Kristen Cavallo (CEO of the Martin Agency who disputes Coinbase CEO) has references to a presentation but not receipts. I'm curious how much of the final product the agency pitched. (not that they don't deserve at least some credit)
Not sure if it's what you were getting at or not, but "receipts" in the context of the post is a colloquialism for evidence, it doesn't mean literal receipts.
Did she post evidence though? She refers to pages of presentations that we don't have access to, so why is she more trustworthy (other than not being the coinbase guy who everyone seems to dislike)?
Also, I don't know how business stuff like this works, but if a company pays an ad agency for ad ideas, aren't they paying for ownership of those ideas? How many classic commercials were actually original ideas of the company whose product was being advertised? Yet we all still consider the polar bears to be a coca-cola commercial, WAZZUUUUUP to be budweiser commercials, etc.
It just seems unprofessional. Why would a company want to hire this agency now? Of course if coinbase ceo is lying then it's definitely rude not to give credit, but that seems like it's just how these things go.
Ahh, yes. The way of the MBA. All corporate gobbledegook with filler words that suck the humanity out of every press release, statement, and public performance.
> Also, I don't know how business stuff like this works, but if a company pays an ad agency for ad ideas, aren't they paying for ownership of those ideas? How many classic commercials were actually original ideas of the company whose product was being advertised? Yet we all still consider the polar bears to be a coca-cola commercial, WAZZUUUUUP to be budweiser commercials, etc.
To convert it to HN-speak, this is like forking an open-source software library, then branding it as your own internal original work. Then the kicker is the Twitter thread where he publicly insults the entire profession of the people they stole it from. So imagine that a company rips off an OSS library, then says something like "no OSS community would have created this."
It breaks an industry-standard norm in the relationship between ad/marketing agencies and client companies. Everyone knows that client companies pay ad agencies. But agencies make their livelihood on their reputation. So everyone who matters in the industry knows that Ken Stewart was behind the Coca-Cola polar bears campaign, or that it was Bill Backer behind the "I'd like to give the world a Coke" campaign. They've been inducted into the Madison Avenue Advertising Walk of Fame, which is literally something only ad people care about. Same with number of stars on GitHub.
Not very professional to call your vendor incompetent on creative content when you use their idea.
I don't think either of them come out smelling of roses here, but an ad agency relies on reputation. If a paying client threatens their future revenue by badmouthing them, they're left with two options:
1) say nothing and have future clients think they're incompetent
2) defend themselves and have future clients know they are competent, but won't put up with some of their client's BS.
Neither choice is ideal, but maybe #2 defends their reputation at the same time that it filters out clients that will spout BS like this. Fewer potential clients, maybe less revenue as a result, but more revenue than if clients thought they were incompetent.
> It just seems unprofessional. Why would a company want to hire this agency now?
If your agency came up a creative Superbowl ad idea, and then the CEO of the company that ran the ad goes and tweets about it, dissing outside agencies (like you), and seems to claim they came up with it internally... how do you get credit for the success of the idea you pitched, since that's a big deal to your business?
I think this is why it just rubs me the wrong way. I think twitter is an awful medium for anything substantial, so if I were her, I would have written a blog post or something instead. I'm also aware that twitter is probably better for engagement _and_ she knows much more about engagement than I do.
I just don't like reading twitter threads. At first I only saw the first 6 tweets of the 12(?) tweet chain because after that it was all just reaction gifs.
She’s unprofessional, but she’s only playing by Twitter rules which he knowingly engaged in when he decided to seek even MORE attention for the ad. I have zero sympathy for people who use social media.
The Martin Agency has been named agency of the year 2 years in a row. They’re pretty popular, at least for the moment. The biggest thing to remember is that ideas are the currency that creative people use to get promoted and recognition within the industry. So for a client to steal the idea and not give credit is pretty insulting.
That being said I worked at Martin for 11 years. They pitch a ton of ideas to clients all the time and gradually dump most of them. I can easily see the QR code being pitched fairly early by a team and it getting cut.
when https://twitter.com/cavallokristen referenced the slide numbers from the pitch deck and dates the client reviewed, that’s basically saying COIN stole the idea. I wonder if they tried to settle this amicably, before taking it to Twitter. If there never was attempt to resolve this in private, that would seem like poor form.
I saw that and I’ll admit that I’m more on Martin’s side on this issue, but without seeing the slides in question its hard to say who is more in the right. Knowing the amount of lawyers Martin and their parent company IPG has I’m sure they had some say in this public squabble. The weird thing is that Accenture made the ad and did get credit from Coinbase. Accenture has been trying to eat away traditional agency business for a long time. I wonder what their side of the story is. It also sounds like Martin didn’t produce much or any work for them. They were named agency of record before their new CMO started. Normally, a CMO picks their own agency.
Just speaking from experience I always take agency talk with a grain of salt. So many big names outsource their work to freelancers, boutique shops, or directors that they’ve used in the past because agency folk don’t want to fully think things through. I would be interested in hearing what Danny Robinson has to say. He’s the CCO at Martin, but I doubt he would take to twitter for this.
> but if a company pays an ad agency for ad ideas,
That's the dispute, they didn't pay. Coinbase met with Martin, listened to their pitch(es), including something about a floating QR code, then said no thanks.
A few months later Coinbase aired a Super Bowl commercial with a floating QR code, and either claims to have created it in-house or created it with Accenture.
The Martin CEO (Cavallo) has every right to be pissed.
Makes total sense if you realize half the players KNOW it's a scam and are just trying to get out before the crash, and thing the Super Bowl ads are a great "shark jumping" indicator.
Perhaps eerily similar to the last time the Super Bowl brought down a major tech craze ...
Americans by and large aren't able to trade crypto in any meaningful way to impact the markets, unless they are an American institution operating on foreign exchanges. Look at trading volumes by pairs and exchanges. The US occupies a small portion of overall spot trading and is absent in derivatives trading, which is almost all of the crypto markets. It's no wonder superbowl ads have no impact on price.
Tangent, but I thought it was a funny commentary: I was watching the olympics with my kid (<12yo) and the Coinbase commercial came on (Didn't see it during the superbowl, but I assume they were the same?). And after the commercial ended my kid said, "was that... some kind of app for gambling or something?"
The Superbowl ad was a qr bouncing around the screen with some retro music in the background. No mention of Coinbase at all except a brief 1/2 second "ad by coinbase" at the end
Reasonable assumption since 80% of NFL ads seem to be gambling, including crypto. And I know this proportion just having watched a few games of the playoffs.
My thoughts exactly. I half expect a drove of VCR manufacturers to step forward and take credit for the concept of a logo that bounces around on your screen...
VHS would blue screen (bad) or static (good) - blue screen was bad because it could burn in TVs (you can sometimes still find TVs that don't display blue well and have a faint STOP burned into the upper right).
So the DVD setup was to bounce a DVD logo (specifically not standing for anything) around in a quasirandom pattern (I believe they did try to make it roughly touch the whole screen at some point).
