The first useful thing to know about Wachsman is that it was born from an information problem. In 2014, David Wachsman began working with a Bitcoin exchange. The technology was ingenious, the language was impenetrable, and the industry around it had almost none of the professional scaffolding that mature markets take for granted. There were founders and protocols and fierce opinions. There were fewer people who could explain, without a fog of jargon, why any of it mattered.
Wachsman saw the gap and opened his firm in New York in 2015. The original operation was one employee in a WeWork. Its proposition was narrow enough to sound eccentric: public relations for Bitcoin and blockchain companies. Within three years, according to the founder, the company had roughly 100 people on three continents. By 2022, it said it had represented more than 350 clients.
The product is a comprehensible sentence
Public relations is often mistaken for a machine that converts invoices into flattering articles. Wachsman’s account of the work is less comforting and more accurate. The agency pitches reporters; reporters retain editorial control; the answer is frequently no. David Wachsman has said the overwhelming majority of pitches are rejected. A client is not buying applause. It is buying the preparation required to deserve attention: a coherent angle, a usable fact sheet, a leader who can answer the next question and enough trust that a journalist will open the next email.
“Good PR is about reducing the number of adverbs and adjectives that exist.”David Wachsman
That principle mattered in crypto because adjectives were plentiful and evidence was not. The category attracted technical breakthroughs, fortunes, hacks, ideological quarrels and outright fraud. A specialist agency could recognize which claim was new, which risk was foreseeable and which reporter had already heard the same breathless promise four times that morning. Pattern recognition became the moat.
Crypto grew up. Its problems multiplied.
The firm did not abandon its niche when digital assets entered the mainstream. It followed the niche into its consequences. A startup launch becomes a capital raise. A capital raise attracts regulators. A regulator changes the story for investors. A security incident becomes a test of the chief executive. An acquisition needs one narrative for employees, another for markets and a third for customers who simply want the product to keep working.
The translation chain
and market evidence
and prepared leadership
customers and policymakers
This explains the current menu. Wachsman still handles media relations, narrative and content. Around that core sit crisis and issues management, CEO advisory, investor relations, policy and regulatory affairs, events and speaking programs, digital marketing, and communications for IPOs, mergers, fundraising and post-deal integration. In 2025 it added a Digital Capital Markets service for public companies and Digital Asset Treasuries. Its AI work now includes perception analysis and advice on how brands appear inside generative answer engines.
The customers span startups, growth companies, unicorns and established enterprises, but the connective tissue is complexity. Publicly named organizations include Visa, DBS, Standard Chartered, Ripple, Solana, Hedera, Cardano, eToro and the Government of Gibraltar. The agency competes both with specialist technology and finance firms and with global communications networks. Its advantage is not that it can issue a press release faster. It is that ten years of strange situations give it a larger library of things that looked unprecedented the first time.
The quiet arithmetic of an agency
Wachsman is privately held and sells expertise rather than software. Fees are not public; the company’s inquiry form asks prospective clients for a monthly budget, which points to tailored retainers and project scopes rather than a price list. Cost depends on markets, services, urgency and the number of stakeholders involved. This is human, senior-attention work. It scales by adding capable people, not by duplicating code.
That constraint makes hiring a strategy. Wachsman has described waiting through extra interviews instead of filling a seat quickly. Its own culture language favors curiosity, learning and a “Fearless” ethos; employee testimonials emphasize complex briefs and cross-border collaboration. Public reviews are less uniform. Some praise the colleagues and rapid learning, while others describe workload, turnover and job-security concerns. Both can be true in an agency attached to volatile industries: the work is interesting partly because the conditions are not gentle.
What failed was the plan that had already cost too much
The most revealing founder story is not a triumph. David Wachsman has admitted making investments that did not work and then finding it unexpectedly difficult to scrap the plan. Money had been spent. Emotion had been spent too. The sunk-cost fallacy, perfectly obvious in a textbook, became persuasive once it was wearing his company’s clothes.
What changed his mind was the recognition that past investment is not evidence for future investment. It is a plain lesson, but it fits the agency’s larger craft. Communications plans are hypotheses. A message that lands in one market can die in another. A beloved founder story may bore customers. The sensible response is not to turn up the adjectives. It is to ask better questions, inspect the evidence and change the plan.
“It’s far better to ask questions than to fake a knowledge that you don’t have and shouldn’t be expected to have.”David Wachsman
The part worth copying
A founder does not need a global agency to borrow the method. Start with the sentence a skeptical outsider would use to describe the product, not the sentence the team uses in its pitch deck. Remove the category clichés. Name the change in the world, the person who experiences it and the evidence that it happened. Then prepare separate versions for customers, investors, employees, regulators and reporters. They do not have the same questions, and pretending they do is how one message becomes five disappointments.
Next, rehearse the hostile question before the launch. Decide who speaks during a crisis and how quickly facts can be verified. Build relationships before they are urgently needed. Treat a rejection as information rather than betrayal. And, when a plan keeps surviving only because it was expensive, stop.
This approach works when there is a real product, credible proof and leadership willing to be precise. It is a poor fit for vaporware, guaranteed-coverage expectations, hidden material facts or teams that want a communications firm to manufacture trust faster than their behavior earns it.
The cleverness of Wachsman’s original bet was not that Bitcoin would rise in price. It was that unfamiliar technologies create a recurring tax on understanding. The firms that pay that tax badly are dismissed, regulated without influence or remembered for the crisis they mishandled. The firms that pay it well give people a clean way to see what changed. Wachsman built a business in the difference.