Emilie Choi of Coinbase: Why Crypto Winter is the Best Time to Build

**Hans Tung** (0:19)
Come to you from GGV Capital. This is Evolving for the Next Billion, where we interview local champions and global giants in tech industry who are shaping the lives of the next billion internet users.
My name's Hans Tung. I'm a managing partner at GGV Capital, and I've been working at and investing in startups across the US., China and other emerging markets for the last 20 years.

**Rita Yang** (0:45)
My name is Rita Yang. I'm the marketing manager at GGV Capital. On this show, you will hear stories about ambition, ingenuity and resilience unfolding every day from Singapore to St. Polo, Beijing to Bangalore.
We also recommend you to join our listeners community on Slack, WeChat and WhatsApp, where you can connect with like-minded people and attend our offline events across the world. You can join by visiting nextbn.ggvc.com.

**Hans Tung** (1:18)
Today on the show, we have my longtime friend, Emilie Choi. Emilie is the president and chief operating officer of Coinbase. Coinbase is the world's most trusted and secure platform to interact with crypto economy in Web3. Before joining Coinbase in 2018, Emilie served as vice president of corporate development for eight years at LinkedIn, where she oversaw more than 40 transactions, including the acquisitions of Linda, Bright, Nusselt, Connectifier, SliceShare and Flip Top.
She also worked at Corp DevRolls in Warner Brothers and Yahoo. It was at LinkedIn when I had the fortune of meeting her. Gosh, that's like 12 years ago now.

**Rita Yang** (1:54)
Coinbase is a GGV portfolio.
Besides running Coinbase on a day-to-day basis, Emilie also funded Coinbase Ventures and made it one of the most active corporate venture funds in the world. Emilie received her BA in economics from Johns Hopkins University and an MBA from the Wharton School. Welcome to the show, Emilie.

**Emilie Choi** (2:14)
Thank you so much for having me, Hans and Rita. By the way, I do remember, Hans, I was remembering our first meetings and I think it was in China. Reid Hoffman and I connected with you when we were looking to expand LinkedIn into China. So, and then that was before you were ever a part of GGV. So it has been quite a long time.

**Hans Tung** (2:33)
Yes, that was back in 2011 I'll never forget that trip. It was, you guys met Who's Who in Beijing and everyone was very interested to talk to you and Reid. And so it was, I enjoyed our conversation very much.
And what has impressed me since is that you had an amazing, amazing career. Extremely smooth on paper, but I'm sure you went through quite a bit of interesting twists and turns a lot of the way, with stops at amazing education institutions like Johns Hopkins and then you paid in Wharton, and then investment banking, Yahoo, Lincoln and now Coinbase. Can you kind of take us through your career and what were some of the interesting things that you did or you saw or you overcame to get you where you are today at this amazing position?

**Emilie Choi** (3:14)
Yeah, I think the big story of my life is that I have been drawn to really, really smart people. That's the thing that's been steady in everything I've ever worked in.
And so, because I'm drawn to incredible people, especially great founders and operators, I key off their energy, I derive a lot of incredible insights and learnings from them and then hopefully that's helped me be better and better at what I do. So, when I first came to Silicon Valley in 2003, I joined Yahoo, which I tell younger people, I swear was the epicenter of all consumer. I swear it was.
Yeah, and there were so many incredible people there, whether it was folks who were hired there like Jeff Weiner or acquired people like Stuart Butterfield and so on, people that I've learned from throughout my career. And I just learned so much from them. I would naturally gravitate to these people that I just knew were gonna be killers. I would learn how they did things and I would imitate those things if I thought they were gonna be effective in my own career. And so, after Yahoo, I went to business school, then went to LA to go to Warner Brothers and had a great experience there. I had the desire to go back to Silicon Valley and because I had worked with Jeff before, and I loved LinkedIn, I joined at the end of 2009 And that was an incredible journey because I got to be part of something that was private, then public, then acquired by Microsoft. You know, 400 employees to 13,000 employees. And that was just an incredible place for me to learn from the best of the best. And in particular, Reid Hoffman, Jeff Weiner and Kevin Scott, who is now the CTO of Microsoft.