Have you ever watched a founder on stage talking about their “overnight success” and felt something was… off?
They glide through the timeline like nothing ever went wrong. No ugly token dumps, no botched launches, no team members who left in the middle of the night. Just a clean, beautiful parabola from zero to hero. And everyone in the audience nods along, hungry for the same fairy tale.
I’ve sat through hundreds of these talks. And every single time I leave thinking the same thing: someone is lying to us, and we’re all paying the price.
The Day Crypto Stopped Talking About Failure
It didn’t happen suddenly. It crept in slowly, the way bad habits do.
First came the 2017 ICO mania, where raising $30 million in three hours became the new normal. Then the NFT summer of 2021, when every JPEG felt like a lottery ticket. Each cycle rewarded the loudest, shiniest stories. The people who told the messiest truths got drowned out by the ones who claimed they “just knew.”
Pretty soon, admitting you shipped a buggy smart contract or completely misread the market started to feel like career suicide. Investors wanted “safe hands.” Community members wanted gods, not humans. And so an entire generation of builders learned to hide the very thing that makes them better: their scars.
The Stories We Tell Shape The Reality We Get
There’s this old idea in linguistics that the vocabulary available to a culture limits what its people can even perceive. No word for a feeling? You’ll struggle to feel it clearly. No shared stories about something? It starts to feel impossible.
In crypto we have maybe the richest vocabulary on earth for winning: moon, lambo, 100x, flip, alpha, NGMI. But try to talk about screwing up in public and the language suddenly goes mute. We mumble vague euphemisms — “learning experience,” “pivot,” “challenging quarter” — anything to avoid saying the obvious: I fucked up, here’s exactly how, and here’s what it taught me.
When the only acceptable narrative is victory, every normal stumble starts to feel like proof you don’t belong here.
What Hiding Mistakes Actually Costs
I’ve watched it play out too many times now.
A founder ships a token with terrible tokenomics because nobody dared tell them the truth in the echo chamber. Six weeks later the chart is bleeding and they’re ghosting their own Telegram. Or a team raises at a $400M valuation on a story that conveniently omits the two previous projects that completely imploded.
Everyone loses. The founder loses years of their life to shame and damage control. The community loses money and trust. The industry loses the hard-won knowledge that could have prevented the next ten teams from repeating the exact same mistake.
- Good tokenomics lessons stay buried in private DMs
- Security best practices die with the exploited project
- Pricing disasters never get dissected publicly
- Team structuring disasters become “personal issues”
We’re sitting on a goldmine of painfully expensive data and pretending it doesn’t exist.
The Irony Nobody Talks About
Crypto was literally born out of failure.
Bitcoin exists because the traditional financial system collapsed in 2008 and exposed its rotten core. Ethereum’s immutable ledger learned resilience the hard way through The DAO hack. DeFi summer exploded because people got tired of centralized exchanges freezing withdrawals.
Every major breakthrough in this space started as a reaction to something that went catastrophically wrong somewhere else. And yet today we act like the next wave of innovation will come from founders who never make a single mistake. It’s absurd when you say it out loud.
Mistakes Aren’t Bugs — They’re The Operating System
Here’s something I tell every founder I work with:
Mistakes are just data wearing a scary mask.
That’s not motivational fluff. It’s literally how the best teams run.
Think about any protocol that survived multiple cycles. They all have one thing in common: an almost obsessive post-mortem culture. Every exploit, every failed governance vote, every liquidity crisis gets torn apart in public within 48 hours. Not to shame anyone — to extract the signal before the noise takes over.
That’s why they’re still here and most of their competitors aren’t.
The Hidden Tax of Pretending
Pretending you don’t fail is exhausting.
I’ve seen founders spend more energy curating the illusion of flawless execution than actually building the product. Late nights rewriting history in pitch decks. Whole Discord channels dedicated to narrative management instead of user feedback. It’s soul-crushing.
And the burnout is brutal. When you can’t admit you’re struggling, you can’t ask for help. When you can’t talk about the rug that taught you everything about liquidity design, you rob yourself of the very stories that would make investors trust you more.
How To Build A Healthier Mistake Culture
It starts with tiny, boring habits that feel almost insignificant at first.
- Ship a weekly “failure log” internally — one sentence per mistake, one sentence on the fix
- Make retros public (anonymized if needed) after every major milestone
- Reward the best post-mortem of the month, not the biggest revenue win
- Celebrate “kill decisions” — features or whole products you had the guts to shut down
- Start investor updates with the worst thing that happened this quarter
These things feel awkward in the beginning. But six months in, something magical happens: people stop panicking when things break because they know breaking is part of the process.
The Market Doesn’t Punish Honesty — It Rewards Survival
Look at the projects that lived through 2018 and 2022.
Chainlink admitted early they had no idea how to price oracles. MakerDAO published every single liquidation screw-up in excruciating detail. Yearn publicly shipped strategies that lost money and explained exactly why.
They didn’t die of embarrassment. They became antifragile.
Meanwhile hundreds of “perfect” teams from the bull markets are gone without a trace.
A New Kind of Flex
Imagine a world where the ultimate flex isn’t “I raised at a billion valuation” but “I survived three near-death experiences and here’s the scar tissue to prove it.”
That’s not weakness. That’s the rarest credential in this industry.
Because anyone can look competent when the charts are green. The real test comes when everything is on fire and you still manage to run toward the flames, figure out what’s burning, and build something that doesn’t catch fire the same way twice.
The Next Generation Deserves Better Stories
Right now there’s a 22-year-old somewhere staring at a red chart, convinced they’re the only ones who ever shipped something that bled 90% in a week.
They’re refreshing Twitter, watching everyone else post yacht pictures and “BTFD” memes, spiraling into shame.
We can do better than that.
We can tell them the truth: every single person they admire has a graveyard of dead projects behind them. That the token that made someone rich was probably the fifth attempt after four spectacular failures. That the real difference between them and their heroes isn’t talent — it’s the willingness to stand back up, dust off the data, and ship version six.
Crypto doesn’t need more unicorns. It needs more survivors who aren’t afraid to show the wounds.
Because in the end, the projects that change the world aren’t the ones that never fail.
They’re the ones that fail so intelligently, so openly, and so relentlessly that eventually failure runs out of ways to kill them.
And that’s a story worth telling.
