Your Venture Might Not Survive What’s Coming
And why that might be your biggest opportunity...
A recent conversation with a founder has been haunting me.
He’s building a business that monetizes social media signals to help creators earn more from their content. His thesis makes sense, at least when he describes it. He communicates a firm grasp of the metrics. His vision to use AI to leverage torrents of social media data to the benefit of creators has a noble ring to it.
But I left that meeting with a sinking feeling.
His business model reminded me of something I’d seen before: the derivatives market that triggered the 2008 mortgage crisis. Brokers celebrated their brilliance while the Jenga towers of collateralized debt obligations that seemed like guaranteed profits in booming markets fell apart when conditions changed. The elaborate structures they built, as chronicled in Michael Lewis’s “The Big Short”, depended on everything continuing exactly as it had been. When the music stopped and, as “Margin Call”’s John Tuld (played by Jeremy Irons) said, “I don’t hear a thing”, that’s when everything screeched to a halt.
In bullish times, sophisticated derivative models can work spectacularly well. But we’re no longer in bullish times.
Three items recently passed through my field of awareness within days of each other, and together they paint a troubling picture that every tech founder needs to consider.
Echoes of 1929
I’ve been reading Andrew Ross Sorkin’s “1929”, which chronicles the days leading up to the Great Wall Street Crash that triggered the Great Depression. The parallels to today are unsettling enough that Sorkin himself has stated, in interviews and in his book, that current market conditions echo many patterns from that era.
The speculative mania back then centred on new technologies like radio. RCA’s stock soared as ordinary investors convinced themselves that this disruptive new technology would reshape the economy. In 2025, we’re seeing identical euphoria around artificial intelligence and related technology stocks. The sense that “this time is different” pervades both eras. The belief that these technologies will create permanent prosperity drowns out concerns about valuation or sustainability.
Both periods witnessed the democratization of finance, placing riskier assets in the hands of individual investors rather than institutions. In the 1920s, margin trading enabled everyday people to take on substantial stock positions with minimal initial investment. Today, the promotion of cryptocurrencies and private equity within retirement savings and pension plans is framed as a means of democratizing wealth creation. However, what is truly being democratized is risk.
The use of leverage, then, as it does today, creates the conditions for cascade failures. When confidence wavers, forced liquidations accelerate the descent. The 1929 crash triggered margin calls, setting off a self-reinforcing spiral. We’re seeing elevated debt levels again: margin debt, corporate leverage, and complex financial instruments that make the system vulnerable to sudden loss of confidence.
One of the issues that concerns me most is the erosion of safeguards put in place after the 1929 stock market crash. During that time, legislators established investor protections and regulatory bodies to prevent another financial disaster. However, many of those protections have now been weakened or dismantled. The relaxation of oversight and the reduction of consumer protection agencies have reintroduced risks that we thought we had successfully contained. As a result, the U.S. economy has become particularly fragile, with negative repercussions for the global economy.
The Big Short 2.0
Then I read about Michael Burry’s decision to close his hedge fund and transition to a family office while placing enormous bets against current market valuations.
Burry is the investor who foresaw the 2008 housing crisis and profited spectacularly by betting against it. His move now carries a stark message about his perception of today’s market. He’s shutting down Scion Asset Management and returning clients’ capital, citing an inability to understand or have conviction about current market behaviour despite continued rallies, particularly in AI stocks.
By converting to a family office, he avoids the scrutiny and disclosure requirements of registered funds. This puts him “off the grid” and free from reporting quarterly trades to the SEC. He can make massive, contrarian bets privately. His fund was known for substantial put option positions against AI equities, suggesting his conviction that a significant correction is coming.
Burry has spoken publicly about accounting gimmicks in big tech and AI firms, warning that profits may be vastly overstated and that sustained rallies could be hiding future depreciation and risks. His closing letter suggested that stepping away is itself a signal: “Sometimes the winning move is not to play”.
When the person who correctly predicted the last major crash takes this position, founders should pay attention.
Beyond Financial Metrics
The third piece came from economist Umair Haque, whose recent Substack argues that the potential for a severe economic crash is both significant and unique compared to typical market cycles.
