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:
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.
Teemu brought up on Ep. 33 of The Spelunking Podcast a gripe against crypto that I’ve often heard myself: if crypto is so great, then why hasn’t it achieved more penetration in a decade?
The simple answer is that people forget the speed at which the Internet truly developed.
Over breakfast in Costa Brava, back in May 2023, the CEO and founder of an AI startup I know told me that he was worried because for the first time things were progressing too quickly, and he couldn’t tell where they were going.
It made me realize that I was perfectly comfortable with it, because crypto has inoculated me against future shock. There are buses hurtling all around you, so you can’t freak out about it - you need to figure out if any of them is headed your particular way, and what’s the smallest change you can apply to get out of its way.
Anything beyond that is overcorrection, and may get you into a different bus’ path.