{"id":29902,"date":"2026-05-06T13:28:28","date_gmt":"2026-05-06T13:28:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.jubi24.com\/?p=29902"},"modified":"2026-05-06T13:28:31","modified_gmt":"2026-05-06T13:28:31","slug":"coinbase-didnt-just-lay-off-14-of-its-staff-due-to-ai-it-replaced-managers-with-player-coaches-and-turned-its-org-chart-upside-down","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jubi24.com\/?p=29902","title":{"rendered":"Coinbase didn’t just lay off 14% of its staff due to AI. It replaced managers with \u2018player-coaches\u2019 and turned its org chart upside down"},"content":{"rendered":"


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Coinbase<\/a> CEO Brian Armstrong is adapting the company for the AI age, cutting 14% of employees and reimagining its org chart to bring the company back to its startup roots.<\/p>\n

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Armstrong said the layoffs, which could affect just under 700 employees based on Coinbase\u2019s last employee count,<\/a> are partly due to a crypto downturn<\/a>. Yet the main motivator is making the company\u2019s leadership structure flatter, enabling its employees to work fast, with AI at the forefront.<\/p>\n

In practice, this means cutting what Armstrong dubs \u201cpure managers,\u201d opting instead for \u201cplayer-coaches\u201d who oversee team members but are also strong individual contributors. The company is also planning to leverage its most AI savvy employees by creating \u201cAI-native pods,\u201d which could even include one-person teams directing agents that encompass the responsibilities of engineers, designers, and product managers.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe are not just reducing headcount and cutting costs, we\u2019re fundamentally changing how we operate: rebuilding Coinbase as an intelligence, with humans around the edge aligning it,\u201d Armstrong wrote in a post<\/a> on X<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The CEO said following the layoffs the company\u2019s leadership structure will also stretch no more than five layers below his own position. Flattening the leadership structure will increase efficiency, he argued.<\/p>\n

\u201cLayers slow things down and create coordination tax,\u201d Armstrong added in the X post.\u00a0<\/p>\n

For years, Armstrong has been all in on AI. After securing GitHub Copilot and Cursor licenses for every engineer, he \u201cwent rogue,\u201d asking engineers to get onboarded with the tools by the end of the week<\/a>, rather than the \u201cquarters\u201d some in the company had said it would take. Those who didn\u2019t meet the deadline had to face the consequences.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cSome of them had a good reason, because they were just getting back from some trip or something,\u201d Armstrong said last year on the Cheeky Pint <\/em>podcast with Stripe<\/a> CEO Patrick Collison. \u201cSome of them didn\u2019t, and they got fired.\u201d<\/p>\n

Over the past year, Armstrong said he has seen how AI has allowed engineers to ship in days what used to take a team weeks. Nontechnical employees are also using AI to write code while many of the company\u2019s workflows are being automated, transformations that Armstrong said influenced Tuesday\u2019s layoff decision.<\/p>\n

Coinbase did not immediately respond to Fortune<\/em>\u2019s request for comment.\u00a0<\/p>\n

To be sure, as Coinbase flattens its org chart, it is also increasing its employee-to-manager ratio, with each leader responsible for 15 or more reports. This follows the recent \u201cmegamanager<\/a>\u201d trend sweeping corporate America, where managers now oversee an average of 12.1 employees, up from 10.9 in 2024, according to Gallup<\/a>. Meta<\/a> may be the starkest example, with its new applied engineering team sporting a 50-to-1 employee-to-manager ratio<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Apart from Coinbase, other companies such as Block<\/a> and Snap<\/a> have laid off thousands, citing the rapid advancement of AI. Yet, Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, has also warned that some companies are \u201cAI washing,<\/a>\u201d or blaming unrelated layoffs on AI. Aleksandar Tomic, the associate dean for strategy, innovation, and technology at Boston College, told Fortune<\/em> some CEOs have used the pretext of AI restructures as a way to spin layoffs as a positive, rather than a negative, for their companies. At the same time, layoffs economy-wide remain low<\/a>, leaving these AI-related layoffs largely as a tech sector phenomenon.<\/p>\n

\u201cInstead of saying, \u2018Hey, we have some business issues that caused us to have layoffs,\u2019 which would be viewed negatively by the market, they say, \u2018Oh, we are laying off people to gain efficiency,\u2019 and then their stock price goes up,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Still, Armstrong said the layoffs and reorganization of Coinbase\u2019s leadership structure will help the company adapt for an era where \u201csmall, high context\u201d teams execute quickly. The old, unhurried way of working is disappearing fast.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cAI is bringing a profound shift in how companies operate, and we\u2019re reshaping Coinbase to lead in this new era,\u201d Armstrong said.\n<\/p><\/div>\n


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Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong is adapting the company for the AI age, cutting 14% of employees and reimagining its org chart to bring the company back to its startup roots. Armstrong said the layoffs, which could affect just under 700 employees based on Coinbase\u2019s last employee count, are partly due to a crypto downturn. Yet … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":29903,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"","fifu_image_alt":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-29902","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.jubi24.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/Coinbase-didnt-just-lay-off-14-of-its-staff-due.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jubi24.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29902","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jubi24.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jubi24.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jubi24.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jubi24.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=29902"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.jubi24.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29902\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":29904,"href":"https:\/\/www.jubi24.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29902\/revisions\/29904"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jubi24.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/29903"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jubi24.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=29902"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jubi24.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=29902"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jubi24.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=29902"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}