Neil Bergquist

Neil Bergquist is the co-founder and CEO of Coinme, the largest cryptocurrency cash exchange in the United States. Established in early 2014, Coinme launched one of the first ten bitcoin ATMs in the world and was the second crypto exchange in the U.S. to have secured a state money transmitter license. As a crypto pioneer, Neil has been committed to the main street application for crypto and champions a mission of inclusion and access to crypto for everyone.

Through partnerships with Coinstar and MoneyGram, Coinme offers one of the world’s largest bitcoin point-of-sale networks with locations in Walmart, Safeway, and major retailers across the United States. Coinme also serves customers with a custodial wallet solution for storing, trading and transmitting cryptocurrencies. Under Neil’s leadership, Coinme was recently ranked as one of the 100 fastest-growing companies in the Americas by the Financial Times and one of the fastest-growing companies in North America by Deloitte Fast 500, ranking number one for the Pacific Northwest. Neil completed his undergraduate and graduate degrees from Willamette University, earning a Bachelor of Arts in rhetoric and media studies and a Master of Business Administration.

What is your typical day, and how do you make it productive?

As much as I aspire to have a ‘typical’ day, it often depends on the top priorities at the time. I start my day by focusing on myself: working out, getting organized, eating right, and meditating. From there, my day is devoted to serving our team members and customers.

My typical day involves a series of meetings with leaders collaborating on solving essential and urgent challenges while moving critical initiatives forward. I provide direction for the company’s products, services, and operations. I also meet with vendors, partners, and regulators to ensure that things run smoothly and that all needs are met.

I take advantage of the time between meetings to catch up on emails, slacks and calls. There is always more to do than the day allows, so I continuously prioritize to ensure I’m focused on the right things and the team is accomplishing them correctly.

How do you bring ideas to life?

I focus more on problems than I do ideas. Once the problem, which sometimes is unmet customer needs, is identified, it is likely to involve exploring and testing a multitude of ideas to see which one is desirable, feasible and viable before bringing it to life.

It’s always important to fall in love with the problem more so than a specific idea.

Coinme was created to solve the problems of limited access to crypto and the limitations of a fiat-based financial system. With the help of my team, we solved the access to crypto problem and brought over 40,000 access points to crypto located within 5 miles for over 90% of the American population. Now, we’re focused on testing and developing various user experiences to make engaging with crypto a delight. These user experiences solve challenges related to P2P payments, remittances and gaining exposure to a financially beneficial long-term store of value.

By staying focused on the problem, your team and resources can yield the greatest impact.

This technique has proved successful for Coinme, enabling us to be an industry pioneer and create value for millions of people who now leverage crypto and Coinme as part of their everyday lives.

What’s one trend that excites you?

I remain excited about the trend of adoption of decentralized money, such as bitcoin. Fiat has many downsides, such as continued devaluation due to its ever-increasing supply. What if money couldn’t be manipulated by any government or centralized organization? The implications of this simple concept continue to excite me every day.

What is one habit that helps you be productive?

I limit cognitive distractions as much as possible while working. It’s a reasonably simple habit, but it’s easy to pretend that we can take on more than we really can. I do this by ensuring I have a dedicated private workspace free from distractions. Additionally, I only work on one priority at a time and silence as many notification systems as possible. It takes time to get into deep thinking and concentration, which can easily be interrupted by a ping or beep.

What advice would you give your younger self?

Temper expectations with the reality that real sustaining change takes more time and resources than you are likely estimating.

To expand on the question, I would like to flip the question because I have an opposite example: advice I’m glad I didn’t take.

When you’re an early-stage entrepreneur, everyone’s always giving you advice, and it’s not always accurate. At the end of the day, you know best what needs to happen with your business. However, dissect the advice for what it’s worth and see what can, if any, be applied. Ponder why they may have advised you to move in that direction. But at the end of the day, you have to choose what advice you want to follow.

When I worked with my team to launch the SURF Incubator, one of our former advisors advised us to start small and grow from there. We were considering leasing an entire floor of a block-long downtown Seattle office building at the time. We ignored the advice because you need a major league field if you want major league talent.

From a financial perspective, starting small is always less risky and easier to manage, which is why the advice was given. But we found a way to go big, ultimately leading to our success. “If you build it, they will come.” Within a few years, we became the most prominent tech incubator in the Northwest, attracting the region’s top startups and talent.

Tell us something you believe almost nobody agrees with you on?

I think regulators will eventually shut down or require massive modifications to decentralized exchanges. I understand that software can be an extension of freedom of speech; however, software can also be an environment exploited for nefarious activities like money laundering. If a regulator cannot regulate a decentralized protocol directly, then they will go after whoever contributes to its existence.

What is the one thing you repeatedly do and recommend everyone else do?

The number one mistake I see early-stage CEOs and founders make is not prioritizing enough. There are always a hundred things to do, but only a few things you must do.

Spending the precise time to figure out what exactly needs to happen right now allows you to focus resources and increase your probability of success.

What is one failure in your career,  how did you overcome it, and what lessons did you take away from it?

Six months after setting the Guinness World Record for the largest snowball fight, we attempted to set the world record for the largest water balloon fight. We needed at least 12,000 participants to set the record. We ultimately fell far short of that goal and didn’t set the record. We learned that it’s much easier to gather a crowd in mid-January than in mid-summer. There are too many competing things to do in the summertime. Unfortunately, it’s a simple lesson that was learned the hard way. I can’t say we overcame the failure as we failed at our primary objective, but we did throw a fun, well-produced event that thousands of people enjoyed. I overcame it by turning my attention away from experiential events and into other entrepreneurial endeavors. This freed me up to eventually pursue an opportunity within the digital currency ecosystem. I overcame it by trying another entrepreneurial endeavor in a different market focused on a very different problem. Overcoming entrepreneurial failure is measured by trying again, even if that means something different.

What is one business idea you’re willing to give away to our readers?

I think the U.S. government should stake all the crypto they’ve confiscated thus far (currently worth billions in USD) and use the yield to reduce taxes or fund non-military-related government programs (i.e., education).

What is one piece of software that helps you be productive? How do you use it?

I would say Slack because Coinme is a remote organization, and communication within an organization like ours is critical and allows us all to be more productive. It makes me more accessible throughout the org (anyone can Slack me) and helps everyone be more responsive than email.

Do you have a favorite book or podcast you’ve gotten a ton of value from and why?

“Emotional Intelligence 2.0” is an excellent book. It focuses on four critical components of emotional intelligence: self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, and relationship management. Organizations are a web of humans, and understanding how humans work and operate helps everyone within that organization intelligently navigate their own emotions and those of their partners. It’s an overlooked skill that has an enormous impact.

What’s a movie or series you recently enjoyed and why?

“When you pray, move your feet.” It’s an African proverb that has been quoted many times.

Key learnings

• Coinme has solved the location problem and enabled ubiquitous access to crypto in the United States through over 40,000 locations.
• Real-world use cases for digital assets are the next phase of growth for the crypto industry and a lucrative opportunity.
• In any business, focus on the problem rather than the idea. This focus will be your organization’s north star, with which to align all initiatives, products, and services to achieve success and growth. Value is determined based on how well a specific idea solves the problem.