The Building Blocks Economy

Most fast-food chains spend a decade expanding.

They open a few stores, dial in the operating model, hire staff, build out a regional supply chain, then slowly grow. McDonald's took 25 years to reach 1,000 locations. Even a fast-growing chain like Chipotle took 15.

The cost structure was the constraint. Kitchens, ovens, leases, staff training, distribution trucks. All upfront. All slow.

Then in late 2020, Jimmy Donaldson — MrBeast on YouTube — announced he was getting into the burger business.

His launch video trended at #1 on YouTube. On day one, MrBeast Burger was live in 300 U.S. locations. Some made $7,000 in a single day. Within 90 days, the chain had sold over 1 million burgers.

No corporate kitchens. No full-time staff. No physical storefronts.

Here's how he did it. MrBeast Burger sat on three building blocks:

Audience — the one block MrBeast actually owned. 100M+ YouTube subscribers ready to order whatever he made. Kitchens — rented from Virtual Dining Concepts, which coordinated hundreds of underutilized restaurant kitchens cooking food under whatever brand was paying. Delivery — DoorDash, Uber Eats.

Three blocks. One owned. Two rented. Stack them up, you have a national chain. Overnight.

This isn't a content-creator story. It's a structural story about the modern economy.

Starting a business used to mean owning the infrastructure: buy servers, hire engineers, build a payments team, set up a delivery network. Cloud computing changed that. Now you rent compute from AWS, payments from Stripe, messaging from Twilio, hosting from Vercel.

Each one of those was once a department. Now each one is a building block — a rentable, recombinable, scalable capability.

AI extends the pattern from infrastructure to expertise.

Historically, expertise was bundled with human labor. To access legal knowledge, you hired a lawyer. To access design judgment, you hired a designer. AI unbundles expertise from the expert — turning knowledge into a rentable building block instead of a hired role.

A solopreneur in 2026 can rent legal review, copywriting, graphic design, research analysis, and customer support — each one a capability summoned as needed, scaled at near-zero marginal cost, paid for by the hour or by the call.

And once every capability is a rentable block, industry boundaries blur.

A YouTuber gets into the restaurant business overnight by renting kitchens. A creator gets into the fashion business by renting AI design + on-demand manufacturing + Shopify checkout. A consultant launches a SaaS product without ever hiring engineers.

The competitive question stops being "what do we own?" and starts being "what can we combine that no one else thought to combine?"

Power comes not from owning infrastructure or employing large teams, but from knowing how to rebundle modular components into something coherent and valuable.

— From Reshuffle, Chapter 7

The strategic question isn't "should we use AI to cut costs?" It's "which capability in our stack should we publish as a rentable block? Which should we keep as our owned moat? And which should we stop building entirely and just rent?"

MrBeast answered that question for the burger business. There are versions of it for every business.

Sangeet on this in Chapter 7 ↗