In April 2018, Coinbase acquired Earn.com a San Francisco based startup for around 100 million dollars. Earn.com founded in 2013 as 21.co has an interesting story of how they got out from an $80 million debt and then sold the company for nearly $100 million to Coinbase. CEO of Earn.com joined Coinbase as CTO, and other employees were also transferred to Coinbase. From a hit mining hardware startup to becoming the first social-commercial network, Earn.com’s journey is like no other.
The revival of 21.co as Earn.com
Earn.com was founded by Balaji Srinivasan, Daniel Firu, Lily Liu, Matt Pauker, Nigel Drego and, Veerbhan Kheterpal in 2013 as a startup that sold bitcoin mining hardware. Initially, the company saw huge success and was able to get investments worth 120 million dollars. In 2014 when bitcoin’s price crashed, the company saw a massive downfall and struggled to generate any revenue. This happened with other bitcoin mining companies as well including Hashfast, Cointerra, Alydian, Aquifer, and many others.
Even though Balaji co-founded the startup, but he wasn’t involved in it operationally, at the time he was working at Andreessen Horowitz as a General Partner. In 2015 Balaji Srinivasan was appointed as new CEO of the company, Balaji had a very tough job in his hand. According to him, when he was appointed as CEO, he had limited capital, and he had to come up with a new product soon. With the help of the new team, they came up with an idea of a paid email where a commercial email sender would pay the reader in digital currency for his time. Thus Earn.com came into existence. Earn.com was successful, and it earned millions of dollars in revenues. Thousands of people signed up on earn.com to earn free cryptocurrency.
What Balaji did with 21.co was remarkable, in less than two years he managed to turn a startup that was on the verge of bankruptcy to multimillion-dollar profit business. In an interview to CoinDesk Balaji described Earn.com as the first commercial social network,” combining elements of LinkedIn and Amazon.
Sucess of the Earn.com attracted many eyes from the crypto industry. Coinbase and Earn.com were in talks for a deal for a long time, but in April 2018, Coinbase acquired the Earn.com.
Balaji Srinivasan, The CEO that changed everything.
Balaji is one of the most respected technologists in the crypto field and is considered one of the technology industry’s true originalists. He has extensive experience in the area before co-founding earn.com he worked as a General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz. And before that, he was CTO at Councyl, where he earned the Wall Street Journal Innovation Award for Medicine. Balaji has a BS, MS, and Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering. He has also taught data mining, stats, and blockchain courses at the Stanford.
With his innovative thinking and experience, he managed to dig out 21.co from $80 million debt and turned it into a highly profitable business. According to industry experts, that being able to appoint Srinivasan as CTO is the most significant achievement of this Coinbase’s acquisition. However, Srinivasan quit the Coinbase in March of this year citing personal reasons.
Earn.com acquired by Coinbase
In April 2018, Coinbase acquired the Earn.com, and Balaji Srinivasan will lead the technical team as CTO of the company. In a blog on their website, Coinbase described the plans of how they are going to expand Earn.com. And he also mentioned that Coinbase is planning on doubling down on Earn.com business.
In an interview to Techcurch.com Srinivasan said that with the user base of Coinbase and the resources that they have Earn.com could hit 100 million dollars in GMV in next one year or so. Coinbase previously has acquired many startups with blockchain analytics startup Neutrino being the latest one.
Coinbase is slowly becoming one platform for all blockchain technology-related services by acquiring startups and expanding them, but buying Earn was one of their biggest achievements.
Before acquiring Earn, Coinbase roped in Emilie Choi from LinkedIn to lead new acquisitions and partnerships. Who helped with this acquisition. They also hired former Facebook and Twitter communications director Rachel Horowitz. In total Coinbase has acquired 12 organizations.
Performance of Earn under Coinbase
Its been only one year since Coinbase acquired Earn, and so far users for Earn are only increasing around the world. It is tough to estimate the future of the business, but according to many experts and former CTO of Coinbase Srinivasan, the company has the potential to become the biggest social-commercial platform in the world in coming years.
A few months ago in March, Srinivasan quit the Coinbase as CTO. In a series of tweets, he said that he wanted to take some time off and get back in shape. He also mentioned that under Coinbase, Earn has closed down on over 200 million dollars.
