From Engine to Organism: Why Your Revenue Model is Broken
For fifteen years, I’ve had the best gig in the world: building companies.
I didn't start here. My journey began on Wall Street, first in the controlled chaos of investment banking, then co-founding a hedge fund. In that world, you learn to see systems in everything. Markets, companies, deals… all intricate machines. You learned the inputs, mastered the variables, and modeled the outputs. Success was about building a better model, a more efficient engine for moving risk and value around the global financial system.
But a fundamental truth began to dawn on me, slowly at first, then with the force of a revelation. Finance was shuffling value. Technology was creating it.
The real action wasn't in arbitraging the present; it was in engineering the future.
Seeing the exponential growth of machine learning, the plummeting cost of computation, and the ever-expanding capabilities of software, the path became clear. I needed to be where value was being born. So, I dove in. I started studying machine learning, Python, and system design, building on the quantitative skills from banking to develop a new kind of expertise. My goal was singular: to build better engines for growth.
For years, I’ve used the metaphor of the "revenue engine" as my guiding star. It’s a powerful concept. It implies a system that can be designed, optimized, and made reliable. As a RevOps Leader, my focus has been on building these engines, meshing go-to-market best practices with master data management, AI, and automation. My secret weapon, the one I’m a little reluctant to share, has always been the pairing of machine learning with revenue operations to create a powerful, data-driven system for predictable growth.
And it works. We can build incredible engines. We can fine-tune the gears of the sales funnel, automate the pistons of marketing outreach, and use AI to predict the fuel requirements for the next quarter. We can make the machine more powerful, more efficient, and more reliable than ever before.
But I’ve come to believe this metaphor is no longer sufficient. It’s a 20th-century model for a 21st-century reality. The engine is a creature of a stable, controllable world.
It operates in a factory. These days, there are no revenue factories.
Our world has become a jungle: a dynamic, unpredictable, and deeply interconnected ecosystem. And in a jungle, a machine, no matter how powerful, eventually rusts, breaks down, or is swallowed by the vegetation.
In a jungle, to survive, you don't need an engine. You need an organism.
This is the evolution of my thinking. We must move from building revenue engines to cultivating Revenue Organisms. An engine merely runs; an organism lives. It adapts, it senses, it heals, and it co-evolves with its environment. It doesn't just produce; it endures.
This isn't just a semantic game or a change in perspective.
It's a fundamental shift in how we view strategy, operations, and growth itself. It requires us to look beyond the tidy mechanics of our funnels and embrace the messier, more potent forces of a living system. I’ve come to understand this system through four key biological concepts.
The Mycelial Network: The Invisible Ecosystem of Growth
In a forest, the towering trees are what command our attention. We see them as individuals, competing for sunlight. But the real story of the forest is happening underground, invisibly. It's the mycelial network: a vast, interconnected web of fungal threads that links the root systems of different trees. This subterranean network is the forest's true circulatory and nervous system, shuttling nutrients, water, and vital information between plants. The mushroom we see on the forest floor is merely the visible fruit of this immense, hidden organism.
For years, we in the business world have been obsessed with the mushrooms: the closed deal, the signed contract, the converted lead. This is the tangible, reportable event that we build our engines to produce. But the Revenue Organism understands that its true, enduring strength lies in its own mycelial network. This is the vital unseen, informal web of relationships and influence that nourishes the entire business.
This network includes:
Word-of-Mouth: The conversations happening on private Slack channels, industry forums, and social media DMs that you cannot control but can absolutely influence through exceptional product and service.
Brand Evangelists: The super-users who create YouTube tutorials, answer questions on Reddit, and build a vibrant community culture around your offering. They are an unpaid, highly trusted extension of your go-to-market team.
The "Dark Funnel": All the anonymous research, learning, and consideration your future customers do before they ever identify themselves. They are being nurtured by the "soil" of your network, namely the articles, reviews, and community discussions created by others.
A revenue engine tries to optimize the process of picking mushrooms. A revenue organism focuses on cultivating the health of the entire forest floor. It invests in community, empowers its evangelists, and understands that the sales cycle doesn’t start when a lead enters the CRM; it starts months, sometimes years, earlier, in the rich, dark soil of its mycelial network. Your go-to-market strategy can no longer be about just targeting accounts; you must nurture your entire ecosystem.
Forget Account Based Marketing. Adopt Industry Based Marketing.
Business Epigenetics: Activating Your Dormant Revenue Genes
In biology, your DNA isn't a simple blueprint where every instruction is always active. Epigenetics is the study of how external environmental factors can act as switches, turning specific genes "on" or "off" without changing the underlying DNA sequence. A gene can lie dormant for a lifetime, only to be activated by a change in diet, stress, or environment.
Your company has its own unique DNA: its core competencies, its intellectual property, its existing product features, and the tribal knowledge of its people. Business Epigenetics is how the market environment interacts with this DNA, activating or deactivating its revenue potential.
I saw this constantly in my modeling work. A feature built for a niche use case—a "gene" might have low adoption for years. A purely mechanistic view would see it as a cost center, a piece of the engine to be ruthlessly optimized away. The organism, however, sees it as stored potential.
Imagine a software company with a robust, but complex, data-exporting feature. For years, it’s used by only a handful of power users. It’s not a selling point. Then, a new wave of accessible BI tools and a cultural shift towards data democratization sweeps the industry. Suddenly, the market environment has flipped a switch. This once-dormant feature is now a critical capability, unlocking a new, high-value enterprise market. The "gene" has been expressed, and it's now a primary driver of growth.
