Time & Perspective Quote by Dee Hock

A businessman warning that evolution might suddenly start moving at startup speed is doing more than marveling at biotech. Dee Hock, who built Visa by redesigning how trust works at scale, is pointing at a deeper pattern: once humans can rewrite the code of life, “nature” stops being the slow, ambient backdrop and becomes a design space with quarterly timelines.

The phrase “literally collapse” is the tell. Hock isn’t using the breezy futurist language of “accelerate” or “disrupt.” Collapse implies a structural failure: the long buffer of time that used to separate tinkering from consequence disappears. That buffer is what made evolution feel safe, even when it was brutal. Genetic engineering threatens to compress error, feedback, and irreversibility into the same moment. The subtext is governance panic dressed as observation. If new species can be made quickly, then mistakes, monopolies, and military applications can arrive quickly too.

Context matters. Hock spent his career thinking about complex systems that don’t behave linearly, where small rule changes produce outsized outcomes. Read that way, the quote isn’t mainly about lab technique; it’s about control. Who gets to decide what counts as “better” biology? What happens when the incentives of markets, national security, or status collide with the humility ecosystems demand?

Hock’s intent lands as a managerial provocation: if we’re about to speed-run speciation, our institutions cannot keep operating like evolution is still slow. The real risk isn’t that we can create new forms of life; it’s that we’ll do it faster than we can build the ethics, regulation, and accountability to live with them.