I don’t think it’s about the credit, if true, it was very rude to take the credit and specifically trash the industry… I would be tempted to throw out a “hey wtf!” if it happened to me!
It does seem stupid, but we're talking about an economy in which ugly digital apes are selling for $300k, so nothing should be a surprise anymore or too petty
It is not about the QR code itself. It's about recommending something like that in a priced ad spot with an intent to go create virality. That is what the ad agency was suggesting and what coinbase was able to achieve. Right idea, in the right context.
This was not a viral ad. Some insiders in the ad biz are talking about it, as are some HN'ers, crypto fans and similar people -- who pretty much all have their minds made up about Coinbase a long time ago.
Coinbase CEO's excuse is that he sees Martin Agency as a "creative firm" not a "traditional ad agency" and he felt they "were all one team". Although it should be noted that last Tweet was posted hours after the original set of Tweets.
It's also possible the CEO didn't know that the idea was pitched months earlier to people on his marketing team by another agency because his marketing team told him they came up with the idea internally.
Hogging credit is, sadly, pretty common in corporate gamesmanship.
That’s plausible but makes him look rather gullible at not only having bought into that lie but using the example as evidence of the supposed inferiority of ad agencies.
I’m not a politically adept person but even I can see that it puts into question his decision making skills as a CEO of a crypto firm. People in leadership positions generally need to be really good at calling bullshit otherwise they get surrounded by pliant yes-men.
Yeah, I don’t feel a ton of sympathy here. He wanted to seem a “tech cool kid” who disrupts traditional media and is above normal corporate stuff, and he either wasn’t willing to let the facts get in the way of that narrative, or just assumed that narrative must be true and that the facts would back him up. He’s either deceitful or sloppy, and both are bad looks.
His 'excuse' was posted 35 minutes after Kristen posted her comment, as tweet 12 in a thread, when tweet 11 in that thread was posted 12 hours earlier.
If only there were some kind of decentralized linked list of prohibitively-expensive-to-counterfeit ordered records that he could have leveraged to prove to the world that his twelfth statement preceded hers.
Just imagine the vast set of use cases for such a data structure! Why it's enough to make one indiscriminately spam various web forums to tirelessly enumerated through all of them.
Not really a valid argument. We survived millennia without a lot of things. The Industrial Revolution was only two centuries ago. It doesn't mean life was necessarily better before then.
Twitter could be improved by requiring a proof of work effort before posting any tweets. The effort could be computational, or just proof of fact checking and basic proofreading would go a long way.
OTOH -- Twitter (on the blockchain) supporting only ~10 tweets per second is a blessing in disguise that would drastically help improve the user experience by imposing a high cost on junk :P
~$0.001 USD is the current cost for gas on Polygon for a transaction. If people have to pay credits to tweet (even this little), I would expect the quality to increase.
Exactly my point: just imagine how fascinating the next 200,000 years will be with blockchain!
When you think in those terms you realize how shameful it is that, say, HN isn't getting in on the ground floor and spawning a worker in every reader's browser to mine crypto. The energy expended to mine Bitcoin pales in comparison to the early mover opportunities lost each day from lack of action.
If only we could spend megawatts of energy and hundreds of millions of dollars in hardware costs to be able to solve a twitter spat between a braggart tech boss and a copywriter feeling not appreciated enough. The humanity could then feel finally its existence amounts to something, some monumental goal is finally achieved.
> If only there were some kind of decentralized linked list of prohibitively-expensive-to-counterfeit ordered records that he could have leveraged to prove to the world that his twelfth statement preceded hers.
The Tweets have timestamps. No blockchain required.
The whole point of threading is to group Tweets in order as posted by the author and put replies below them. It wouldn't make sense to throw a bunch of Tweets and replies in chronological order and force the users to try to figure out which Tweet was in response to which parent Tweet.
There's a "blockchain solves everything" mentality that's prevalent in certain web3 communities.
It's fueled by the fact that there really aren't many, or perhaps any, usable web3 platforms that do anything beyond distributed ledger or NFT type stuff. Obviously nothing in web3 even resembles the scale and speed and ease of use of Twitter.
This has left the door wide open for futurists to paint the most idealistic picture possible of what web3 will look like. Blockchain technology is largely irrelevant to the projections (because it's boring). Instead, the projections suggest to solve all of the various social and legal problems in unspecified ways, with "web3" used as the excuse. It goes hand-in-hand with the idea that big corporations are evil and bad for users, but democratizing ownership will change all of that. Nevermind the fact that the big corporations are already publicly traded and you can buy a share of them today if you want, which isn't actually very different than buying governance tokens of a web3 system. The people with the most money and insider connections (to get early coins at a steep discount) are still going to be the ones calling the shots and shaping the systems to derive profits for themselves. There's nothing magical about web3 that stops people with money from buying outsized influence.
In addition, blockchain tech reduces the friction of obscuring money and data flows. This is good for unaccountable power. Government is not perfect, but it at least pretends to be accountable power.
It's a shitpost-- blockchain wouldn't even have helped him here because he posted number 12 after hers.
But now I'm wondering who exactly is upvoting the comment.
To be clear-- Bitcoin is an energy-gobbling database sync party trick. We would have been better off wildly exaggerating the potential of sleep sort for the past decade and a half.
If you are saying that Twitter adjusts the timestamps to the viewer's local time zone, that's not exactly a secret. Or are you accusing Twitter of retroactively changing timestamps to alter the narrative? That would be a bold claim in need of some proof.
> If only there were some kind of decentralized linked list of prohibitively-expensive-to-counterfeit ordered records that he could have leveraged to prove to the world that his twelfth statement preceded hers.
Every time I talk with a blockchain enthusiast, they seriously pull similar ideas and every time I tirelessly try to convince them there are better/simplier/more effective/etc. solutions to the same problems they try to apply blockchain.
> The Tweets have timestamps. No blockchain required.
Ah, so The Martin Agency was not the entity he called "an outside agency" which "pitched us a bunch of standard super bowl ad ideas" in the second tweet of the thread?
My guess, which may be a tad speculative, is that there is an ongoing, but previously-confidential, dispute between Coinbase and the agency over whether and how much the former owes the latter for the work they did.
Coinbase hired a new CMO. When that CMO joined, she decided to go with a different agency.
A QR Code in a commercial is not novel, making the entire commercial a QR code is. Sounds like Martin Agency presented a commercial with QR codes, not a QR code commercial. Unless Martin Agency shares the slide, It’s impossible to claim it was MA’s idea.
It sounds like her reply is the result of the Coinbase CMO cutting ties with her company.
Haha okay, her tweet says: “It was actually inspired by presentations our agency showed your team on 8/18 (pages 19-24) and 10/7 (pages 11-18) with ad concepts for the Super Bowl with floating QR codes on a blank screen.”
Right but did it say mimic a DVD screensaver? I really think she should show the goods if she wants to make light of the situation. BTW I'm kind of on her side, but don't make us take her word for it.
Is Martin Agency really dissimilar from the agencies that make other superbowl ads? What is a "traditional ad agency" anymore, even? And what's with the weaselly "I'd be remiss"? At this point, many hours after he failed to acknowledge them, he pretty clearly is remiss. Just apologize already!
