Spray and Pray

Biological Parallel

Oak trees produce thousands of acorns annually, with no parental investment post-dispersal. Most get eaten, rot, or land in poor sites—less than 0.1% germinate successfully. This high-volume, low-investment strategy works when offspring are cheap and environments unpredictable. The VC criticism 'spray and pray' identifies the failure mode: deploying this r-selected strategy without acknowledging that in high-fixed-cost environments (startups requiring follow-on capital), iteroparous selectivity outperforms.