1d • General discussion
R-Selected Entrepreneur
The best business advice you ever received will now DESTROY your business.
…
In case you missed it…
I’m writing a series about what happens when the rules of business change faster than businesses can adapt.
AI has destabilized the environment and I’m trying to figure out what survives.
I’ll drop the previous articles in the comments if you want to catch up.
…
In my last post, I argued that most of us are still building businesses optimized for stability while AI has pushed us into an increasingly unstable world.
Here’s the best business advice any of us ever received, pre-AI:
Focus.
Niche down.
Specialize.
Choose “The One Thing”.
Ignore distractions.
Don’t succumb to “shiny object syndrome”.
Go deep.
Build the moat.
Etc. etc. etc.
It’s all the same thesis, just stated differently.
And, in a pre-AI world, this was the greatest lesson an entrepreneur could possibly learn.
For most of us, it was a lesson we learned the hard way and had to re-learn at regular intervals.
The traditional entrepreneurial playbook looks something like this:
Pick a market.
Find your niche.
Develop deep expertise.
Build one great company.
Hire specialists.
Optimize operations.
Increase margins.
Build defensibility.
Scale.
Then spend years making that machine increasingly efficient.
This is an extraordinarily effective strategy when the environment remains stable long enough for optimization to compound.
You spend ten years learning an industry nobody else understands.
You develop proprietary processes.
You recruit highly specialized talent.
You build distribution.
You accumulate institutional knowledge.
Every year the organism becomes more perfectly adapted to its environment.
That sounds wonderful.
Until the environment changes.
Then something strange happens.
The thing that made you great can become the thing that kills you.
Your expertise becomes legacy knowledge.
Your specialization becomes rigidity.
Your optimized processes become expensive baggage.
Your moat becomes irrelevant because somebody invents an airplane.
Optimization is extraordinarily powerful.
It also contains a hidden assumption:
Tomorrow will resemble yesterday closely enough for today’s optimization to remain valuable.
I no longer believe entrepreneurs can safely make that assumption.
That was the old (K-selected) model built for the K-selected environment.
But when the environment is unstable, the balance tips and begins to favor optionality over specialization, the r-selected species).
So, how do we become r-selected entrepreneurs?
We make more bets.
Smaller bets.
Faster bets.
And we stop falling in love with any of them.
The old model was:
Pick a lane.
Commit.
Optimize.
Protect the thing that works.
The new model is:
Test.
Launch.
Measure.
Kill.
Repeat.
Then pour resources into whatever survives.
That’s how r-selection works in nature.
Lots of offspring.
Low investment in each one.
Fast feedback from the environment.
Most die.
A few make it.
Those survivors get to reproduce.
Now translate that into business.
Instead of spending six months building one product, launch six versions in six days.
Instead of debating which offer is best, test five (or fifty).
Instead of creating the perfect funnel, ship three ugly ones and see which one converts.
Instead of betting the company on one strategy, create a portfolio of experiments.
The goal is no longer to be right before you act.
The goal is to learn faster than everyone else.
That’s the new game we’re all playing.
And AI changes the economics of this completely.
Before AI, experimentation was expensive.
Every test required people.
Time.
Money.
Coordination.
Technical skill.
Opportunity cost.
You couldn’t afford to try everything.
So focus was rational.
You HAD to choose.
AI changes that.
It makes ideas cheaper to test.
Products cheaper to build.
Campaigns cheaper to launch.
Research cheaper to conduct.
Software cheaper to create.
Content cheaper to produce.
Entire business models cheaper to explore.
Which means something profound happened:
The cost of optionality collapsed.
That might be the single biggest change entrepreneurs haven’t fully internalized yet.
For decades, the bottleneck was execution.
You had more ideas than you could possibly pursue.
So the winning strategy was to ruthlessly ignore almost all of them.
Now execution is rapidly becoming abundant.
Which means the bottleneck is moving.
The entrepreneur of the future isn’t the person with the discipline to ignore every shiny object.
It’s the person who can test shiny objects cheaply enough to discover which one is actually gold.
That does NOT mean chaos.
It does not mean chasing every idea that crosses your mind.
It means building a machine for disciplined experimentation.
A system that can:
Generate lots of ideas.
Test them cheaply.
Get feedback quickly.
Kill losers without emotion.
And aggressively compound winners.
That is what an r-selected business looks like.
Not reckless.
Adaptive.
Not unfocused.
Experimental.
Not committed to a single answer.
Committed to finding the answer faster than everyone else.
The world changed.
The strategy has to change with it.
Tomorrow, I want to show you what this looks like inside an actual company.
Because “move fast and experiment” sounds great until you have employees, payroll, customers, systems, and a business you’re terrified of breaking.
That’s where this gets interesting.
…
P.S. If you just want to skip to the end, I’m hosting an in-person event built around this new reality.
It’s two days, October 15th & 16th, here in Phoenix, AZ.
It’s $2k all-in (meals included). Founders & Entrepreneurs only. Come spend a day rebuilding the way you operate around this new reality.
DM me if you’re interested.
P.P.S.
I write every post and comment myself. No AI. No VAs.
Share = Support 🙏
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R-Selected Entrepreneur
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