 This next session is going to be packed with actionable ideas that you can take back to your teams about how to approach the move to remote work. These insights come from Coinbase, the largest crypto exchange in the United States. Back in May 2020, when the world had been thrown into the largest remote work experiment, Coinbase's leaders quickly recognized that the future of their work was remote first. So in a few moments we will welcome to the stage two of the leaders who helped the company navigate this transformation. Dominique Bayer, who oversees the employee experience, the longing inclusion and diversity and HR enablement functions at Coinbase, and Daisy Linden, the director of employee experience, who stewards the company's transition from in office to remote first, leads the workplace experience and remote first teams, and supports cultural change and employer brand work. So needless to say, we are going to learn a lot from them today. They'll talk us through how to align your executive leadership on a path forward and how to overcome some of the common pitfalls along the way. So please welcome Dominique and Daisy. Hello everyone and welcome. My name is Daisy Linden and I'm here with my colleague Dominique Bayer. And we're talking about how Coinbase went remote first over the last 18 months today. So thank you so much for joining us. In today's conversation, we're going to dig into things like why it matters that you have a good reason for going remote. We're going to talk about design principles to help you shape the journey that you take if you decide to go more remote or remote first or remote only. And we're going to talk about the big hurdles to remote first that we have experienced ourselves so far. I'll just introduce myself briefly and then ask Dominique to do the same. I am the director of employee experience here at Coinbase. I've been with the company for three years and it is a big part of my job to think about how we operationalize this big decision we made a little over a year ago to be a remote first company. So Dominique, do you want to talk about yourself? Yeah, hi everyone. I'm thrilled that Daisy and I have the opportunity to share our story going through remote first. I lead everything related to employee experience at Coinbase as well as everything it takes to have a high functioning people organization related to people strategy, people analytics and people technology. And the fun fact about me is that I joined Coinbase in May of 2020. And if you're keeping track of timelines, that's about two months after the world basically went into shelter in place. And so I joined Coinbase in a totally remote capacity. And basically within the first two weeks of me joining, we announced that we were going to be permanently remote first and we were the first tech company to do that. So happy to share that perspective. Yeah, and I think we'll kick off with just talking about how that decision got made. At the time, just for context, I was actually leading our internal comms function. So that was the that was the scope that I had at the time and how I was touching this decision. But how did we get there? I will say that pre pandemic Coinbase was a very in office company. We were all about consolidating teams. We really believe they need to be physically proximate to do their best work. But as we started preparing for what was eventually the inevitable shift to work from home early last year, there was a conversation that kicked off among the E.T., our executive team, our E.T. about about being remote and the challenge is inherent in it. And we actually intentionally started ramping down the number of people who were in office before the sort of government mandated shelter in place happened because we wanted to minimize the shock to the system for Coinbase. And because we wanted to make sure we could do it in sort of a compliant and a safe way for our customers and for our employees. But as we started doing that, as we as we reckoned with bullet three here, we have to do this, we kind of realized that being remote wasn't slowing us down. We were still hiring like crazy. We were still building amazing products. We were we were not losing any of the the momentum that we felt like we might have before we were forced to go remote. And so it was this incredible moment of a forced experiment that we had to go all in on and had this opportunity to ask ourselves, should should we do this forever? Should we stay remote? And to answer that question, we had to come up with the rationale that made sense for Coinbase. We didn't want to just do it because of momentum. That wouldn't make sense. So for us, I think what we ended up identifying were three big, three big wise, three big reasons why it made sense for us to be a remote first company in the future. First was incredible access to diverse talent. Coinbase has as a cultural tenant the notion of top talent in every seat. And the idea that you can only recruit from driving distance around your offices is kind of intention with that idea of top talent in every seat. So being a remote first company would earn us the ability to really get top talent in every seat. Second was alignment with the core principles of crypto, which is obviously a fundamentally decentralized technology and making a big symbolic move like this, I think was a in some ways like a statement of our of our support and belief and commitment to those principles of crypto. And then finally, and not least, was autonomy and flexibility for employees. We have always tried to be a really employee first company where we give lots of autonomy and trust to our people. And this felt like an extension of that. So for those reasons, we decided that post pandemic Coinbase would be a remote first