a16z: To the founders of crypto, companies don't buy the best technology.

Written by: Pyrs Carvolth, Christian Crowley, a16z

Compiled by: Chopper, Foresight News

In the current blockchain adoption cycle, founders are learning a disturbing but profound lesson: companies don't buy the "best" technology; they buy the least disruptive upgrade path.

For decades, new enterprise technologies have promised orders-of-magnitude improvements over traditional infrastructure: faster settlements, lower costs, and cleaner architectures. But in practice, these promises rarely match the technological advantages.

This means that if your product is "clearly better" but still can't win, the difference isn't in performance, but in product fit.

This article is dedicated to a group of crypto founders who started in public blockchains and are now struggling to transition to enterprise-level businesses. For many, this is a huge blind spot. Below, we share key insights based on our own experience, successful case studies of founders who have sold their products to enterprises, and real feedback from enterprise buyers, to help you better market your products to businesses and secure orders.

What exactly does "best" mean?

Within large enterprises, the "best technology" is the technology that is perfectly compatible with existing systems, approval processes, risk models, and incentive structures.

SWIFT is slow and expensive, yet it remains a mainstay. Why? Because it provides a sense of security in shared governance and oversight. The COBOL language is still in use because rewriting a stable system would pose an existential risk. Batch file transfers persist because they enable the creation of clear checkpoints and audit trails.

One potentially unpleasant conclusion is that the obstacles businesses face in adopting blockchain are not due to a lack of education or vision, but rather to misaligned product design. Founders who insist on pushing the most perfect technological form will continuously run into obstacles. Founders who treat corporate constraints as design inputs rather than compromise solutions are most likely to succeed.

Therefore, we shouldn't downplay the value of blockchain. The key is to help the technology team package a version that enterprises can accept, which requires the following ideas.

Businesses fear losses far more than they love gains.

Founders often make a mistake when pitching to a company: assuming that decision-makers are primarily driven by benefits, such as better technology, faster systems, lower costs, and cleaner architecture.

The reality is that the core motivation for corporate buyers is to minimize downside risk.

Why? In large organizations, the cost of failure is asymmetrical. This is the complete opposite of small startups, a point that founders who haven't worked in large companies often overlook. Missing opportunities is rarely punished, but glaring mistakes (especially those related to unfamiliar new technologies) can severely impact career prospects, trigger audits, and even attract regulatory scrutiny.

Decision-makers rarely benefit directly from the technologies they recommend. Even with strategic alignment and company-level investment, the gains are dispersed and indirect. The losses, however, are immediate and often personal.

As a result, corporate decisions are rarely driven by "what might happen," but rather by "the probability of not failing." This is why many "better" technologies struggle to gain widespread adoption. The barrier to implementation is usually not technological superiority, but rather: will using this technology make the decision-maker's job safer or more dangerous?

Therefore, you must rethink: who are your customers? One of the most common mistakes founders make when selling a business is assuming that "the most technically savvy person" is the buyer. The reality is that business success is rarely driven by technological conviction, but rather by organizational dynamics.

In large organizations, decision-making is less about returns and more about risk management, coordination costs, and accountability. At the enterprise level, most organizations outsource parts of their decision-making processes to consulting firms, not because they lack intelligence or expertise, but because key decisions must be continuously validated and proven sound. Introducing a reputable third party provides external endorsement, mitigates liability, and offers credible evidence when decisions are later challenged. This is the practice of most Fortune 500 companies, hence the substantial consulting fees in their annual budgets.

In other words, the larger the organization, the more crucial it is to ensure its decisions can withstand internal scrutiny afterward. As the saying goes, "No one gets fired for hiring McKinsey."

How exactly do companies make decisions?

Corporate decision-making is similar to how many people use ChatGPT: we don't let it make decisions for us, but rather use it to test ideas, weigh pros and cons, reduce uncertainty, and always take responsibility for ourselves.

Companies generally behave in similar ways, except that their decision support layer consists of people, not large models.

