Draper Nearly Missed Coinbase Boom with Early Rejection

Venture capital legend Tim Draper revealed that he nearly passed on investing in Coinbase, one of the most successful bets in his fund's history. He liked founder Brian Armstrong immediately but had already invested in a competing project called CoinLab and thought retail crypto adoption was too far away to justify the bet.

It was actually Draper's son Adam who made the first call correctly by writing Armstrong a cheque. Tim Draper followed shortly after, joining the next funding round. The return from Coinbase alone nearly doubled the entire Draper Associates Fund V value.

Coinbase has since grown into one of the world's largest cryptocurrency platforms, with over 120 million customers using it for trading, payments, finance, and value storage. It completed a landmark direct public listing on Nasdaq under the ticker COIN in 2021.