company. And we didn't know this at the time, but being really decisive, we were one of the very first companies to make this real decision in the wake of having to go work from home for everybody. Being so decisive so early on gave us a ton of space over the last 18, 12 to 18 months to actually think about what it means to be a remote first company. And that was the kind of the tradeoff we made. We didn't necessarily have all the answers when we made the decision, but making that decision has allowed us the space to go develop those answers. Dominique, what am I missing? What would you add? Yeah, I think, you know, hindsight is 2020. And I think it's it's you've just put a very beautiful narrative around it. I think as as a relatively new person starting and really coming in at the middle of I think this conversation. I think what was very clear to me was how quickly we as Coinbase are able to make decisions if we think they're the right thing to do. It didn't mean that we had figured everything out and we didn't turn over every stone in some deep analytical exercise. But I think we identified pretty quickly, like what are the key things that would make the decision? Do we think it's true? And then once we made the announcement, the work that was handed off to me was, OK, make this the right decision. We made a bet here. So like, let's make sure that we can play it out. And that was pretty exciting, kicked off our journey. But I think also, like you said, being so decisive early, instead of hemming and hawing about the right information and how to make the decision, we were able to put all that energy into creating the best future of work for Coinbase. So I guess that's one thing that I would share to the audience, which is, you know, you might be in various phases of this. You probably have employees who are just like clamoring to come back to the office. But there's other employees who probably had a new type of freedom during this time that also don't want to give it up. And in some ways, deciding earlier versus later just means that you can devote a lot more energy into really leaning into the future. And I think that's one of the things we have done. Yes, like you said, you you you entered the story kind of midway through the conversation and you were charged with how do we how do we operationalize this? How do we make this big aspiration into a plan? So I'll flip to our next slide so then you can talk a little bit about how you thought about it. Yes, yes. And a little bit more about me and my background coming to Coinbase. This is actually the first time I was in a people function or even an employee experience function. But my background is actually much more in I would call it like business generalist roles. I started in management consulting when I moved over into tech. I served in a role called this ops, which is very strategic and operational and then moved into growth and product roles. And so in many ways, not only was I coming in new to Coinbase, new challenge, but also sort of a new function. That said, I would say that fundamentally this work was pretty textbook, like nebulous, large problem that just needs to be structured, broken down into key pieces of work. And then executed against. So in that way, you know, it was actually very cool for me to come in and be able to do this. So first things first, you know, we really needed to be clear about our goals and articulating what our charter was. And one of the things that was very inspiring for me and very much in the spirit of Coinbase and our bent toward innovation is in May of 2020, there was just a lot of conversation about how sucky it was to work from home for some folks, you know, not having the same benefits of the office and all of that. And when we talked about being remote first, we said, well, we can't just try and replicate what was in the office. We've been doing it for two months. There's there's no replication for getting coffee in person. But there are a whole lot of other benefits, not having to commute, having more flexibility on your time, actually not having FaceTime weirdly. And so we we set out a charter that was that, you know, we weren't trying to just like replicate or equalize the remote experience. But actually that we had this opportunity to create a better Coinbase and and to really lean into how do we take this opportunity to in some ways, like, right the wrongs with the sort of like legacy in office structure. And so some of those things, for example, were that, you know, before before the pandemic, about 90 percent of our employee base was in the SF Bay area and 10 percent were either in global offices or remote. And that 10 percent, regardless of where they were, felt like they were second class citizens that didn't have the same access to learning and development, that they were sort of this anomaly. And in a remote world or in a remote first world, that actually went away. Everyone was more on equal territory. So things like that we really wanted to lean into. And so that was our charter to be a better version of Coinbase. And then once we aligned on our charter, then it was really about, OK, next step, how do we create some structure on this? Like, what are our core principles? And Daisy, I think there's another slide here if you want to flip toward it. So we aligned on five core design principles. And again, because we were dealing with such a nebulous problem, we didn't know all of the decision points. And we wanted to be able to make decisions quickly without always having to check in with our executive team. And so we aligned on these five design principles to shape all of our subsequent decision making. So the first was about maximizing choice for employees. And as Daisy mentioned earlier, like, we