New decisions must pass through multiple layers of hurdles, including legal, compliance, risk, procurement, security, and senior management oversight. Each layer addresses different concerns, for example:

• What problems might arise?
• Who is responsible if something goes wrong?
• How can this be compatible with the existing system?
• How do I explain this decision to executives, regulators, or the board of directors?

Therefore, for truly meaningful innovative projects, the "customer" is almost never a single buyer. The so-called "buyer" is actually an alliance of stakeholders, many of whom are more concerned with avoiding mistakes than with innovation.

Many technologically superior products often fail here: it's not that they can't be used, but that the organization doesn't have the right people to use them safely.

Take online betting platforms as an example. With the rise of prediction markets, crypto "water sellers" (such as deposit gateways) might see online sports betting platforms as natural corporate clients. However, to do so, you must first understand that the regulatory framework for online sports betting differs from that of prediction markets, including the separate licenses issued by each state. Knowing the varying attitudes of different states towards crypto, deposit gateways will understand that their clients are not product, engineering, or business teams looking to access crypto liquidity, but rather legal, compliance, and finance teams concerned with the risks associated with existing betting licenses and core fiat currency operations.

The simplest solution is to clearly identify the decision-makers early on. Don't be afraid to ask your product advocates (people who like your product) how they can help promote it internally. Behind the scenes often stand legal, compliance, risk, financial, and security stakeholders… They all possess undisclosed veto power and have vastly different concerns. Winning teams will package the product as a manageable decision, providing stakeholders with readily available answers and a clear benefit/risk framework. Simply by asking, you can find out who you're packaging it for and then find a seemingly safe yet reassuring path to "consent."

Consulting firm

Often, new technologies pass through an intermediary before reaching enterprise buyers. Consulting firms, system integrators, auditors, and other third parties often play a crucial role in the transformation and legitimization of new technologies. Whether you like it or not, they become the gatekeepers of new technologies. Using mature and familiar frameworks and collaboration models, they transform new solutions into familiar concepts and turn uncertainty into practical advice.

Founders often feel frustrated or skeptical, believing that consulting firms slow things down, add unnecessary processes, and become additional stakeholders influencing final decisions. And they certainly are! But founders must be realistic: in the US alone, the management consulting services market is projected to exceed $130 billion by 2026, with the majority coming from large corporations seeking help with strategy, risk, and transformation. While blockchain-related business only accounts for a small portion, don't assume that including "blockchain" in a project will allow it to escape this decision-making system.

Whether you like it or not, this model has influenced corporate decision-making for decades. Even if you're selling blockchain solutions, this logic won't disappear. Our experience communicating with Fortune 500 companies, large banks, and asset management institutions has repeatedly proven that ignoring this layer can lead to strategic errors.

The collaboration between Deloitte and Digital Asset is a prime example: by partnering with a large consulting firm like Deloitte, Digital Asset's blockchain infrastructure has been repackaged in language more familiar to enterprises, such as governance, risk, and compliance. For institutional buyers, the involvement of trusted parties like Deloitte not only validates the technology but also makes the implementation path clearer and more robust.

Don't use the same set of lines.

Because corporate decision-makers are extremely sensitive to their own needs (especially downside risks), you must customize your presentations: do not use the same sales pitch, the same PowerPoint presentation, or the same framework for every potential client.

Details matter. Two large banks may appear similar on the surface, but their systems, constraints, and internal priorities could be vastly different. What works for one bank might be completely ineffective for the other.

Using a generic sales pitch is tantamount to telling the other party that you haven't taken the time to understand the organization's specific definition of the project. If your sales pitch isn't tailored to the individual, the organization will find it hard to believe that your proposal is a perfect fit.

There's an even more serious mistake: the "start from scratch" rhetoric. In the crypto space, founders often tend to paint a picture of a completely new future: a radical replacement of the old system, ushering in a new era with newer, better decentralized technology. But companies rarely do this; traditional infrastructure is deeply embedded in workflows, compliance processes, existing supplier contracts, reporting systems, and countless touchpoints and stakeholders. Starting from scratch not only disrupts daily operations but also introduces various risks.

The wider the scope of the change, the less likely anyone within the organization is to make the decision: the bigger the decision, the larger the decision-making alliance becomes.

