From Collab.Land by James Young

If you’re looking for a blog about smooth sailing, wild success, and genius moves, you’re in the wrong place. This is about being James Young: messy, mistake-ridden, occasionally brilliant, often clueless, and perpetually fascinated by the intersection of humans and technology. Let’s get real.

It all started in game development. Back then, I was knee-deep in free-to-play games, thinking I was revolutionizing entertainment. Spoiler alert: I wasn’t. But I learned about scale — building systems that could handle millions of users without collapsing. From there, I jumped into online advertising, trying to better understand the business models behind f2p games. I even convinced myself I could fix ad fraud. Naïve? Absolutely. But that journey gave birth to Token Curated Registries, a decentralized attempt at solving trust issues in digital spaces. It was an idea ahead of its time, and, honestly, I had no clue what to do with it.

Then came SpankChain. Yes, you read that right. A platform for sex workers using the first-ever payment channel. Because sex work is work, and it deserves respect. That project not only worked, but it scaled, proving that bold ideas could have real impact.

By the time I co-wrote the MolochDAO white paper, my obsession with coordination failure was growing like a weed. We launched MolochDAO to fund Ethereum2.0. Groundbreaking? Sure. But it also highlighted the massive gaps in the ecosystem. No one was supporting dapp developers. So, MetaCartelDAO was born — a grants committee for decentralized projects. Still, the gaps in tooling were impossible to ignore.

Cue DAOops, my no-code experiment to solve the developer tooling problem. Then COVID hit, and DAOs couldn’t even verify their members. That simple, glaring problem became the spark for Collab.Land. During the HackMoney hackathon in May 2020, we hacked together a tool that gated access to chat groups based on token ownership, like DAO shares. We didn’t win the hackathon, but we had stumbled onto something bigger.

Here’s the truth: I didn’t have any of it figured out. Collab.Land started as a scrappy experiment during a chaotic time. Co-founders dropped off. Stress was relentless. And I had no idea what the business was supposed to become. DeFi Summer 2020 brought traction, but I was too caught up in the drama to recognize it.

The biggest bet I had made so far was bringing in my life partner as co-founder. Working with your spouse isn’t for the faint of heart. College sweethearts turned co-parents turned co-founders — it’s a mix of breakthroughs and blowouts. The tools that kept our relationship strong didn’t always translate to the relentless chaos of a crypto startup. But we had resilience, shared values, and a clear sense of who we are. Our commitment to value-driven work and self-sacrifice, while noble, turned into a liability in an industry where quick gains rule and anything less than instant success gets you ousted from relevance.

Fast forward to the bull market, and Collab.Land pivoted entirely to token gating. The no-code tools I’d poured so much into? Nobody cared. I naïvely believed that focusing on growth and providing value would lead to monetization. It didn’t. I missed the NFT and DeFi waves entirely because I was too busy grinding. Idiotic? Yes. Humbling? Absolutely.

Desperate for community support, we launched an NFT, followed by a retroactive token airdrop two years later. It made zero people rich. Airdrop farmers hated us. Influencers ignored us. Our investors, rightfully upset, showed their disappointment in different ways. All of them had expected more, and I couldn’t blame them. My idealistic vision of kumbaya vibes crashed into harsh reality: no good deed goes unpunished. The backlash was brutal, leaving me jaded and questioning the very industry I had poured my life into.

We tried launching a dev portal, a kind of miniapp store for Collab.Land integrations. It was tons of work for little traction. We tried to fast-follow Friend.tech and failed spectacularly. Some investors rage-quit. Others ghosted. The failures piled up. Startups are brutal. They test your patience, your sanity, and your ability to keep moving forward when everything feels like it’s falling apart.

Revenue or die — that became the mantra. Collab.Land’s survival demanded hard pivots and painful honesty. Almost breaking even with Collab.Land feels like walking a tightrope.

I believe communities are the fundamental building block for crypto but I’m rethinking DAOs, realizing that building incentives alone isn’t enough. Coordination can’t just rely on idealism. It needs structure, and maybe even AI. Agent-led communities are where my thoughts are now.

The road to success is littered with regrets and “what ifs.” Every mistake — every piece of roadkill along the way — gets a salute as I move forward. The focus now is on staying relevant and building tools that matter. Agents are the new applications. SaaS needs to evolve into APIs — Agent Programmable Interfaces.

2025 is here.The fire is still burning, and so am I.