The Coinbase co-founders met on Reddit and launched the company out of a two-bedroom apartment when ‘a bitcoin was worth $6’

The Coinbase co-founders met on Reddit and launched the company out of a two-bedroom apartment when ‘a bitcoin was worth $6’

Cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase went public on Wednesday in a direct listing that opened at $381 per share, valuing the company at $99.6 billion. In anticipation, bitcoin hit a record high of over $64,000 Wednesday morning, according to data from Coin Metrics.

But when Coinbase co-founders Brian Armstrong and Fred Ehrsam first started the company in 2012, "a bitcoin was worth $6 and only known by a few nerds on the internet," Ehrsam tweeted on Wednesday.

At the time, "bitcoin was the crazy idea that the world could have a digital money for everyone," he said.

Armstrong and Ehrsam first met on Reddit and shared a bullish view on bitcoin and the cryptocurrency space as a whole, Ehrsam said on Twitter. In turn, they decided to launch Coinbase with the "mission" to "make crypto easy to use."

Although the company currently has a multibillion-dollar valuation, its beginnings were "not glamorous," Ehrsam said. "Coinbase launched out of a two bedroom apartment we shared with another company."

Over the first two years in business, Coinbase grew to a company with over 1,000 employees.

But between 2014 and 2017, Coinbase faced "serious hardship," Ehrsam said. "In the 3 years ... the outside world thought crypto was dead."

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