I was nineteen when I started building in crypto. Not trading, building. I joined NFTzilla as Head of Media and Marketing, helping scale a platform for minting and selling NFTs. Then I co-founded NFTuence, which connected creators with brands in the Web3 space. I made real money. I lost some real money. I met people who became millionaires overnight and people who lost everything just as fast. I watched an entire industry inflate, pop, and leave most of its participants holding nothing but lessons.
I don’t regret any of it. Not even the losses. Especially not the losses.
Here’s what crypto taught me about building things that actually last.
Velocity Is a Competitive Advantage
In crypto, the window between “this is a good idea” and “twelve other people are building the same thing” was measured in days. Sometimes hours. The ecosystem moved at a speed that would give most traditional business people a panic attack. If you couldn’t go from concept to launch in weeks, you were already behind.
This sounds stressful, and it was. But it installed something in me that I carry into everything I do now: a deep, almost physical discomfort with slowness. When I see a team spend three months on a project that should take three weeks, I feel it in my chest. Not because I think speed means sloppiness, I don’t, but because I know from experience that speed and quality aren’t opposites. They’re both functions of clarity. When you know exactly what you’re building and why, you can move fast and still build well.
At Treetop, I’ve brought this mentality to healthcare marketing. We launch campaigns in days that other companies take months to produce. Not because we cut corners, but because we’ve eliminated the bureaucratic friction that slows most organizations down. That instinct, that urgency, comes directly from crypto. When you’ve operated in an environment where a week’s delay means someone else ships your idea, you never lose the bias toward action.
Community Is the Only Real Moat
Every successful crypto project I saw had one thing in common: a community that would go to war for it. Not customers. Not users. A community. People who identified with the project, who evangelized it without being asked, who showed up in Discord at 2 AM to help new members.
The projects that treated community as an afterthought, as a marketing channel to be optimized, all failed. The ones that built community as the core product, not a feature of the product, survived. Some thrived.
This lesson transfers directly to everything I’ve built since. In healthcare, the families we serve aren’t customers in the traditional sense. They’re a community dealing with some of the hardest challenges a parent can face. When we build systems that genuinely serve that community, not just extract revenue from it, the business results follow. Referrals increase. Retention improves. Reviews accumulate. The community becomes the growth engine.
I see the same pattern in AI. The tools and platforms that will win aren’t the ones with the best models or the slickest interfaces. They’re the ones that build genuine communities of people who care about the mission. Community is a moat that money can’t buy and competitors can’t copy. Crypto taught me that at nineteen. I haven’t forgotten it.
Hype Fades, Building Skills Don’t
The hardest lesson crypto taught me was about hype. When the market was up, everything felt inevitable. Projects with no real utility were raising millions. People with no real skills were calling themselves founders. The narrative was so strong that it bent reality, temporarily.
Then the market crashed. And reality unbent.
What I noticed in the aftermath was simple and clarifying: the people who had built real skills survived. The ones who had only ridden the wave didn’t. The developers who’d learned Solidity kept building. The community managers who’d learned how to actually cultivate engagement found work in other industries. The marketers who’d learned performance marketing and data analysis pivoted seamlessly. The rest, the ones who’d confused a bull market with personal talent, disappeared.
I was lucky. I was young enough that the crash didn’t wipe me out financially. And I’d spent my time in crypto actually building things, not just speculating. So when the music stopped, I had real skills: product development, go-to-market strategy, community building, performance marketing, data analysis. These are transferable. They work in any industry, in any market condition.
This is the thing I try to tell people who are early in their careers: optimize for skills, not for market conditions. Markets cycle. Industries rise and fall. But the ability to build, to take an idea from zero to something real, to design systems that work, to lead teams, to ship, that compounds forever. No market crash can take it from you.
No Regrets, Just Compound Interest
People sometimes ask if I wish I’d skipped crypto and gone straight into something “serious.” The answer is no. Absolutely not. Those years in Web3 were the most compressed learning experience of my life. I learned more about building, marketing, community, and resilience between nineteen and twenty-one than most people learn in a decade of corporate work.
The specific projects are gone. NFTzilla isn’t running anymore. NFTuence wound down. The tokens I held are mostly worthless. But the lessons, velocity, community, the difference between hype and substance, those are embedded in everything I build now.
When I design marketing systems at Treetop, I’m using pattern recognition I developed in crypto. When I build AI agent infrastructure on the side, I’m applying community-building principles I learned in Discord servers at 2 AM. When I evaluate new opportunities, I’m running them through a filter that was forged in the crash: is this real, or is this hype? Does this build something lasting, or does it depend on conditions staying favorable?
Crypto didn’t teach me to be a crypto person. It taught me to be a builder. And builders don’t belong to any one industry. They belong to whatever problem is most interesting and most worth solving right now.
For me, right now, that’s healthcare and AI. Tomorrow it might be something else entirely. The industry doesn’t matter. The building does.
