Kings of Crypto: One Startup’s Quest to Take Cryptocurrency Out of Silicon Valley and Onto Wall Street by Jeff John Roberts

PART ONE
From Open 
Secret to 
Civil War

1
Brian Has
a Secret
Brian Armstrong stepped out of his car, felt soft California sunshine on his
bald head, and smelled eucalyptus. He gazed at the façade of Y
Combinator: the one-story building, just five miles from Google’s Mountain
View campus, looked more like a sleepy suburban office park than a
famous startup school that had educated the founders of Stripe, Dropbox,
and other billion-dollar companies. Brian didn’t care about the place’s
humdrum appearance. He knew who had gone there before him. The
founders of Airbnb, a company he’d just left, had come out of Y
Combinator, and so had the CEOs of other Silicon Valley stars like
Doordash, Twitch, and Reddit. Brian, pale and shy-looking at first glance,
exuded a quiet confidence from his trim frame and wasn’t bothered that
he’d broken up with his would-be cofounder just days before, making him
the rare entrepreneur to do the program alone. It was the summer of 2012,
and Brian was brimming with certainty that he would build Y Combinator’s
next famous startup.
It wasn’t always this way. Twelve miles to the south, in San Jose, is
where Brian had spent his early teenage years in the 1990s, restless and
vaguely unhappy. San Jose is the tenth-largest city in the country and the
hub of Silicon Valley, but it could still feel—then and now—like a lifeless

Kings of Crypto: One Startup’s Quest to Take Cryptocurrency Out of Silicon Valley and Onto Wall Street by Jeff John Roberts