If a competitor can rebuild your product on the same model in a month, what exactly are you defending?
where I've got to
The moats that existed because building software was hard are draining. The ones that were never really about software (distribution, trust, network effects) look stronger by comparison. The open problem is proprietary data: everyone claims it, few have the kind that compounds with use.
What is a moat when the model isn't yours?
Mac developers have a verb for this: to get Sherlocked. In 2002 Apple shipped Sherlock 3, which did most of what a popular third-party app called Watson did, and Watson's business went away.…
Ask three well-run companies to use the same frontier model to answer "what should our product strategy be?" and you get three versions of one memo. Nobody did anything wrong. The inputs wer…
When people say a startup has distribution, they usually mean it has found a cheap way to reach people through someone else's surface: a search engine, an app store, a feed, a marketplace. T…
The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical ReproductionThe Tacit DimensionPerforming Arts: The Economic DilemmaThe Innovator’s DilemmaInformation RulesTechnological Revolutions and Financial CapitalStrategy Letter VAggregation Theory7 PowersAttention Is All You NeedThe Bitter Lesson