Lupine

By the first spring after Mount St. Helens erupted in 1980, lupines were already sprouting through the ash - small patches of improbable green in a devastated landscape. Their roots hosted bacterial partners that pulled nitrogen from air and fixed it into soil, rebuilding the chemical foundations of life from atmosphere and rock. Lupines are pioneer nitrogen-fixers, the first vascular plants to colonize catastrophically disturbed sites. They don't wait for soil to be ready - they create it.

This demonstrates the difference between primary and secondary succession. Mount St. Helens wasn't bare rock (primary succession requiring centuries) - soil remnants persisted under the ash. Lupines sprouted within a year, demonstrating rapid initiation of secondary succession when substrate exists. They exemplify the facilitation strategy: arriving first not because they compete well, but because they can survive conditions that exclude everyone else. Their value isn't competitive dominance - it's infrastructure creation that enables the next wave.

The business insight is counterintuitive: The most valuable early-stage contributions are often infrastructure, not products. Lupines teach that fixing nitrogen (building the platform) matters more than being the dominant plant (winning the market). AWS enabled thousands of companies that compete with Amazon in other domains. Lupine strategy is building the substrate that enables an ecosystem, even if you don't dominate it. Infrastructure creators rarely win market share - they win value capture through dependency.