off. So I had to code it up and put it all together.” When the data team completed their analysis three weeks later, they confirmed that Balaji was 100% right. “He was continually doing things like that,” Brian explains. “And he’s incredibly high in disagreeableness, which I learned from him as well. He would go into a team and ask, ‘Why isn’t this functioning well?’ And he would suffer no fools. He would not be afraid to go in there and turn half the people on a team — whether he had the permission to fire them or not… He was a very contrarian figure. I’d say about once a week someone would come into my office and say, ‘I can’t work with Balaji. He’s causing so much collateral damage.’ And I’d say, ‘Yes, but he’s also generating an enormous amount of value and I need you to learn how to work with him.’” Brian knew Balaji wasn’t going to last forever at Coinbase because it was incredibly disruptive, but ultimately he taught Brian how to be a “turnaround CEO” when needed: “In the past I was opting a little more toward trying to be liked instead of being clear about what we’re doing, where we’re going, and what the bar is. He helped me become a better CEO and have a little more disagreeableness.” Video source: @stripe (2025)