Brian Armstrong Quotes

The U.S. finally feels like it's back on offense. Innovation is happening and is encouraged.

It's hard not to be an optimist right now. We're in a golden age for freedom.

Optimism is a moral duty

It’s healthy to have semi-irrational beliefs.

“Whether you think you can, or you think you can't - you're right” is a great quote that I think about a lot. Being conscious about your attitude makes a huge difference.

It's pretty simple: economic freedom is good for the world. Property rights, sound money, reducing friction in the economy, etc has led to enormous prosperity. Crypto is the best invention we have to enable this globally. We'll keep building the tools to bring it to 1B+ people.

It’s never as good or as bad as it seems. Keep building!

if you were designing money from scratch today, you’d get crypto.

People generally don't go after their most ambitious ideas. But that's what creates the most value. Plus there's fewer people who play in that space.

Go for the hard thing.

Incumbents love to try regulatory capture, when they should just embrace new opportunities to grow

Count me as someone who believes AI should not be regulated

We need to make progress on it as fast as possible for many reasons (including national security). And the track record on regulation is that it has unintended consequences and kills competition/innovation, despite best intentions.

We’ve enjoyed a golden age of innovation on software and the internet largely due to it not being regulated. AI should do the same. The best protection is to decentralize it and open source it to let the cat out of the bag.

The number one requirement to be a successful entrepreneur is having an unreasonable amount of determination.

Be stubborn on goals, and persistent in finding ways around anything that might stop you getting there.

I got to see the issues of money first-hand from being an early employee at Airbnb.

Trying to move money around 100+ countries wouldn’t work properly. It was (and still is) very slow, with constant delays, high fees, and it only works in certain countries.

Crypto fixes this.

One of my favorite lessons I’ve learnt from working with smart people:

Action produces information. If you’re unsure of what to do, just do anything, even if it’s the wrong thing. This will give you information about what you should actually be doing.

Sounds simple on the surface - the hard part is making it part of your every day working process.

People are capable of far more than they think, on far shorter timelines. Problems expand to fill the time you give them.

At some point with enough regulation producing fines, it borders on looting.

You can have more fines from over-regulation, or you can have a growing economy, but you can't have both.

Five freedoms in crypto:

1) Freedom to control your own money
2) Freedom to move your own money
3) Freedom to invest your own money
4) Freedom to preserve the value of your own money
5) Freedom to raise money