In the successful cases we've seen, founders first adapt to the existing state of their clients, rather than demanding that clients adapt to their own ideals. When designing an entry point, it's crucial to integrate it into existing systems and workflows, minimizing disruption and establishing a reliable entry point.

A recent example is the collaboration between Uniswap and BlackRock on tokenized funds. Instead of positioning DeFi as a replacement for traditional asset management, Uniswap aims to provide permissionless secondary market liquidity for products issued under BlackRock's existing regulatory and fund structures. This integration does not require BlackRock to abandon its operating model; it simply extends it on-chain.

Once you've gone through the procurement process and the solution is officially launched, it's perfectly fine to pursue more ambitious goals later.

Companies will hedge their investments; you need to be the "right hedge."

This risk aversion manifests as a predictable behavior: institutions will hedge their positions, and often on a large scale.

Large enterprises don't bet everything on emerging infrastructure; instead, they conduct multiple experiments simultaneously. They allocate small budgets to various suppliers, test different solutions within their innovation departments, or pilot projects without affecting core systems. From an institutional perspective, this preserves choice while limiting risk exposure.

But for founders, there's a subtle trap here: being selected ≠ being adopted. Many crypto companies are just one of the options companies use to test the waters; it's fine to try it out, but there's no need to scale it up.

The real goal is not to win a pilot program, but to become the hedge with the best odds of winning. This requires not only technological superiority, but also expertise.

Why does professionalism outweigh purity?

In these types of markets, clarity, predictability, and credibility typically outweigh pure innovation: it's difficult to win with technology alone. This is why expertise is crucial; it reduces uncertainty.

By professionalism, we mean that when designing and showcasing products, you must fully consider institutional realities (such as legal constraints, governance processes, and existing systems) and commit to operating within these frameworks. Following established practices essentially tells the other party that this product is governable, auditable, and controllable. Regardless of whether this aligns with the spirit of blockchain or cryptography, this is how businesses view the practical application of technology.

This may seem like corporate resistance to change, but it's not. It's a rational response to corporate incentive mechanisms.

Getting bogged down in the ideological purity behind the technology—whether it's "decentralization," "trust of least privilege," or other cryptographic principles—makes it difficult to convince institutions bound by laws, regulations, and reputation. Demanding that companies accept a "complete vision" for a product all at once is asking too much and is premature.

Of course, there are also examples of a win-win situation where groundbreaking technology meets ideological purity. LayerZero recently launched its new public chain, Zero, attempting to solve the scalability and interoperability challenges in enterprise deployments while retaining the core principles of decentralization and permissionless innovation.

But Zero's real difference lies not just in its architecture, but in its organizational design philosophy. Instead of creating a one-size-fits-all network and expecting companies to adapt, it collaborates with core partners to jointly design dedicated "Zones" for specific scenarios such as payments, settlements, and capital markets.

Zero's architecture, the team's willingness to genuinely collaborate on these application scenarios, and the LayerZero brand all minimized some of the concerns of large traditional financial institutions. These factors combined led institutions such as Citadel, DTCC, and ICE to announce themselves as partners.

Founders can easily interpret corporate resistance as conservatism, bureaucracy, or a lack of vision. Sometimes this is true, but there's usually another reason: most organizations aren't irrational; they're primarily focused on staying afloat. Their design aims to preserve capital, protect reputation, and withstand scrutiny.

In this environment, the winning technology is not necessarily the most elegant or the most ideologically pure, but rather the technology that strives to adapt to the current situation of the enterprise.

These realities help us see the long-term potential of blockchain infrastructure in the enterprise sector.

Enterprise transformation rarely happens overnight. Consider the "digital transformation" of the 2010s: despite the technologies already existing for years, most large enterprises were still modernizing their core systems, often at great expense by hiring consulting firms. Large-scale digital transformation is a gradual process, achieved through controlled integration and expansion based on mature use cases, rather than a complete replacement overnight. This is the reality of enterprise transformation.

Successful founders are not those who demand a complete vision from the outset, but those who know how to implement it step by step.