The missing language of mistakes in crypto discourse | Opinion

We love stories. And stories of success we love even more. They’re polished, cinematic, and easy. In tech and especially in crypto and web3, success has become the only acceptable narrative currency. Every conference panel celebrates the outlier who “made it,” while the quiet, unglamorous work of building — the false starts, wrong turns, and painful lessons — stays offstage.

This obsession doesn’t just distort public perception; it reshapes how founders think. In the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, language shapes human cognition, meaning that the words and narratives available to us set the limits of how we perceive, understand, and interpret the world.  The crypto community’s “success-only” discourse reshapes how young builders, entrepreneurs, and founders interpret their own journeys. In simple terms: what you talk about becomes what you’re able to see. And in a culture where only wins are spoken aloud, founders begin to equate every misstep with existential failure instead of growth.

I see it constantly. Founders come to me covering up failures, denying mistakes, creating a parallel reality where they are successful, as they treat missteps like they’re sins. The industry used to stigmatize mistakes. And entrepreneurs don’t see these missteps as natural data points in the learning curve. They see them as stains on their record. Somewhere along the way, we taught them that perfection is proof of competence. It’s not. It’s a red flag.

When success becomes a language trap

To continue my analogy with the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, I’d say that the way we talk about entrepreneurship shapes how we experience it. In crypto, the distortion is especially severe. The discourse celebrates spectacular outcomes — the overnight unicorn, the 10x token, the founder who “never missed.” But that’s not how companies are built. And that’s not how great products are made.

The real journey looks more like what I call mistake zones: product and UX friction, pricing misfires, team miscommunication, clumsy go-to-market moves, and fundraising and narratives that don’t land. Each of these is a test, and most founders fail several before they get one right. But because the industry idolizes “perfect execution,” they start to see failure as fatal rather than formative.

The irony? Web3 itself was born from mistakes. Ethereum’s (ETH) resilience was forged in the 2016 DAO hack. Decentralized governance models emerged from centralized breakdowns. Every major innovation in this space began as a reaction to something that went wrong.

Yet the more the industry professionalizes, the more allergic it becomes to visible imperfection. The culture that once thrived on experimentation is drifting toward performative infallibility.

The furnace of leadership

We celebrate success far too publicly and process mistakes far too privately. But making mistakes isn’t just inevitable in entrepreneurship — it’s vital.

I’ve seen startups break under the weight of small failures because their founders didn’t know how to sit with pain. I’ve also seen founders grow stronger after monumental stumbles. The difference isn’t intelligence, funding, or timing. It’s emotional resilience — the ability to metabolize pain into progress.

Pressure and pain are not side effects of building; they are the furnace where leadership is forged. A founder who can reflect, adjust, and keep moving after a failure is infinitely more valuable than one who has simply been lucky enough not to fail yet.

Mistakes are the raw material of growth. They reveal assumptions. They expose blind spots. They test conviction. But they only work as data if you can stand close enough to the heat without burning out.

Mistakes are just data

One of the slides I often show to founders reads: “Mistakes are the norm. They’re just data.” That mindset shift changes everything. A failed experiment is not a verdict on the founder’s worth; it’s an information packet. Did the product fail because of onboarding friction? Was the incentive misaligned? Was the story disconnected from metrics? Good founders turn those insights into their next iteration. Great founders turn them into muscle memory.

When you think of mistakes as data, you can measure them, control for them, and even model them. Our internal formula for expected weekly growth literally includes variables for failure rate and rollback time. Failure isn’t an interruption to growth; it’s a measurable input.

The biggest mistake, of course, is inaction — waiting for certainty that never comes. As I tell young entrepreneurs, the only way not to make a mistake is to do nothing.

The fear economy

Still, the fear of mistakes runs deep. It’s amplified by social media, where visibility is currency and reputation feels fragile. Founders perform competence instead of practicing it. They overpolish decks, overpromise on roadmaps, and go silent during setbacks.

This “fear economy” suffocates real innovation. When people are scared to fail publicly, they stop experimenting. They build for optics, not for users. They avoid risk at precisely the stage when they should be taking it.

And yet, the paradox is clear: every metric that actually matters — product-market fit, user retention, sustainable growth — depends on how effectively a team can run, absorb, and learn from small mistakes.

A new discourse for builders

If language shapes perception, it’s time we changed the words we use around failure. The narrative should not be “avoid mistakes” but “design for safe mistakes.” Build systems — flags, canaries, changelogs, mentor feedback loops — that make learning inevitable and damage minimal.

This isn’t romantic fatalism; it’s strategic realism. The path to product-market fit is paved with controlled failures. Each one should leave the company slightly smarter, faster, and more coordinated.

Communities, accelerators, and investors should talk openly about their own misfires. Normalize changelogs not just for product updates but for leadership lessons. Make reflection a KPI.

If discourse frames thinking, then founders deserve a new frame — one where courage matters more than certainty, and progress is measured not by absence of error but by speed of recovery.

The language of growth

True entrepreneurship is not a highlight reel. It’s a feedback loop. Every error, from pricing mistakes to messy team dynamics, is a message waiting to be decoded. The founder’s job isn’t to avoid missteps but to interpret them, integrate what they reveal, and keep shipping with more clarity than before. The next generation of founders shouldn’t fear being wrong; they should fear standing still. Because in this industry, as in life, perfection doesn’t build great companies. Adaptation does.

And nowhere is this more true than in crypto, where mistakes aren’t just felt, they’re visible. A bug becomes a hack, a miscommunication becomes a sell-off, a poor decision becomes a token chart that bleeds in real time. When your errors are priced into a market by the minute, you don’t get the luxury of denial. If you haven’t built the muscle of analyzing mistakes, preparing for them, and recovering fast, the market will punish you long before a competitor has the chance. That’s why founders in web3 must treat resilience not as a soft skill, but as survival infrastructure — because a single unprocessed mistake can crash a young project. At the same time, a well-digested one can become its strongest advantage.