I don't know the ad space particularly well, but the fact that Adweek named the Martin Agency its Agency of the Year for 2020 and 2021 suggests that it's not especially far removed from a "traditional ad agency", no?
I don't normally watch this stuff but checked out the other commercials out of curiosity. If you find this obnoxious, oh boy, they are surprisingly even worse.
It depends where you live. In Japan, QR codes are used by the majority. In Los Angeles, half the restaurants you go to serve their menus via QR code. In the Netherlands, online payments are frequently completed using iDeal, which lets you scan a QR code with your phone instead of manually inputting payment details.
The restaurants is one I hadn't thought of - even though I'm the only one I know who knows you can point a phone at a QR code to get a web link, many in LA probably know it now, too.
Still not sure it was a very useful use of Super Bowl dollars, should have at least had coinbased.com under it or something.
The fact that you have not heard of it does not make it rare. Leaving aside all the discussions in thread and people's view about crypto and Bitcoin, I think the ad is genius.
At least around me (Michigan) many of the local restaurants got rid of normal menus and went straight to QR Codes on the napkin holders/etc. In addition to the lack of contact vector for COVID, there is the side benefit to owners of not having to reprint/laminate menus when you do a price change.
> Still not sure it was a very useful use of Super Bowl dollars, should have at least had coinbased.com under it or something.
Agreed on that; perhaps just a little too avant-garde in that matter.
The idea itself is not as such that new or innovative. It is simple bouncing QR code on a screen after all.
However taking that idea and running with it with the vision and conviction that it will work, staking your reputation as an ad agency and as a customer backing with $12M or more in ad spends. The customer and ad agency both part of that process, the fight seems a bit petty.
Broadly, it seems like an _ad agency_ is one of the last groups I'd want to (evidently) lie about or otherwise irritate.
That said: this whole episode did just get Coinbase on the front of HN again, and I just learned the name of an apparently good agency. I'll laugh if it turns out this was all planned between them...
It feels like an ad agency has more to lose with appearing unprofessional in handling their clients. For better or worse, ad agencies are ridiculously highly paid to sometimes take a few punches for their clients or let their clients take the visible public credit for their work. If you're an ad agency, you have to check your ego at the door for your clients, IMO, and handle any conflict internally.
I don't particular care about this kind of nuanced back and forth, he-said/she-said type of story. In any other industry, this kind of minor drama might end up as a footnote in some industry trade blog, at best. But because crypto is attached, suddenly it gains traction on HN because people can find another excuse to take pot shots at something they dislike.
You have the people who worked on the Ad on one side and a lying billionaire on the other. It's only a "nuanced back-and-forth" if you're afraid to call a lie a lie.
There's vastly more value in being the agency responsible for "creating a winning ad" than an agency that outed someone who took credit for their work.
Because everyone wants a winning ad, and most people don't take credit for someone else's work.
Sure, obviously it’s a trivially implemented idea. It’s also a contemporarily unique idea, which resulted in an ad we’re (still) here talking about. That’s what is hard to do.
Literally everyone at my Superbowl party hated the ad and were making fun of it before it was over. Not a single person took a pic of the qr code even when it was a mystery
This is an extremely weird exchange... I would interpret her tweet as, Coinbase contracted her team, they pitched ideas, they rejected the ideas, then "stole" it and developed it internally. But his later reply suggests that, no, they were partners through to the end.
It does seem like he was intentionally or unintentionally building a universe where it was the "internal team" who developed it, but frankly I'm not sure that's a big enough misstep to warrant the marketing company replying like that trying to "out" him. In my eyes, that's an extremely unprofessional move on their part.
We bring in outside engineering contractors all the time to work on stuff. When the feature is finished, we don't tell customers "thank you, yes we're very happy with the work our engineering team and McKinsely & Sons Contracting Firm LLC did for us". That just straight up never, never, never happens; we take responsibility for both the success and failures of our contractors. Of course, success is always nice, and when directly asked we don't hide it (on the contrary; we're happy to give them some free word-of-mouth marketing if they've done good work). There's an alternate reality here where the marketing firm maybe reaches out privately and says "hey Brian; your tweets really paint a picture that we had nothing to do with it; mind giving us a shout-out?"
But that's not the direction they went, and instead they just aired dirty laundry in a public forum. Actually, its not even dirty laundry?! Its just laundry. I can say with absolute certainty that if any contractors/third parties pulled this stunt with us, we'd never use them again, period. Beyond anything else, NDAs are SOP in exchanges like this, I'd bet my life savings she absentmindedly signed one; to throw out a tweet like that isn't just unprofessional, its potentially litigable.
> unintentionally building a universe where it was the "internal team" who developed it
0% chance it was unintentional given that he said “no ad agency would have done this ad”
Her tweet gets her firm attention from people who may believe that Coinbase is bad/run by men who want to take credit for other peoples’ work, which is probably… a lot of people. Her tweet is probably good for business.
No way it gets litigated or that they win, given that other people at Coinbase publicly gave her credit even before she Tweeted
> We bring in outside engineering contractors all the time to work on stuff. When the feature is finished, we don't tell customers "thank you, yes we're very happy with the work our engineering team and McKinsely & Sons Contracting Firm LLC did for us"
But do you ever tell your customers "We used no contractors for this work. No contractor would ever have had the ideas our internal team came up with" when there were, in fact, contractors involved in the conception and design of the project?
In the tweet he literally said “no ad agency would do this ad”. Your example for your company and contract is not nearly the same. If you tell your customers and investors that no contractors could come up with your new feature that contractors actually came up with then it would match and it would sound like a fraudulent representation of the company’s teams work.
In advertising, they give out awards to agencies for making the best ad. The ad is somewhat also an ad for the agency.
It’s like paying someone to write your biography, then claiming you wrote it yourself and turning the author into a ghostwriter (without their agreement). You shouldn’t expect the author to let you get away with that. If the work doesn’t go in their portfolio, you need to pay extra.
I'm not sure the analogy holds. When you hire engineering contractors, you typically pay them for the work. You don't get them to a pitch a fix on a whiteboard, tell them "no we don't like that, we won't proceed with you and you can leave now" and then have your own people do that fix. Which is my reading of what's alleged here.
I'm sure Armstrong would have posted the shout out in the alternate reality in which the agency privately and professionally requested it, but I prefer the reality where he looks like an absolute tit that got shamed into doing it.
Not because I care about crediting creative agencies, but because of the cheesy LinkedIn-style fake story about how much they'd achieved by rejecting unimaginative agencies, when actually they commissioned an agency which come up with the core idea and all the implementation. Nothing wrong with not naming your contractors until you start telling marketing stories about how you didn't use any because they couldn't possibly achieve what you achieved in house! Sure, it wasn't professional to call it out, but that doesn't mean it didn't deserve it
The convinces me further that Armstrong is damage controlling for an ad that got way less organic interest in both the short and long run than FTX' Larry David ad. When the ad failed to generate any sizable metrics worthy of story, Coinbase tried to spin this daring ad into a story itself.
