MrBeast launched 300 restaurants in a single day. He owned exactly one building block - his audience. The other two he rented. AI is doing to expertise what the cloud did to compute.
The capabilities that used to require a multi-year build - operations, fulfilment, expertise, content production - are increasingly available as rentable building blocks.
The competitive question stops being "what do you own?" and starts being "which one block must you own, and what do you rent for the rest?" Most firms get this wrong by owning the wrong blocks and renting the differentiating ones.
The 20th-century firm was an integrated stack - design, manufacture, distribute, support, market, all done in-house. The competitive moat was vertical integration. You couldn't get good at any one block without owning the rest.
The cloud era unbundled compute and storage into rentable building blocks. SaaS unbundled software capabilities. The gig economy unbundled labour. AI is now unbundling expertise itself - legal, medical, financial, design, engineering - into capabilities anyone can rent.
In a building-block economy, the strategic question is which one or two blocks you genuinely own - and the rest you assemble. Get this wrong and you're either an inefficient integrated firm or a wrapper around someone else's engine. Get it right and you can launch businesses at speeds that integrated firms can't match.
When the only block you needed was the one you'd already built.
Jimmy Donaldson - MrBeast on YouTube - launched a burger chain in 2020. By the end of launch day, 300 locations were live across the US. Try doing that with a traditional franchise model. Years of build-out, capital, real-estate deals.
The trick: he owned exactly one building block - his audience. The other two he rented. The food was made by existing restaurant kitchens with idle capacity (operations rented). The delivery was DoorDash and UberEats (fulfilment rented). The only block he needed to own was the one nobody else could replicate quickly: 100 million subscribers who would order on launch day.
The pattern generalises. The win in a building-block economy goes to whoever identifies which one block is theirs to own - and rents everything else with confidence.
Neither model wins universally. The wrong one for your market kills you - integrated firms in fast-moving consumer spaces, assembled firms in heavily regulated ones.
A wave of restaurant brands launched 2020–2023 with no kitchens of their own. They owned a brand and a menu. They rented kitchen space (from existing restaurants), rented delivery (DoorDash), rented payment processing (Stripe).
Speed was extraordinary. But the brand block alone wasn't always durable. Many collapsed within two years because the only thing they owned was undifferentiated branding. The principle worked; they picked the wrong block to own.
A small AI-native consulting firm builds proprietary domain models on top of rented foundation models, runs engagements through rented project-management infrastructure, and uses third-party billing tools.
What they own: a thin layer of methodology + the client relationships + the synthesised domain knowledge in their custom models. Three people can deliver work that used to take a team of twenty. Because they assembled, not integrated.
Six common capability blocks. For each, decide whether your firm OWNS it (proprietary), BUYS it (rents from someone else), or SKIPS it (doesn't have, doesn't need). The result reveals your firm's position in the building-block economy.
Six capability blocks. For each, what's your firm's stance?
You're neither owning nor assembling blocks. You may be operating on a much older model that the building-block economy is about to make obsolete.
When algorithms decide what wins, knowing the algorithm is the new edge.
Value flows to whoever bundles a new role around the new constraint. The sommelier still wins.
Roles thrive by resolving scarcity, risk, or coordination. AI moves which one is scarce.
The win in the building-block economy isn't owning everything. It's owning the one block nobody else can rent.
An advisory engagement that maps your industry's value stack and identifies which blocks are commoditising, which are becoming rentable infrastructure, and which one block your firm should own.