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I told my team something last week that probably sounded nuts. We're in survival mode, but we're not broke.
That's the part nobody talks about. Everyone glamorizes the "we have 3 months of runway" panic.
The story where you're eating ramen and sleeping under your desk. But we're sitting on 2-3 years of cash. We're fine on that front. And somehow, that makes it worse.
Survival mode isn't about money. It's about relevance.
The Other Kind of Crisis
In February 2022, I took out a loan to make payroll. I had 14 people on the team. The business was humming. We were hitting our numbers. The existential crisis was simple: can we afford these salaries next month? That's a math problem. You solve it or you don't.
This isn't that.
In December 2025, I shut down two entire business lines. Not because they were bleeding money. They were profitable. But profitable became meaningless when I watched Claude do in seconds what my team spent weeks building. I walked into the office and had to tell people: what you're selling doesn't matter anymore.
That's not a cash crisis. That's an identity crisis.
Broken Playbooks
Survival mode now means something different. It means waking up knowing that every playbook is broken. The thing that worked in 2024 is a liability in 2026. You can't make a 5-year plan because you don't know if your entire market still exists in 12 months.
I went from 14 people to around 4. Not all at once. But everyone could see it coming. You could feel it in Slack. The slow realization that your job might be infrastructure someone else owns.
What kills you isn't the crisis you can see. It's the one that's invisible until it's too late.
A Priority, Not a Pace
I've been thinking about how to talk to my team about this without bullshitting them. So I said something simple: what you work on today might be irrelevant tomorrow. Not as a threat. As a fact. And if that's true, then we have to build differently.
Survival mode is a priority, not a pace. You don't run faster. You get smarter about what matters.
We're not in crisis mode. Crisis is visible. You can fight it. AI isn't a crisis. It's a slow drop. The frog doesn't jump out because the water is warm. By the time you realize the heat, you're already cooked.
Fighting Invisible Enemies
So what does survival mode actually look like? It means we're fighting irrelevance instead of a visible enemy. You can't build a Gantt chart against irrelevance. You can't hire your way out of it. You can't even plan around it because the shape of the problem changes weekly.
What you can do is stay alert. Keep your skills portable. Make sure the thing you're building is something you'd want to own, not something you're renting. Stay ruthless about what's actually valuable.
And be honest with your team. Tell them the truth. Not the cheerleader version. The real version.
December 1st vs December 2nd
The business I killed was worth millions on paper. On December 1st, 2025, it was a legitimate asset. On December 2nd, it wasn't. That transition happened in a Slack message. That's how fast it moves now.
But here's the thing: I wasn't destroyed by it. The team wasn't destroyed by it. We're still here. We're still working. We're still thinking about what comes next.
Because survival mode is what happens when you accept that everything you know is temporary, and you decide to build anyway.
You are the asset. Everything else is infrastructure. And infrastructure gets commoditized. So you better be worth something independent of what you're selling.