Moving Ground, Adapting Founders — Twenty-Five Years of Pattern Recognition

By Manfred Lueth — 19 May 2026

The map is not the terrain, both keep changing (Image generated by Perplexity, 2026)

Twenty-five years ago today, I incorporated this company. The world I incorporated it into had itself only recently been rebuilt — the Wall had fallen a decade earlier, and the assumptions that followed that moment are still working their way through our economies, our institutions, and our businesses today. Some threads stretch back thirty-five years. You cannot make sense of where we are without pulling on them.

At moments like this — a company anniversary, a paradigm shift, a floor that is visibly moving — it is worth doing what engineers call a post-mortem and what I call an autopsy: look back clearly, so you can look forward honestly.

Here is what I see.

Mindset A: Open, trust-based, efficiency-first.

From 1990 onward, the logic was coherent and, for a time, correct. The Wall fell. Russia, consumed by its own implosion — oligarchs privatizing state assets overnight, a middle class discovering consumption after decades of enforced scarcity — was integrated rather than confronted. Trade creates interdependence. Interdependence creates peace. Peace creates prosperity. China entered the WTO. The Euro launched. Supply chains went global because global was cheaper, and cheaper felt permanent.

Founders built on this. Rationally. Efficiently. Correctly — for the world that existed.

But Mindset A did not end with an announcement. It eroded. The signals that something had shifted arrived unevenly — first in academic papers, then in policy circles, then in election results, then in boardrooms. Different professional worlds, different news diets, different political priors: some people were already operating in Mindset B while their counterparts — equally intelligent, equally informed — were still running Mindset A logic and winning with it. There was no consensus. There still isn’t. Watch any European parliament debate on trade policy, or follow US politics for forty-eight hours, and you will find both mindsets fully operational, each with evidence, each with believers who are not fools.

That is what makes the switch dangerous. It does not replace one operating system with another. It creates a period — years, sometimes a decade — where both run simultaneously, and where the one you are running determines not just your strategy but which signals you notice and which you file away.

Mindset B: Resilience-first, national-first, tit-for-tat.

It did not announce itself. It revealed itself — in signals that were real, visible, and consistently filed away because the cost of believing them was too high.

Consider the NATO 2% defense commitment. European members were not deceived, not naive, but choosing — consistently deferring for thirty years. The logic was coherent: the cost of taking it seriously was immediate, the cost of ignoring it felt distant. Democratic governments responding to voters who preferred lower energy bills over higher defense budgets made a rational short-term decision — and externalized its true cost onto the next political cycle. The same mechanism ran through sovereign debt in Athens and through structured products on Wall Street: not villains breaking rules, but rational actors optimizing for the short term while the long-term bill accumulated quietly. Hospitals before tanks. Energy bills before defense budgets.

Until Russia’s invasion of Ukraine made clear that the cost of that assumption had never disappeared — it had only been waiting.

The switch from Mindset A to Mindset B was not caused by Putin or Trump or Covid. They were symptoms. The switch happened the moment enough accumulated deferred costs became impossible to defer any further. Supply chains optimized for efficiency collapsed under a pandemic. Energy dependency became a weapon. Defense underspending became a strategic emergency. The Mindset A world had not been replaced — it had been running on borrowed time, and the loan came due.

What Never Changed

Technology did not care which mindset was dominant. It never has.

The internet arrived during peak Mindset A and rewired commerce and communication regardless of geopolitics. AI is arriving during peak Mindset B — amid fracture, tariffs, and institutional distrust — and it is rewiring work, creativity, and decision-making regardless.

The founders who failed in 1999 were not wrong about the internet. They were wrong about the scaffolding underneath it. They assumed the institutional floor — capital availability, market access, regulatory stability, talent supply — was as solid as the technology wave they were riding. It was not. The wave was real. The ground was borrowed.

The same mechanism is running now. AI will do what the internet did. The founders who fail will not be the ones who missed the technology. They will be the ones who confused the wave for the ground.

Which raises the question that follows directly from this — and the one most founders cannot answer cleanly: which of your current assumptions belongs to the wave, and which belongs to the ground underneath it? That distinction is the difference between building and floating.

The Assumptions You Are Not Pricing

Two assumption risks that consistently go underpriced — both now actively breaking:

Regulatory stability. Rules feel permanent until they are political. The AI Act is rewriting what European founders can build, on what data, at what speed — while US platforms operating on European users continue to collect, train, and monetize under frameworks that would be illegal if a European company applied them domestically. The asymmetry is not accidental. It is the current shape of the regulatory floor. Founders who optimized for current rules carry the least slack when rules change — because optimization and adaptability trade off against each other, and the Mindset B world legislates faster, less predictably, and with less patience for efficiency arguments.

Talent availability. SAP eliminated 8,000 roles in 2024, explicitly framed as AI-driven reallocation. Klarna went from 3,800 to 2,000 employees while growing revenue — then tried to rehire when quality suffered. Across Europe and the US in 2025, entry-level hiring in consulting, finance, and marketing dropped 15–30% in eighteen months. The bottom of the talent pyramid is being compressed by AI from above and by demographic decline from below. A founder building a five-year growth plan on the assumption that qualified people will be available, at a price the model supports, at the moment they are needed — is running a Mindset A assumption in a Mindset B labor market.

The counterweight — and this matters:

If founders fully priced every assumption risk from day one, most businesses would never start. The irony is that the same governments now lamenting Europe’s innovation deficit have spent fifty years building the Überstaat that makes founding nearly impossible — mountains of compliance, employment protection designed for large incumbents, tax structures that punish early risk. Luring TSMC to Dresden with billions of public money is not an innovation policy. Lightening the structure so founders can run instead of climb — that would be.

Some optimistic assumption is not naivety. It is the necessary condition for starting at all.

The autopsy is not about eliminating that. It is about knowing which assumptions you are running — and having a plan for when they expire.

Destruction Desk
We perform autopsies on innovation’s failed assumptions.

This newsletter was edited by Manfred Lueth.

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