actually think this is the biggest value cap for remote first is this idea of offering optionality, offering flexibility. One of the ways I describe this is we, again, very much came from a office culture that was, I would say, pretty quintessential, like best in class tech offices. You go in, you know, meals are provided, snacks are everywhere. And that I think for the last 20 years, I call this the Google effect. That's become the norm of what it means to offer a best in class experience. And when we said we were going to remote first, we realized, gosh, we can't we can't rest on the laurels of having this like dynamic office. So we have to offer something else. And that something else is optionality and flexibility. Be able to work where you want to work. The second design principle was. Because we were going to continue to have both offices and people working from home, we knew that there are going to be different experiences and we it was important for us to build equitable experiences, but not identical experience. Like I mentioned, there's no way to replicate an in-person meeting virtually as much as we all have tried. It's different. We know that. So that's not what we were even trying to aspire to do. But we wanted to make sure that whether you are working from a home office or coming into the office, that either way, you are having, you know, really a phenomenal employee experience and the choices horse. The third principle is around ensuring equal access to opportunity growth and inclusion. And so, like, you know, I think we can all probably identify with either having experienced it or the fear of being a remote worker and and somehow, like, you know, winnowing your career opportunities, you're not going to be seen as much. People are going to think you're not committed. You know, there's all of these old preconceived notions about what it means to be a remote worker. And we knew that in order for remote first to be successful, we actually needed to change the composition of of who's coming into the office. If we said we were going to go remote first and 90 percent of people were still based in this SF Bay area, nothing was going to change. And one of the biggest blockers to making people really feel comfortable that they could move to, you know, Cincinnati, Ohio and still have the same career opportunities was to make sure that they understood that we didn't see that as stepping back or caring less about work just because you want to maybe, you know, make other decisions in your life. That's good for your quality of life or well being. So making sure that this was true and ensuring equal access was is pretty important to us still is the fourth design principle was around letting the culture drive the decisions we wanted to make. And so, you know, this is really when tackling remote first, there's actually so many different decisions you can make with a financial lens. Like, you know, I if you wanted to cut costs, you might make certain decisions. Or if you wanted to. Well, I actually I think the cutting costs one is probably the biggest one that comes up with remote first. But really making sure that we weren't we weren't making decisions because we were trying to optimize something in the business, but rather that we really wanted to continue to hone and foster this culture. And so really thinking about what's the culture that we want. And then that's what would drive our decision making. And then lastly, this this has actually always been a principle of Coinbase, this notion of default of trusting employees. But we wanted to make sure to call out and to continue to really cherish that principle because I don't know about all of you. But certainly when you when we first were entering a remote first world, there was a lot of buzz about new software and technology to be able to monitor, you know, whether employees were working. I think there's like some software to see if like people are actually typing on their keyboards or not. Also, we had adopted or we soon realized that we were going to do Geo based compensation philosophy, which means that we do pay differently based on where you're working. And there are all ways that, you know, you can imagine employees trying to game the system or things like that. And what we didn't want to do is to vote like, you know, a disproportionate amount of resources to compliance. But rather, we wanted to continue to have this trust with employees where we would set policies that we thought were the best for the culture and we would, you know, default to an honor code. So those were our design principles. I think they've served us pretty well. I don't know, Daisy, what do you think? Have we have we stayed true to these? I think so. I actually had a friend ask me when I was telling them about the course of this work, whether these design principles are sort of just like window dressing or writing on a wall or sort of socked away in a Google Doc somewhere. And I think the reality is we do revisit these quite often. And they I think have continued to be the North Star for this work, along with the charter as kind of the macro goal. And they're things that I think we can honestly point to with employees and say this is this is the future of work that we're building at Coinbase and that these are the principles around which we're building that future of work. So, you know, I feel great about these. I feel like we did this was a good early piece of work that we were that we were able to do around around about first. Yeah, if anything, no, go ahead. I was going to say, if anything in retrospect, I now understand how much these have saved us as we were going through the decision making, especially when we were working with so many different stakeholders internally who are