There is a species of crab called the hermit crab that does something most animals never do.
It changes its home.
Not because the old one broke. Not because something attacked it. But because it grew.
The hermit crab is born without a shell of its own. It finds an empty one, moves in, and builds its life there. For a while, the shell works perfectly. It fits. It protects. It defines, in some visible way, what the hermit crab is.
And then the crab grows.
The shell that once protected it begins to restrict it. The crab that was comfortable becomes cramped. And here is the part that most people do not know, if the hermit crab refuses to leave the old shell, it does not survive.
The protection becomes the prison.
The identity becomes the obstacle.
The crab must find the courage to walk out into open water, exposed and vulnerable, and go looking for something bigger.
Most companies never do this.
BlackBerry did.
THE RISE
In the early 2000s, BlackBerry was not just a phone company.
It was infrastructure.
Presidents carried BlackBerrys. Investment bankers carried BlackBerrys. The device had become so deeply embedded in the nervous system of global business that its users were nicknamed CrackBerry addicts, not as an insult, but almost as a badge.
At its peak in 2011, BlackBerry had 85 million subscribers worldwide. Its market capitalization had reached nearly $70 billion. It was not simply winning the smartphone market. For a particular kind of user, the enterprise professional, the government official, the person for whom security and reliability were non-negotiable, it was the only answer.
The shell fit perfectly.
And then the world changed.
THE FALL THAT WASN'T
In 2007, Apple introduced the iPhone.
In 2008, Google launched Android.
BlackBerry's leadership famously did not believe these developments threatened them. Their customers needed keyboards. Their customers needed security. Their customers needed the deep enterprise integration that a consumer-focused touchscreen device could never replicate.
They were not entirely wrong about their customers.
They were catastrophically wrong about the market.
By 2016, BlackBerry's subscriber base had collapsed from 85 million to 23 million. The company that had once defined mobile communication was being described in the past tense by journalists who had not yet noticed something important.
BlackBerry had already started walking out of the shell.
THE ACQUISITIONS
What most obituaries missed was that while the public narrative was about decline, BlackBerry's leadership was quietly making a different set of decisions entirely.
In 2010, they acquired QNX, a company whose software ran inside nuclear power plants, medical devices, and automotive systems. Not glamorous. Not headline-grabbing. But profoundly important.
QNX made operating systems for machines where failure was not an option.
In 2015, BlackBerry acquired Good Technology for $425 million, strengthening its grip on enterprise security. The same year it acquired AtHoc, a platform for secure crisis communications used by government agencies, and WatchDox, a data security company.
In 2019, it acquired Cylance for $1.4 billion, an AI-powered cybersecurity company that used machine learning to detect threats before they executed.
None of these acquisitions were about phones.
All of them were about a single underlying conviction.
That security, embedded deeply in systems that could not afford to fail, was the real business BlackBerry had always been in.
The phone was the shell.
The security was the crab.
THE COMPANY THAT EMERGED
Today, BlackBerry's software runs inside more than 255 million vehicles on the road. Not as an entertainment feature. As the foundational operating layer, the code that runs instrument clusters, advanced driver assistance systems, digital cockpits, and the safety-critical architecture that modern vehicles depend on entirely.
Audi. BMW. Ford. GM. Honda. Mercedes-Benz. Toyota. Volkswagen.
The list of automakers running on BlackBerry QNX reads like an industry roll call.
The company that the world declared dead now sits invisibly inside the machines that carry billions of people to work every morning.
And they have no idea.
In 2025, BlackBerry rebranded its entire IoT division as QNX, a deliberate signal that the old identity had been fully released. The phone company name was finally retired from the business that mattered most.
The shell was gone.
The crab had found something far larger.
PERPLEXITY
One of the most powerful tools for entrepreneurs navigating transformation and reinvention is Perplexity.
BlackBerry's story is, at its core, a story about knowing what you actually are beneath what you are currently selling.
Most entrepreneurs, when facing disruption, ask the wrong question. They ask how to save what they have built. The right question, the one BlackBerry eventually answered correctly is what capability sits at the center of everything you have built that the market will always need.
Perplexity helps entrepreneurs ask better questions faster.
Unlike traditional search, which returns a list of links and leaves the synthesis to you, Perplexity reads across multiple sources simultaneously and delivers a direct, cited answer. You can then go deeper. Ask follow-up questions. Build an understanding of a new domain in a fraction of the time traditional research requires.
Imagine an entrepreneur facing disruption in their industry asking Perplexity to map which of their existing capabilities are transferable to adjacent markets. Imagine asking it to identify which acquisitions companies in similar positions have made during reinvention phases, and which ones worked. Imagine asking it to outline what the automotive software landscape looks like for a company considering a pivot in that direction.
The bottleneck in reinvention is almost never courage.
It is information.
It is knowing enough about the new territory to make a credible first move.
Perplexity compresses that research cycle dramatically, giving entrepreneurs the intelligence they need to act before the window closes.
Because windows, as BlackBerry nearly discovered, do not stay open indefinitely.
THE FINAL WORD
The hermit crab does not mourn the old shell.
It cannot afford to.
The open water is dangerous and the exposure is real. But the alternative, staying inside something that no longer fits is a slower and more certain kind of ending.
BlackBerry made every mistake a dominant company can make. It misread the market. It underestimated the competition. It clung to the shell long after the shell had stopped serving it.
And then it did something rarer than success.
It reinvented itself. Quietly. Methodically. Through a series of acquisitions most people dismissed and a pivot most journalists never bothered to cover.
Today its software is embedded in the machines that carry the world.
Most people still think it makes phones.
The lesson for every entrepreneur is not that reinvention is easy.
It is that reinvention is possible.
But only for those willing to walk out into open water and go looking for a bigger shell.
"There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under the heavens: a time to be born and a time to die, a time to plant and a time to uproot." Ecclesiastes 3:1-2
Let’s Stay Connected ✨
I’d love to keep the conversation going beyond this post. If you found these insights valuable or simply want to exchange ideas, feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn. It’s a great space to share perspectives, build meaningful connections, and grow together.