Haque’s concern centres on something most financial models ignore: political instability as a systemic economic risk. Unlike most crashes triggered by internal economic factors like profits or money flows, he suggests the next crash could be triggered by a far wider range of unpredictable external events, particularly abrupt political decisions that create climates of instability which markets cannot ultimately ignore.
He uses the metaphor of musical chairs to explain that mounting economic and political imbalances make the system ever more precarious. The illusion of endless wealth expansion cannot continue indefinitely as foundational social and political risks escalate. At some point, this multifaceted instability will be “reflected in wealth” through a major correction or a collapse that adjusts values to new socio-political realities.
This framing is crucial for technology founders because it highlights risks that don’t appear in your financial models or market analyses. You can have perfect unit economics and strong product-market fit, yet still be building on a foundation that could fracture from forces entirely outside your control.
The Fragility of Dependency
This stream of thought brings me back to my client and his social media monetization platform. His business model has multiple dependencies, making it inherently fragile.
He depends on continued access to social media platforms whose policies could change overnight. He depends on creator economics remaining attractive despite platform fee structures that could shift and the explosion of AI content. He depends on advertising markets staying robust despite economic headwinds. He depends on AI infrastructure costs staying manageable despite rapid evolution. Most fundamentally, he depends on the continued existence and stability of the platforms themselves.
Each dependency represents a point of failure. When you stack dependencies, you don’t add risks, you multiply them. A business model with six critical dependencies, where each has a 90% probability of remaining stable, has only a 53% chance that all six remain stable simultaneously. That’s not resilience. That’s a 50/50 roll of the dice.
The Antifragile Alternative
Nassim Nicholas Taleb introduced the concept of antifragility: systems that don’t just resist shocks but grow stronger because of them. This stands in contrast to robustness, where the system merely withstands stress, and fragility, when the system breaks under pressure.
The principles of antifragility offer technology founders a framework for building business models that can survive what’s coming. Four principles matter most:
1. Build optionality into everything
Multiple revenue streams reduce dependence on any single customer segment or market condition. Optionality also means reversible decisions that let you change course without catastrophic costs. It means developing capabilities that transfer across markets, so you’re never trapped betting everything on a single opportunity.
Early-stage ventures are inherently fragile because they typically depend on a single revenue stream. When that revenue source dries up, the business can fail. Antifragile business models, on the other hand, create multiple avenues to generate value from core capabilities. For instance, a SaaS company that earns revenue through subscriptions, implementation services, training programs, and data insights can adjust its focus when one revenue stream falters. Similarly, a B2C model that looks beyond just consumer monetization and explores opportunities to become an infrastructure provider can attract interest from retailers and their suppliers, opening up new possibilities. The key is to ensure that these diverse revenue streams share common operational foundations, so you’re not essentially building separate businesses.
2. Embrace volatility as feedback
Instead of treating market turbulence as a threat to overcome, position your business to learn from it and benefit from it. This means executing rapid, low-cost experiments to validate or invalidate assumptions in the moment. These tests might fail, but they protect you from committing to catastrophic preconceptions. Each small experiment that fails eliminates a wrong path and strengthens understanding of what works in the real world. Listen closely for signals in a world full of noise.
This aligns with the Beachhead stage in Momentum Scaling: work with Reference Clients to validate your value creation and capture hypotheses before committing to full-scale operations. Build your value proposition around solving problems that become more acute in times of uncertainty, making your business more valuable precisely when conditions are chaotic.
3. Create compounding advantages
Focus on building a business where each interaction, each operational improvement, each customer success makes the next one easier and more valuable. This means maintaining strategic reserves that provide flexibility to respond to opportunities and threats. It means cultivating customer diversity across segments, industries, or geographies to protect against concentrated risk.
The ultimate compounding advantage is becoming a linchpin at the centre of a value creation network. When multiple parties depend on you to orchestrate value flows between them, you’ve created switching costs that transcend any single relationship. Your customers stay not just because they value what you provide, but because leaving would disrupt an entire ecosystem of relationships and workflows they’ve built around your platform. This network position makes you stronger with each new connection, each integration, each workflow that runs through your systems.
