If RIVERS are a metaphor for the startup world (fresh, fast flowing and ever changing), the OCEAN is analogous to the corporate world (stagnant, vast but occasionally tempestuous).
Most fish species live in either rivers or the ocean. However, there are two interesting fish families that move between the two: eels and salmon.
A) EELS
Eels are born in the ocean but spend their adult life in rivers. They are a metaphor for a corporate employee who at some point becomes an entrepreneur.
B) SALMON
Salmon are born in rivers but spend their life in the ocean. They are a metaphor for an entrepreneur who moves into the corporate world.
Just as both fish species are highly valued and important for the ecosystem, both types of professionals create value for the economy and society. Which of the two is more interesting remains up to you.
Free market competition in capitalism creates a "race to the top" just like trees in a forest race to outgrow their neighbours and reach the top of the canopy, in order to maximise each individual tree's access to sunlight. This is clearly a very resource-intensive and energy-intensive process:
- humans have to constantly develop new skills;
- companies have to innovate and iterate their products and services;
- and trees need to grow heavy trunks to reach higher and higher.
2. CARTELS CAN LIMIT COMPETITION TEMPORARILY
Trees are unable to strike a deal to limit the height of every tree in the forest, thus leaving everything to natural competition. While humans and companies could agree such a deal amongst themselves but it would result in a temporary and unstable equilibrium (as the video below about baggage carousel crowds and competing trees shows): everybody would have a strong incentive to break the pact. Furthermore, anti-monopoly laws forbid such cartel agreements in the corporate world.
3. GOVERNMENTS CAN LIMIT COMPETITION PERMANENTLY
One key stakeholder that can actually impose such levelling rules is the government. For example, the Chinese Government banned private for-profit tutoring of school subjects for school-age children in July 2021, thus putting a cap on the competitive pressure on parents (and students) to constantly upskill their children.
4. HOW "RACE TO THE TOP" BECOMES "RACE TO THE BOTTOM"
Why do we often see unbridled capitalism as a "race to the bottom" when it should in principle be a "race to the top"? Most human and natural systems function as a "winner-takes-all" game in the immediate enviroment of the winning person, company or tree. So while the successful individuals race to the top, they cast a shadow on those left behind, thus relegating them to the second or third division - which can be seen as pushing them towards the bottom. As a result, in the perception of an external observer, the big pool of players who are "pushed to the bottom" cannot outweigh the smaller pool of winning players who race to the top.
