A convo in a group chat recently had me thinking about a pattern I keep seeing in web3, crypto and tech more generally that I thought was worth discussing here in the open.
The pattern: some founders don’t pitch like builders. They pitch like preachers.
Not the sincere kind. The ‘disingenuous church planter’ vibe.
The kind of person who makes you wonder if they’re actually offering eternal salvation… or if the only motivation behind that permanent smile is your 10% tithe.
Culturally, we’re jaded enough to accept that salespeople are going to sell.
We expect the P.T. Barnum ringmaster energy. We know the whole ‘a sucker born every minute’ thing exists.
But we tend to expect more from people who position themselves as trying to fix the world.
That’s the tell for me: when someone whose commercial product pitch leans hard on moral posture – the mission, the movement, the liberation narrative, the ‘we’re changing everything’ platitudes – I start asking: what are you actually trying to sell me in the name of your Tech God?
Because I’ve seen this movie outside of tech too.
I grew up around someone who wasn’t especially spiritual inwardly or in many of his behaviors but, as the oldest child of religious parents, dutifully followed their wishes: he went to an evangelical university and eventually became a “church planter”. He made them _so proud_.
What always stood out when talking with him wasn’t the theology, though: it was how animated he got talking about the economics of how to make church planting a financially sustainable venture with a replicable business model.
It wasn’t that I felt it was evil in itself for him to consider where the money would come from in this context. It was the mismatch: the sanctimony on stage that didn't align with his lackluster behind-the-scenes spirituality, coupled with the laser focus on the spreadsheets.
Even when he talked about his personal spiritual struggles, it always felt rehearsed: like a line designed to gain your confidence by revealing that he, too, is human.
These kinds of mismatches show up in tech constantly.
If your product is real, you shouldn’t need to launder the pitch through faux nobility.
If your ‘why’ is genuinely bigger than you, you should be able to talk about incentives and tradeoffs plainly: without the halo.
Someone in the chat said it cleanly: a lot of crypto and tech more broadly is “trying to find a problem for the tech to solve”, rather than first identifying a real problem that resonates with an actual user base and building a solution that they would find compelling.
My default advice to that archetype is simple: stop using vague moral energy as a substitute for utility.
If you’re serious about building a commercially viable product, you don’t need a congregation. You need daily active users. For that, you need something that intersects meaningfully with their real-life needs.
