This Coinbase executive is worth Rs 5,000 crore in only 15 months after joining

Surojit Chatterjee joined Coinbase Global in February 2020 as the chief product manager [Image: LinkedIn/Surojit Chatterjee]

Surojit Chatterjee joined Coinbase Global in February 2020 as the chief product manager. In just 15 months of his joining, his Coinbase stake is accounted to be worth about $180.8 million i.e. Rs 1,500 crore after its first volatile day of trading on April 14.

In the next five years, the former Google executive is also set to receive share options that are currently worth about $465.5 million i.e. Rs 3,500 crore, Bloomberg has reported. This gives a total of over $646 million i.e. Rs 5,000 crore.

Chatterjee, an IIT Kharagpur graduate, joined Coinbase founders Brian Armstrong and Fred Ehrsam as major winners of the firm’s Nasdaq Inc. debut. Together, their stakes are worth more than $16 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

Also Read: Crypto exchange Coinbase debuts on Nasdaq, here's what you need to know

Chatterjee’s Coinbase stake is a dramatic example of the instant equity employees can receive when joining startups. Gone are the days when equity was mainly distributed in tranches over many years, a reward for loyalty as well as performance, the report said.

Also Read: Coinbase makes its Nasdaq debut; here’s how Indian investors can invest: Vinay Bharathwaj of Stockal

Coinbase opened on the Nasdaq at $381 per share, 52 percent above its reference price and rising as high as $429.54 before finishing the day at $328.28. The company ended the day with a market value around $86 billion after topping $100 billion earlier in the session.

Cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase had its debut on Nasdaq on April 14 in one of the most anticipated events of the year on Wall Street that has seen a great deal of excitement over bitcoin's record-breaking run. Coinbase is the first company devoted entirely to cryptocurrency to enter the US stock exchange and will be listed under the symbol, what else but COIN.

Speaking of Chatterjee, he joined Coinbase in February 2020 after working for three years at Alphabet Inc.’s Google, where he led the company’s shopping platform during his second stint at the search giant.

Before that, he headed product and delivery for mobile search ads and AdSense before a brief stop at Indian e-commerce site Flipkart. His experience at the Flipkart appealed to Brian Armstrong.

“When someone has only lived, worked, or transacted in a country like the United States, it can be difficult to grasp the size of the opportunity in simplifying cross-border transactions," Armstrong, wrote in the company's blog post last year while announcing Chatterjee’s appointment.

Coinbase, on the other hand, has benefited from bitcoin's meteoric rise over the year, with the crypto asset's price rising from $6,500 in April 2020 to a record-high of $62,575 on April 13, 2021.

The Coinbase entry "is potentially a watershed event for the crypto industry," said Daniel Ives at Wedbush Securities. "Coinbase is a foundational piece of the crypto ecosystem and is a barometer for the growing mainstream adoption of bitcoin and crypto for the coming years, in our opinion."

(With inputs from AFP)