For the last twenty years, entrepreneurship orthodoxy has been built around one word: focus. Pick one thing. Go deep. Say no to everything else. This advice was reasonable for a specific era — one where cognitive bandwidth was the scarce resource and where the cost of context-switching was genuinely high. That era is ending.
We are in the age of AI. The binding constraint is no longer execution bandwidth. AI handles execution at a level and speed that previously required specialist teams. What AI cannot do is see across domains — recognise the pattern that only becomes visible to someone who has been in enough different rooms. That cross-domain pattern recognition is the cognitive capability that is becoming more valuable as everything else gets automated. And it is exactly what ADHD produces.
What Multiple Experiments Actually Build
I built companies across software, training, agriculture, migration and employment services. From the outside, this looks like distraction. From the inside, it was a curriculum. Each domain taught me something the others could not. Software taught me systems thinking and leverage. Training taught me how adults actually learn versus how institutions think they learn. Agriculture taught me supply chain reality and the gap between lab science and field conditions. Migration taught me regulatory complexity and the psychology of people making life-changing decisions under stress.
None of those lessons were available to someone who stayed in one lane. All of them compounded together into a pattern library that I could not have built any other way.
When COVID created a market for rapid diagnostic tools in early 2020, I could see the opportunity because I had pattern recognition across regulatory environments, supply chains, consumer psychology under stress and product design for non-specialist users. That is not a specialist's toolkit. It is a portfolio builder's toolkit. The $130 million in sales that followed was not despite the breadth of prior experience — it was because of it.
My five companies were not a mistake. They were a curriculum. The pen was the graduation.
What Actually Caused the Failures
My companies were not killed by running too many simultaneously. They were killed by a single external shock: family court freezing orders that made it legally impossible to pay ordinary expenses. The lesson was structural, not strategic.
The companies were running. Several were profitable. The external shock that killed them was not recklessness — it was a legal mechanism that most business operators never encounter and that no amount of focus on a single venture would have protected against.
The AI Amplification
Here is what is different now compared to even five years ago. The execution layer of running multiple ventures — the specialist work that each domain requires — can increasingly be handled by AI tools. Legal research, financial modelling, technical writing, code generation, market analysis, design: all of this can now be produced at a fraction of the previous cost in time and money. The bottleneck has shifted entirely from execution to insight.
In that environment, the person who can see across domains — who can ask the question that only makes sense if you have been in five different rooms — has a structural advantage that is growing, not shrinking. The ADHD brain that struggles in a system designed for specialisation thrives in a system where AI handles specialisation and humans provide synthesis.
I am building Terraform Technologies and Wallace Biotechnologies simultaneously. Each one is an experiment in a different part of the problem space I care about. Each one generates data. The data from each one makes me better at the others. What I learn about regulatory navigation in biotechnology informs how I think about energy infrastructure. What I learn about consumer psychology in food systems informs how I think about housing accessibility. The domains talk to each other through the person running them.
The New Orthodoxy
The question the old focus advice was trying to answer was: how do I avoid spreading my attention so thin that nothing gets done properly? That is a real question. But the answer is not fewer projects — it is better systems for each project, combined with AI leverage to handle execution. The answer is quality of attention within each domain, not the elimination of domains.
The profound insight is this: in the age of AI, ADHD is not a liability to be managed. It is a structural advantage to be deployed. The ability to hold multiple problems simultaneously, to see the connection that the specialist cannot see, to move fluidly between contexts and bring each one into relationship with the others — this is the cognitive profile that the coming decade will reward most. The era of the specialist is not ending. The era of the specialist as the ceiling of human value is.