Smokin’ These Moats!

Let’s get a little absurd, but not too absurd.

Ultimately, I want to talk about competitive moats, especially the change in what makes a moat a moat, as brought on by the AI wave and its focus on data.

In other words, over the last five years or so, tech as a barrier-to-entry has evaporated – “tech” is “free,” which means no matter how awesome your tech is, it’s no longer your IP and certainly no longer a competitive moat.

This puts an outsized emphasis on data as that moat – the data you have, the data you can collect and enrich, and the data you can rent or buy. We just went through this with the product strategy crash course stuff, and now I want to dive a little deeper into your moat.

But what makes data a moat?

That’s a damn good question. And it can take forever to answer – even though it’s one of the more fun discussions you can have about your business. There’s dreamscape, whiteboard, green-shoots talks to be had. God, I’m a nerd!

There’s also ways to do it wrong, which is why I chose the cringiest thing to ever come out of Mark Zuckerberg's mouth as the basis for the title of this private post.

Let me do this in my roundabout way. Before I give you the directions, let me tell you when you’ve gone too far. Which is the exact way my Dad used to give me actual directions before we had navigation. Homage!