Become Unpivotable
At Hype we don’t pivot. We never have. Nine years in.
Written by: Danny Gazit, CEO of Hype
Crypto has seen a lot of teams commit seppuku recently.
Some of it was forced. Runways drying up, tokens going nowhere, investors going quiet, users churning. This post is not about those companies.
The more interesting cases are the companies that had a choice. Agencies that six months ago were “crypto-native” are suddenly AI-first, or digital asset specialists, or production studios overnight. Same people, same teams, fresh label. You can watch the bios and see the pivot happening in real time.
Hype has been around for four cycles of this now and this trend isn’t new. In fact it’s often the exact same pattern each time.
It usually starts with small, reasonable adjustments in the name of staying ‘relevant’. The homepage gets cleaned up. The language gets softer. The company starts talking to audiences it does not really understand. Eventually it starts to look like something a normal fintech consultancy or SaaS business could have shipped. By the time anyone notices, the company has given up the only thing that made it different and is now competing with players who have 100x the capital and 100x the people. Good luck with that.
All this feels safer from the inside. From the outside, it looks like surrender, or worse, capitulation. A good bookstore can sell coffee, host events, and build an online shop. It should probably do all three. But if it stops calling itself a bookstore because books are having a bad quarter, it has confused new revenue with a new reason to exist.
The problem is bear markets make founders overcorrect. When prices are up, crypto weirdness looks like vision. When prices are down, it starts to look like liability. So founders reach for whatever word the market is rewarding that quarter. AI, neobank, data, new media, institutional. The list goes on.
Bear markets are also the worst possible time to discover you never had conviction.
At Hype we don’t pivot. We never have. Nine years in.
We’re unpivotable.
I get asked “why” quite a lot, especially during times like this. The answer is conviction. Crypto was never a label we borrowed or a fad we pivoted to, it’s where we’ve built our reputation and moat over nine years. The relationships, the pattern recognition, the context you only get from being in it every day. That value never changes even when BTC goes down.
When budgets tighten and teams get more selective, people don’t want to take more risks. They go to the partners who have proven they get it right.
Giving up that position at exactly the moment it becomes most valuable, just to sound more broadly appealing, has never made sense to me.
Being unpivotable doesn’t mean standing still though.
It means you expand around what you’re already good at, rather than swapping it out for whatever’s trending this quarter. For us that’s meant going deeper into how the companies we work with actually operate over the years. Not just how they go to market, but how they hire, how they structure teams, how they build partnerships, where time leaks out of the business.
We’ve never pivoted, but we have expanded plenty. Over time the Hype group has grown well beyond marketing. Talent, infra, events, advisory, founder comms. None of it came from a workshop about new verticals. Each one came from being close enough to clients to see what they actually needed, and deciding we were the right people to build it for them. Same mission every time, to help the best and most ambitious teams in crypto win.
And AI is the obvious next step in that pattern. We already sit inside our clients’ workflows. We see where the bottlenecks are, where the leverage is, where teams are losing hours a day to work that shouldn’t exist. We’ve spent the last 12 months fixing exactly that for ourselves. Now we’re starting to do the same for a small number of clients, selectively, where we can build something real.
The opportunity here isn’t the branding or calling yourself an AI company, that’s just theatre. Actually using it properly, to make our work and our clients’ work better, is the entire game. (And tbh, the gap between teams who do and teams who don’t is widening every month. By year end it’s going to be brutal).
So while everyone else reinvents themselves into whatever’s hot this quarter, we’re focused on getting better at what we already do, and expanding around the moat we’ve already built. We are staying where our judgement has an edge and using new tools to make that edge sharper.
AI is going to make generic execution cheaper. That makes earned judgement more valuable. Knowing the market, knowing the people. Knowing which words land, which narratives feel inauthentic.
The worst thing you can do in that world is walk away from the only place where your judgement has an edge. We won’t be making that mistake.
Become unpivotable.
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