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Coinbase Introduces Employee Pods
For the humans only // Illustration by Kate Walker
Coinbase announced that it’s reorganizing its workforce into “pods,” where humans work alongside AI agents.
The Big Picture: The AI-powered employee reorganization is upon us, with companies such as Meta and Block laying off workers en masse in an effort to move faster and operate more nimbly. It’s still too early to tell whether these bets on a smaller workforce will lead to bigger returns, but the idea has gained enough traction to potentially become a trend beyond Silicon Valley.
Between The Pods: Coinbase is downsizing, per The WSJ.
Coinbase announced that it was laying off 14% of its workforce.
The company is reorganizing its teams into pods made up of 1 to 8 employees working alongside several AI agents.
The pods will be “cross-functional,” meaning they could include roles like engineers, designers, applied scientists, and more, all optimized by AI that handles the majority of coding.
Clock Out: Coinbase’s goal is for each of these pods to operate like a little startup capable of developing and shipping products in record time. Rob Witoff, head of platform at Coinbase, said a pod of three people is currently working on an AI-advisor project that would’ve previously required 10 to 15 employees.
Deepak Singh, a VP at Amazon Web Services, said Coinbase’s pod makeover fulfills Bill Gates’ idea of the “two-pizza team” — the notion that teams should be small enough to feed with just two boxes of pizza. With Coinbase saying it wants to shrink teams down to a single person, those pods may soon have a lot of leftovers.
The Future: Working at a tech company could start to feel a bit like being an entrepreneur-in-residence — essentially, a startup founder operating within a larger organization.
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Today’s email was written by David Vendrell.
Edited by Nick Comney. Polled and Copy-edited by Kait Cunniff.
Published by Darline Salazar.