Where is your moat?
Published on 05.07.2025
Everyone is building; building harder than ever, and quickly you notice is that there's usually a north star, and a ton of competition trying to build the same thing to reach this shared destination.
This is happening in every industry out there, and a primary enabler is the AI. AI has brought down the barrier to entry by quite a margin, enabling everyone to build something they truly want. This naturally increases competition.
And perhaps Peter Thiel's notion of "start where thers less to no competition" in Zero to One is fading away in the AI era. The whole thing is an endless cycle of creative destruction - turbocharged by AI.
But the good side to competition is that it leads to great innovations which I hope to see more in the future.
The shared north star or mission to build the next big thing is quite strong since AI has brought down the barrier to entry. And it's not just that, AI has also compressed the timeline for everything. Market validation happens faster and the product iterations cycle quicker.
Traditional business moats are dissolving everyday, and maybe only few moats like data, integration depth, network effects and specialised infrastructure may exist.
And it's quite clear that many teams are sprinting towards these shared north stars, each believing they've found the secret path to the finish line. I think this blind belief is very much necessary.
But in the end the survivors are not the ones with the best initial idea, but those who can adapt faster when landscape shifts - which it inevitably does. It's like musical chairs but with the music getting faster and chairs keep disappearing.
One has to not care about the idea too much, but be prepared to adapt and test new hypothesis over and over again, ergo speed-up "Cycle Time".
I think I'll focus on increasing that cycle time for everyone because the idea converges quickly but not the adaption and execution.
Have thoughts? DM me on X - @pwnfunction.