This is very interesting. The CEO said in his initial letter that Coinbase should only engage in politics that are relevant to their "core mission", but it's kind of interesting to reduce a candidate to "What can this candidate or party do specifically for our business?" and ignore other policies that a candidate or party may seek to enact.
Pretending that you're unaware of or completely ambivalent about the consequences of shifts in political power (so long as it benefits you financially) doesn't really qualify you as "apolitical." You're still involved in the political process even if you stick your fingers in your ears and chant "nananana I can't hear you."
I hate to sound incisive, but it kind of seems like the position that Coinbase's leadership has taken is "The board and CEO will decide what qualifies as 'apolitical' and as such will dictate the ongoing political activity of the company, which they have no desire to stop being involved in."
Or just "the board and CEO will decide what political activism is relevant to the core business of the company, and the political positions the company should take". Which seems exactly within the remit of the board and CEO.
This is absolutely true, and appears to be the stated policy in no uncertain terms.
The issue that I intended to address is the interesting usage of language to sidestep making political contributions and supporting candidates and parties as being political acts.
Companies aren't democracies. When you sign up to work for somebody else, the board and the executives have every right to make these decisions. Upset that you can't lobby for the rights of pink haired people in the office? Go start your own company and put murals featuring oppressed pink-haired people all over the walls. Until then, recognize that companies aren't set up as democracies, because no investor would be dumb enough to throw their money down a toilet where any muppet who can run a QA job or write a few lines of JS has equal input with someone who co-founded the enterprise.
I think that's too strong a statement in support of the current default, which is the largely feudal corporation.
First, company structures are pretty clearly being pushed in a more democratic direction, and have been for quite a while. Silicon Valley is the poster child for flatter organizational structures, "good ideas can come from anywhere", increased freedom of movement for workers between companies, as well as sharing the financial gains more broadly (at least, that is the ideal that SV represents to the outside world).
You look at a typical SV corporation and see a rigid hierarchy. Most of the rest of the world sees an insanely freewheeling mess that can't possibly work.
There are also today already companies that are explicitly structured as democracies (in some cases a bit more like constitutional monarchies, and in other cases more like minarchist collectives). Not all of these experiments are successful, nor should we expect them to be.
But I certainly don't expect this overall trend to reverse, stop, or even slow down. If anything, I expect it to accelerate, as existing companies continue to try to pick out and graft on the parts and tools that seem to be working for other organizations. Even when these grafting attempts are unsuccessful (which is often), they just draw attention to the orgs that are succeeding (inspiring attempts at analysis of what is different), which leads to more such experiments.
Pretending that you're unaware of or completely ambivalent about the consequences of shifts in political power (so long as it benefits you financially) doesn't really qualify you as "apolitical." You're still involved in the political process even if you stick your fingers in your ears and chant "nananana I can't hear you."
I hate to sound incisive, but it kind of seems like the position that Coinbase's leadership has taken is "The board and CEO will decide what qualifies as 'apolitical' and as such will dictate the ongoing political activity of the company, which they have no desire to stop being involved in."