Kyle Reidhead, Co-Owner of Milk Road and Co-Founder of Impact3 – Interview Series

Kyle Reidhead, Co-Owner of Milk Road and Co-Founder of Impact3, is an entrepreneur, investor, and marketing strategist focused on the intersection of cryptocurrency, artificial intelligence, and digital media. Through his leadership at Milk Road, he helps produce research, analysis, and educational content that makes crypto, macroeconomics, and emerging AI trends more accessible to everyday investors. At the same time, he co-founded Impact3, a crypto-native marketing and public relations agency that has worked with leading Web3 protocols and blockchain companies. Previously, Reidhead co-founded Web3 Academy, an educational platform dedicated to blockchain adoption, founded the health technology company HealthSimple, and held business development leadership roles at Complete Concussion Management, building experience across healthcare, startups, and technology before focusing on the digital asset ecosystem.

Milk Road is a crypto-focused media platform that delivers daily market news, in-depth research, investment analysis, podcasts, and premium intelligence designed to help investors better understand digital assets, macro trends, and the rapidly evolving AI landscape. Under Reidhead’s leadership, the platform has expanded its coverage to include the growing convergence of AI and crypto. Impact3 complements that mission by providing specialized marketing, communications, and growth strategies for blockchain and Web3 companies, helping projects build brand awareness, engage communities, and accelerate adoption through crypto-native campaigns tailored to the unique dynamics of the digital asset industry.

Your entrepreneurial journey has taken you from founding HealthSimple in the healthcare space, to helping grow Complete Concussion Management, to launching Web3 Academy, co-founding Impact3 Growth, and now becoming a co-owner of Milk Road. What were the key experiences and insights that shaped your transition into the digital asset industry, and how have those lessons influenced the way you approach investing and building businesses today?

For me, building businesses comes down to one thing: resilience. You try things, you fail, you take the lesson, and you get better – and the faster you run that loop, the smarter and more capable you become. That has been my motto from day one: break things, fail, learn, keep going. Don’t let the tough times get you down or the good times get you too excited. You stay even-keeled through the ups and downs and keep putting one foot in front of the other.

The moment that pushed me into digital assets wasn’t planned. One day Facebook banned my account out of nowhere – I still don’t know why. At the time, all of HealthSimple’s business ran through Facebook; I had two groups with tens of thousands of people, and that’s where my revenue and clients came from. I woke up and it was gone. Not long after, I came across Ethereum, and I immediately understood it was the future – a system no single company could switch off. That’s what got me into the space, and the lesson stuck: build on infrastructure you don’t have to ask permission to use.

Milk Road has become one of the most recognizable brands in crypto media. What attracted you to the opportunity to become a co-owner, and what is your long-term vision for the platform?

Through our agency, Impact3, we’d spent years helping media companies grow, and eventually we started building in media ourselves with Web3 Academy. The whole idea was to simplify finance and crypto for the average person so they could actually understand the space and invest in it. Milk Road was one of the best we’d ever seen at doing that – an incredible newsletter – so when the opportunity to acquire it came up in 2024, we took it and ran.

We’ve kept the simple, educational content Milk Road was known for, but we’ve expanded beyond crypto into stocks and the macro picture. The goal is to meet retail investors wherever they are – sometimes that’s crypto, right now a lot of it is AI, sometimes it’s macro – and give them the research and content to navigate markets.

We’ve also launched Milk Road Pro, where anyone can track our analysts’ real portfolios, trades, and research live. You get a notification the moment an analyst makes a trade, so instead of consuming recycled or misleading information on social media, you see exactly what they’re doing in real time.

Long term, the vision is a full market intelligence platform that helps retail investors manage their portfolios well. Part of that is tracking our analysts and building community around them. The other part is integrating AI, so people can track their assets, get advice, and eventually even have some of the management done for them – all aimed at one thing: helping them make money in markets.

Many retail investors struggle to separate signal from noise in the digital asset market. What framework do you use to evaluate opportunities, and what are the most common mistakes you see investors making?

The biggest thing for retail investors is to take the emotion and the hype out of it – don’t let the highs or the lows get the best of you. Look at the numbers instead: the data, the fundamentals of the business, the flows. When you take a more objective view of markets, you make far better decisions. And it’s often not about what you buy – it’s about what you don’t buy.

So do the research. Learn the technology, understand how it actually works, then look at the business itself: How does it make money? Who are its competitors? Who’s on the team? The more you understand the product and the business, the better you can judge its growth – and the better an investor you become.

A lot of people in digital assets never actually used DeFi or crypto. They didn’t understand the friction, or what was genuinely better than the alternatives – they just invested based on what people told them to on social media. That’s a terrible way to allocate capital. Get in, use the products, pick apart the data, and talk to analysts and others who know what they’re doing. That’s the information you want behind every decision about where to put your money.

Milk Road focuses heavily on the intersection of crypto, macroeconomics, and now artificial intelligence. How do you see AI reshaping the crypto ecosystem over the next five years?

Honestly, right now I think AI is doing more harm than good to crypto – mainly because it’s pulling capital out. We’ve clearly seen retail investors who were once excited about crypto move into the stock market and the AI trade instead. That said, I do think there’s a real intersection between the two, in a few areas.

First, payments. I think AI agents will use stablecoins – they’ll want to manage capital on-chain rather than off, because it moves instantly, it’s cheaper, and it’s more efficient. Agents don’t care about the UX friction that holds humans back; it’s simply not a problem for them. This barely exists today, but it’s coming.

Second, authentication. Verifying what’s real – especially content and accounts on social media – is going to be critical, and blockchain looks like the natural solution.

