Bacteria

Bacteria are the original lean startups—organisms stripped to the minimum viable components that can reproduce. No nucleus, no organelles, no complexity that doesn't directly serve replication. A bacterium divides every 20 minutes under optimal conditions, meaning one cell becomes a billion in 10 hours. This isn't just fast—it's fast enough to evolve visibly within human lifetimes. The strategic implications are profound. Bacteria don't plan; they iterate. Antibiotic resistance doesn't require intelligence—it requires enough random variation that some individuals survive, combined with fast enough reproduction that survivors dominate within days. The bacterial strategy is brute-force search: generate millions of variants, let the environment select winners, repeat. It's evolution as algorithm. Bacteria also invented horizontal gene transfer—sharing genetic information between unrelated individuals. This is open-source biology: innovations spread laterally across species, not just vertically through generations. A resistance gene that evolves in one bacterium can transfer to completely different species. The bacterial commons accelerates adaptation beyond what any single lineage could achieve. The business parallels are uncomfortable. Bacteria succeed through strategies that would horrify corporate strategists: no planning, no differentiation, no competitive moat. Just speed, variation, and ruthless selection. Yet bacterial 'companies' have dominated Earth for 3.5 billion years while every sophisticated competitor has gone extinct multiple times. When exploring bacteria in this section, look for: iteration speed (how does fast reproduction substitute for planning?), horizontal transfer (how does information sharing accelerate adaptation?), and minimal viable organisms (what can you strip away and still succeed?).