# Garry's Channel: How I turned $300k into $2 billion

**Author:** Garry Tan
**Type:** Video
**URL:** https://www.ycombinator.com/library/Jf-garry-s-channel-how-i-turned-300k-into-2-billion
**YouTube ID:** x5YApjnTG10

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Garry writes: “I was lucky enough to be the first investor in a company called Coinbase. Today they are a Cryptocurrency
exchange worth billions that just went public. But when I met Brian, Bitcoin was $5 and Coinbase was just him. Here's
the story behind my best investment yet.”

## Transcript

eight years ago i met a founder and invested three hundred thousand dollars into his company those shares are now worth over 2.4 billion dollars that company was coinbase which investors have now valued at more than a hundred billion dollars it's the best investment i've ever made you might have heard of my 200 million dollar mistake i said no to being a co-founding engineer at a 40 billion dollar company don't feel too bad for me i did say yes to being one of the first checks in a 100 billion dollar startup

silicon valley is crazy this is my story of my two billion dollar success let's get into it coinbase is now worth a reported 100 billion dollars or more on the secondary markets by the time you're watching this who knows where the price will be in march of 2012 brian armstrong sent me 0.05 bitcoin

using his new startup called bitbank his idea was pretty simple make a clean well-lit place for people to buy and hold bitcoin while a lot of startups pivot the idea stayed the same this whole time for them the only thing that really changed was bitbank ended up changing their name to coinbase when it got that .05 bitcoin in 2012 bitcoin's total market cap was under a billion dollars today bitcoin's market cap is over a trillion dollars that fraction of a bitcoin was worth

about two cents then today it's worth about 2500 bucks a moment later right after i got that .05 bitcoin i got an email from brian he had built this prototype and got it online he had been coding like crazy the past few weeks he asked do you have any tips on finding co-founders and do you know anyone from your community who might be interested it's funny to think back on that because anyone who would have joined back then would be a multi-billionaire today here's what i wrote back

the hardest part about finding co-founders is you probably already know the right people but they might be doing other things you've got to show these people why this could be or already is much bigger than anything that they're doing right now it's about transferring your belief in this market and this product to others you already know your future co-founder but you both just don't know it yet and right about that time i was reading thousands of yc applications for the summer 2012 batch

i remember brian and i had voted infinity in the application review system paul graham built that click of a mouse guaranteed an interview at y combinator for them honestly i'm really thankful that i was a really small part of something that was a pivotal moment for coinbase and honestly y combinator even if brian didn't have a co-founder just yet you've got to remember even in 2012 bitcoin was a very fringe idea still brian was a solo founder building on something brand new at the time basically no one i mean no

one believed in bitcoin i found out about bitcoin originally on hacker news here was the very first mention of it on that website in 2009 if you read those comments they sum up how most people thought of it not likely cool maybe it's useful or i just don't get it that is what made brian so impressive today it feels like bitcoin is much more well known but at that moment very few people had any understanding of it let alone believe that it could be

useful to society as hard as it was for a founder to believe it was even harder for investors to believe most people said no but i didn't this investment is likely to be one of the best calls i've ever made and maybe ever will make here are the reasons why i said yes when most people said no first i was primed for the problem i knew how hard and terrible the experience was to buy bitcoin already after i read about it on hacker news i tried to buy it on the first website you

probably could buy it on which was mount gox it was a terrible experience and while bitcoin had captured my attention it was that bad design and horrible user experience that felt so wrong and i knew that that couldn't be the thing that brought bitcoin all the way next i was primed for the idea i believe that fiat currencies might fail because in 2005 i had also been an engineer working on software for peter deals hedge fund clarium capital management one of the

books they made us all read to train up for the role was the dollar crisis by richard duncan that book had primed me for the madness that happened in 1971. that was the year that richard nixon took the united states off the gold standard you can no longer trade your dollars for gold at that time dollars which were already the reserve currency of all other central banks suddenly became a fiat currency printable at will 25 of all dollars in circulation today

were printed just in the last year in 2020 thus bitcoin as louis pasteur once said chance only favors the prepared mind i feel very lucky to have been prepared for this idea when it came finally brian was a builder and personally i love funding builders it was very powerful for brian to be able to build that first version of coinbase and secure it himself with physical banks you protect physical money with physical bullets but

with internet money you protect it with great software engineering and secure systems we knew brian was an engineer and head of anti-fraud at airbnb which itself had just reached billion-dollar startup status and we knew anti-fraud at airbnb was actually like being part of the special forces i just knew that brian had been put through the paces by hackers daily it takes that kind of builder to walk away from that kind of opportunity to show you what the real future will be

that's what brian did for me here are the key lessons for you from the coinbase story first be contrarian and right can you find something that is fringe but ultimately right is there something from history or psychology or first principles bottom-up thinking that can help you justify your crazy idea and why it's going to take the world by storm sooner or later every crazy idea will have its day but only if it has a truly compelling pitch second be a builder the more you can do

the less you leave to chance and the more people will want to fund you join you or use your product or service do those things yourself to the extent you can i made a whole video about this called roll your way to a startup unicorn link in the description to check that out finally it's clear how powerful and useful it is for founders to be able to send a super compelling email remember when brian sent me .05 bitcoin it was worth only 23 cents but he

literally sent me free money it got my attention and it showed me brian was serious about building something genuinely useful that i could use in the end i was incredibly lucky that i got that email i got to meet brian and that i had the chance of funding this company for that i am so thankful i'm also really thankful for all of you watching right now there are so many businesses that need to be created and the reason why i'm putting these videos together is to help make that happen i hope these

videos are helpful to you and i hope you'll take a moment to click subscribe and hit the bell icon to get notifications for whenever i post be well and i'll see you next week [Music]

you
