Assif Hirji
The meteoric rise of Cryptocurrencies since the start of the year is transforming one of the most significant exchanges in the industry. Coinbase has just announced that it is hiring Asiff Hirji as President and Chief Operation Officer (COO).
Mr Hirji comes with a raft of experience, including a directorship position at Danish Saxo Bank. He was also Chairman of the Board at the Copenhagen-based fintech giant between 2014 and 2015.
He has worked at many financial and technology companies during his career. He is Director of Eze Software, which is a tech provider to hedge funds, broker-dealers and investment managers.
Chief Restructuring Officer at HP
Most recently his full-time position was as Chief Restructuring Officer at Hewlett Packard. Based in Palo Alto, he was reporting directly to the CEO of the company Meg Whitman, leading the effort to split HP into two Fortune 50 companies.
In his latest role, Hirji was instrumental in the successful restructuring of the HPE Services division. In 12 months he turned it from a subsidiary that had a $2 billion cash burn and was losing 10% or revenue due to minimal margins into a cash-flow break-even unit that was sold to CSC for $8.5 billion.
Commenting on the news to Fortune Magazine, the CEO and co-founder of Coinbase, Brown Armstrong, said: “It’s a huge hire for us. This is going to give us a ton of Leverage to grow our existing businesses.”
Hirji has been a senior adviser at Bain Capital and will retain a role as operating advisor at Andreessen Horowitz until the end of the year. The firm led a $25 million capital raising effort for Coinbase in the early stages of its development in 2013. Since then the company has raised a total of $217 million.
