> So why are they doing this? My sense is they see what’s coming.
I think this vastly overestimates how efficiently corporations are actually run.
I've been in meetings with executives at several public companies. When the topic of adjusting HC or spending money comes up, usually those conversations happen in a ratio of 50% politics, 40% wild-ass opinion, and 10% data. And almost always, the "data" are completely cherry-picked, highly speculative nonsense that someone asked a BI team to produce to support their own political agenda. Now, I wouldn't say that means Coinbase is healthy, or unhealthy, but IMO there is pretty much zero correlation between their actions and having some kind of crystal ball on the market.
Seconding this. I work as a contractor at a Fortune 100, and have been there long enough, and am now highly enough ranked, that I see most of the decision pipeline from the C suite down to the intern I'm helping. The a-rationality of it is shocking. No one two steps above me really understands what our project does or how it makes money, only how it plays into the spreadsheets; and yet decisions come down from above that layer that have blistering consequences for us, with no apparent relation to our reality, but probably make a cell on a spreadsheet green instead of red.
Arguably, that's just how well things can work at this scale. A CEO of a company that large who can see all the way down to me would be a nano-manager who should be fired. But it's still incredibly frustrating to be implementing decisions that affect me (such as a hiring or spending freeze), knowing that it was decided blindly with respect to me.
As I near retirement, I'm starting to believe that any organization run substantially by spreadsheets alone is too large, meaning that profit is wasted on organizational overhead, and investors should be dismantling such companies into smaller ones.
Having had the same experience this is why I prefer to invest in small cap companies. The amount of overhead and waste in big companies is insane and overwhelming.
One would think that there's an enormous chance for optimization at companies at this scale, especially because everyone at the bottom know what is/isn't working but for various reasons, companies are very bad at doing this.
> I wouldn't say that means Coinbase is healthy, or unhealthy
I’d say that a company that makes an offer today and reneges it tomorrow is not a healthy company. It’s certainly not a company I’d work for. We aren’t talking about contracts underwritten 3 years ago.
I think it makes a difference if the founders of the corporation are still the CEO. At any rate crypto goes through very quick bull/bear cycles, with the most recent downturn being in 2018 & 2019. And they can easily see broad volume stats across the industry (it's all on-chain after all).
Ive been in these types of meetings at public companies. I think this is too pessimistic. The bigger issue is even with reasonable intentions and data, their ability to predict the future is limited.
I.e., general rule, don't assign to malice which can be explained by incompetency.
I think this vastly overestimates how efficiently corporations are actually run.
I've been in meetings with executives at several public companies. When the topic of adjusting HC or spending money comes up, usually those conversations happen in a ratio of 50% politics, 40% wild-ass opinion, and 10% data. And almost always, the "data" are completely cherry-picked, highly speculative nonsense that someone asked a BI team to produce to support their own political agenda. Now, I wouldn't say that means Coinbase is healthy, or unhealthy, but IMO there is pretty much zero correlation between their actions and having some kind of crystal ball on the market.