Venture capital, especially within web3, often gives disproportionate importance to spectacular outcomes while undervaluing the less impressive yet more consistent results. Extremes, whether it’s billion-dollar sudden crashes like those of some famous crypto exchanges, or billion-dollar valuations that give birth to the next big businesses, get most of the attention. The quieter ones, the ones in between these two extremes, seldom make the news.
The Middle Ground
Real stories lie in these less publicized spaces. Most founders do not encounter theatrical-scale dramatic failures or outrageous triumphs. The common scenarios lie in the messy central part: poor recruitment, botched product launch, or backfiring marketing strategies. These missteps typically don’t trend on media platforms, affect entire markets, or get widespread press coverage. However, they indeed shape robust companies and cultivate resilient leaders.
The Media Perspective
Media’s fixation on extreme occurrences offers distorted insights into entrepreneurship. It gives the impression that the startup journey ends as a disaster or an incredible success. But in reality, businesses grow from learning and recovering from their mistakes. They focus not on avoiding them but utilizing them at the right scale and pace.
The differentiating factor between a startup that ages gracefully and one that falls apart after a mistake is how they handle and learn from these errors. This process is not merely an unavoidable part of entrepreneurship; it is an essential one. The size, timing, and ability to turn these missteps into growth opportunities make all the difference.
Learning From Missteps
Developmental psychology tells us that children who do not make mistakes fail to build resilience. The same applies to startups. Committed leaders understand that failure is not the end of the world. They cherish mistakes as raw materials that shape the journey to success rather than end it.
Navigating through Difficulties
Building a startup in an unpredictable environment like web3 involves handling permanent volatility. It’s not the capital that matters the most but emotional resilience. It’s about how leaders respond to distress, tolerate discomfort, and transform setbacks into stepping stones.
Making Mistakes Publicly
Mistakes in the web3 ecosystem often happen publicly. While this exposure might seem brutal, it also offers opportunities. Credibility in decentralised systems is gained more from transparency than perfection. Founders who openly tackle their mistakes and learn from them gain more trust from the community.
Investor Focus
This situation changes the role of investors. Traditional market analyses give importance to market size, financial models, and competitive landscapes. But in web3, entrepreneurs must look beyond these numerical figures. Instead, they should focus on how the founding team has tackled failure in the past.
Overcoming the Myth of Smooth Scaling
A common myth in the startup world is smooth scaling or exponential growth. But the reality of entrepreneurship is jagged. The path to success includes progress, erasure, detour, and repetition. Leadership isn’t about avoiding these dips; it’s about surviving them without losing sight of the overall vision.
Take, for instance, Ethereum. The 2016 DAO hack nearly brought it down. But the strenuous debates and the subsequent contentious hard fork showcased Ethereum’s resilience. The platform didn’t succeed despite the mistake, but because it learned from it.
Final Thoughts
In the web3 world, mistakes are the forge of leadership. The dividing line between failure and resilience isn’t avoiding errors, but a founder’s capacity to absorb and learn from them. Those who learn from their setbacks, adapt, and bounce back are the ones that last longer than news headlines.
The media loves extremes but ignores the reality of entrepreneurship. It’s the smaller, less publicized stumbles that actually drive progress. This unglamorous, messy process is where decentralized entrepreneurship comes alive, and it deserves more attention than any catastrophic event or highly successful business ever will.
