Entrepreneurship in fast forward
People outside the web3 space don’t seem to be able to wrap their head around why there is seemingly so much nonsense happening, particularly when they haven’t been on the VC investor side.
It’s a combination of two things:
- Crypto is entrepreneurship in fast forward, so you get all the potential ethical issues that you would on a growth startup (or even stodgy nonagenarian corporates such as Volkswagen, as Theo Schlossnagle highlighted on his Ethics in Computing talk), only on faster cycles; and
- Everything happens in the open, on public ledgers, where every move is visible, there to be analyzed by everyone.
Traditional startups manage to blow themselves up all the time through in-fighting, unethical behavior, flat-out deceiving investors, screwing over customers, or simply failing to deliver on their promises. But on the traditional VC route, it’s usually only the investors who end up learning about it (unless it’s an astonishingly visible implosion, á la Theranos), and they have a vested interest in keeping it quiet, because nobody wants to be seen as “the idiot who backed those clowns”.
On crypto? It’s all out there, for everyone to scrutinize and, given how teams not only actively court regular users but live their entire lifecycle on public channels like Telegram, Discord, and Twitter, then anyone who wants to may hear about it the moment something goes wrong.
Combine that with how tempting it is for an online media starved for page views to publish click-baity pieces, and it gives you an environment where the information is not only much more readily available but actively publicized.
If anything happens - and, given the faster cycles, it often does - chances are you will find out.
Published: 2025-01-21
