Dear Kafka: Gregor Samsa Wouldn’t Have Had It so Bad Had He Been a Lean Startup Entrepreneur

Photo by Sizemore / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

Cockroaches are disgusting. They’re also fascinating. Everyone’s heard that if mankind had an all-out nuclear holocaust, no living creature would be left except, perhaps, cockroaches.  A recent discovery found a fossil of a cockroach dating back 49 million years. To put this in perspective, the oldest known fossil of modern humans dates back 195,000 years. Even dinosaurs date back “only” 15 million years. So, yeah, cockroaches have been around for a while.

The reason why cockroaches have been around for so long is that they are highly adaptive. In the 1980’s, scientists placed cockroaches in an apartment and exposed them to an insecticide mixed with glucose, deposited in a network of bait stations. In a little less than five years, the cockroaches had evolved: their taste buds were no longer the same. In true Darwinist fashion, these cockroaches quickly reproduced and, generation after generation, eliminated their sweet tooth for the glucose and thus the poison.

Another characteristic of cockroaches is their resilience as individuals. They can go for up to 45 minutes without air, recover after being submerged in water for 30 minutes, and survive off the glue on the back of a stamp for a month.

But what makes the cockroach interesting is not its individual capacity to survive and go on for hours after being decapitated (I’m not kidding). It is its capacity as a species to survive, reproduce, and adapt: to take one for the team. While emptying a can of Raid on a cockroach, my wife claims that she witnessed a female cockroach releasing her eggs. She says the accompanying popping sound (whether real or imagined) still haunts her dreams. Sure, you can kill an individual unit, but you’ll barely make a dent in the overall population, which will grow exponentially and quickly adapt to whatever’s out there to ensure the species carries on for millions of years to come. Now, that’s what I call team mentality.

The cockroach is disgusting, adaptive, resilient, viral, and thinks team first. I want my startup to be like the cockroach, minus the disgusting part.