I went down a rabbit hole this week and came out a little shaken, then weirdly calm. Here's the honest version.
It started with a simple question. What's our moat.
Every founder's supposed to have an answer.
I went looking for ours, and day by day I watched it disappear.
The models we use are open and change every quarter.
Fine, I knew that one.
Then I looked hard at our coding tool - the thing I was secretly hoping was our edge.
There are a dozen open-source ones. All free, all good.
Cline, Aider, OpenHands, more every month.
Then Cursor bought Continue and shut it down, and it hit me that even the good open ones aren't safe.
They get bought and folded.
And then the last piece.
Everything else, we can build with AI in weeks.
The apps. The dashboards. All of it.
So I'm sitting there at 1am with the math done, and the math says you have no defensible technology.
None. Anyone can build what you build.
I'll be honest. For about a day that felt like the floor dropping.
If anyone can build it, why does my company get to exist.
I knew this for a while, but still, part of me believed there are still some moats in building software, especially AI-software,
Then it flipped.
Because that same week, everyone around me was raising.
Huge rounds.
People who already made it starting new things so they don't feel left behind.
A trillion here, a billion and a half there.
And I felt the pull. Should we raise. Are we doing this wrong.
But when I put the two things next to each other - building is free, and everyone's raising - they cancelled out.
If building is free, all that money isn't buying a moat.
It's buying a head start in a race with no finish line.
Whatever edge it buys disappears the day the next open model drops.
The thing that doesn't disappear is trust.
And you can't raise a round to buy trust.
You earn it slowly, by being honest when it costs you something.
That's a game 3 people can win.
Might be the only game 3 people can win.
So here's where I landed, if you're a founder feeling the same thing.
Stop defending the tech.
It was never going to be your moat - anyone can copy code. Put your energy into the stuff that takes years and can't be downloaded.
Trust. Taste. Telling the truth even when it's expensive.
Being small isn't the weakness I thought it was.
We can swap our whole model in a day.
We can tell you to use a competitor when they're better.
We can post our own failures.
The big players can't do any of that - their size and their investors won't let them.
That's not me making peace with being small.
That's the actual edge.
And the weird left-out feeling, watching everyone sprint while you walk your own pace - that's not a sign you're losing.
It's just what a different road feels like.
I went looking for our moat and found out we don't have one.
Neither does anyone else.
A week ago that would've scared me. Now it's the most freeing thing I know.
We're building the honest one.
Cheapest real prices, capped margin, everything published, the bad numbers included.
In a world where everyone can build everything, that's the only company I actually want to run.
More soon.