Survival of the Fittest
Natural selection amongst startups
Day to day, my cofounders and I wonder how to build something people want, find the people who want it, and generate value which they’re ultimately willing to pay for. Just like every other young startup in the world.
Naturally, we look to other startups and companies operating in a similar space (broadly B2B, enterprise software, possibly with some SaaS offering).
There are obviously numerous great examples of companies that made it. By extension, a lot has been said and written about creating a startup, building something people want, raising money, scaling and so on. Although I’ll likely write about some of these things and how we’re trying to navigate them, this is about a more basic question — what’s the simplest truth common to all startups?
In 1869, the 5th edition of On the Origin of the Species was published. This was the first edition in which Charles Darwin used the phrase survival of the fittest.
Interestingly, Darwin didn’t come up with this phrase — it was instead coined by Herbert Spencer in 1864 after reading Darwin’s seminal work. Essentially, this was another way of saying natural selection. Darwin liked the phrase, so he used it too.
Why this apparent tangent? Because survival of the fittest and natural selection fundamentally apply to startups, at all stages of their life, from embryonic idea to super massive world dominant companies. Darwinian evolution has been applied to a huge range of topics, from social theory to economics, and of course to startups. This is merely an attempt at looking at how it applies to our single example — one species rather than the lessons across all species.
Survival of the fittest is intended to mean something like best adapted for the local environment. Nothing to do with being fit.
Local means something like at a given point in space and time, given other species and events around you.
So, if you’re the best adapted, you’re more likely to survive. This idea breaks down into two fundamental pieces. One of them is complex and as previously mentioned has been written about a lot, the other is more basic but arguably more critical.
- Best adapted
This covers the gamut of building something people want, funding, scaling, pricing, hiring, technology, competition, etc. Huge reams of things can be written about any one of these, and they’re all critically important. Unfortunately, there are also a lot of right (and even more wrong) ways of going about any one of them.
2. Survival
If you’re best adapted, you’re more likely to survive. As simple as that. Phrased another way, the longer you survive, the more chances (and they are chances) you get at adapting. Hopefully this leads to a virtuous circle of changing and surviving.
This is so fundamental that I personally view it as the single most important aspect of any startup. Admittedly somewhat anthropic, but still worth thinking about.
Maybe the trick is focusing on survival as a goal. The company will have to fight and change to become sustainable, but as long as there’s life, there’s a chance.
Additionally, the company might be able to game survival. Since the founders and the company are different entities, one can support the other.
This is the thesis — you can (and should) strive for survival at all costs and by any means, and there are more means than simply the company adapting. If one reorders the idea of adaptation leading to survival, or at least recognises that survival provides the opportunity to adapt in the first place, it becomes apparent that we as founders have other tools at our disposal to attempt to enter the adapt/survive/adapt cycle.
Viewed in this light, survival becomes simpler. From the founders perspective it’s a question of appetite and money. Appetite better be present (otherwise what are you doing?), which leaves money.
Most founders have a fairly broad set of skills they can use to address this problem in its own right. This is why, in the first six months of Quartic we consulted enough to generate our own seed round.
Just like any single species, any single startup statistically probably won’t survive. This is certainly true over enough time. But understanding that survival is absolutely necessary (if not sufficient) helps place context on why one should sacrifice/beg/borrow/steal to keep your startup alive for as long as needed (which may be a very long time indeed).
Once the lights go out, all bets are off.
About
I’m Arlo — a cofounder and CEO of Quartic Technologies. We’re building software to bring real-time business analytics to operations in the field.