The strategic implication is profound. Your organization is sitting on latent, unexpressed value. As a leader, your job is not just to manage existing revenue streams, but to constantly scan the environment for the epigenetic triggers that could activate your company’s dormant DNA.
This requires a long-term perspective that resists the urge to cut every feature or team that isn't pulling its weight today. It's about preserving a diverse "gene pool" of capabilities, knowing that the key to future survival might be hiding in plain sight.
Allostasis: The Strategic Rhythm of Stress and Recovery
The concept of homeostasis, maintaining a stable internal state, is well understood. But a more dynamic and relevant concept for today's volatile world is allostasis. This is the process of achieving stability through change. It’s the body’s adaptive response to acute stress. When faced with a threat, it floods the system with adrenaline and cortisol, enabling a "fight or flight" response. This high-energy state is crucial for survival, but it's toxic if sustained indefinitely. After the stressor is gone, the body must enter a recovery phase to repair and rebalance.
A healthy revenue organism doesn't seek placid stability. It strategically leverages allostatic responses to seize opportunities and defend against threats.
The Adrenaline Response (Opportunity): This is the focused, high-intensity sprint to launch a new product, penetrate a new market, or integrate a major acquisition. The entire organization mobilizes with a surge of energy, purpose, and resources. It’s exhilarating and highly productive.
The Cortisol Response (Threat): This is the "all hands on deck" crisis mode to address a security breach, a major service outage, or a sudden, existential competitive move. It’s a defensive, highly focused state designed for pure survival.
The tech industry, in particular, is addicted to the adrenaline response. We glorify "crunch mode" and "hustle culture." But we too often forget the second half of the allostatic cycle: recovery. A state of perpetual, high-intensity stress is not strength; it is allostatic overload. It leads to burnout, broken processes, and poor decision-making. It’s the biological equivalent of running a marathon every single day.
A truly resilient organization knows how to consciously trigger these high-intensity states and, just as importantly, how to consciously enter a recovery phase. After a major product launch, a leader’s most important job is to plan for a period of reduced intensity, blameless post-mortems, system repair, and organizational learning. It's in this recovery phase that the organism heals, adapts, and becomes stronger for the next sprint.
It’s a rhythm of stress and recovery, not a relentless, linear push.
Neuroplasticity: Building an Organization That Learns
The most complex biological system of all is the brain, and its most remarkable feature is neuroplasticity: the ability to reorganize itself by forming new neural connections. When you learn a new skill, you aren't just accessing a file in a folder; you are physically rewiring the structure of your brain.
A revenue organism's "brain" is its collection of processes, communication pathways, and shared assumptions. Revenue Neuroplasticity is the organization's ability to learn from market feedback and fundamentally rewire itself.
This is where many companies fail. They have dashboards, but not a nervous system. They see the data, but they don't learn from it.
Weak Neuroplasticity: A company runs a marketing campaign that fails. They review the report and decide not to run that specific campaign again. The learning is shallow and isolated.
Strong Neuroplasticity: The company conducts a deep, blameless post-mortem. They discover the failure was caused by a flawed assumption about the customer journey. They then change the fundamental process by which they develop all future marketing campaigns, perhaps by integrating the customer support team into the initial brainstorming phase. They have physically rewired their operational "neural pathways."
This is the ultimate purpose of the systems I love to build. My "secret weapon" of pairing machine learning with RevOps isn't just about optimizing the current engine. It's about building the central nervous system for the organism. The RevOps tech stack including the master data, AI models, and the automation workflows provides the sensory inputs. It allows the organism to feel pain (a spike in churn), detect opportunity (a new pattern in user behavior), and sense changes in the environment (a shift in competitive messaging).
But the sensors are useless without the ability to act. True neuroplasticity happens when these data-driven insights create feedback loops that enable the organization to physically restructure its go-to-market processes. It’s about building a learning brain, not just a beautiful dashboard.
The Organism Needs an Operating System
The engine metaphor is not dead.
It is simply being subsumed by a larger, more powerful concept. The "engine" I have spent my career building is still absolutely vital—it becomes the organism's critical infrastructure. It is the circulatory system that pumps data through the organization, the central nervous system that processes signals, and the muscular system that executes a response.
By viewing our companies as living organisms, we are forced to think more holistically. We stop obsessing over single-point metrics and start measuring the overall health of the ecosystem. We move from rigid, five-year plans to adaptive strategies that can evolve with the market. We stop treating our people like cogs in a machine and start seeing them as the living cells of a complex, intelligent system.
My journey from Wall Street to the heart of tech has taught me that the most resilient, valuable, and enduring creations are not rigid and mechanical, but adaptive and alive. The challenge for the next generation of leaders is not to build a bigger engine, but to cultivate a smarter, healthier, more resilient organism.
Soon, you’ll think of yourself as a Revenue Biologist and not a Revenue Engineer.
👋 Thank you for reading Mastering Revenue Operations.
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I started this in November 2023 because revenue technology and revenue operations methodologies started evolving so rapidly I needed a focal point to coalesce ideas, outline revenue system blueprints, discuss go-to-market strategy amplified by operational alignment and logistical support, and all topics related to revenue operations.
Mastering Revenue Operations is a central hub for the intersection of strategy, technology and revenue operations. Our audience includes Fortune 500 Executives, RevOps Leaders, Venture Capitalists and Entrepreneurs.