Emerging tech strategist Audrey Nesbitt on why innovation alone doesn’t save a startup, and how human behavior still decides who scales and who sinks.
Every tech boom arrives with the same promise: this time will be different. Yet whether it’s fintech in the 2010s, blockchain in the 2020s or AI today, the story rarely changes. Founders build faster, raise bigger and crash harder; not because the technology fails, but because people do.
Audrey Nesbitt has watched that cycle unfold from every angle. A veteran of emerging tech and the author of “Why You Shouldn’t Be the CEO (And Other Ways to Save Your Startup),” she argues that innovation alone has never been the problem. What keeps killing great ideas, she says, is leadership that can’t evolve as fast as the technology it creates.
In this conversation, Nesbitt takes a scalpel to the founder mindset and explains why knowing when to step back may be the most underrated startup skill of all.
You’ve built and scaled startups through multiple innovation waves, including fintech, blockchain and now AI. After watching all those cycles, what patterns keep repeating and what mistakes just never seem to go away?
The mistakes that are inherently human are the ones that don’t change. The tech evolves, the buzzwords rotate, but I see startups make the same mistakes cycle after cycle.
Look, not every founder falls into these traps, but enough do that the pattern is predictable. The most common one? Confusing technical possibility with market demand. Just because you can build something doesn’t mean anyone wants it. I’ve watched brilliant engineers spend a year perfecting a solution to a problem that exists primarily in their own heads.
In Web3, teams built these elegant decentralized platforms and then stood around genuinely confused when regular people didn’t want to memorize seed phrases and set up wallets just to use what was essentially a slightly different version of something they already had. Turns out people prefer “click here to sign in with Google” over “here’s your 12-word recovery phrase, don’t lose it or your account disappears forever.”
The other pattern that never dies is building for builders instead of users. It’s like watching chefs create elaborate molecular gastronomy dishes and then wondering why people keep ordering burgers. You’re solving for the wrong audience.
Where it gets really expensive is the leadership side. Some of the smartest technical founders I know are absolutely terrible at delegation. They built the company from zero, so they think they need to approve every pixel, every expense, every hire. What worked when you had five people becomes organizational quicksand at fifty.
The irony is that the skills that make you a great founder at the start, that obsessive attention to detail, that refusal to compromise on quality, those same traits often become the bottleneck that prevents you from scaling. The tools change every cycle. Those human blind spots? Completely reliable.
You’ve shared a story about launching a Web3 social platform that was “years ahead of its time.” What did that experience teach you about timing and market readiness, especially in emerging tech?
I worked on the launch team for a Web3 social platform in the very early days of crypto, and that experience taught me a brutal lesson: people won’t make the leap to something new unless it’s dramatically better and simpler than what they already have.
We built this technically sophisticated platform, thinking people would be excited about the innovation. But regular users were perfectly happy with Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, the platforms they already used. Setting up a digital wallet, managing keys, and learning a completely new interface just to post content felt like homework, not innovation.
Here’s what many innovators, well ahead of their time, fail to understand: there’s a psychological threshold people must cross before they’ll even notice or act on a product change. In psychology, it’s called the just noticeable difference. Your product has to be different enough that people actually perceive the improvement, not just different for the sake of being different. We cleared the “technically different” bar but completely failed the “noticeably better” test.
People want simplicity, not hoops to jump through. And here’s the thing: they don’t care about decentralization. They don’t care about crypto. It’s still a niche market. We believed features like data ownership and censorship resistance were revolutionary, but these benefits were often below the threshold of what regular users could perceive as valuable in their daily lives.
The timing lesson goes deeper than just “we were early.” Market readiness isn’t about technology maturity. It’s about whether people are frustrated enough with the current solution that they’ll tolerate friction to try yours. We launched when that frustration didn’t exist yet. The existing platforms weren’t causing enough pain for people to notice our solution as meaningfully different.
In Web3, we often see founders obsessed with launching a token before they even test product demand. Why do you think market demand comes second so often?
Token design gets prioritized because it’s a fundraising mechanism disguised as product innovation. That’s really what it comes down to. Not all tokens, but enough that it’s a clear pattern.
For years, Web3 operated under this model, where a good whitepaper could equal funding. It wasn’t a fantasy for everyone; plenty of teams actually raised significant capital this way. Write some elegant tokenomics, throw in buzzwords about decentralization and governance, and you’ve got capital. No need for customer discovery, revenue models, or proof that anyone actually wants what you’re building.
It worked for a while. Investors threw money at concepts, not companies. But the market has matured. That’s not happening anymore. Investors are finally asking for proof of concept, actual business plans, and real customers.
You’ve said that “blockchain doesn’t fix bad leadership.” What leadership blind spots are most common in decentralized or DAO-style organizations?
Blockchain doesn’t change human problems. Ego, micromanagement, poor leadership, poor execution. These issues exist regardless of whether you’re a DAO or a regular biz structure.
The biggest mistake is founders thinking technology solves organizational dysfunction. It doesn’t. You still have power dynamics, personality conflicts, and the need for someone to make hard decisions when consensus fails. The difference is that those problems are now slower and muddier because the structure makes accountability harder.
DAOs can be manipulated. The people with the most tokens, the most time, or the loudest voices dominate. It’s not some revolutionary governance model; it’s the same power dynamics with different mechanisms. When things go wrong, accountability disappears into “the community decided” instead of anyone actually owning outcomes.
Decentralization is a technical architecture. Leadership is a human capability. Both are solving completely different problems. Good leadership creates clarity, makes unpopular decisions when necessary, and builds systems where people can execute effectively. You can’t automate that with smart contracts.
Leadership requires emotional intelligence, strategic judgment, and the ability to coordinate humans under pressure. Those are skills, not code. Blockchain doesn’t fix bad leadership any more than email fixed bad communication.
You’ve also warned against “tokenizing everything.” From your perspective, what are the biggest red flags when a team decides to launch a token, and when does tokenization actually make sense?
The biggest red flag is a token for a token’s sake. No real reason for it other than to raise money. When tokenomics comes before product-market fit, you’re looking at a fundraising vehicle, not a business.
If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. Promised returns that defy economic logic. The token mechanics only work if the number goes up forever. Whitepapers full of jargon but light on actual utility.
The regulatory piece is critical. Teams launch tokens, thinking they’ve found a loophole around securities law, then act shocked when enforcement comes. Most founders also underestimate the ongoing marketing, community management, and liquidity provision required to make a token successful.
When does tokenization actually make sense? When it’s genuinely central to your product’s core functionality. When network effects require early participants to be economically aligned. When you’re solving coordination problems that traditional payment systems can’t handle. But that’s maybe 5% of the projects that launch tokens.
The test is simple: remove the token from your business model. If everything collapses, you don’t have a product. If it still makes sense and solves real problems, then maybe tokenization adds value on top of that foundation.
If you had to distill your advice for Web3 founders into one sentence, what would it be?
Stay connected to the Web3 community for support and innovation, but spend equal time with the people in your real-world industry silo learning what’s actually broken, what use cases matter, and whether anyone will pay for what you’re building, because community enthusiasm is usually about token success on exchanges, not product-market fit.
