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Wishing you could get in on the next great company while it’s still private?
Coinbase (COIN) co-founder and CEO Brian Armstrong has a solution to bring the average investor into private companies, a process normally reserved for the wealthy.
He wants to rewrite the accredited investor rules.
The current rules to invest in private companies allow only “accredited investors” who can prove a certain level of wealth. In effect, that shuts out the average investor.
“If you pass a financial literacy test, you’re smart, and if you’re a smart up-and-coming young person, I don’t see why you shouldn’t be allowed to put $100 into the Series C of Anduril or something that’s still a private company,” Armstrong said on Yahoo Finance’s Power Players with Brian Sozzi podcast (video above; listen in below).
“Retail investors sometimes have just as much of an opinion on this as the pros or the wealthy people who somehow, like if you have a million-dollar net worth, you can somehow do this. But a young, hungry, smart kid can’t do it. It doesn’t make sense to me,” he said.
The ability for average investors to invest more easily in private companies would be a boon to Coinbase, which recently laid out its most ambitious product expansion to date.
Coinbase announced it is evolving from a crypto exchange into a unified platform combining crypto, traditional stocks and ETFs, prediction markets, perpetual futures, tokenized assets, and payments — all accessible from a single account.
The headline product was Coinbase Advisor, one of the world’s first SEC-registered AI investment advisers. It can issue explicit buy and sell recommendations, analyze a user’s portfolio history, and execute trades around the clock. Coinbase also announced tokenized equities that are 1:1 backed by the underlying stock.
“14 years ago, we were basically just a place to buy Bitcoin,” Armstrong said. “And now you can literally manage your entire financial life.”
Brian Sozzi is Yahoo Finance’s Executive Editor, host of the ‘Power Players With Brian Sozzi’ podcast and a member of Yahoo Finance’s editorial leadership team. Follow Sozzi on X @BrianSozzi, Instagram, and LinkedIn. Tips on stories? Email brian.sozzi@yahoofinance.com.
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