Deserts & Rainforests: If It Could Have, It Would Have.
There is a lazy belief floating around startups that often gets disguised as pattern recognition:
If this company could have broken out, it would have by now.
Once people decide a company is old, it stops being seen as early.
Not unfinished. Not still learning. Just old.
And from there, the whole environment changes. Investors lean back. They tell other investor friends to lean back. Talent gets hesitant. Partners stop caring. The company gets less patience, less help, less belief, and less shots on goal.
That is why this phrase is so dangerous. It does not just describe failure.
It helps cause it. It becomes a self fulfilling prophecy.
Having worked with startup ecosystem developers in over 150 cities around the world: you start to see a pattern that in certain startup ecosystems, this mentality is immensely more common… For emerging ecosystems it can really hold back growth.
Last month I got to have a great conversation with Ayhan Isaacs, Head of Economic Development at the Founder Institute and Paul O'Brien who spent over a decade in Silicon Valley, helped build the Founder Institute in Texas, and recently published the book Startup Ecosystems.
Deserts and Rainforests
If you walk through a desert and see sparse plant life, you do not conclude that life itself is weak. You conclude the environment is harsh.
Water is scarce. Nutrients are thin. Conditions are brutal.
In a rainforest, everything compounds. Moisture, density, biodiversity, feedback loops, mutual reinforcement.
Startup ecosystems are like that.
Some are growing in rainforests (Silicon Valley, New York City): patient capital, strong talent density, tight feedback loops, helpful investors, useful introductions, and a market that is ready.
Others are growing in deserts: thin networks, bad advice, premature pressure, scarce capital, weak distribution, and people on the outside mistaking temporary awkwardness for permanent incapacity. “If it could have, it would have…”
In a desert, even a healthy seed can look dead.
That is the mistake so many people make with startups.
They see slow growth in a harsh environment and diagnose the seed. When often the real issue is the habitat.
A lot of people are not evaluating startups through a pure value-creation lens. They are evaluating them through “status” logic. See more about, Status Games vs Wealth Games in my last post.
They are not really asking, what can this become? They are asking, shouldn’t the world have already validated this by now. That is how lazy dismissal gets mistaken for wisdom.
Main Street vs. High Growth
A lot of experienced business people, especially from Main Street SMBs, apply the wrong mental models to high-growth tech companies. That is not a knock on them. It is just a different game.
A stable small business is often optimizing around known demand of a product already well established in other markets, operational consistency, and efficient execution.
An early-stage startup is often still discovering and building the product from scratch. Perhaps even discovering a new market from scratch. Learning the user behavior, the messaging, the distribution motion, and the actual shape of the market.
That means a startup can look messy for a long time without being broken.
Trying to judge an unformed startup with mature small-business logic is like demanding rainforest output from something planted in sand.
Canva
Canva did not spring fully formed out of Silicon Valley.
Melanie Perkins and Cliff Obrecht started Fusion Books in Australia in 2007. That business became a proving ground for the broader idea. Bill Tai met them in Perth in 2010. He later helped connect them to Cameron Adams and Lars Rasmussen. Canva then raised its seed round in 2013 from a mix of Australian and U.S. investors. 6 years later after finding fertile ground.
From the outside, someone could look at that journey and say: if this was really going to be huge, why did it take so long?
But that would be the wrong diagnosis.
What looked slow was actually incubation.
What looked late was actually learning.
What looked geographically disadvantaged was a company proving itself outside the densest capital network in tech and then breaking through anyway.
That is the point.
Sometimes it is just a founder fighting through a thinner environment before the right network, capital, and timing finally click.
It is lazy to write founders off before rolling up your sleeves and helping. Every founder is on a journey.
Sometimes that journey happens across one company. Sometimes it happens across several.
Startups are as much human development systems as they are product experiments. The founding team is learning
judgment.
sales.
people.
markets.
Good investors understand this. They don’t gossip from the shadows.
They diagnose clearly. Offer tough love directly. They identify what is actually broken. They tell the truth. And then they roll up their sleeves to help. They coach. Help sharpen the positioning. Help with hiring. Open the right doors.
Good investors shorten the learning and feedback cycles.
That is what value-add is supposed to mean.