probably optimizing from from their lens and really allowing us to almost like cut through organizational clutter. Yeah, I mean, and talking about the number of stakeholders and partners, like it very much does take a village to to move a company from in office to remote first and part of the way that we included a ton of teams really early on was the way that you broke down this big question of what does it mean to be a remote first point base into a series of really discreet questions? So maybe we can talk about that next. Yeah, sounds great. So it's always nice to have the theoretical like what's the charter we're trying to go after and what are our principles? But yes, as you mentioned, like there's brass tax work that needs to happen to actually go from being again, a predominantly in office culture to being one that is remote. And so, you know, pretty soon after this announcement was made, to be honest, the thought in my head was like, OK, shit. Oops, was pretty quickly, I realized we really need to break down what what is this like bigger amorphous problem into discreet pieces. And so through a series of brainstorming days with you, you were very involved in those early days. We basically distilled this work down into nine key questions and actually one step further, prioritize those questions based on first. What we call P zero priority number one was about the information we thought we owed it to employees to know right away. And so this is fast forward. This is now June of 2020. We've been remote now for three months. People are starting to want to permanently move to, you know, other places in the country. They don't know if it should be a permanent move or a temporary move. And we felt like we owed it to them to tell them. Number one, is your job going to permanently be remote? And we actually did find that 95 percent of our roles will be permanently remote, but five percent were not. So people in that five percent group needed to know that they couldn't permanently move or the repercussions of that. Number two, I mentioned this earlier, but we ultimately recommitted to our geobased compensation philosophy. That's something we had before remote, but we recommitted to it. And so people needed to understand if you were to move to, you know, go back to your hometown, what's the compensation of that? And then three, we also felt like we needed to tell people if there's anything tricky related to things like visas or anything else that would add additional complication to whether they moved or not. So again, I would call those like the table stakes questions that we just felt like we owed it to employees to tell them as soon as possible. So they wouldn't be in limbo. And then the next set of questions that we prioritized really had to do with what I would call the new piping of the company. And so that was a perspective on how we create those equitable working experiences. What is it? What does it look like in office in the future? What does it look like at home in order to appropriately set expectations and plan for that? Number two, how do we maintain security security? You know, I can't underscore how important security is for us. And it's one thing when it's fairly well contained within, you know, one or two geos. It's a lot harder when you've got basically an infinite number of offices. And then the third is around tooling and documentation and what we needed to support a remote first headquarters, if you will. And so, you know, I think when we think about this tier of questions, there's actually a lot of crutches that you have when you're all co-located. You can almost be like a little rougher on the edges with policy or cultural norms, because there are a lot of, you know, unspoken cues you get in the office. And this piece of work was actually about saying, well, if you don't get the crutch of being co-located, what is the other infrastructure you need? And then the last set of questions, I would say, we're really about how do we optimize now within this structure? And so it was about, you know, how do we effectively collaborate and connect while working? How do we train and develop employees, especially earlier career employees where there's so much about apprenticeship that's part of the job? And then lastly, how do we identify and recognize employees? Specifically, you know, we were realizing that there are a lot of fears that our employees had about having their work be invisible. If people didn't see them in the office, didn't see them working late, you know, they didn't bump into Brian Armstrong in the lunch line. And in truth, that's actually something that I think is actually a problem in the legacy structure. The fact that, you know, even if we didn't want it, there was some notion that there was a FaceTime culture or on the flip side, if you're like me, a working mom and have to leave at 430 every day, that somehow that that would be a ding. Anyways, all of this is to say, I think determining what our new recognition signals we're going to be to make sure that when people are toiling away in their home offices that they still feel like their work is seen. So those were our nine key questions and and we organize them in three different phases doing this and being able to articulate the structure early, I think gave people a lot of calm and confidence that this decision that seemed like we made relatively quickly actually had some order to it and that we were methodically working through what I would describe as like the the biggest fears in our employees minds. Yeah. And I think one of the one of the things that was really valuable about the way we structured this work was we actually gave people internal deadlines that we were working to. So they knew that on September 1st, no matter