Morale Is Made of Progress
In a downturn, no speech and no bonus works — only visible shipping keeps a team alive
- Difficulty
- Moderate
- Time to result
- ~months to results
- Steps
- 5
- Confidence
- 85%
Shah's rule for leading through a drawdown (crypto winter at Alchemy, the 85-90% revenue collapse at Airbnb during COVID): morale cannot be manufactured with rhetoric or extrinsic incentives. It is a byproduct of visible progress. So the leader's job in a downturn is not to inspire — it is to manufacture and surface evidence that the thing is still real and still moving, and to have hired people whose motivation doesn't depend on the price going up.
Origin
Jason Shah's operating stance at Alchemy through the 2022 crypto winter, explicitly generalised from watching Brian Chesky lead Airbnb through COVID (referencing the Airbnb episode with Jonathan Golden on the podcast, where revenue fell 85-90% with no known recovery date).
Core principles
- 01Morale and the ability to keep building are the determinants of long-term survival — if everybody takes the ball and goes home, the uncertain future never materialises.
- 02The only way to maintain morale is to make progress. Speeches don't work.
- 03Extrinsic motivators (free tokens, bonuses to stay excited) don't work either.
- 04New technologies never move up in a straight line — say this plainly and often when the market says otherwise.
- 05Focus on product and customers, which are the things still under your control when the market isn't.
- 06The hiring decision precedes the morale problem: people motivated for the right reasons stay motivated when the price doesn't.
How to run it
- 1
Accept that rhetoric will not work
Explicitly rule out the two default levers — the motivational all-hands speech and the extrinsic sweetener (free crypto, retention bonuses). Shah is blunt that neither really works. Removing them forces you to the only lever that does.
Watch out A speech that isn't backed by shipped progress actively erodes credibility, because the gap between the words and the visible reality is now larger.
- 2
Re-anchor on the metrics that aren't the price
Find and surface the leading indicators that are still going up while the price goes down. At Alchemy: more developers on the platform than ever, record Ethereum transactions, new layer-2 launches, Solana announcing a web3-native phone. These are the evidence that the thing is real.
Pro tip Say the structural point out loud: the term 'web3' has barely existed in the popular lexicon for a year, and adoption curves for the internet, AI, and QR codes were never straight lines either.
Watch out Don't paper over the bad news. Shah names the huge price drop, the financial-mismanagement scandals and the contagion directly — the optimism only lands because the realism came first.
- 3
Ship something visible, then show it
Make and demonstrate concrete progress. Alchemy launched Solana support during the winter. The team went to EthCC in Paris and saw the volume of builders and hackathons in person. The reaction that matters is 'this is real, we're actually doing things, building things'.
Pro tip Physical proximity to other builders (conferences, hackathons) is itself a progress signal when your own metrics are noisy — it keeps the spirit of building alive.
- 4
Keep the team on product and customers
Direct attention to the two things still fully under the team's control. Airbnb's response to a 90% revenue collapse with no visible recovery date was to focus on product and customers rather than to wait out the market.
Watch out Every hour spent watching the price is an hour not spent generating the progress that is the only real morale input.
- 5
Fix it upstream: hire people motivated for the right reasons
The durable version of this framework runs at hiring time. People who joined for the token price leave when the token price falls; people who joined for the mission and the craft keep building. Shah's recipe: the right people plus visible progress keeps a team highly motivated and highly effective for whenever things do turn around.
Watch out You cannot retrofit this during a downturn. It is a hiring decision made years earlier.
In the wild
With prices collapsed and major scandals rippling through the industry, Shah's team pointed at what was actually happening: more developers on the platform than ever, Solana support shipped, record Ethereum transactions, new layer 2s launching, and a packed EthCC in Paris full of people building.
→ The team's read was 'this is real, we're actually doing things, building things' — morale sustained by evidence rather than by exhortation, with the company continuing to build the core business while adapting to the new environment.
During COVID, Airbnb's revenue fell 85-90% and leadership genuinely did not know when it would turn around — it was not a case of 'this comes back in six months, keep plowing forward'.
→ What worked, per Shah, was making progress and focusing on product and customers — the same recipe, at far greater scale and with far worse numbers.
Common mistakes
Trying to buy morale
Giving everybody free crypto or equivalent extrinsic sweeteners to keep them motivated doesn't work. It confirms that the intrinsic reason to be there has evaporated, and it selects for exactly the people who will leave next cycle.
Leading with a speech instead of a shipment
No speech maintains morale. People get excited when they see progress. A leader whose only response to a downturn is communication has misidentified the input variable.
Optimism without realism
Shah calls himself a techno-optimist and a realist, and names the price collapse, the scandals and the contagion explicitly before making the bull case. Optimism that skips the acknowledgment reads as denial and destroys the leader's credibility for the next update.
Is it for you?
Best for
Leaders and PMs holding a team together through a market crash, funding winter, or a demand collapse where the recovery date is genuinely unknown.
Not ideal for
Situations where the business is actually dead and progress is theatre — manufacturing visible shipping to sustain morale in a company that should be wound down is cruelty dressed as leadership.
From the transcript
“so in my opinion i think that the only way to maintain morale is to make progress i think that no speech no sort of…”
“free crypto to keep motivated about it or something like that really works i think people get really excited when they see progress so for…”
“important right because we've seen in this space that there are these cycles and i think that morale and ability to keep building are the…”
“product and your customers and ultimately if you hire the right people who are motivated for the right reasons i think that recipe keeps people…”
From the episode
Building a meaningful career
Jason Shah (Airbnb, Amazon, Microsoft, Alchemy)