Multimillionaire tech guru Bryan Johnson says that if he hadn’t sold his payments company Braintree to PayPal in 2013 and became obsessed with anti-aging, he may well have ended up devoting his life to crypto.
“Had I not sold Braintree, I just would have been entirely all in on crypto,” he says.
Magazine catches up with Johnson in the speakers’ lounge at Token2049 in Singapore, ushered over to meet the youthful-looking 47-year-old by an assistant who looks like a supermodel and has a million-watt smile.
Best known today for his pursuit of longevity treatments, Johnson made his name by founding the mobile and internet payments firm Braintree in 2007. At one point, the company was growing at 4,000% a year. In 2012, it acquired Venmo, and in turn, Paypal acquired Braintree for $800 million. Johnson pocketed $300 million from the sale and has a reported net worth of around $400 million.
Around that time, he became super interested in cryptocurrency and was working on a deal between Braintree and Coinbase to process Bitcoin payments and enable merchants to accept the cryptocurrency.
“We were among the very first in the industry to adopt crypto, like famously, we partnered with Coinbase in 2013,” he says.
“I was very bullish on crypto, and then we sold shortly after. But, yeah, there’s a reality where my entire life is crypto.”
Onstage at Token2049, Johnson hammers home his message of getting enough sleep. (Andrew Fenton)
Bryan Johnson co-founded The Network School
Part of the reason Johnson is in Singapore is to help launch The Network School, which he co-founded with former Coinbase Chief Technology Officer Balaji Srinivasan. He notes “we never crossed paths at that point,” referring to 2013.
The announcement of the Network School. (X)
The school is a three-month learning program for 150 tech-focused libertarian capitalists held in the abandoned, Chinese-built Forest City on…
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