Taking the Long View: What a Web3 Deal Taught Me About Trust and Tokenization

In 1992, Steve Jobs was asked at an MIT Q&A what he had learned from his time at NeXT.

Instead of firing off an answer, he paused. Five seconds. Ten seconds. A full 18 seconds of silence. The room held its breath.

Finally: "I now take a longer-term view on people."

After years of jumping in to fix things himself, he had realized the value of patience and trust. He shifted from being a fixer to a builder — from controlling everything to trusting his team, from short-term reaction to long-term growth.

That 18-second pause speaks louder than almost any business advice I've encountered. And it came back to me again and again during one of the most instructive deals I've ever been part of — the Klumi Ventures deal, which didn't close.

This is the story of what I learned.

When Code Meets Reality: The Klumi Ventures Deal

Klumi Ventures is not a typical crypto startup. They are a regulated digital asset fund manager and Web3 venture capital firm based in the UAE — the first and only licensed Web3 VC fund manager under Abu Dhabi's ADGM regulator, with a special license to invest in both crypto tokens and equity. They launched a $100 million fund focused on emerging decentralized technology, alongside a $15 million fund for early-stage Web3 startups.

When I first came across Klumi's vision, my inner geek got very excited. Here was a team focused on real-world asset (RWA) tokenization — essentially turning things like real estate, bonds, or commodities into blockchain tokens — in a region that's fast becoming a global hub for digital assets.

The numbers behind the thesis are real. Stablecoins processed over $8.5 trillion in transactions in a single quarter of 2024. The tokenized asset market (excluding stablecoins) grew 85% year-over-year to $15.2 billion on-chain by late 2024. Over 119 issuers were tokenizing assets, from private credit to real estate.

This is not hype. It's infrastructure forming.

But here's what I didn't fully appreciate walking in: executing on an RWA venture is 90% human work and 10% code.

RWA Tokenization: Beyond the Hype

Real-world asset tokenization sounds like a technology problem. It isn't — or rather, the technology is the easy part.

Bridging two worlds. DeFi and traditional finance operate in parallel silos. Crypto has transparency and speed; TradFi has centuries of scale and trust networks. Bringing real assets on-chain requires aligning with regulations, legal frameworks, and the expectations of institutional players. You need lawyers, regulators, and traditional financiers at the table — not just engineers.

Regulatory trust. Klumi spent months working with ADGM to obtain their license — audits, due diligence, demonstrating institutional trustworthiness. No smart contract could shortcut that process. The moat they built was built on trust, not code.

Legacy integration. Real estate deeds and bond certificates don't become tokens overnight. Hooking blockchain systems into existing databases, ensuring a token legally represents a real asset claim — it's painstaking work that requires old institutions and new tech firms to genuinely cooperate. I started calling RWA "Real Work Ahead" tokenization after seeing the checklists involved.

Market education. Most potential investors and partners nodded along to the buzzwords but had deep-seated questions: How do we know the asset backs the token? What if something goes wrong? Addressing those questions took weekly calls, workshops, written memos — essentially hand-holding people into the future. It required patience and empathy, not just expertise.

Code might create the platform. Trust creates the market.

What Actually Happened

Our team pulled out at the last minute — two weeks after the investment committee voted yes, after all those memos and late-night diligence sessions.

The reason was my mistake.

I spotted a miscommunication in the deal terms during negotiations. My instinct was to jump in and fix it — classic. But our tokenization experts, the people who were supposed to handle the technical details, were still working through it.

I jumped in anyway. Spent hours on calls. Went deep on technical and regulatory details that were supposed to be their domain. I gained invaluable knowledge. But the investment team saw a red flag: "Tick knows more than the founder."

They pulled out. Not because the deal was bad, but because the fit was wrong — and I had made the fit problem visible by trying to fix it.

I was so focused on the deadline that I forgot about the people. I should have taken a breath and let the experts do their job.

Investor-Founder Fit

I failed to close the deal. I'm glad it failed.

In venture investing, people talk about founder-market fit and product-market fit. We almost never talk about investor-founder fit. But it matters as much as either.

In this case, our technical team — experienced in platform technology — struggled to understand decentralized technology at the practitioner level. That gap killed the relationship before the term sheet.

The lesson for founders: the right investor for you is one who can take the leap of faith your technology requires. They have to be courageous and determined in the same direction as you. An investor who is technically fluent in the wrong paradigm is not a neutral party — they are an active misfit.

If your investor can't follow your technical reasoning, or if you find yourself doing more explaining than building, that is information. Use it.

The Long-Term View

After the deal fell apart, I took a step back.

Steve Jobs's lesson from NeXT echoed in my mind: take a longer-term view on people. Not just your team — your partners, your investors, your counterparties. Everyone in a deal is a person first, a role second.

The real lesson of the Klumi deal was not about tokenization. It was about the difference between fixing and trusting. I am very good at fixing. I am still learning how to trust.

If something isn't done right, the instinct is to grab the wheel. Jobs learned to resist that impulse. He learned to think instead: we are building a team here for the next decade. Zoom out. Invest in capacity, not fixes.

Technology revolutions are not built on brilliant code or bold ideas alone. They are built on relationships, trust, and time.

The 18-second pause is not awkwardness. It is space for something meaningful to form.

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Related: How Family Offices Became the Smartest Money in Venture — on why patient capital wins, and how family offices learned to think in decades. The Immigrant Capital Thesis — on why rebuilding across cultures produces a fundamentally different relationship with trust, risk, and long-term value.

Tick Jiang is the technical co-founder of NUVC (nuvc.ai), an AI-native venture capital intelligence platform built in Melbourne. She writes on capital, technology, and the long game.