Building a moat · Clief Notes

Building a moat

Moats are durable, defensible competitive business or economic advantages that give what you do an edge over your competition.

Startups often confuse the novelty of what they do and the excitement they feel for it with defensibility, and this is a topic that's been worming in my head for the last couple of days.

Here's what counts as a moat:

A feature or benefit that's difficult to replicate
Deep capability or knowledge that is difficult or expensive to develop or acquire
A running head start where it becomes prohibitively expensive for competitors to simply skip to the end and simply wait to copy what you've done

And the longer you've been at it without anyone catching up, the deeper the moat.

These are not moats:

An idea, without process or execution
A build, without knowledge or depth of execution
A product, without market fit
A solution, in search of a problem

Here's what led me here:

AI gurus gatekeeping things that are readily available for free if people performed a simple search engine query
What they gatekeep isn't necessarily game-changing
It points to a deeper behaviour: gatekeeping as a form of social engagement, rather than a signal of actual depth of mastery
It's more signal than noise, leads early and latecomers down the wrong paths.

There are typically three types of startup founders:

First-time: they tend to be secretive and focus on products, features and benefits
Seasoned: they tend to build moats, aren't as obsessed with secrecy, and focus on distribution
Veterans: pretty open, confident of their moats, and it's all about building the ecosystem.

You can see where

@Jake Van Clief

stands from what he does today. That also tells you he has seen more failures than successes and he has worked hard to get to where he is today. You can apply this to most other AI gurus out there, to see where they actually stand with respect to the depth of their AI adoption vs where they claim (or imply) to be.

The question remains: what are you building, and what is your moat?

7 comments

Building a moat