That email came from Olaf Carlson-Wee, who in 2012 had just graduated from Vassar College with a degree in sociology He d written his undergraduate thesis on bitcoin and the larger implications of open source finance.
He was also one of Coinbase s earliest users, he said in a 2016 interview with the Y Combinator blog, and he wanted to work there. I literally cold emailed jobs@coinbase and said, I love bitcoin. Here s my thesis. I ll do any job, Carlson-Wee told Y Combinator.
After becoming employee No. 1 with a job in customer support at the then-fledgling company, for his three years there, Carlson-Wee was paid entirely in bitcoin, according to the Wall Street Journal, with a starting salary of $50,000.
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The Friendly Assassin
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By Jeff Kauflin, Maria Abreu and Antoine Gara
David Vélez set out to kill off the fat fees and lousy service of Brazil’s big banks. The operation succeeded beyond his wildest dreams: Today, his no-fee Nubank is the most valuable digital bank in the world, with 35 million customers and he’s gunning for more.
In the summer of 2012, David Vélez moved to São Paulo with a newly minted Stanford MBA and a plum job as a Sequoia Capital partner. Douglas Leone, the head of Sequoia, had recruited the then-30-year-old Colombian to stake the venture capital powerhouse’s claim in Brazil a youthful, resource-rich country of 200 million that had grown 4% a year for a decade to become the world’s seventh-largest economy. But on October 1, Leone called Vélez with bad news: After considering the uninspired pitches from Brazilian entrepreneurs and hearing that top-ranked University of São Paulo had produced just 42 computer science graduates the