This isn’t what people expect from an accounting firm. They expect answers.
But in a brand new industry, pretending you have all the answers is dangerous. Curiosity is a much better starting point. It wasn’t because we didn’t understand accounting. It was because our clients were building things that had never existed before.
Before we could explain the accounting, we had to understand the business.
It Started With a Conversation
That usually started with a conversation. “I don’t get it”….then, “Walk me through it.”
We weren’t looking for accounting answers yet. We were trying to understand what our clients had actually built, why the transaction happened, and what they were trying to accomplish.
They weren’t hiring us because they needed someone who understood the technology. They needed someone willing to take the time to understand it. Understanding didn’t happen in a single meeting. It required listening, asking questions, going back, thinking, and learning.
Only then could we interpret what we were seeing and turn it into useful financial information that helped our clients make better decisions.
Learning Together
Every conversation became a learning opportunity.
Our clients taught us how their technology worked, what problems they were solving, and why they had designed it that way. We helped them understand how those same transactions would be interpreted in the financial statements.
Neither perspective was enough on its own. What made those early client relationships so unique was that we were learning together.
Every client was building something different. One was creating a decentralized exchange. Another was building infrastructure. Another was launching a new protocol or token. There wasn’t a standard business model to learn because there wasn’t a standard industry yet.
Every new client meant learning another business from the ground up. Every conversation made us better accountants, and every conversation helped our clients better understand the financial side of what they were building.
We Became Translators
Over time, something unexpected happened. We stopped thinking of ourselves as accountants who happened to work in Web3. We became translators.
We learned how to take conversations about wallets, smart contracts, staking, governance, token vesting, and protocols, then translate them into financial information that founders, investors, auditors, and boards could actually use.
That translation became far more valuable than simply knowing the accounting guidance.It helped people make decisions.
The Lesson
Looking back, I think that’s one of the biggest lessons those early years taught me. Expertise isn’t about having every answer the moment someone asks the question. It’s about being curious enough to keep asking better questions until the right answer reveals itself.
That mindset has shaped every client relationship we’ve built since.