You're right. The FTX ad was also a big mistake, for different reasons, but it did get more buzz, and it is replayable. Coinbase's QR code gimmick was something that sounded super edgy in a boardroom with people super-invested in the process... but entirely forgettable among the millions of viewers who are drunk, full, watching Snoop Dogg, betting on football, and inundated with ads featuring the Sopranos, Larry David, Scarlett Johansson, etc etc
FTX got the nature of Larry David completely wrong. He is an enormously successful, extremely wealthy man who, subconsciously, all of his fans love to cheer on and with whom they agree. Larry is socially awkward, but in a way people envy -- he goes right up to hypocrites and challenges them to their face. You don't stay on air for 10+ seasons without being the protagonist hero the audience wishes they could be. He is not, in any way, a buffoon or an idiot. But the takeaway impression from the ad is Larry David saying "naaah". That's it -- that's what people remember. Just throwing a tag up there, "don't be like Larry" isn't going to flip an internal emotion people have held for two decades. The affinity people have for "Larry David" the character or Larry David the person is far too large for that.
Even in the focal point of the commercial itself, LD is the alpha with the office, the desk, the awards, the guy being pitched to... and FTX expects me to instead side with a random nerd with a cell phone? Oh, and the call to action is terrible -- FTX is hardly even mentioned. I would bet 9 out of 10 regular Joe's have no idea who the Larry David ad was for.
postscript - the ad could have been saved, if the pitch was delivered by someone familiar, with equal stature and affinity. Because we always see Larry arguing with his closest circle -- and because they are also wealthy and successful (which, subconsciously, provides credibility). If it was Cheryl trying to get him to invest? Definitely. Leon? 100%. Jeff? Maybe. Richard Lewis? I think it would have worked great. Ted Danson? Possibly, hard to tell how that would go emotionally. Jerry, Jason or Julia? Could have been amazing. But some random guy with zero credibility? It's just a fatal error, self-imposed, no way around it.
Larry David "fans" make up a minority of viewers. The majority of viewers just see him as a recognizable, funny face. And, to this majority, his character in the commercial was a great fit.
A quick glance at Youtube view counts shows FTX commercial ahead of BMW's Zeus/Hera commercial which was supposedly ranked #1 by a number of online publications -- make of that what you will, but calling it a "big mistake" seems highly subjective, unless you've actually obtained viewer engagement metrics.
Larry David and his persona are more widely known that you think. Curb memes are all over social media, he did a bunch of SNLs very recently, lots of people know he's the Seinfeld guy, and he's been on HBO since 2001 -- even if you aren't a current subscriber there's a good chance you once were.
But it doesn't matter. In the FTX commercial, he's the likable one. Maybe he's saying dumb things but he's the one the viewer bonds with. There's a long history of lovable, well, "losers" is the wrong word, but perhaps "serial mistake-makers." Ralph Kramden, Archie Bunker, George Jefferson, Jack Tripper, Tim Allen on Tool Time, Homer Simpson, Michael Scott. Having any of these guys, even Michael Scott, saying "naaaah" to your product would be an absolute disaster for a commercial. You can't just put a tag line at the end and say "Don't Be Like _______." The human brain doesn't work that way.
I have no doubt that FTX's commercial has a lot of views and that people rate it highly. It is a funny commercial. It's interesting and compelling to watch. But it still ends in a very successful Larry David, in his big office, behind a big desk, surrounded by tons of accomplishments, saying "naaaah" to a guy who, frankly, does not have a compelling pitch, is not particularly likable or relatable, and who just about anyone would want to throw out of their office ASAP. And although lots of people may be watching the ad and praising it, I feel very confident in stating that few of them are compelled to sign up for FTX.
epilogue - Technical note #1, I just checked the extended version, FTX guy is on-screen for 3 whole seconds -- not a great way to make a strong, memorable impression. Technical note #2, the call to action "Don't Miss Out" is also on-screen for 3 whole seconds, no URL, even FTX is in tiny letters, and is followed by an epilogue with Larry. So the commercial isn't even over and people have become distracted and already forgotten who the commercial was for.
I believe both ads got their fair share of 'organic interest' or news. The Coinbase ad was also discussed quite a lot after it first appeared on-screen.
the agency probably would have let this slide if he didn’t toss in the “agencies wouldn’t do this” dig at the end, that would have taken me from tepid to nuclear too… agencies have their work stolen all the time (the pitch process is terrible) and that’s nothing new, but to do it and then trash the entire industry is nuts
This kind of thing happened all the time when I was at a software consultancy. In press releases, interviews, etc., our clients' leadership would regularly talk about creating their new website or application entirely in house, when it was really done by contractors like me, whose relationship to the company amounted to some names in a shared Slack channel. This was product: I assume it's common in marketing as well.
I always considered it part of doing business. Sometimes it was even part of the contract that we couldn't mention we worked with them. That's fine until you decide to leave, and realize you aren't supposed to include any of your best work in your portfolio!
I wonder if they actively promote the lie of in house expertise or simply choose not to highlight your contributions? The latter case seems less unethical… still shady to not correct a wrong interpretation though.
> Sometimes it was even part of the contract that we couldn't mention we worked with them. That's fine until you decide to leave, and realize you aren't supposed to include any of your best work in your portfolio!
This is the default in all consulting/contracting/freelancing isn't it? Can't even mention your client, let alone the product you were working on. It's a real battle to get the reference rights in the contract.
In practice you mention in public documents something like "leading movie streaming service", and use the name in private discussions and sales.
whether it's the coinbase CEO for misrepresenting the origin or the marketing agency CEO for lodging such an accusation, someone is in the wrong.
given that reddit's QR-code commercial was the most discussed one from the prior year and that coinbase explicitly considered this inspiration [0], it seems prudent to gather more data before judging who was wrong.
given the reddit precedent and the proliferation of QR codes under covid, it does not seem unreasonable for multiple people to independently conceive of commercials with QR codes.
1. when did coinbase discuss the reddit commercial?
2. how similar are the agency proposal and the final commercial?
3. did coinbase brief the marketing agency on all previously considered ideas?
I agree that it's a clumsy move by Coinbase at best, and dishonest at its worst.
What I find far more interesting though is the response, which really reveals the core use case of Twitter.
The people responding are having a party. Read it. This is the moment where they shine. Piling onto somebody that made a mistake or is embarrassed. Watch how much pleasure they take from it, "best thing they've seen all day". Frantically liking, retweeting, dancing on somebody's corpse. This really is the best part of their day, they've been scrolling all day without proper outrage, and this is the jackpot for their hate addiction. It fulfills them.
It's a white male even, no better target than that. Let's make it a feminist and BLM issue too. The more the target is stamped into the ground, the better.
And the twisted part is that these people typically signal how good and righteous they are. They're not. They're sadists that take joy from the suffering of others.
Case in point, "DHH" (from Basecamp) still can't open comments on his Twitter a whopping 6 months after bringing himself into trouble. The harassment is this intense.
