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- Coinbase is closing its former San Francisco HQ in 2022, it announced Wednesday.
- It already downgraded the location to a normal office as part of its plan to become decentralized.
- The decision means career outcomes are based on capability and output rather than location, Coinbase said.
- See more stories on Insider’s business page.
Cryptocurrency-trading platform Coinbase announced in February it would downgrade its San Francisco headquarters to a normal office, as it pushed ahead with plans to become a decentralized company.
It’s now shutting that office down entirely, as it simultaneously targets a “remote-first” strategy.
It announced Wednesday the office would close in 2022.
-Coinbase News (@CoinbaseNews) May 5, 2021
“We’ve committed to having no HQ, and it’s important to show our decentralized workforce that no one location is more important than the another,” the company said on Twitter.
“Closing our SF office is an important step in ensuring no office becomes an unofficial HQ and will mean career outcomes are based on capability and output rather than location,” it added.
It said the company would instead offer employees a network of smaller offices “to work from if they choose to.”
There is growing momentum for companies to let employees work from home permanently.
Facebook, Twitter, Salesforce, and Ford have said their employees can remotely post-pandemic, and some companies are canceling office leases.
Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong said in May 2020 the company would become “remote-first” after the pandemic. He said “the vast majority” of staff would have the option to work from home if they wanted, but they can continue to be office-based if that was preferable.
“I have come to believe that not only is remote work here to stay, but that it represents a huge opportunity and strategic advantage for us,” Armstrong wrote in a blog post at the time. This included having access to more talent.
He added that the company’s long-term vision was to have one floor of office space in ten cities, rather than ten floors of office space in one city.
During the pandemic, there have been reports of a tech “exodus” from Silicon Valley, as both workers and companies consider the benefits of remote working, which has led to a surge in migration to low-tax states like Florida and Texas. Armstrong said in February around 150 Coinbase employees, or almost 30% of its San Francisco workforce, had left the city to work remotely elsewhere since January 2020.
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