Survival of the Fittest

I was chatting with a colleague yesterday about our team's adoption of AI tools. There was no grand thesis, no strategic framework. Just a shrug and a sentence: "I mean it's there, got to use it now or you get left behind."

Not the most elegant take, but an honest one, and I think it captures a feeling that most founders, operators, and investors are carrying right now: the sense that something fundamental is shifting, even if we can't quite articulate the shape of it yet.

Later that day, I saw a post from Alfred Lin of Sequoia that struck a similar chord. He wrote about being asked constantly whether AI is coming for people's jobs and offered what I think is the right framing: the people who do well in moments like this are the ones who can hold two ideas at once – focusing on what endures, and embracing what changes. He's spent his career repeatedly "firing" himself – moving from ecommerce to marketplaces to finance and now to AI – not because the prior domain stopped mattering, but because the frontier moved.

Alfred's post also references the discourse earlier this year on the research reports released by Citrini Research and Citadel Securities. Citrini published a speculative piece imagining an AI-driven economic crisis by 2028: mass white-collar displacement, a negative feedback loop across the consumer economy, the financial system unraveling. It went viral, markets sold off, and the conversation dominated every group chat and dinner I was at for weeks. Days later, Citadel published a rebuttal arguing that AI adoption follows historical S-curves: slow initial uptake, gradual acceleration, eventual saturation. The economy, in their view, moves far more slowly than the technology itself.

Both are compelling. And I think both have a lot of validity to them. To me, all of these thoughts combined bring up the concept of survival of the fittest. I think that people tend to hear it as survival of the strongest or the smartest. Darwin's actual point was about adaptability – the organisms that survive are the ones most responsive to change.

I think that's the right mental model for founders and operators right now. AI is a tool, not a strategy. The companies that thrive won't be the ones that slap an AI overlay on their pitch deck or chase the latest model release. They'll be the ones that treat AI the way they treat any other leverage point in their business: with curiosity, discipline, and an understanding of the problem they're actually solving. You don't need to master the technology. But you do need to engage with it.

Let’s not forget that we have seen these patterns before. The early days of cloud computing, mobile, even the shift to remote work: each of these moments produced a spectrum of doomsday predictions and utopian promises. The reality always landed somewhere in between. The winners were not the loudest or the most reactive. They were the most adaptive: willing to learn, iterate, and be uncomfortable in the messy middle.

And that's the part my colleague's instinct gets right. It's there. You don't have to know exactly where it's going. You don't have to have a perfect strategy on day one. But you do have to engage. You have to pick it up, use it, and figure out how it fits into the way you build.

The fittest aren't the strongest. They're the ones still evolving.