The current startup ecosystem is in an era where survival itself is uncertain.
The food sources for ten years from now are completely out of reach… However, the laws of natural evolution are different.
To transition from survival to super-survival, an organization that produces favorable changes is necessary.
If support for the advance team is cut off during tough times, ultimately, everyone will face a path of mortality.

When you become a member of the startup ecosystem, you can feel how the recent economy is without even watching the news. That's right. Right now, everyone is worried about survival. The raised benchmark interest rate isn't dropping, and stock prices have long been at rock bottom. Moreover, the future of the semiconductor industry, which has been a significant part of our economic power, does not look rosy. For future food sources like AI, batteries, and the bio-industry, there are many variables, making it impossible to guarantee success.

In this crisis situation, the usual response is to make the decision to eliminate organizations that are not earning money. Even if they are precious, it is difficult to maintain organizations that only incur costs. Representatives of companies that have ambitiously created dedicated teams for experimentation for food sources ten years from now may also waver during such tough times. This is why numerous exploratory groups within companies have quietly disappeared in recent years. We are usually short-sighted individuals who cannot endure even ten years.

Let's dramatically broaden our perspective and look at the incredible 4 billion-year history of life. The world of bacteria, which began around 3.8 billion years ago, has become extraordinarily diverse, and the world of eukaryotes that we belong to has become even more diverse. While it's impossible to know exactly how many species exist on Earth (roughly hundreds of billions), ecologists estimate that less than ten percent of the species that have ever been born are still alive today. In other words, 90 percent of life forms have gone extinct. Hence, extinction is a rule, not an exception, in the world of life. Survival is the exception.

The corporate ecosystem is similar. According to the representative U.S. stock index, S&P 500 (as of 2021), the average lifespan of a company is 22 years, and this lifespan is gradually shortening to around 16.4 years by 2027. This is a decline of about 30-40% compared to 33 years in 1965. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (as of 2016), about 20% of new businesses close in their first year, and 50% vanish within five years. In the domestic case (as of 2020), the survival rate of startups in their fifth year is about 34%, which is lower than that of the U.S. and is in line with the average of OECD member countries. There is merely a scale difference in longevity; the worlds of life and business exhibit similar patterns of fate. In other words, most fail.

Does your heart feel a little lighter now? If so, let's learn about the principles of success from nature. If you go to the forests of Costa Rica, you can encounter a remarkable cricket with an incredible dorsal plate. Unlike typical crickets, this cricket's dorsal plate is as wide as a leaf, adorned with what appears to be actual leaf veins. Of course, nobody drew it. There are even shapes that look like they were eaten by insects. This is not because bugs have eaten it; it just looks that way. Birds trying to catch the crickets will likely mistake this for a leaf. It's an astonishing adaptation. Darwin was the first scientist to start explaining how such remarkable traits in the natural world could evolve through natural causes.

The principle is none other than the mechanism of natural selection. For natural selection to operate, there must be variation, which must lead to differences in survival and reproduction, and this variation must also be inherited. When this process is algorithmically repeated, such variations are cumulatively selected, ultimately creating very sophisticated adaptations like the dorsal plate of the cricket.

However, even such amazing adaptations cannot last long. In a short period ranging from a few decades to a long time of thousands of years (which is not even a blink of an eye in the history of life), the species itself disappears. For companies that aim to adapt to market conditions by creating new variations (products and services) inspired by nature, this is also disheartening news.

But digging deeper into the history of life can yield positive insights. According to paleontologists, segments (the individual segments that make up the bodies of arthropods and others) already existed before the Cambrian explosion (540 million years ago to 480 million years ago) when animals emerged simultaneously like the Big Bang. Since then, segmentation has been the driving force behind the tremendous diversity of the animal kingdom. By varying the number of segments or attaching various appendages (legs, eyes, wings, etc.) to those segments, an infinite number of variations can be produced. Thus, once segmentation was born, it has never disappeared from Earth. In this sense, the evolution of the cricket's dorsal plate and segmentation is at different levels. If the dorsal plate represents survival, then segmentation is a super-survival (a state of having entered the evolutionary path of enduring success beyond mere survival) system.

For our companies to enter the path of super-survival beyond mere survival, we must pay attention to being an organization that can produce 'favorable variations' like the segmentation system. In medium-sized enterprises or larger, there is a need to conduct experiments to seek new food sources as subsidiaries or internal ventures without interference from the main business. Since startups themselves exist as segments, the government, local governments, and investors must not spare support and investment to allow them to continue generating new variations. If support is cut off for the advance team due to tough economic conditions, ultimately, everyone will head down the path of mortality. From the perspective of the nation as a whole, to overcome the crisis of survival, there must be organizations that continuously execute new initiatives beyond routine administration. This is the principle of super-survival we learn from nature.