And as these models get bigger and more important, I think we’ll want to decentralize the technology itself. You can already see the early signs: the recent US directive suspending foreign-national access to Anthropic’s Mythos model shows how quickly access to a frontier model can be restricted. That’s exactly the kind of thing that accelerates decentralized AI – ultimately we don’t want any single party deciding which models we can and can’t use. It’s still early, and we don’t have real solutions to most of this yet, but over time I think AI adoption and crypto adoption end up reinforcing each other.

After years of market cycles, what indicators are you paying the closest attention to when assessing the health and direction of the broader digital asset market?

For me it all comes down to adoption – specifically, real assets coming on-chain. I want to see more dollars on-chain, more equities, more treasuries, because those are the world’s favorite assets. We’ve built incredible on-chain capital markets infrastructure, but it’s largely unusable today because it doesn’t yet hold the assets people actually want to use. Until dollars, equities, treasuries – maybe even real estate – come on-chain, we’ve got a lot of infrastructure that doesn’t do much.

So the metrics I watch are simple: How fast are stablecoins growing? How fast is the use of tokenized equities growing? Right now it’s slow – stablecoin supply has been roughly flat since October. It was growing around 50% year over year before, which is great in isolation, but compare that to AI, where you’re seeing 10x, 20x and beyond – just look at Anthropic’s revenue. From an investor’s standpoint, there simply isn’t enough growth in crypto right now to want to hold many of these assets.

I used to care a lot about the business cycle and the liquidity cycle, but crypto has diverged from both – it doesn’t have the growth, while the broader stock market keeps tracking the cycle. Ultimately I need to see growth, and to me growth means the world’s best assets coming on-chain. The more of that we get, and the more it actually gets used, the closer crypto gets to its moment.

Through your work at Impact3 Growth and Web3 Academy, you’ve had a front-row seat to the evolution of Web3 startups. What separates the projects that achieve long-term success from those that fail to gain traction?

We’ve been lucky to work with some of the best organizations in crypto – and plenty that have failed. The biggest differentiator is a long-term time horizon. The winners aren’t chasing hype or running Ponzi-nomics to juice users and TVL. They’re building a product that’s genuinely better than what exists in traditional finance, and they’re here for the long haul to make it happen.

The teams I get excited about are focused on building a great product – solid infrastructure that also integrates with the rest of the financial world – and on the fundamentals: generating revenue and finding real product-market fit. That long-term, product-first focus is what separates the projects that last from the ones that don’t.

Institutional adoption of digital assets continues to accelerate through ETFs, tokenization initiatives, and blockchain infrastructure investments. Which developments do you believe will have the greatest impact on mainstream adoption?

I’d actually push back on the framing a little. I don’t think most of crypto is built for mainstream consumer adoption – it’s built for institutional adoption. Think about traditional financial services: the mainstream doesn’t use most of them. People have credit cards, bank accounts, and mortgages, and beyond maybe some equities – which plenty don’t even own – that’s about it.

I don’t think crypto and DeFi were ever really meant for mass consumer use; that was largely a narrative created in 2021. What we’re actually doing is rebuilding financial infrastructure, and the people who use financial infrastructure are the biggest banks, corporations, and institutions in the world. That’s who this is being built for.

As for what moves the needle: stablecoins are a big one, because moving dollars globally in a cheap, instant way is a massive opportunity. Tokenized equities are another – they give people outside the US access to equities cheaply and easily, and you can build new financial primitives on top, like borrowing against them. Down the road, I think a lot of retail investors will prefer holding tokenized stocks they can actually use in DeFi over leaving them sitting in a bank account. But the adoption is going to come from the big institutions before it comes from consumers.

The crypto industry has matured significantly since the last major bull market. What changes have impressed you the most, and where do you believe the industry still has significant work to do?

I’m not sure I’d say the industry has matured so much as a lot of people have simply left, because the easy opportunities aren’t here anymore. That’s probably the biggest change.

There are still plenty of people in the space focused on hype and pumping their token rather than building a sustainable business and product. But the teams that stayed focused on the fundamentals are the ones still standing – the Coinbases, the Krakens, the Skys of the world – and those are the companies I want representing this industry.

The good news is the representation is there; we just need to keep highlighting it. Those businesses will keep growing and increasingly define what crypto is, while the noisy stuff gets quieter. Mostly, we just need more time for the good entrepreneurs to keep building.

With increasing regulatory clarity emerging in multiple jurisdictions, how do you see regulation affecting innovation, investment opportunities, and market growth over the coming years?

I don’t think regulation hurts innovation – at this point I think it only helps. We’ve had essentially no regulation in this space for decades, and this is as far as that’s gotten us. The customers of blockchain and on-chain infrastructure are institutions, and they need regulation to participate. If we want adoption, we need regulation. Nobody wants to innovate in a space where the customers can’t actually use the products. So if we want more investment opportunities, more innovation, and more growth, clear regulation is the single most important thing we need right now.

Looking ahead, what trends, sectors, or technologies within digital assets are you most excited about, and where do you believe investors should be focusing their attention today to prepare for the next decade of innovation?

What I’m watching most closely are companies that already have users and revenue and are integrating blockchain, stablecoins, and tokenized assets to make their products better and their businesses more efficient. Robinhood is a great example; Coinbase has been doing it for a while. I think a lot of financial businesses will follow, integrating stablecoins and DeFi services so they can offer customers better products at better rates – and become more profitable doing it.

I’m focused more on the equity side right now, because those are the companies with the users and the most to gain from adopting blockchain. Within crypto specifically, I’m looking for protocols building good products that integrate with real-world assets – stocks, treasuries, dollars – because I think that’s the key unlock for the on-chain capital markets we’re building. The ones building in that direction, generating real revenue, and using that revenue to buy back their tokens – that’s what I want to see.

Thank you for the great interview, readers who wish to learn more should visit Milk Road or Impact3.