Armstrong said the layoffs, which could affect just under 700 employees based on Coinbase’s last employee count, are partly due to a crypto downturn. Yet the main motivator is making the company’s leadership structure flatter, enabling its employees to work fast, with AI at the forefront.

In practice, this means cutting what Armstrong dubs “pure managers,” opting instead for “player-coaches” who oversee team members but are also strong individual contributors. The company is also planning to leverage its most AI savvy employees by creating “AI-native pods,” which could even include one-person teams directing agents that encompass the responsibilities of engineers, designers, and product managers.

“We are not just reducing headcount and cutting costs, we’re fundamentally changing how we operate: rebuilding Coinbase as an intelligence, with humans around the edge aligning it,” Armstrong wrote in a post on X. 

The CEO said following the layoffs the company’s leadership structure will also stretch no more than five layers below his own position. Flattening the leadership structure will increase efficiency, he argued.

“Layers slow things down and create coordination tax,” Armstrong added in the X post. 

For years, Armstrong has been all in on AI. After securing GitHub Copilot and Cursor licenses for every engineer, he “went rogue,” asking engineers to get onboarded with the tools by the end of the week, rather than the “quarters” some in the company had said it would take. Those who didn’t meet the deadline had to face the consequences. 

“Some of them had a good reason, because they were just getting back from some trip or something,” Armstrong said last year on the Cheeky Pint podcast with Stripe CEO Patrick Collison. “Some of them didn’t, and they got fired.”

Over the past year, Armstrong said he has seen how AI has allowed engineers to ship in days what used to take a team weeks. Nontechnical employees are also using AI to write code while many of the company’s workflows are being automated, transformations that Armstrong said influenced Tuesday’s layoff decision.

Coinbase did not immediately respond to Fortune’s request for comment. 

To be sure, as Coinbase flattens its org chart, it is also increasing its employee-to-manager ratio, with each leader responsible for 15 or more reports. This follows the recent “megamanager” trend sweeping corporate America, where managers now oversee an average of 12.1 employees, up from 10.9 in 2024, according to Gallup. Meta may be the starkest example, with its new applied engineering team sporting a 50-to-1 employee-to-manager ratio. 

Apart from Coinbase, other companies such as Block and Snap have laid off thousands, citing the rapid advancement of AI. Yet, Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, has also warned that some companies are “AI washing,” or blaming unrelated layoffs on AI. Aleksandar Tomic, the associate dean for strategy, innovation, and technology at Boston College, told Fortune some CEOs have used the pretext of AI restructures as a way to spin layoffs as a positive, rather than a negative, for their companies. At the same time, layoffs economy-wide remain low, leaving these AI-related layoffs largely as a tech sector phenomenon.

“Instead of saying, ‘Hey, we have some business issues that caused us to have layoffs,’ which would be viewed negatively by the market, they say, ‘Oh, we are laying off people to gain efficiency,’ and then their stock price goes up,” he said.

Still, Armstrong said the layoffs and reorganization of Coinbase’s leadership structure will help the company adapt for an era where “small, high context” teams execute quickly. The old, unhurried way of working is disappearing fast. 

“AI is bringing a profound shift in how companies operate, and we’re reshaping Coinbase to lead in this new era,” Armstrong said.

Penguin Random House; Macmillon

Sometimes, girls just wanna have fun, right? I’ve been in a springtime mood of wanting to dive into a cartoon-colored ball pit of comic novels with spunky heroines. And I found some good ones; but what I also found is that, much like the classic screwball comedies of yore, escapism in these playful novels links arms with edgy social commentary.

Yesteryear, by Caro Claire Burke

Yesteryear, an intricately-plotted debut novel by Caro Claire Burke, has been getting lots of attention — and deservedly so. The main character here is an online trad wife named Natalie Heller Mills. On camera, Natalie revels in activities like spending four hours making a loaf of sourdough bread and then adorning it with a nativity scene made out of herbal stick figures — from her own garden, naturally.

A little of this goes a long way for those of us who share the attitude of the late Joan Rivers. Rivers famously quipped: “I hate housework! You make the beds, you do the dishes, and six months later you have to start all over again.” Amen.

So imagine my glee when Natalie — who only plays at being a pioneer woman — wakes up one morning to the realization that she’s been transported back to the year 1855! Welcome to the real pioneer life where, if you want milk for your morning gruel, you’d better hustle out to the barn and find a cow.

If Burke had only stuck to this plotline, Yesteryear would be a fun one-note snark at retro lifestyle influencers; but instead, it tells a more ambitious, suspenseful, and, yes, ultimately melancholy story of its heroine’s aspirations and capitulations to ideas of how women should live their lives.

American Fantasy, by Emma Straub

I thought Gary Shteyngart‘s brilliant 2024 essay in The Atlantic about his agonizing seven nights aboard The Icon of the Seas, the largest cruise ship in the world, had ruined me for all other tales of enforced frivolity on the ocean; but I was wrong. Emma Straub’s latest novel, American Fantasy, starts off sharing Shteyngart’s cynicism and ends up affirming the right of women — especially middle-aged women — to party without self-consciousness or apology.

Our main character here is a 50-year-old divorced woman named Annie who’s been persuaded by her younger sister to join her on a four-day themed cruise. The “theme” is on board: namely, a gone-soft-’round-the-middle boy band of the ’90s named Boy Talk that both Annie and her sister loved.

Almost every other passenger aboard is a woman of a certain age, otherwise diverse in “race, political views, ability, income bracket,” even sexual orientation. All were rabid Boy Talk fans. The cruise production manager, a gay woman named Sarah, reflects that:

These were the guys who had launched a million sexual awakenings, and even if they had awakened something other than heterosexuality, they had still been present, like distant guardian angels of puberty.

Straub tells the story of the cruise through the eyes of Sarah, Annie and one of the band members, a thoughtful guy named Keith who, like Annie, is at a crossroads. This is a novel that makes the radical move of honoring, rather than ridiculing, female fandom. Here’s Straub’s description of Annie’s epiphany about her own fandom as she’s standing in a packed crowd during a Boy Talk performance:

[T]he music was a direct vein to her own childhood, the least complicated part of her life. …
All around Annie, women were dancing and singing, and for a second, she closed her eyes and thought, No one else will ever understand this, except, of course everyone standing beside her, who all understood it perfectly.

Enormous Wings, by Laurie Frankel

I’ve shared the premise of Laurie Frankel’s forthcoming novel, Enormous Wings with a few friends. Based on how instantly they entered the book’s title into their cellphones, the premise is all you need to know about this wild-but-all-too-timely story about female autonomy or lack thereof. So here goes:

Frankel’s heroine, Pepper Mills, is 77 and a reluctant new resident of the Vista View Retirement Community in Austin, Texas. Surprisingly, she meets a nice man there and has sex. And, then, through a medical fluke that Frankel almost makes plausible, Pepper finds herself pregnant. Her doctors expect the pregnancy to end in miscarriage; when it doesn’t, Pepper seeks an abortion. But, she lives in Texas and she’s now such a media sensation that it’s almost impossible for her to leave the state.

Complicated, gutsy and entertaining, Enormous Wings pokes fun at life’s unpredictability and stokes anger at situations that aren’t at all funny.