Follow-Up to The Cost of Casual Equity
I thought I was only going to write one post about T.Rex Arms. But life doesn’t work that way. Sometimes, a bad decision becomes the gift that keeps on giving.
In the interest of “transparency,” T.Rex’s executive team recently published a company timeline on their website, released a video outlining revenue history, and even included the original 2015 partner agreement signed by Lucas Botkin and his three co-founders. I won’t rehash the contents—you can watch or read those yourself.
What I want to examine is the decision to publish any of this in the first place.
Let’s be clear: the smartest move after Lucas published his video would’ve been silence. Nothing. No timeline. No video. No counter-explanation.
Sometimes, the most strategic response is to do nothing—especially when the optics are already bad. And let’s not forget: it was T.Rex Arms that tried to control the narrative first. The June 2 video wasn’t a reaction; it was a preemptive strike. And it backfired.
Instead of creating clarity, their “transparency” achieved the opposite. The central message of their timeline is clear: “Lucas was important, but he wasn’t the company.” The problem is, no one’s buying that. Not anyone who paid attention to the rise of T.Rex Arms, anyway.
Take this passage:
“David Botkin showed Lucas how to make Kydex gear.”
Let’s assume that’s true. It’s still irrelevant.
That’s like saying Steve Jobs succeeded because his dad taught him about craftsmanship, or because Bill Fernandez introduced him to Wozniak, or because Wozniak was the technical genius behind Apple I and II.
All of those things are technically true. And completely beside the point.
Apple didn’t become Apple because of Wozniak.
It became Apple because of Jobs.
T.Rex Arms didn’t become what it is because someone taught Lucas how to mold plastic.
It became what it is because of Lucas Botkin.
Founders are rare. Vision, taste, timing, and obsession don’t come in groups. The rest of the executive team may be competent operators. But they’re not builders. They lack the DNA. And the company’s future will reflect that.
The timeline itself subtly rewrites the company’s DNA. It begins in 2011 with Isaac and David B. experimenting with Kydex. Lucas enters in early 2013, quickly iterates beyond their early work, and by October launches T.REX ARMS from a spare room. His foundational role is largely softened—mentioned explicitly only in the 2016 entry about the first YouTube video.
That’s not transparency. That’s a curated erasure.
The entire document reads like a PR scrub—an attempt to reposition Lucas as a talented contributor to their company, not the other way around. The problem? Everyone who watched the early videos knows the truth. The energy, the vision, the brand—it was him.
One entry in the timeline deserves particular scrutiny:
“In April 2025, Lucas expressed that if he bought out the other owners, he would remove 5 of the 7 executives and 10% of the team. With this context, David B., David N., and Isaac prayerfully decide not to sell.”
Let’s decode that.
Lucas apparently believed the company was bloated—too many executives, too many underperformers, and too many barriers to speed and focus. Maybe he saw gatekeepers. Maybe he saw a slow, top-heavy culture. Either way, he saw a need to optimize.
And the other owners? They chose not to sell—not because of the price, but because Lucas might make cuts.
That tells you everything.
They didn’t make a business decision.
They made a protectionist one.
They chose to preserve their own relevance, their own ecosystem, and their own people—regardless of whether that ecosystem serves the mission or the market. That’s not entrepreneurship. That’s internal politics.
This isn’t speculation. It’s in their own timeline.
And the longer T.Rex operates like a bureaucratic nonprofit instead of a founder-driven company, the faster it will decline. Great companies don’t run like state agencies. They run like insurgencies.
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The bottom line?
T.Rex Arms can release all the slides and timelines they want.
But at this point, they’re John Sculley.
And we all know what happened to Apple when Sculley pushed Jobs out.
You can fire the founder.
You can reframe the story.
You can even keep the revenue going—for a while.
But in the end?
You lost the company.