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Season 3 Kickoff 🎙️ Paul Grewal: Chief Legal Officer @ Coinbase
Welcome to Season 3, friends! We’ve got QUITE the lineup for you. For our season premiere, I welcomed Paul Grewal, Chief Legal Officer at Coinbase.
Paul is currently the Chief Legal Officer at Coinbase, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange that IPO’d in April at a valuation of $65 billion. A friendly face in the world of law and tech, Paul previously served as Vice President and Deputy General Counsel at Facebook. He began his career as an intellectual property attorney and as a U.S. Magistrate Judge for the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California He sat on the bench for 6 years, and during his judge service, Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts appointed him to the Magistrate Judge Education Committee. Paul holds a degree in Civil and Environmental engineering from MIT, and a JD from UChicago. For all you aspiring lawyers and crypto fans, this IS the episode for you!
Excerpts from the pod below:
Initially, you served as a US Magistrate judge for the Northern District of California. Then you took a left turn into tech by joining Facebook as Deputy General Counsel. What was your path to getting there?
To understand how I got to Facebook, I think it's helpful to understand life before Facebook. As you mentioned, I was a partner at a major law firm trying technology cases for well over a decade before I was appointed to the Northern District bench in 2010. And I was relatively young — I was 40 — when I was put on the court. I went on the bench with no fixed notion that I would serve for the rest of my career, even though most judges — certainly most judges in the federal courts — tend to view becoming a judge as a capstone event.
In 2016, I was continuing to enjoy the privilege and honor of serving as a judge and also the great fun of being in a courthouse every day, when I heard about the opportunity at Facebook to lead a global litigation team and scale an organization in a way that I had never done before. It was an opportunity to apply lessons that I had learned over 15+ years of practice. And it was too interesting an opportunity for me to say no to. I figured that whether I succeeded or failed in the corporate world, I would learn a ton; and I would get to do a bunch of things that I hadn't ever done before with a bunch of people I'd never known before. And I would have some great stories to tell at the end, one way or the other. And all that proved to be true.
What was it like going to work in a sector that you'd often been ruling against?
Well, the first thing that you learn as a judge in any court is that your job is to apply the law, regardless of where the chips may fall as a result of that decision. I never went into any case involving a tech company thinking about what that might mean in terms of my reputation or how happy the particular company would be on any given day because that's not the oath that I took. The oath that I took was to uphold the Constitution and to apply the law impartially. And that's what I tried to do every day.
Now, that said, I issued all kinds of rulings as a judge that I think the tech industry was unhappy with. At the same time, I issued plenty of other rulings that I suspect they were much more happy with. It just wasn't relevant to my calculus. And so when I decided to leave public service and re-enter private life by joining Facebook, I hope that the most important quality that the tech industry took from my service was that I did my best to be impartial, and that I wasn't afraid to call balls and strikes and speak truth to power when it was necessary.
So you spend 4 years at Facebook, and then Coinbase comes and effectively poaches you. What is the crux of your role at Coinbase?
We have our fair share of litigation, though it would be a stretch to suggest it's anything like the docket that Facebook has today all over the world. But we face our fair share of class action litigation and commercial disputes. We also are the object of some interest of government: regulators and investigators, and that requires us to respond to subpoenas and formal process that we receive from time to time.
But the heart of what I'm trying to do at Coinbase is establish a team — that itself is growing rapidly on a similar scale to what I experienced at Facebook — and culture and principles surrounding that team that empower the people that work with me to make their own judgment calls and provide their own advice day in and day out on the range of issues that crypto and Coinbase face. Thats means a lot of thinking about the right way to get to a regulated state. When it comes to crypto, we've been super clear, long before I arrived, but certainly since I've arrived, that Coinbase welcomes sound regulation. And that's a pretty radical position to take in the world of crypto, given its anti-regulatory, even anti-government origins.
But one of the things that I've enjoyed getting to understand and then help articulate to many regulators and policymakers is that whatever early ideological leanings people had when it came to crypto… those leanings have evolved massively as this niche technology has emerged as a fundamental financial service for the world. Getting people to understand that a lot of the early history of crypto is not nearly as relevant to the way things work today, and that companies like Coinbase are very interested in developing sound principles that allow us to make rational decisions in running our business and expanding our platform is really what I view as the heart of what I'm here to do.
Catch the full episode on Apple, Spotify, or on our website!
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