Kelly Ann Collins has been building in emerging technology since the 1990s, from digital media to AI to blockchain. She shut down a successful agency to follow a deeper calling, and today she runs SheCrypto, a media platform covering Bitcoin, blockchain, and Web3, and the Women In Bitcoin + Blockchain Fund, which has helped thousands of women access industry events since 2025. She was named to Inc.’s Female Founders 100 in 2021. She talks openly about the less glamorous side of building something people don’t understand yet: the no’s, the restarts, and the decision to keep going anyway.
Company: SheCrypto
We are thrilled to have you join us today, welcome to ValiantCEO Magazine’s exclusive interview! Let’s start off with a little introduction. Tell our readers a bit about yourself and your company.
Kelly Ann Collins: I’m Kelly Ann Collins, and I’m the founder of SheCrypto, where we simplify crypto. Not the technology, the explanation. The premise of our platform is that blockchain isn’t complicated, but the way most people talk about it is. That’s not a slogan, it’s the operating decision behind everything we publish.
Most crypto media nowadays is written for people already inside. I went the other way, using plain language, no jargon, and no assumption that the reader knows what a crypto wallet is. I spent years as a journalist at USA Today and The Associated Press before I became a founder, so I had a lot of practice taking something complicated and making it make sense without flattening it. That skill turned out to be the actual product.
What was the moment you realized that complexity was holding your company back, and how did that shift your approach to product, operations, or strategy?
Kelly Ann Collins: The moment came when I looked at a month of our own output and realized a reader could swap our name for a dozen others and never notice. We were covering everything: price talk, DeFi, NFTs, the metaverse, whatever the week demanded. All of it was competent and none of it was distinctive. I’d built SheCrypto to cover crypto, which sounds like a mission until you realize everyone else was covering crypto too, most of them with more resources.
I’d say the shift came from deciding who we were not for. We stopped explaining crypto to people already inside it and started explaining it to people outside. That one call changed the content, the partnerships, and who we invited onto the podcast, and it meant turning down the largest and loudest audience in our own category. It was uncomfortable, and it was right.
Can you share one specific example of something you simplified (a product feature, process, pricing model, or customer experience) that delivered outsized results?
Kelly Ann Collins: We stopped writing about the numbers. So no price predictions, no trading signals, no charts, and all that technical stuff. That’s most of the traffic in crypto media, by the way, and we walked away from it. In its place we explained things clearly to our audience. This included topics like what a stablecoin actually does, why digital identity matters to someone who’s never owned a wallet, and what a regulator means when they say what they say.
Traffic didn’t spike, but we did get a different audience. One that kept coming back and happened to be the one conference organizers and reporters were trying to reach. When we relaunched as a full media platform in 2025, those readers followed us, because they’d signed up for a point of view and that came with us.
How do you systematically identify and eliminate complexity across the organization without oversimplifying in ways that hurt quality or value?
Kelly Ann Collins: Three tests, and they all fit on an index card.
The first is a sentence test. If a piece of content, a product, or a meeting can’t be described in one sentence that a smart person outside the company would understand, it isn’t ready. The second is the decision test. If a meeting can’t name the decision it’s supposed to produce, it’s a document, not a call. The third is subtraction. Any new recurring commitment has to replace an existing one, so the default is never to add.
The guard against oversimplifying is a line I use with the team: simplify the surface, not the substance. The reporting behind a piece stays as hard as it ever was. The verification stays. What gets cut is the delivery complexity, the jargon, the throat-clearing, the need to prove we know the terminology. A reader should feel how simple it is and never see how much work went into that.
What’s the biggest resistance you’ve faced when pushing for radical simplicity, and how did you overcome it?
Kelly Ann Collins: The resistance actually came from inside crypto, and it was about status. Jargon works as a credential in this industry. If you can talk about liquidity provisioning and composability, you belong. Plain language can read as unserious to people who spent years learning the vocabulary, and I’ve watched someone decide I must not understand a topic because I explained it “too clearly”.
For other CEOs who struggle with feature bloat, process overload, or confusing customer journeys, what’s the most important principle or first step you would recommend they take?
Kelly Ann Collins: Write down the sentence your best customer uses to describe you to a friend, in their words, then read your own homepage. If the two don’t match, that’s your first project. It’s harder than it sounds, because most founders write the sentence they wish customers said, which is why it feels fine and nothing changes. After that, pick one thing to cut this week, an actual cut with no review attached. Complexity leaves one decision at a time, through someone willing to be the person who said no.
