There’s something appealing about viewing entrepreneurship through the lens of evolutionary biology. Any fruitful niche finds occupants, symbiosis can offer a leg up, and “survival of the fittest” ultimately reigns. I’m reminded of this November 2006 video from Brad Feld encouraging entrepreneurs to “munch on the bones” of competition (Grendel worthy, by the way):
So extinction is part of the process. And a rejuvenating element.
Ambling through the halls of the natural history museum in Paris, Olivia Judson weaves the story of death and rebirth in her stellar “Wild Side” NYTimes blog. She writes:
…each mass extinction has been followed by a pulse of fresh evolutionary change: large numbers of new forms appear. The reason is that before the mass extinction, most niches are occupied — a situation that typically prevents radical changes. Afterwards, many niches are empty and available for re-occupation — which promotes rapid change. (This is why new islands and lakes are always sites of rapid evolution and invention: the few animals and plants that arrive rapidly evolve to fill the various empty niches. Think of the Hawaiian islands, the Galapagos, New Zealand or Madagascar, each of which has — or had, until we got there — a variety of unique animals and plants.)
It’s a pleasure to watch new islands form and spawn endemic businesses in the startup world. Consider the Facebook application gold rush of a year ago, or the iPhone development craze we’re seeing now, or what will inevitably be an open mobile platform with massive reach and opportunity (3.3 billion mobile phone subs in Nov 2007).
What of this week’s news regarding search advertising consolidation? Yahoo!’s new partnership with Google (which puts Google ads into Yahoo!’s search results) expands the reach of a nimble elephant and, I suspect, continues to raise the hurdle for competition in the near-term. Arrington practically calls it a prelude to extinction. Wilson claims symbiosis offers a leg up.
Regardless, the market will demand options and I’m encouraged by the thought of thousands of entrepreneurs sitting in crow’s nests yelling, “Land ho!” at the prospect. Old models die and new ones replace.
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