Coinbase’s first employee cold-emailed founders and was paid in bitcoin for 3 years

The founder of a cryptocurrency hedge fund, Olaf Carlson-Wee was the first employee at the biggest US bitcoin exchange, Coinbase, and he was hired after he sent a 90-page undergraduate thesis on “Bitcoin and the larger implications of open source finance” to the founders. According to Business Insider, after graduating from New York's Vassar College with an undergraduate degree in Sociology, Olaf decided to send an “annoyingly long” cold email to Coinbase’s founders. He revealed that as he was one of Coinbase’s earliest users and grew determined to work with the company, which is why he sent his thesis to the founders, hoping to land an interview.

Olaf said that about five minutes after his email, he heard back from one of the co-founders, Fred Ehrsam, who asked if they could hop on a Skype call. He said that he spoke with the Ehrsam for about 20 minutes, and the crypto enthusiast was even asked to come prepared two presentations at an in-person interview in San Francisco. Further, Olaf said that his first presentation was on the pharmacological induction of lucid dreams and the second was on his high-level strategy for Coinbase on security. 

Olaf’s $50,000 salary was paid in Bitcoin 

Following the in-person interview, Olaf was then asked to tackle a “really brutal mathematics problem” while Ehrsam went to talk over the hiring decision with the second co-founder Brian Armstrong. Olaf said that he had figured out the problem way faster than he would have expected. But he was still grilled by Armstrong for another hour with questions like “what do you wanna do with your life?,” “What drives you as a person?” and “what’s a belief you have that is extremely unpopular?”

Four days later, Olaf was then asked to work a two-week paid trial in customer support and eventually landed a formal job offer. During his three-year stint at Coinbase, Olaf said that his $50,000 starting salary was paid entirely in bitcoin. He now runs his own crypto hedge fund called Polychain Capital, managing assets worth more than $300 million, which has secured investments from Coinbase’s Ehrsam and venture capitalists like Sequoia Capital and Founders Fund. 

(Image: Twitter)