It's not that neither of these two didn't do anything questionable, but they didn't exactly commit war crimes either. The "good" people are so relentlessly cruel. They've lost any sense of proportionality, reason, perspective, and basic human forgiveness.
When you've spent some more time on (tech) Twitter, as I unfortunately have, you actually recognize the grifters. It's always the same few dozen people that have many followers. They are basically the distributors of outrage. A fresh high profile outrage? Count on them to be there in minutes, dropping their low effort hot take. They're experts in maximizing pain in the fewest characters.
If the CEO of a financial services company is both willing to lie to the public and is willing to have the public believe he is a liar, that is a bigger red flag than if he was just ignorant to the details of how an idea for an ad originated.
All this characterizing as "lying" is so dramatic. Is there literally no possibility that he misunderstood something, or that maybe the caller-out from the ad agency is themself leaving something out? People are so quick to label and name-call when we can hardly say we really know anything about the situation for certain.
I didn't say he was lying. I was reacting to the hypothetical in the previous comment that maybe this drama was intentional. If that is the case, I have no idea what word to use besides "lying". With our current knowledge, it can still be a misunderstanding and like I said maybe "he was just ignorant to the details of how an idea for an ad originated."
It was a major Super Bowl commercial, I have to think its creative path was lit pretty brightly in everybody's minds. They didn't just pick it out of a stack of papers. At all. Of course I'm no business mercenary with experience at all levels and sizes of company, but for something like this I think we can assume they had a lot of meetings about it.
> If the CEO of a financial services company is both willing to lie to the public and is willing to have the public believe he is a liar, that is a bigger red flag than if he was just ignorant to the details of how an idea for an ad originated.
Armstrong and Coinbase are one of the most toxic companies in the Bitcoin ecosystem, they were willing to lie to new customers entering the space during Segwit all while spreading FUD; they tried to pawn off Bcash as Bitcoin to unsuspecting newbies.
They also have a LONG history of shutting down accounts, reversing purchases, locking funds with limited recourse etc... worst yet is that they are one of YC's unicorns.
Honestly, the sooner people realize why the should look for alternatives the better. As an early adopter who was excited about they could do to bring some level of professionalism after Bitcoinica and MtGox instead I'm ashamed and embarrassed to have ever directed anyone to them.
Jack Dorsey's CASH/Block is everything that they will never be.
> what's jack doing different? I'm out of the loop
To begin, Jack is a maximalist, and has been funding/supporting Lightening development really early on and has recently integrated it into CASH for no cost withdraws/txs. He has also paid for Bitcoin core development and made initiatives to lower Bitcoin's mining carbon footprint and will now be making miners.
He also has spent a great deal of time time and resources to bring Bitcoin awareness into Africa, prior to COVID he was going to live in Africa to try and pick up where Patrick Byrne left off and onboard the develope WOrld with financial services they have been denied. Unfortunately, this was when they tried a hostile take over at Twitter and tried to oust him.
Finally he has made it clear that his ambition is to make Bitcoin the currency of the Internet, and has had discussions about it's role with UBI.
Whereas Armstrong has proven himself to be an incredibly shady individual with a focus on short term gains and operates with little to no scruples.
> I'm sorry, but how is that any different from the entirety of the cryptocurrency space, or the YC startup space in fact? Plenty of scams in the former and cutthroats in the latter.
Despite what you may think, in the 10+ years I've been in the BTC ecosystem scammers are the exception not the rule; you just hear about this because it's what makes headlines. You'll never know or hear about a period of time when you could buy bitcoin by sending cash or precious metals in the mail, or the times when bitcoin that were sent to a wrong address were sent back in good faith. I can go on, but it is only in the last 5 years that this space has inundated with these kind of antics: sadly that's the cost of scaling up a project, and getting closer to critical mass.
I've been in the Corporate World, too and the two cultures never really mix well because we have different aims entirely; chiefly that monetary profit is a byproduct of our success, not the success itself.
Coinbase has it's roots in the SV VC World and Goldman Sachs, which is why I think they have conducted themselves as they have.
> They’re all toxic.
>>Having spent over a year in the industry there’s no way I’d go back.
I don't disagree about the space in the last 5-6 years, I haven't been to a meet up in around that time as it became a waste of time if you were around the early days where disrupting Industries with this tech was the biggest driver of our culture. Now it's all moonbois and memes.
There are a few places I could point you to make you see what still exists from that time, but it's pretty fringe.
But I must say that a single year doesn't really amount to much; Bitcoin moves at way too fast of a pace that I doubt you got much more than the ability to scratch the surface.
In my first year, when Satoshi was still around on BTF, the Community told they didn't care what he thought and would kick the hornet's next and help out Wikileaks. In the coming years we'd see the Snowden revelations and manhunt, and Julian's releases via Wikileaks that included things like all those cables to vault 7 etc... which were only possible because Bitcoin appreciation (50,000%) allowed them to survive. [0]
It took me 5 years before I was ready to undertake a startup, that was the first of it's kind in the space and upon reflection was needed but way too early, and only now has started to get wider traction.
I'm sorry, but how is that any different from the entirety of the cryptocurrency space, or the YC startup space in fact? Plenty of scams in the former and cutthroats in the latter.
No. False advertising can get you sued, hence advertisers are usually careful about any claims they actually make in an advertisement preferring not to claim anything and imply everything.
How can it be anything else? What kind of sane CEO for an advertising company would publicly call out a client for lying - potentially costing them future business after they've made a homerun promo - without having said client be in the loop about it?
OTOH, she is confrontational, especially in her other tweet[0], so I'm thorn. But it does seem like they could be just fabricating buzz.
It sounds like that agency was fired by the new CMO. Which seems pretty common. Advertising at that level is a big incestuous kick back revolving door of just a couple parent companies.
Google says Martin Agency is owned by IPG.
Which is like 1 of only 3 or 4 players that capture the vast % of traditional ad spend. They all own a bunch of different brands.
So it's still deceitful, just a different kind of deceit that can...I dunno, be cast as more acceptible? I'm not sure what kind of judgement either of those alternatives shows in an industry that has, I hope we can agree, credibility problems.
in what sense did Jobs take credit for that? Apple worked with the agency, but I've never seen anyone claim an agency wasn't involved. I've seen the reverse, the story of the long collaboration of apple and their ad agency.
Read Steve Jobs' biography, he took full credit. This was the "reality distortion" field that people accused Jobs of. He would walk in and tear an idea to shreds and then turn around and tell everyone that idea was his. He would do this routinely. Probably not on purpose, maybe he forgot it was someone else's idea, but he definitely did this very often.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 245 ms ] threadAlso, I don't know how business stuff like this works, but if a company pays an ad agency for ad ideas, aren't they paying for ownership of those ideas? How many classic commercials were actually original ideas of the company whose product was being advertised? Yet we all still consider the polar bears to be a coca-cola commercial, WAZZUUUUUP to be budweiser commercials, etc.
