Rampell: AI lowers software creation costs, increasing early-stage competition
Alex Rampell · Why AI Moats Still Matter (And How They've Changed) · Dec 3, 2025 · at 5:00
a16z General Partner Alex Rampell highlights how AI tools increase competitor density for obvious startup ideas, raising the bar for zero-to-one defensibility.
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“Nobody can because it's so easy to actually produce software, and that's kind of the, that's the double-edged sword of AI, is that it's very, very easy to produce software. Everybody can go do something that is a very obvious idea, because it's obvious everybody's gonna go build it, But can you get to the type of scale where you actually could show a moat? And that, that has gotten, you know, arguably harder because you have a larger end count of potential customer, sorry, potential competitors.”
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