4. Build cash reserves
Financial buffers aren’t inefficient; they’re strategic preparation. When competitors cut back during downturns, you can invest in talent acquisition, customer acquisition, or technology development at favourable terms. The 12 to 18-month cash reserve recommended during early scaling stages isn’t just a safety net. It’s the resource that lets you act when others are paralyzed by uncertainty.
What This Means for Your Business Model
If you’re building on dependencies you can’t control, you’re building on sand. The combination of speculative market conditions similar to those in 1929, credible warnings from investors who foresaw the last crash, and increasing political and economic instability creates an environment where fragile business models face an existential risk. This risk is so significant that no amount of investor capital, even if you’re able to raise it, can offer protection.
Ask yourself these questions about your business model:
Can you survive if your primary revenue source disappears tomorrow? If the answer is no, you have a single point of failure.
Do you depend on platforms, partners, or market conditions outside your control? Each dependency multiplies your risk.
Are you building capabilities that remain valuable even if your initial market fails? If your skills and assets are specific to one narrow opportunity, you’re betting everything on that opportunity not suddenly vanishing.
Does your business become more valuable when conditions are uncertain? If you only thrive in stable, predictable markets, you’re building for a world that no longer exists.
Can you pivot without destroying your financial foundation? If changing direction means starting over financially, you lack the optionality that enables survival.
The answers to these questions reveal whether you’re building something antifragile or something that’s one shock away from collapse.
When, Not If
Consider the pattern: 2000 saw the dot-com bubble burst, destroying companies that had raised hundreds of millions of dollars. 2008 brought the real estate collapse that froze commercial lending overnight. 2022 delivered the venture capital contraction and the failure of Silicon Valley Bank, which exposed how many startups across the US and Canada had confused access to capital with viable business models.
These weren’t random events. They were systemic corrections that punished fragility and rewarded resilience. The interval between them is shortening. The magnitude isn’t decreasing — it’s amplifying.
Extinction-level economic events are not anomalies to prepare for. They’re recurring features of the landscape that must be foreseen and designed around. The founders who survive aren’t lucky: they are ready. They build business models that don’t depend on conditions staying favourable.
The Path Forward
I don’t want to seem as if I am encouraging you to abandon ambition or to stop building. It’s a call to build differently.
The venture capital playbook encourages founders to project confidence about the future, to create detailed forecasts stretching years into the future, and to commit fully to a single vision of how the market will evolve. That playbook was designed for a different world.
In an environment marked by the kind of instability we’re seeing now, the winning strategy isn’t to correctly predict the future. It’s building a business model grounded in value creation, that can thrive regardless of which future arrives.
This means favouring customer-funded growth over investor-funded growth because customers are interested in the value you deliver today, not promises about tomorrow. It means building profitability into your model from the start because profitable businesses have the freedom to adapt while money-losing businesses must surrender to their burn rate.
It means expanding into adjacent markets thoughtfully rather than pursuing explosive growth in a single direction because diversification provides both learning and protection. It means developing deep operational capabilities that compound over time rather than racing to scale before you’ve figured out how to execute consistently.
Most fundamentally, it means accepting that we’re operating in an era where the only certainty is uncertainty. The business models that survive won’t be those that predict the future correctly. They’ll be the ones that build enough optionality, embrace enough volatility as feedback, and create enough compounding advantages that they can adapt in an agile way to — and benefit from — whatever future comes to be.
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The echoes of 1929 are getting louder. Michael Burry is betting against the market with the kind of conviction that preceded his correct call on 2008. Political and economic instability is mounting in ways that traditional financial models can’t capture.
Most founders will miss the opportunity this presents: while your competitors scramble to survive the turbulence ahead, you could be building the business model that thrives because of it.
Antifragility isn’t just defensive. It’s your next competitive advantage.
The founders who recognize this today will be the ones still standing when the dust settles.
Davender’s passion is to guide innovative entrepreneurs in developing the clarity, commitment, confidence and courage to enter, engage and lead their markets in an unpredictable world by thinking strategically and acting tactically. Find out more at https://www.davender.com and https://linkedin.com/in/coachdavender .