It just seems unprofessional. Why would a company want to hire this agency now? Of course if coinbase ceo is lying then it's definitely rude not to give credit, but that seems like it's just how these things go.
To convert it to HN-speak, this is like forking an open-source software library, then branding it as your own internal original work. Then the kicker is the Twitter thread where he publicly insults the entire profession of the people they stole it from. So imagine that a company rips off an OSS library, then says something like "no OSS community would have created this."
It breaks an industry-standard norm in the relationship between ad/marketing agencies and client companies. Everyone knows that client companies pay ad agencies. But agencies make their livelihood on their reputation. So everyone who matters in the industry knows that Ken Stewart was behind the Coca-Cola polar bears campaign, or that it was Bill Backer behind the "I'd like to give the world a Coke" campaign. They've been inducted into the Madison Avenue Advertising Walk of Fame, which is literally something only ad people care about. Same with number of stars on GitHub.
I don't think either of them come out smelling of roses here, but an ad agency relies on reputation. If a paying client threatens their future revenue by badmouthing them, they're left with two options:
1) say nothing and have future clients think they're incompetent
2) defend themselves and have future clients know they are competent, but won't put up with some of their client's BS.
Neither choice is ideal, but maybe #2 defends their reputation at the same time that it filters out clients that will spout BS like this. Fewer potential clients, maybe less revenue as a result, but more revenue than if clients thought they were incompetent.
If your agency came up a creative Superbowl ad idea, and then the CEO of the company that ran the ad goes and tweets about it, dissing outside agencies (like you), and seems to claim they came up with it internally... how do you get credit for the success of the idea you pitched, since that's a big deal to your business?
I just don't like reading twitter threads. At first I only saw the first 6 tweets of the 12(?) tweet chain because after that it was all just reaction gifs.
That being said I worked at Martin for 11 years. They pitch a ton of ideas to clients all the time and gradually dump most of them. I can easily see the QR code being pitched fairly early by a team and it getting cut.
Just speaking from experience I always take agency talk with a grain of salt. So many big names outsource their work to freelancers, boutique shops, or directors that they’ve used in the past because agency folk don’t want to fully think things through. I would be interested in hearing what Danny Robinson has to say. He’s the CCO at Martin, but I doubt he would take to twitter for this.
Depends on the contract.
What they aren't paying for is the ability to say "these guys we paid couldn't come up with anything so we had to do it ourselves".
Because the agency isn't being paid to have a client bad mouth them in public as mediocre when it was the angency that came up with the idea.
It's crypto. I wouldn't be surprised if they didn't pay them at all.
That's the dispute, they didn't pay. Coinbase met with Martin, listened to their pitch(es), including something about a floating QR code, then said no thanks.
A few months later Coinbase aired a Super Bowl commercial with a floating QR code, and either claims to have created it in-house or created it with Accenture.
The Martin CEO (Cavallo) has every right to be pissed.
I believe every corner of the market has been reached and has either bought in or is not buying.
Perhaps eerily similar to the last time the Super Bowl brought down a major tech craze ...
Which was?
Preceeded the dot com crash
Is it mostly because of US anti-money-laundering laws?
Yes. Something like that. :)
The Superbowl ad was a qr bouncing around the screen with some retro music in the background. No mention of Coinbase at all except a brief 1/2 second "ad by coinbase" at the end
So the DVD setup was to bounce a DVD logo (specifically not standing for anything) around in a quasirandom pattern (I believe they did try to make it roughly touch the whole screen at some point).
It makes the CEO look weak, stupid, and petty.
The general public? It has been long forgotten.
https://twitter.com/brian_armstrong/status/14958203518796595...
The Martin Agency’s proposal was rejected, but the idea of the QR code that they suggested remained in some minds.
The creative firm they did the ad with was Accenture Interactive, see this: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6898989...
Hogging credit is, sadly, pretty common in corporate gamesmanship.
I’m not a politically adept person but even I can see that it puts into question his decision making skills as a CEO of a crypto firm. People in leadership positions generally need to be really good at calling bullshit otherwise they get surrounded by pliant yes-men.
> really good at calling bullshit
Maybe one of those things can tell us about the other?
Pro tip: Ninja edits don't work on Twitter.
https://twitter.com/brian_armstrong/status/14956369442897756... https://twitter.com/Cavallokristen/status/149581148789773517... https://twitter.com/brian_armstrong/status/14958203518796595...
Just imagine the vast set of use cases for such a data structure! Why it's enough to make one indiscriminately spam various web forums to tirelessly enumerated through all of them.
When you think in those terms you realize how shameful it is that, say, HN isn't getting in on the ground floor and spawning a worker in every reader's browser to mine crypto. The energy expended to mine Bitcoin pales in comparison to the early mover opportunities lost each day from lack of action.
The Tweets have timestamps. No blockchain required.
The whole point of threading is to group Tweets in order as posted by the author and put replies below them. It wouldn't make sense to throw a bunch of Tweets and replies in chronological order and force the users to try to figure out which Tweet was in response to which parent Tweet.
But perhaps they were indeed being sincere?
EDIT: On review of their prior posts, it looks like they were.
It's fueled by the fact that there really aren't many, or perhaps any, usable web3 platforms that do anything beyond distributed ledger or NFT type stuff. Obviously nothing in web3 even resembles the scale and speed and ease of use of Twitter.
This has left the door wide open for futurists to paint the most idealistic picture possible of what web3 will look like. Blockchain technology is largely irrelevant to the projections (because it's boring). Instead, the projections suggest to solve all of the various social and legal problems in unspecified ways, with "web3" used as the excuse. It goes hand-in-hand with the idea that big corporations are evil and bad for users, but democratizing ownership will change all of that. Nevermind the fact that the big corporations are already publicly traded and you can buy a share of them today if you want, which isn't actually very different than buying governance tokens of a web3 system. The people with the most money and insider connections (to get early coins at a steep discount) are still going to be the ones calling the shots and shaping the systems to derive profits for themselves. There's nothing magical about web3 that stops people with money from buying outsized influence.
But now I'm wondering who exactly is upvoting the comment.
To be clear-- Bitcoin is an energy-gobbling database sync party trick. We would have been better off wildly exaggerating the potential of sleep sort for the past decade and a half.
Every time I talk with a blockchain enthusiast, they seriously pull similar ideas and every time I tirelessly try to convince them there are better/simplier/more effective/etc. solutions to the same problems they try to apply blockchain.
> The Tweets have timestamps. No blockchain required.
The best "stop your blockchain bs" answer!
https://twitter.com/brian_armstrong/status/14956361148243804...
My guess, which may be a tad speculative, is that there is an ongoing, but previously-confidential, dispute between Coinbase and the agency over whether and how much the former owes the latter for the work they did.
A QR Code in a commercial is not novel, making the entire commercial a QR code is. Sounds like Martin Agency presented a commercial with QR codes, not a QR code commercial. Unless Martin Agency shares the slide, It’s impossible to claim it was MA’s idea.
It sounds like her reply is the result of the Coinbase CMO cutting ties with her company.
https://twitter.com/cavallokristen/status/149581148789773517...
