As an entrepreneur, my problem with blockchain is that it consumes the image and focus of your company. With blockchain, it seems like it’s all or nothing. You’

As an entrepreneur, my problem with blockchain is that it consumes the image and focus of your company. With blockchain, it seems like it’s all or nothing. You’re either a “blockchain startup” or a “tech startup.” You can’t be a tech startup that just happens to use blockchain in a part of your product. It becomes the focus of your pitch and any hype it generates. The irony is that for a “blockchain startup” to succeed, it must be solving a problem that exists independently of blockchain, for which “blockchain” is simply an implementation detail. There is most likely a way to solve the same problem your blockchain startup is solving without blockchain. If there is not, I would suggest you might be solving a non-problem. Adopting “blockchain” in any public way forces you to focus on a deceptively non-critical aspect of your business. The more you integrate your product with blockchain, the more your company depends on the success of crypocurrency in general. For example, consider you’re building a marketplace for Wordpress themes backed by cryptocurrency. You end up creating a convoluted scheme to fit your desired solution to the problem, when a simple network of payments on existing infrastructure would suffice (and indeed has sufficed for years before blockchain). In focusing on blockchain as a payment or distribution mechanism, you are causing your product to depend on the success of the blockchain ecosystem as a whole. You need people to use cryptocurrency in general, so they can use it on your marketplace without friction. Put another way, unless your product is truly category-defining, nobody is going to learn how to pay with ethereum just to use it. The success of your product depends on the wider adoption of cryptocurrency in general. So as a blockchain startup you are betting on two things. One, that your company can succeed in solving the problem it sets out to solve (a risky bet in itself). And two, that the larger blockchain ecosystem will evolve as a wider market of people adopt it and know how to use it with your product. Your success is tied to two independent variables instead of just one. That seems like an unnecessary risk IMO.