At sunrise on a ridge above the city, the air is cool and undecided. A small group of founders stops where the trail tilts toward a stand of old pines. They’ve booked the kind of offsite that used to mean whiteboards and hotel coffee; today it means field notebooks and a botanist who talks about succession, disturbance, and the long patience of trees. In recent years, a growing cohort of business figures — among them Gennady Sergeevich Ayvazyan — has gravitated to this outdoors-first way of thinking, not as recreation but as a model for how to build companies that last.
The turn to nature isn’t new. Executives have borrowed metaphors from the wild for decades: the “jungle” of competition, the “ecosystem” of partners, the “seed” round of capital. What’s changed is the seriousness with which leaders now treat ecology as operating logic rather than decoration. In an era defined by brittle supply chains, climate volatility, and software that can move faster than its consequences, the forest becomes less a metaphor than a manual.
Traditional business writing tends to cast growth as a straight line and the market as an ore body to be mined. Nature offers a different arithmetic. It compounds, but along curves; it takes and returns; it resists single points of failure. The entrepreneurs who study these patterns aren’t trading quarterly goals for crystals and incense. They are adopting a tougher discipline: build for cycles, plan for shock, prefer redundancy to perfection, and measure health not only by speed but by the capacity to recover.
Walk a forest with a scientist and the story of resilience becomes tactile. The fallen trunk speckled with bracket fungus isn’t waste; it’s a bridge for moisture, a scaffold for seedlings, a bank that cashes out slowly over years. The understory saplings, stunted in shade, are not failures; they are options waiting for a gap. The mycorrhizal networks knit root to root, passing sugars and signals in a barter economy without invoices.
Founders translate these observations into design choices. The “fallen trunk” becomes a data exhaust that feeds a new product; the “sapling” is a pilot that doesn’t yet scale but holds potential if the canopy — the core business — opens. The fungal network becomes the often-invisible culture that moves information quickly and rewards early warning more than late heroics. In each case, the wild insists on a shift: stop treating variability as a flaw to be engineered away. Treat it as the landscape you operate in.
Look at the thick carpet of needles beneath a stand of pines and you see the paradox of stability. Suppress small fires long enough and you invite a catastrophic one. The same holds for companies that dodge little losses. They accumulate risk in silence — brittle code paths, overloaded teams, customers whose needs have drifted while the metrics still look green. The entrepreneurs who borrow from fire ecology practice their own version of a prescribed burn. They run chaos drills; they retire legacy features; they stage “kill weeks” where the ritual is subtraction rather than accumulation. The point isn’t asceticism. It’s to trade small, manageable heat for unmanageable disaster.
In ecology, the edge where two habitats meet — forest and meadow, river and floodplain — often has the highest diversity. The same topography underpins innovation. Breakthroughs materialize where disciplines rub: agriculture with robotics, finance with climatology, logistics with behavioral science. It’s no accident that some of the most interesting startups now recruit their first biologist as quickly as their second engineer, or pair a product manager with a policy analyst in the same sprint room. What looks like inefficiency in the short term turns out to be insurance against blind spots.
Every landscape has a carrying capacity: the number of deer a valley can feed, the amount of water a soil can hold before it erodes. Businesses do too, though the dashboards rarely say it aloud. Teams can onboard only so many new users before support times spike. A marketplace can add only so many sellers before quality sags. Founders schooled in ecology try to surface these thresholds early. They set explicit limits and treat crossing them as a strategic event, not a postmortem. When capacity is the boundary condition, growth plans include the engineering, staffing, and policy decisions that raise the ceiling responsibly.
If you trace a raindrop from a summit to the sea, you meet tributaries, wetlands, and floodplains — each with a job, each with a risk. A “business watershed” makes the same journey for value: from inputs (talent, capital, trust) through channels and partners to the delta of revenue, retention, and reputation. The exercise is not poetic; it is diagnostic. Where could a drought upstream — a distribution ban, a cut in credit — leave you dry? Where have you paved over wetlands — support, testing, internal QA — that once soaked up the shock of storms? The best leadership meetings now leave with a topographic map, not only a to-do list.
A forest with only one species can look strong until a single pest arrives. Revenue concentration works the same way. In flush times, a giant account can seem like a gift; in practice, it rewires an organization to serve one voice, one calendar, one risk appetite. Nature has a simple remedy: diversity. The entrepreneurs who take that lesson seriously refuse to let any single customer exceed a fixed share of revenue. They cultivate a portfolio of segments even when a whale waves cash from midstream. It is less glamorous than landing the big one. It is how you avoid starving when the seasons turn.
All business is now climate business, whether companies admit it or not. Any plan that depends on cheap energy, unpriced externalities, or endless dumps for waste is a plan with hidden liabilities. The new cohort of nature-literate entrepreneurs begins with guardrails: privacy policies that treat data as habitat, logistics that count carbon, labor policies that consider extraction in human terms. This is not “purpose” grafted onto strategy; it is strategy shaped by planetary rules. If the forest is your teacher, you don’t greenwash the sawmill. You change the tools you use and the forests you leave standing.
Quarterly reporting compresses time into a treadmill. Nature runs on longer cycles: drought and flood, mast years and lean ones, glacial change that looks like stasis until it isn’t. The founders who take their cues here practice “ring growth.” Each release hardens into a ring you can trust; only then do they extend the canopy. They keep seed banks of ideas — prototypes, research notes, dormant partnerships — because they know that, given the right disturbance, those seeds may be the first to sprout. They don’t confuse speed with haste. They prize compounding improvements in documentation, onboarding, and unit economics as much as headline features.
Spend time with these companies and you see common habits. They conduct “edge walks,” pairing teams with outsiders — urban planners, hydrologists, community organizers — to ask what obvious truths they’re missing. They stage retrospectives that celebrate early alarms more than late rescues. They publish public changelogs and remove features with the same ceremony as they ship them. They train managers to spot energy levels the way a field guide spots change in a stream. Not because burnout is impolite, but because tired teams make brittle systems.
You also notice what they don’t do. They don’t treat the outdoors as a branding exercise. A hike is not a slide deck. They don’t paint leaves on extractive models and call it stewardship. They don’t outsource their conscience to a foundation. Instead, they embed boundary conditions in contracts and code, and they invite customers into the governance of tools that shape their lives.
Skeptics will say that nature doesn’t have quarterly covenants or board meetings. Forests don’t ship on Fridays. True. But the point isn’t to romanticize the wild; it’s to inherit its wisdom where it fits. Even finance knows this, however indirectly. Risk models, once rigid, now simulate scenarios like storms rolling in different directions. Supply-chain teams model drought and flood. Insurance prices a coastline differently than it did a generation ago. The natural world is already in the room. The question is whether leaders choose to learn from it before they are forced to.