They should have made it bounce to the exact corner at end of the ad for any Office crazies
TL;DW: a floating color-changing QR code on a black background, with obnoxious music.
As for this one it's obviously designed to get people to look it up. Seems to have worked if we want to trust CNN: https://edition.cnn.com/2022/02/14/investing/coinbase-qr-cod...
And now HN is talking about it too. More publicity for them.
Still not sure it was a very useful use of Super Bowl dollars, should have at least had coinbased.com under it or something.
> Still not sure it was a very useful use of Super Bowl dollars, should have at least had coinbased.com under it or something.
Agreed on that; perhaps just a little too avant-garde in that matter.
its probably the most public and normal qr codes have ever been
However taking that idea and running with it with the vision and conviction that it will work, staking your reputation as an ad agency and as a customer backing with $12M or more in ad spends. The customer and ad agency both part of that process, the fight seems a bit petty.
That said: this whole episode did just get Coinbase on the front of HN again, and I just learned the name of an apparently good agency. I'll laugh if it turns out this was all planned between them...
I don't particular care about this kind of nuanced back and forth, he-said/she-said type of story. In any other industry, this kind of minor drama might end up as a footnote in some industry trade blog, at best. But because crypto is attached, suddenly it gains traction on HN because people can find another excuse to take pot shots at something they dislike.
You have the people who worked on the Ad on one side and a lying billionaire on the other. It's only a "nuanced back-and-forth" if you're afraid to call a lie a lie.
Because everyone wants a winning ad, and most people don't take credit for someone else's work.
It does seem like he was intentionally or unintentionally building a universe where it was the "internal team" who developed it, but frankly I'm not sure that's a big enough misstep to warrant the marketing company replying like that trying to "out" him. In my eyes, that's an extremely unprofessional move on their part.
We bring in outside engineering contractors all the time to work on stuff. When the feature is finished, we don't tell customers "thank you, yes we're very happy with the work our engineering team and McKinsely & Sons Contracting Firm LLC did for us". That just straight up never, never, never happens; we take responsibility for both the success and failures of our contractors. Of course, success is always nice, and when directly asked we don't hide it (on the contrary; we're happy to give them some free word-of-mouth marketing if they've done good work). There's an alternate reality here where the marketing firm maybe reaches out privately and says "hey Brian; your tweets really paint a picture that we had nothing to do with it; mind giving us a shout-out?"
But that's not the direction they went, and instead they just aired dirty laundry in a public forum. Actually, its not even dirty laundry?! Its just laundry. I can say with absolute certainty that if any contractors/third parties pulled this stunt with us, we'd never use them again, period. Beyond anything else, NDAs are SOP in exchanges like this, I'd bet my life savings she absentmindedly signed one; to throw out a tweet like that isn't just unprofessional, its potentially litigable.
That's a lot of fancy words to say "he lied".
I can understand the sentiment if he was just waxing lyrical about the ad, but he explicitly said "no ad agency would come up with this".
0% chance it was unintentional given that he said “no ad agency would have done this ad”
Her tweet gets her firm attention from people who may believe that Coinbase is bad/run by men who want to take credit for other peoples’ work, which is probably… a lot of people. Her tweet is probably good for business.
No way it gets litigated or that they win, given that other people at Coinbase publicly gave her credit even before she Tweeted
But do you ever tell your customers "We used no contractors for this work. No contractor would ever have had the ideas our internal team came up with" when there were, in fact, contractors involved in the conception and design of the project?
It’s like paying someone to write your biography, then claiming you wrote it yourself and turning the author into a ghostwriter (without their agreement). You shouldn’t expect the author to let you get away with that. If the work doesn’t go in their portfolio, you need to pay extra.
Not because I care about crediting creative agencies, but because of the cheesy LinkedIn-style fake story about how much they'd achieved by rejecting unimaginative agencies, when actually they commissioned an agency which come up with the core idea and all the implementation. Nothing wrong with not naming your contractors until you start telling marketing stories about how you didn't use any because they couldn't possibly achieve what you achieved in house! Sure, it wasn't professional to call it out, but that doesn't mean it didn't deserve it
Even in the focal point of the commercial itself, LD is the alpha with the office, the desk, the awards, the guy being pitched to... and FTX expects me to instead side with a random nerd with a cell phone? Oh, and the call to action is terrible -- FTX is hardly even mentioned. I would bet 9 out of 10 regular Joe's have no idea who the Larry David ad was for.
postscript - the ad could have been saved, if the pitch was delivered by someone familiar, with equal stature and affinity. Because we always see Larry arguing with his closest circle -- and because they are also wealthy and successful (which, subconsciously, provides credibility). If it was Cheryl trying to get him to invest? Definitely. Leon? 100%. Jeff? Maybe. Richard Lewis? I think it would have worked great. Ted Danson? Possibly, hard to tell how that would go emotionally. Jerry, Jason or Julia? Could have been amazing. But some random guy with zero credibility? It's just a fatal error, self-imposed, no way around it.
Jeff: GREAT! I'll send the paperwork over first thing tomorrow. This is going to be good, you won't regret this.
theme music plays
Julia is maybe worth even more with family money?
I would have loved to see a Leon bit though. That's a great idea. You got to get in that Ass... er NFTs i guess were slinging now
A quick glance at Youtube view counts shows FTX commercial ahead of BMW's Zeus/Hera commercial which was supposedly ranked #1 by a number of online publications -- make of that what you will, but calling it a "big mistake" seems highly subjective, unless you've actually obtained viewer engagement metrics.
But it doesn't matter. In the FTX commercial, he's the likable one. Maybe he's saying dumb things but he's the one the viewer bonds with. There's a long history of lovable, well, "losers" is the wrong word, but perhaps "serial mistake-makers." Ralph Kramden, Archie Bunker, George Jefferson, Jack Tripper, Tim Allen on Tool Time, Homer Simpson, Michael Scott. Having any of these guys, even Michael Scott, saying "naaaah" to your product would be an absolute disaster for a commercial. You can't just put a tag line at the end and say "Don't Be Like _______." The human brain doesn't work that way.
I have no doubt that FTX's commercial has a lot of views and that people rate it highly. It is a funny commercial. It's interesting and compelling to watch. But it still ends in a very successful Larry David, in his big office, behind a big desk, surrounded by tons of accomplishments, saying "naaaah" to a guy who, frankly, does not have a compelling pitch, is not particularly likable or relatable, and who just about anyone would want to throw out of their office ASAP. And although lots of people may be watching the ad and praising it, I feel very confident in stating that few of them are compelled to sign up for FTX.
epilogue - Technical note #1, I just checked the extended version, FTX guy is on-screen for 3 whole seconds -- not a great way to make a strong, memorable impression. Technical note #2, the call to action "Don't Miss Out" is also on-screen for 3 whole seconds, no URL, even FTX is in tiny letters, and is followed by an epilogue with Larry. So the commercial isn't even over and people have become distracted and already forgotten who the commercial was for.
The ad was a remarkable novelty at the time, but the lack of replay ability is probably a big deal.
