Brian Armstrong says Coinbase started an internal venture bets program so great ideas—and great people—don’t walk out the door: “We have something internally called Next Bets. Twice a year, we have a panel where anybody in the company can come in and pitch and say, ‘I think we should be building this.’” “My fear was from reading things about Steve Wozniak at Hewlett-Packard. He famously went to HP and said, ‘I think we should build a personal computer.’ They said no, and he left to found Apple.” “The panel—there are different product group leaders who each have their own budget. They can decide to fund it out of their own budget.” “If you get any one of them to decide they want to fund it, you’re greenlit. It’s kind of like coming in and pitching an internal set of venture capitalists.” “The Next Bets are typically very small teams—like two or three people—with small amounts, but they’re really crazy, high-potential ideas where it’s okay if they don’t work, but the ones that do could be really massive.” “USDC came out of that. The Base blockchain came out of that. There’s a really cool one we’ll probably announce in a couple weeks.” @brian_armstrong with @ti_morse on @relentless(a16z)