Airbnb CEO says he’s ‘really proud’ of one of his first engineers who left and started Coinbase

Airbnb CEO says he’s ‘really proud’ of one of his first engineers who left and started Coinbase

Airbnb co-founder and CEO Brian Chesky told CNBC he's "really proud" of what one of the company's first software engineers has gone on to accomplish since leaving the online home-rental marketplace.

That former Airbnb employee is Brian Armstrong, co-founder and CEO of Coinbase. The cryptocurrency exchange went public and soared in a direct listing Wednesday, in a major milestone for the burgeoning digital asset industry.

"Brian actually is one of the original architects of our payment platform and our fraud detection system. So I'm really, really proud of what he's doing," Chesky said in an interview that aired Friday on "Tech Check."

San Francisco-based Airbnb, which had its own high-profile IPO in December, was founded in 2008. Armstrong worked for the company for a little over a year. Shortly after his departure in 2012, Armstrong started Coinbase along with Fred Ehrsam, a former foreign exchange trader at Goldman Sachs.

Chesky said he's "kept in touch" with Armstrong.

At the time of Coinbase's founding, bitcoin was only three years old and priced around $6. Ehrsam still serves on Coinbase's board, but stepped back from a day-to-day role in 2017. He's now a managing partner at Paradigm, a crypto-focused investment firm he helped start.

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