The Myth of Long-Term Moats
A lot has been written about moats in software. Network effects. Switching costs. Proprietary data. Everyone wants to believe they're building one. But the idea of a "long term moat" is mostly a myth, especially in this market. Moats aren't permanent. They're time-bound. At best, they function as a bridge. And companies either use that bridge to reach the next defensible position, or watch their moat get breached.
Stacking Temporary Advantages
The real "long-term moat" is just a sequence of smaller moats stacked together. Each one buys time. And what you do with that time, how fast you execute, how quickly you evolve, determines whether you stay ahead. In the Age of AI, this is more true than ever. If the moat window used to be 6-12 months, today it's 2-3 weeks. Models change. Infrastructure shifts. Customer needs rewrite themselves in real time. What was a 12-month product head start in 2023 is now 3 prompts and a wrapper in 2024. It's easier than ever to both build and distribute software.
The Speed Imperative
And it's happening all around us! The first LLM-based CRMs? Swarmed. The first AI note-taking tools? Cloned endlessly. Even in infra plays like vector DBs — great framework seeing differentiation collapse overnight. It isn't just important, it is THE moat. The ability to build, ship, learn, adapt faster than everyone else is the only sustainable edge right now. In a world where everything is open source, everything is demo-able, and everything is one blog post away from being copied, speed is the only thing that compounds.
Key Takeaways
- Traditional moats are becoming increasingly temporary
- The window for competitive advantage has shrunk from months to weeks
- Execution speed is now the primary differentiator
- Success requires constant evolution and adaptation
- Building and shipping faster is the new sustainable edge