You can’t show a QR code ad on a phone, and potential coinbase users see a lot of digital ads.
https://www.theverge.com/2022/2/13/22932397/coinbases-qr-cod...
And even other interest, such as using QR code for an ad, which in itself is a unique thing.
Coinbase is trying to squeeze as much marketing from the Superbowl ad as they can. The tweet thread by Brian is part of that.
I always considered it part of doing business. Sometimes it was even part of the contract that we couldn't mention we worked with them. That's fine until you decide to leave, and realize you aren't supposed to include any of your best work in your portfolio!
This is the default in all consulting/contracting/freelancing isn't it? Can't even mention your client, let alone the product you were working on. It's a real battle to get the reference rights in the contract.
In practice you mention in public documents something like "leading movie streaming service", and use the name in private discussions and sales.
given that reddit's QR-code commercial was the most discussed one from the prior year and that coinbase explicitly considered this inspiration [0], it seems prudent to gather more data before judging who was wrong.
given the reddit precedent and the proliferation of QR codes under covid, it does not seem unreasonable for multiple people to independently conceive of commercials with QR codes.
1. when did coinbase discuss the reddit commercial?
2. how similar are the agency proposal and the final commercial?
3. did coinbase brief the marketing agency on all previously considered ideas?
[0]https://twitter.com/brian_armstrong/status/14956363618898575...
What I find far more interesting though is the response, which really reveals the core use case of Twitter.
The people responding are having a party. Read it. This is the moment where they shine. Piling onto somebody that made a mistake or is embarrassed. Watch how much pleasure they take from it, "best thing they've seen all day". Frantically liking, retweeting, dancing on somebody's corpse. This really is the best part of their day, they've been scrolling all day without proper outrage, and this is the jackpot for their hate addiction. It fulfills them.
It's a white male even, no better target than that. Let's make it a feminist and BLM issue too. The more the target is stamped into the ground, the better.
And the twisted part is that these people typically signal how good and righteous they are. They're not. They're sadists that take joy from the suffering of others.
Case in point, "DHH" (from Basecamp) still can't open comments on his Twitter a whopping 6 months after bringing himself into trouble. The harassment is this intense.
It's not that neither of these two didn't do anything questionable, but they didn't exactly commit war crimes either. The "good" people are so relentlessly cruel. They've lost any sense of proportionality, reason, perspective, and basic human forgiveness.
When you've spent some more time on (tech) Twitter, as I unfortunately have, you actually recognize the grifters. It's always the same few dozen people that have many followers. They are basically the distributors of outrage. A fresh high profile outrage? Count on them to be there in minutes, dropping their low effort hot take. They're experts in maximizing pain in the fewest characters.
They live for this. How absolutely pathetic.
Which would also be a massive red flag.
Armstrong and Coinbase are one of the most toxic companies in the Bitcoin ecosystem, they were willing to lie to new customers entering the space during Segwit all while spreading FUD; they tried to pawn off Bcash as Bitcoin to unsuspecting newbies.
They also have a LONG history of shutting down accounts, reversing purchases, locking funds with limited recourse etc... worst yet is that they are one of YC's unicorns.
Honestly, the sooner people realize why the should look for alternatives the better. As an early adopter who was excited about they could do to bring some level of professionalism after Bitcoinica and MtGox instead I'm ashamed and embarrassed to have ever directed anyone to them.
Jack Dorsey's CASH/Block is everything that they will never be.
To begin, Jack is a maximalist, and has been funding/supporting Lightening development really early on and has recently integrated it into CASH for no cost withdraws/txs. He has also paid for Bitcoin core development and made initiatives to lower Bitcoin's mining carbon footprint and will now be making miners.
He also has spent a great deal of time time and resources to bring Bitcoin awareness into Africa, prior to COVID he was going to live in Africa to try and pick up where Patrick Byrne left off and onboard the develope WOrld with financial services they have been denied. Unfortunately, this was when they tried a hostile take over at Twitter and tried to oust him.
Finally he has made it clear that his ambition is to make Bitcoin the currency of the Internet, and has had discussions about it's role with UBI.
Whereas Armstrong has proven himself to be an incredibly shady individual with a focus on short term gains and operates with little to no scruples.
> I'm sorry, but how is that any different from the entirety of the cryptocurrency space, or the YC startup space in fact? Plenty of scams in the former and cutthroats in the latter.
Despite what you may think, in the 10+ years I've been in the BTC ecosystem scammers are the exception not the rule; you just hear about this because it's what makes headlines. You'll never know or hear about a period of time when you could buy bitcoin by sending cash or precious metals in the mail, or the times when bitcoin that were sent to a wrong address were sent back in good faith. I can go on, but it is only in the last 5 years that this space has inundated with these kind of antics: sadly that's the cost of scaling up a project, and getting closer to critical mass.
I've been in the Corporate World, too and the two cultures never really mix well because we have different aims entirely; chiefly that monetary profit is a byproduct of our success, not the success itself.
Coinbase has it's roots in the SV VC World and Goldman Sachs, which is why I think they have conducted themselves as they have.
> They’re all toxic. >>Having spent over a year in the industry there’s no way I’d go back.
I don't disagree about the space in the last 5-6 years, I haven't been to a meet up in around that time as it became a waste of time if you were around the early days where disrupting Industries with this tech was the biggest driver of our culture. Now it's all moonbois and memes.
There are a few places I could point you to make you see what still exists from that time, but it's pretty fringe.
But I must say that a single year doesn't really amount to much; Bitcoin moves at way too fast of a pace that I doubt you got much more than the ability to scratch the surface.
In my first year, when Satoshi was still around on BTF, the Community told they didn't care what he thought and would kick the hornet's next and help out Wikileaks. In the coming years we'd see the Snowden revelations and manhunt, and Julian's releases via Wikileaks that included things like all those cables to vault 7 etc... which were only possible because Bitcoin appreciation (50,000%) allowed them to survive. [0]
It took me 5 years before I was ready to undertake a startup, that was the first of it's kind in the space and upon reflection was needed but way too early, and only now has started to get wider traction.
0: https://www.cnbc.com/2017/10/16/wikileaks-julian-assange-bit...
Having spent over a year in the industry there’s no way I’d go back.
OTOH, she is confrontational, especially in her other tweet[0], so I'm thorn. But it does seem like they could be just fabricating buzz.
0: https://twitter.com/Cavallokristen/status/149586819497588326...
Google says Martin Agency is owned by IPG.
Which is like 1 of only 3 or 4 players that capture the vast % of traditional ad spend. They all own a bunch of different brands.
Acdenure, the condsulting body shop spun off from Arthur Andersen the fraudulent accounting ccompany that perpetrated the Enron fraud?
https://www.forbes.com/sites/onmarketing/2011/12/14/the-real...
He makes the case that some of the quotes from the Isaacson biography aren't true, like this one:
"Jobs, who could identify with each of those sentiments, wrote some of the lines himself, including “They push the human race forward."
Edit: Yes, I'm agreeing with you..