what, they were going to know about how we were thinking about tooling or equitable experiences. And by what was I guess it would have been October 1st, we told them about our new meeting norms and how we're thinking about recognition for the future. So I think just putting those lines in the sand and if I could give advice to companies who are on this journey, like giving yourselves those internal milestones. And even if you don't know exactly what the answer is going to be by those dates, giving employees a sense of when they will have more clarity, I think can calm a lot of the noise that you can feel internally, which is a totally natural reaction to that ambiguity of, I don't know what's coming next. I don't know what working here is going to feel like in the future. So so, yes, we pulled together teams to answer each of these questions or V one of our answers to these questions in the back half of last year. And those teams were comprised of subject matter experts of natural owners in the organization of passionate employees. And we made sure to have like a voice of the customer on each of those teams. So people who were actually going to be on the receiving end of these answers to make sure that we were not kind of designing in a vacuum. So I'll say and I say V one, because I think this work, you know, different for each of these questions, but we continue to iterate. This is definitely a journey of evolution. But I mean, that's that's where I wanted us to go next, which is when we look back on the last 18 months, like what are the big wins? What are the big challenges that we uncovered? And since I'm already talking, I'll just share what I think first, which is empowering employees. I think one of the big gaps that we experience with an entirely remote culture is loss of connection, especially because Coinbase has been growing so fast during this time that we're really wanting to put it in the hands of employees to stay connected with their colleagues. So one thing we did was implement a monthly coffee budget for all employees to expense coffee or Boba or whatever they wanted, just for the purposes of connecting with a colleague, maybe someone on their team, maybe someone they've never met before, but really empowering them to continue that sort of investment in relationship making for themselves. And the other one that I think we we managed was this is this is not written down anywhere. But I think Dominique and I and the working team have sort of this informal ship it at 80 percent rule, which the reason I relate this to trust and transparency is because I think we're clear about that with employees. We we have been pretty consistent with them that we're going to share our best guess at this, our best answer as of today. It might change and we probably don't have all of the FAQ answers quite yet, but ask them when you have those questions and we will do our best to find the answers as quickly as possible. The idea being if we wait until we're at 100 percent fidelity to ship something, a decision, a new design for a comp program or something like that, we're probably taking too long. And we've probably we've probably overthought something that we should have just tried to put out there and get some feedback on. But Dominique, what would you add? Yeah, so, you know, it's funny, what keeps going through my mind, Daisy, is you keep saying the last 18 months. And I'm like, no, it hasn't been 18 months. Um, but I I actually would call that a win. I mean, I I it's easy looking back now and say, oh, this is, you know, it's very well organized and all that. And I think it was. But I do think that, you know, being committed to this journey that we're on and having really turned over, I think the most important stones, I think, honestly, to me, that's the biggest win that we are where we are. And it no longer feels like we are designing a remote first reality, but that we're actually in that remote first reality now. So much so that Daisy, I think when you joined the team, your role was director of remote first. And we realized that doesn't make sense because remote first is everything now. And so it really is just employee experience. Yeah. Well, the one thing I didn't mention this slide was meeting proliferation, which is probably a whole other conference talk in and of itself. So if you want to talk about meeting overload, you can find me on LinkedIn. But I will just say that I think everyone has experienced this. Going fully remote means more meetings. And so now we're making efforts to wind that back and be really, really, really thoughtful about what the occasions are that require an investment in a synchronous meeting and where our employees and our teams should be really focused on a sync work instead. But definitely a lot to continue to improve there on our side and that will for sure be an 18 month journey. Definitely. That is that is probably a forever journey. So well, we'll wrap up here with our last last slide and and on a real high note with what keeps us up at night about remote first. Do you want to do you want to jump in first? Yeah, well, as much as I had just said that we're now in remote first, you and I talk all the time about how the proof is going to be in the pudding when, you know, offices have gone back to the to the old world where they're open, we're going to have some people in office, some people at home. And that's where there's going to be people are really going to realize that for those people who want to go in office, but that experience is going to be different. And it's not going to be the same as when that was the center of energy. And so I think we're as well prepared as we can be. But I guess I'm expecting still some growing pains there. I'm going to kick the culture