| This sounds like a puff piece and it's hard to be all that excited about the products that are being touted in the piece - He decided instead to quit and pursue his idea to start Feasier, a platform that aggregates home furnishing listings from different stores into one place. So...what's the moat? Why can't anyone build a clone sight and come in with slightly cheaper shipping and undercut his business? Or this - Zhu says she is working every day on Maida AI, which automates health care administration tasks like patient intake and note-taking. From what I know of the current health care tech situation, everything uses EPIC which is terrible technology, but it's entrenched because it follows regulation and probably pays off some senators/regulators/insurance companies - much like every DOD government project. So unless her product can follow every regulation as well as EPIC (it can't) she can't win in an entrenched market that has a moat she can't cross. I don't doubt there are a bunch of unemployed web developers out there (I'm one), and a lot of VC money that doesn't know what to do after crypto imploded, but these are uninspiring. Of the thousands of web dev companies maybe one will become popular, but it would be from random chance. This just sounds like a bunch of unemployed and desperate people buying lottery tickets, but with computers. The people who are going to make money are the people who are able to corner the energy market or the server and computation market. The innovations will be from a few brilliant academics who make the next transformer model or the next quantum computing model and so forth, which makes up a few thousand people. The "democratization" of the internet just now means everyone is equally broke. Shit, you can make websites now by drawing them and then having an AI make the code (as edge-case clunky as that is). So anyone with a Bamboo pad and a "million dollar" idea can draw one up and buy a web address. So what? |
The dumbest dismissals of business ideas always start with this phrase. Moats aren't like some obvious thing where you pull up a ladder and no one can follow you. Usually just having a slightly better UX (or a UX that people are used to) is enough to be a moat. Users latch onto things they have good experiences with.
Of course, if you want to benefit from anticompetitive business practices (outprice competition, drive them out of business, hike prices), rather than value creation, you need a big pull-up-ladder-type moat, but not every company needs to be Uber/Lyft getting in winner-take-all funding wars.