What is your personal framework for determining if a founder is an outlier or not? Given how many people you've seen go through YC, and chatting with most of the batch, what stands out to you?
The only moat in technology are the founders and team. I think this concept of having a moat sounds great when VCs write investment memos - but in reality, cold, hard execution everyday is what matters and that all comes from the quality and tenacity of the team.
Every piece of application software is a wrapper on other software with a set of opinionated workflows built on top.
Yes, there are some companies that made it hard to switch from - Snowflake, Salesforce - because there are data stores and its a pain to move your record of data. But even they don't have true moats - its just sticker.
So I think Google is right in saying there is no moat. But given their size, Google has layers and bureaucracy, which makes it hard to execute in a new market. That's why OpenAI I think will win - because they are smaller, can move fast, have a great team and can hence, execute...till the day they become a big company too and get disrupted by a new startup, which is the natural circle of life in technology.
The concept of a moat for facebook (via network effects) and google (via scale, habits and learning effects) has worked well when it comes to printing cash.
Moats don't last forever, doesn't mean they aren't real.
The guy writing the post was writing about AI research at google. Not generally at Google, or for search.
