THINKDROP #39: All About Exaptation
- Pierre Stanghellini
- Apr 29
- 7 min read
>The Feather Was Never a Wing. Until It Was.
You've been staring at your toolbox wrong.
Everything you've built, every skill you've sharpened, every system you've designed — you think you know what it's for. You built it for X. You trained for X. You optimized for X. But the most transformative things in history didn't come from people who found a new tool. They came from people who looked at an old tool and asked: what else could this do?
That's exaptation. And it's not a biology term. It's a business strategy.
In 1982, evolutionary biologists Stephen Jay Gould and Elisabeth Vrba coined the term to describe a fascinating pattern in nature: features that evolved for one purpose, then got hijacked for something entirely different. Bird feathers? They evolved for warmth. Then — millions of years later — they became wings.
Same feather. Different game. New world.
The best companies, careers, and breakthroughs follow the exact same pattern.
And once you see it, you can't unsee it.
Pierre Stanghellini,
Founder @ HARi.wtf
1. The Feather Was Never a Wing (Until It Was)
Evolution doesn't plan. It tinkers. It takes what's already there and repurposes it under new pressure. That's terrifying if you're trying to control outcomes — and liberating if you're trying to innovate.
Most organizations believe innovation means invention: building something new from scratch. But that's expensive, slow, and risky. Exaptation is the opposite play. You take a capability you already have — a process, a skill, a technology — and you drop it into a context it was never designed for.
The magic isn't the new idea. The magic is the unexpected fit.
TRY THIS: This week, list 3 internal capabilities your team or company has — tools, processes, or skills built for one purpose. Then ask: what completely different problem could each one solve? Give yourself 20 minutes. Don't filter. Just list.
2. You Already Know the Companies. You Didn't Know the Word.
Slack started as an internal messaging tool at a gaming company called Glitch. The game failed. The tool survived — and became a $27B business. That's exaptation.
YouTube launched as a video dating site. "Tune In, Hook Up" was the tagline. It flopped. Then users started uploading random videos. The founders let it happen. Then Google paid $1.65B for it. That's exaptation.
Instagram was originally a location-check-in app called Burbn. Cluttered, complex, going nowhere. The founders stripped it down to just the photo filter feature — the one thing users actually liked. That's exaptation.
TRY THIS: Pick one product or service you admire. Spend 10 minutes digging into its origin story. Find the moment of accidental pivot. What was the original use case? What problem did users actually solve with it? That gap is where exaptation lives.
3. Your Own Career Is Waiting to Be Exapted
Here's the uncomfortable truth: most people underestimate what they already know. They look for the new thing — the new certification, the new skill, the new market — when what they actually need is a new context for what they've already mastered.
A lawyer who understands contracts deeply is also a precision thinker who can stress-test business models. A teacher who can hold a room of 30 teenagers is also a world-class facilitator who can run high-stakes workshops. A chef who manages kitchen chaos is also a system designer who can streamline operations.
Same skills. Different game. Completely different value.
TRY THIS: Write down your top 3 professional strengths — the things you're genuinely excellent at. Now brainstorm 3 industries or roles completely outside your current field where those exact strengths would be rare and valuable. Don't dismiss anything. The stranger the better.
4. Why Your Brain Fights Exaptation (And How to Win)
There's a name for the cognitive trap that blocks exaptation: functional fixedness. It's your brain's hardwired tendency to see tools only in terms of their intended function. A hammer is for nails. A spreadsheet is for numbers. A sales team is for selling.
This bias is efficient. It saves energy. And it absolutely kills innovation.
The researchers who cracked this gave people a candle, a box of thumbtacks, and matches, and asked them to attach the candle to the wall so it wouldn't drip. Most people failed. They saw the box as a container for tacks, not as a platform. The ones who succeeded emptied the box and used it as a candle holder. Same box. Exapted.
TRY THIS: Pick one resource in your life or business that has a fixed identity — something everyone uses the same way. For 5 days, every morning, ask: "What else could this be?" Write one answer per day. By day 5, you'll surprise yourself.
5. How to Force Exaptation (Without Waiting for an Accident)
Exaptation in nature is accidental. In business, you can engineer it.
