Moat

“It is going to be company IP. It is going to be the true differentiator or the moat in this new world.”

“Moats are most often discovered, not designed.”

“I think that we would happily take a bet on a product that doesn't have a quote unquote moat or durability story. If it has, you know, a lot of momentum, a lot of craft, a lot of, you know, sort of growing engagement.”

“I think that enthusiasm can be a moat in a business.”

“The agents are going to be a commodity at some point. Your judgment about what to Point them to is the moat”

“A clone with little or no distribution is a folder on someone's laptop. It always was. The moat was never the code. It was everything you added to the code.”

“The bulk of it is qualitative. Understanding what kind of price the company can take, if it has pricing power, or whether, in some examples, there's what the nomad guys called scale economies shared, where the benefit is not taking price, but passing scale ben…”

“I would say the single biggest moat in the AI age that we are living in now, I think is actually going down the learning curve by making the effort.”

“As someone who works in AI, your mode is basically, you have to be new, you know, you have, like, I don't, I'm sure anyone can relate, But you always, when there's a new model that comes, you have to talk about it. Otherwise you're kind of losing a lot of that…”

“If you only invest in businesses that have huge moats, you're not going to make any investments. Like very few companies truly have moats.”

“With the rise of AI, taste is going to be one of the biggest moats that you could possibly have.”

“Any one of these modes is not enough. But what you want to do is you want to take a company and score it across them. Maybe you assign one point to each mode they have. And I think anything four or more, you're pretty damn secure. But if you have a two or thre…”

“If you have a process that has many components and you speed up some of the components that haven't yet been sped up become the limiting factor. They become the most important thing. And, you know, you might not have thought about them at all, right? You might…”

“And as you are going through this, like pain of like developing multiple approaches and then solving the problem, I feel that is like going to be the real boat as an individual. Like I like to call it like pain is the new moat, but I feel that is exactly super…”

“And that kind of knowledge that you've built across the organization or across like your own experience, lived experiences. I feel that the, that pain is what translates into the mode of the company, right? This could be like a product of evals or like somethi…”

“If something doesn't lead to Lower costs, sustained lower costs over time, or the sustained ability to charge higher prices over time, and ideally both, it is not a moat.”

“I still believe that products are no more the moat with AI first world, but in, in, but really hard, in really hard startups, which were, which go beyond just products, I feel still, I mean, the problem itself becomes a moat if you are trying to solve somethin…”

“I find that moats tend to be overhyped, actually. I find that more businesses tend to start up with a product and then evolve eventually into a moat.”

“I think it's reduces all the moats.”

“The moat is a burning pile of money.”

“I think that the best moats aren't technological moats. They're not data moats. They're actually people moats. People and networks have the most friction to change.”

“She wakes up in the morning, is excited about a, what is seemingly a very boring problem to a lot of people. And that is a moat.”

“Actually, you know, you don't really want to hide behind some walls, like the real ever, ever since The blitzkrieg in, like, 1940, 19 39, whatever, we learned that, like, high velocity attack is the way to win, not, like, sitting behind defensive walls.”

“If I look back, I go, like, never sell a single thing. If you could, and, you know, people have to live and People have various desires, but if you could, never sell a share. And I know we've gone through the up and the down cycle, but great companies, compani…”

“When you identify an anti-trend like that and you're first it's a really good moat.”

“There is no moat in productivity. Avoid it if you can.”

“I think a lot of people think about culture as touchy-feely, right? Are employees happy? And for us, that's not the question. It's more about alignment. Are employees behaving in a way that will help that company grow its moat?”

“There is no such thing as like a absolute true moat. The question is how well, how quickly, how, you know, how much earlier than everyone else did you get there?”

“Every moat only works if the castle is sufficiently small. If the prize at the end of the finish line becomes sufficiently large, you're gonna need a bigger moat, and you need to figure out a you know, how to defend the castle harder.”

“If that assumption is true, I think this means that the moat that's created by these large capital investments is actually not particularly deep, right? It's more of a speed bump than Then, you know, something that prevents new entrants.”

“The problem is that software is going to be like content, which is that like your product is not the moat.”

“And I think the answer is the one that it's always been, which is better execution is the moat. If you can build a better CRM and get it into market, you can win, right?”

“I think at very early stages you shouldn't worry so much about moats as much as a consumer friction you're solving for. If the consumer friction is compelling, then in the consequence of operating, you will gather enough data, which could become a moat, or you…”

“If few investors are interested, if you can cross that hurdle, it creates an incredible moat for you, because you can be the pioneer.”

“You know, another mode that's really not that solid is product. And I think more and more founders are getting away from thinking that their product is something that others can't copy. People are pretty good at writing code nowadays. They're pretty fast.”

“Yeah, we raised just under seventy million.”

“And then 20 12 was when we raised our first institutional round. And so we went out to Mayfield and Mayfield led what ended up being about a thirteen million dollar what we call the series B.”

“The last round that we raised was Insight Venture Partners. So that was in 2015 Insight put in fifty million dollars. And that was our Series C.”

“It was an interesting spot for the company because we didn't have to raise. And so we were in, we were profitable, which very few SAS companies turned out to be profitable.”

“We were actually one of the only companies in sort of focused on the world of advertising that actually priced in that way. So we priced based on an annual contract commitment. We had recurring revenue deals.”

“So basically we were really focused actually not on expansion in the beginning, but we were really just for the first, I would say almost two years from 20 12 to 20 14 of just getting new logos. Frankly, we didn't honestly focus on expansion. It was something …”

“We didn't put a matrix on our site. We didn't do a transparent pricing. We said, look, we're going to put together each deal is different. Each client is different. Their needs are different. The support level they want is different. The number of users they'r…”

“It was in the, it was certainly in the 500 plus customer range five, six, 700, something in that sort of order of magnitude.”

“500 times a hundred grand ACV would put you north of fifty million bucks in ARR. Was that accurate? Yep.”

“One of the great contrasts in life is between people who know a moat when they see it and people who know how to build one potentially out of nothing.”

“All moats are constantly under attack. You can't see it, but they're constantly under attack. And what Munger says is, Is the future of every business is worse than the present.”

“If the chapter on moats bores you, you're not going to be a good investor. If the chapter on moats bores you know, you, you're not going to be able to understand a good business from a bad business.”

“It was very tough as a European company to make a dent. It was very Americanized in terms of the type of partners that you needed and the type of funding that you needed.”

“Well, I think the reason that moats are important is that they basically determine your profit margin over time. So if you build something that no one else can build, you can make 20 or 50 or maybe even 90% margins. But if what you're doing is easy to copy, th…”

“I really think it's important to think about moats from day one, and you might not actually develop a good moat until year two or year five or even year 10, but I think it's at least important to think about, you know, whether you could build a moat over time …”

“Complexity is the new moat.”

“And so I had my first one recently I, we had a company called Moat that I really loved, but it wasn't strategic enough. And they sold that for the reported price was eight 50 to a billion and it was a lot less than we had a chance at it.”