one over to you. Yeah, I think one of the things that I've been talking about with our talent team, because they get questions about this a lot, is what does it mean for culture to have a company that has grown so much as as an exclusively remote company and how has culture shifted and what are we worried about? I think what we've got going for us is as a founder led company, I think so much of the culture emanates from the exec team and from Brian. And I think that will continue to be true. But I think that that massive growth has had just as much an impact on our culture as going remote first has. And you can't really discount either of the two. They're both huge shifts for us. And so, yeah, what keeps me up at night is how do we I mean, so much of culture is about communication. How do we make sure that new new joiners really understand what they're getting themselves into when they join Coinbase and all of the good and all of the hard and equipped managers to underscore that? I think it's it's it's honestly it's a communications challenge going forward. And I think that only gets more complex as we continue to scale and scale in new countries where we haven't had historical presence. That's definitely the culture piece. And you were you were the the one who thought of this operational backbone question, so maybe you can touch on that. Yes, I so I think I have more appreciation for all of the things that happen on the back end in order to fuel a great employee experience. And so I think you and I have really leaned in on the innovations around employee experience, the employee facing stuff and have realized through this work just everything it takes to power 2000 home offices or make sure that we can ship laptops to all sorts of new company countries, etc. And so I think it can't be discounted just how much operational change there is on the back and that we hope is going to be seamless to employees, but certainly can't be discounted. Yeah, that's definitely a huge part of this work going forward. And I think the good news is the silver lining of what keeps us up at night maybe is the opportunity to build these back end systems to really scale as we go from thousands to tens of thousands of people. So and maybe just highs and lows the journey, I can start really quick. Mine are linked. I think the high of this journey is consistently seeing how happy many of our employees are with this decision that we've made. And when we do when we do surveys, seeing comments like I joined Coinbase because it's a remote first company or even over the last year, people who are so happy to have spent more time with their kids and with their families than they would have spent in the car driving down 280 or 101 in the Bay Area for a couple hours a day. So that that makes me feel really good about this journey. And I think the flip side of that is that remote first isn't for everybody. And while everyone who has joined us in the last maybe not 18 months, but 12 months has done so with the full knowledge that Coinbase is now a remote first company, we have hundreds of people who joined the company at a time when the agreement was we're an in office company. And luckily, lots of those people are flexible and curious and into this idea. But some of them aren't. And it I never want to make things harder for employees than we have to. And so I think it is a bummer that we can't be all things to all people, I guess, is my low. How about you? Yeah, well, I will describe a very discreet low. And that is when I had to send an email to the company saying that we are planning to close our San Francisco Headquarter office. That was a low, not that I didn't actually think it was the right decision in order to break the mindset of having a headquarters and really being able to leave into remote first, which was the reason. But again, just knowing that so many people were looking forward to a world where the coronavirus was behind us and they'd be back in the office. And I could almost I could feel that excitement to return to the world that was and this was really just like almost like the harshest way of saying that world is over and it was a necessary step. But like absorbing what I felt like was the pain and disappointment. And so that was I would call that a low. But for me, ultimately, the high in all of this work is that I truly believe that being a remote first company is going to allow us to be much more inclusive, a much more diverse and really create a place where everyone can be successful regardless of their background. And I think that's the future. I think it has to be the future. And so I'm just super excited about our ability to tap into more diverse talent pools. I personally feel like it is game changing for any working parent to be able to both lean into your career, but also be there for your kids when you need to be. And so, yeah, I'm just I'm just really excited about like the future of work that's being created. That's totally different from what we've experienced in the last 20 years. So good. And so true. Well, thank you, everyone. That's all we've got for today. We've got a link here and we'll also drop it in the chat to our original blog post announcing we were going remote first, which has some more of the nitty gritty behind the thought process of that decision. If you want to check it out. And of course, we would not be Coinbase if we did not end on the note of if you're interested in this journey, if you are interested in Coinbase, definitely check out Coinbase.com slash careers. We would love to have a conversation and it's been a pleasure and Dominique, so nice chatting with you about this. Oh, you too, Daisy. Just another day for us. We'll enjoy the rest of the sessions, everyone, and thanks for joining.