In the AI Era, Software Products Are No Longer Moats, Says Sharma
Shikhil Sharma · How to Build a Startup in 2025? | Shikhil, Co-Founder Astra Security · Sep 30, 2025 · at 47:39
Astra Security co-founder Shikhil Sharma explains how defensibility shifts away from software products toward solving deeply complex technical problems in the age of AI.
0:00 / 0:18exact quote · 18.9s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“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 something something hard.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Shikhil Sharma
Sharma: Astra Would Need One-Fifth Its Headcount If Built Today
“I mean, we've always built Astra in a very lean way in terms of hiring people. Ah, but, ah, I think this would have, we would have done at one fifth of the cost and even one fifth of people along the way that we hired, ah, in a, ah, AI first world.”
Sharma: AI Agents Will Soon Obsolete B2B SaaS Website Buying
“I think all that is going to be toasted very very much in the next few years where how people would be consuming and discovering would be very different, and probably they might not even come to your websites either. They'll just discover you through these int…”
Hidden SaaS Pricing Excludes Startups From AI Agent Searches, Says Sharma
“In a world where agent tech is taking decisions, or even AI is trying to, if someone's asking AI, boss please tell me some let's say pen testing tools which fit in this budget, then you have no indicator of pricing, neither to your customers, nor agent tech, w…”
Sharma: AI Onboarding Makes Average Engineers Productive Rapidly
“You can, if you've got the correct processes in place, you can actually get a half decent engineer and train them on your processes because AI is very great at even reviewing your entire code base and infrastructure and giving context to a new person and make …”
Brand Storytelling Beats Backlinks for AI-Era Google Ranking, Says Sharma
“Google sees that Astra as a brand is putting out a lot of content on YouTube or other channels, and other people are actually putting a lot of content about Astra and marking it as a top-end test company, and it has nothing to do with backlinks. Then Google wi…”
Sharma: Chat Interfaces Will Soon Become Legacy Software UI
“And I feel that even at some point it would not even chat interface. Also, I feel as a stepping stone, probably it will go beyond that. It would just be wherever they are in an application and it will become that contextual that even chat interfaces would also…”