The process is simple, not easy, but simple.
Step one: audit what you have. Skills, tools, relationships, data, processes, assets. Map them all. Most organizations have wildly underutilized capabilities sitting in plain sight.
Step two: stress-test them in alien contexts. Show your capabilities to people outside your industry. Ask customers what unexpected problems they wish you could solve. Run a session where the only rule is: this capability can't be used the way it's normally used.
Step three: follow the friction. When something gets traction in an unexpected context — even a small signal — don't dismiss it. That's where your next chapter might be hiding.
TRY THIS: Set up a 30-minute "exaptation session" with one colleague this week. Pick one of your company's underused assets. Your only question: "Who else would pay for this, and why?" No idea is too weird. Capture everything. Review it 48 hours later with fresh eyes.
6. AI Is the Greatest Exaptation Story Ever Told.
And Entrepreneurs Are Missing the Point
Here's what most people get wrong about AI: they think the race is about building it. It's not. The real race is about exapting it.
GPT was designed to predict the next word in a sequence. From that one trick, we got coding assistants, legal research tools, medical diagnosis systems, and customer service platforms that displaced entire departments. Nobody planned that.
Same models. Completely different games.
The entrepreneurs winning right now are not building AI. They looked at existing tools and asked: "What does this make possible that was impossible before, in MY industry, for MY customer?"
Most industries are still in denial. Legal. Healthcare. Construction. Real estate. The incumbents protect their workflows. The smart founders drop AI into those workflows and watch the old structures fall apart.
You don't need to understand transformers. You need to understand your customer's pain well enough to see where an AI tool fits like a key into a lock nobody else has tried yet.
TRY THIS: Pick one painful, expensive process in your industry — something everyone accepts as "just how it is." Spend 20 minutes asking: which AI tool (ChatGPT, Claude, Midjourney, Whisper…) could eliminate 80% of the friction today, with zero custom development? If you find one, that's your exaptation move. Start this week.
5-Point Recap
Exaptation is real strategy — it's not a biology lesson, it's the playbook behind some of the biggest pivots in business history
The tool isn't the limit — what changes is the context, the user, the problem; the capability was already there
Your career is a treasure chest — your existing skills are almost certainly more transferable than you think
Functional fixedness is the enemy — your brain locks tools to their original purpose; breaking that lock is a practice, not a talent
AI is the biggest exaptation opportunity in a generation — the entrepreneurs who win won't build new models; they'll be the first to drop existing ones into problems nobody else thought to solve
Food for Thought
The most powerful moves in business don't come from building something new. They come from seeing something old in a completely different light.
That's exactly what we did with HARi. The CRM market was broken, a bloated setup, painful management, predatory pricing, and outsourced agencies billing you for tasks AI handles in seconds. We didn't fix the CRM. We exapted AI into the whole category.
HARi sets itself up, runs itself, and covers the marketing your team never had the budget to hire for. Same problem. Completely new game.
And here's what I want you to take from this: AI is not a threat to your business. It's the most generous opportunity your generation has ever been handed. For the first time in history, a solo founder or a lean team can operate at the scale, speed, and sophistication of a company ten times their size. That gap is closing fast. And the entrepreneurs who move now are the ones who will own the next decade.
So stop waiting for permission. Stop waiting for the perfect tool, the perfect moment, the perfect budget. Look at what's broken in your industry. Look at what your customers hate doing. Then ask: what AI capability, dropped into that exact pain point, changes everything?
That's your move. It's sitting right there in front of you.
The feather was always there.
It just needed the right environment to become a wing.
Go build your wings.
Pierre Stanghellini
→ Let's connect, drop me a line directly at pierre@hari.wtf.
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About Pierre Stanghellini
Pierre Stanghellini is the Founder of HARi.wtf — an AI-native consulting firm built for entrepreneurs and growing businesses who are done paying bloated agency fees, drowning in manual tools, and hiring headcount they can't afford.
Based in Hong Kong, Pierre works with founders and teams across Asia and beyond to cut friction, automate what slows them down, and scale with less. He writes THINKDROP every week, no fluff, no hype, just ideas that make you think differently about business, strategy, and the world around you.
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