**From Strategy to Exploration \- The Signal Beneath the Sarat Pediredla Strive & Thrive Conversation**
Last week, Romesh and I sat down with Sarat Pediredla, for our latest episode of Strive and Thrive. I took so much away from that conversation, but this isn’t a recap of it, this is a reflection of what that conversation signaled to me - survival in an age of instability.
On the surface, we were talking about Hedgehog Labs, pivots, growth, and exit. But underneath that, I picked up on something interesting that aligns with the discussions I have been having lately - a different way of thinking about what it really takes to build something that lasts, and this isn’t just about the end success, it is about how the success actually happened.
For Sarat, Hedgehog Labs didn’t begin as a consultancy, it started as a product business, but the market shifted, and within months the business had to pivot. This wasn’t a one off, the same thing happened multiple times over the years. And like many businesses that survive long enough, hindsight makes it easy to tell a sanitised version of the story, rather than what it was truly like living the experience.
The messiness, the scares, the coming very close to failure, more than once and for me that is where the real signal sits.
Listening back, what Sarat articulated was this:
- resilience mattered more than strategy
- culture wasn’t branding, it was the thing that allowed them to adapt
- pivoting wasn’t a one-off reaction, it became a capability
- and perhaps most importantly, the real challenge wasn’t technical it was emotional
That last point kept coming back, it wasn’t the skills, the framework or even the ideas. It was the support systems, and the coaching. People you can talk to when things aren’t working. Because most of the time, they won’t be.
The discussion then moved onto AI, and something clicked for me. Sarat is now building a new business largely on his own, with AI doing work that would previously have required a team. And that matters, because it changes the economics of building:
- The cost of building is collapsing
- The speed of execution is increasing
- The barrier to starting something new is lower than it has ever been
And this creates a different problem. If more people can build, then building itself stops being the differentiator. What starts to matter more is direction, judgement, timing and importantly, knowing what to build, when, and for whom.
We felt this recently when releasing Zooid; AI compressed the time from idea to prototype but the harder question became “is this the right thing, for the right people, at the right moment in the market?”. And that is a very different kind of challenge, less engineering and more sensing.
This is the shift I keep coming back to, I think we’re moving from a world of strategy to a world of exploration. For decades the business guidance has been - have an idea, execute it, scale it. Whilst that was the dominant story, I’m not sure that was ever really true. Especially in corporate and government, where plans often stood in for reality. But now that model feels increasingly broken.
Because in reality:
- markets move
- technology shifts
- customers change
- context is unstable
And with AI accelerating everything, that instability only increases.
So, the pattern in real businesses seem to behave more like:
Signal → explore → adapt → repeat.
I’m not full anchored on the language yet, but the logic feels rights. The leadership advantage is shifting upstream; when execution becomes easier, advantage moves from building efficiently to sensing well, choosing well, and adapting fast.
As a consequence of development in AI, Sarat suggests we’re going to see more entrepreneurs. I believe to be true, but I am wondering, will we see a different kind of entrepreneurship emerge? One less defined by certainty, fixed plans or even technical capability, and more by judgement, adaptability, emotional resilience, and the ability to stay in motion long enough for the signal to become clear. That, to me, is the deeper pattern.
For Strive & Thrive, maybe that is what it is becoming, my opportunity to listen for where leadership and entrepreneurship are heading next?
For Easol, the question I’m left with is this:
if leaders, entrepreneurs don’t lack ideas, maybe what they increasingly lack is the time, space, perspective, and support needed to properly explore those ideas before the world changes again. Leaving me with this question: “How do we help them stay in motion?”