Competitive Moats in the AI Era - Our Sold Out/Standing Room Only RDSW 'Strategy Track' Talk Now Available!

By popular demand we are releasing the whole talk: slides, audio video from Scot's Raleigh/Durham Startup Week talk on Competitive Moats in the AI Era.

Good Morning NC Builders! I hope everyone is recovering from RDSW, we’re finally digging out of a huge avalanche of emails and work that piled up while we were busy networking, talking, volunteering and RDSW’ing with everyone - what an amazing week.

As part of our activities, I was invited to speak at the Strategy talk about Competitive Moats in the AI Era. I explain why in the talk and I added more context/color to the video so I won’t repeat myself.

The 12 GenAI Era Competitive Moats “Money Slide”

Unlike most content where you build to a crescendo, or treat something like this as super proprietary, I wanted to start with it and make it effectively ‘open source’. Why? It’s no exaggeration to say I raised the (as of yet unannounced - stay tuned) ReFiBuy Series Seed on the back of this slide. On top of this, I believe these 12 strategies are the unlock for companies born after the ChatGPT demarkation line of Q4_22 and before to harden their business for the rough seas ahead.

Here you go - the 12 competitive moats in the AI Era.

As the slide said, I did a ton of research on this. This post has all the materials from the talk and all the materials that ‘went into’ the talk.

Back in Feb, We put this post out→

The Tweener Founder Bat Phone is Ringing Off the Hook: SaaS Blood is in the Water - What Should Triangle Founders Do?

In there we said the second ‘what you should do’ is “Analyze and Cover your AI Risk”. Think of this talk and this post as the ‘going deeper’ on that.

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Deck from the Talk

You can download the deck here and use any of this information in your own pitches if you would like.

PRESENTATION: Competitive Moats In The Ai Era

1.02MB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

Sources of Information on AI Competitive MOats

Here are the 8 core sources used for the deck if you want to go deeper. You can go REALLY REALLY deep and I recommend it to understand the nuances of each moat.

• Y Combinator (Hamilton Helmer & The Lightcone Team) (aca YC)

  • The 7 Most Powerful Moats For AI Startups

  • This is the gold standard. They take Helmer’s classic “Seven Powers” and apply it directly to the AI era. Process power and counter-positioning are the standouts here.

  • Watch the breakdown on YouTube or read the YC transcript.

• NFX (Pete Flint)

  • How AI Companies Will Build Real Defensibility

  • Flint introduces the “Motte-and-Bailey” strategy. Speed and distribution are your temporary wooden fort (the bailey), buying you time to build network effects and deep embedding (the stone motte).

  • Read the NFX thesis here.

• Bessemer Venture Partners (BVP)

  • Building Vertical AI: An Early Stage Playbook for Founders

  • BVP drops a massive 10-principle playbook. They argue the best technical moats come from multimodality and solving hyper-specific, nuanced workflows.

  • Check out the BVP playbook.

• Andreessen Horowitz (a16z)

  • Trading Margin for Moat

  • a16z is pushing “services-led growth.” The idea? Use forward-deployed engineers to replace human workflows, capture the data, and eventually become the System of Record.

  • Read the a16z insight.

  • I also love this Alex Rampell content video and written

• Elvia Perez (Synthesis)

  • Defensibility in the Age of AI: Five Attributes Every Vertical Startup Needs

  • Perez synthesized multiple VC frameworks into five core attributes. Her take on “Workflow Ownership”—owning the authoring layer where work actually begins—is crucial.

  • Read Elvia’s synthesis on Medium.

• Azati

  • Generative AI and Competitive Advantage: Where the Real Moat Is (and Isn’t)

  • Azati does a great job separating the mirages (like prompt engineering) from the real moats (like domain expertise encoding and proprietary training data).

  • Read the Azati breakdown.

• Euclid Ventures

  • Dude, Where’s My Moat?

  • Euclid outlines why moats matter even more in Vertical AI, focusing heavily on data loops and long-term lock-in strategies from day one.

  • Read Euclid’s perspective.

• Insignia Ventures Partners

  • In the Age of AI, Moats Matter More Than Ever

  • The paradox: AI makes it easier to build but harder to defend. Insignia focuses on how data flywheels and switching costs are the ultimate survival tools.

  • Read the Insignia VC review.

How to Watch/Listen?

Here’s the YouTube:

Or check out the audio here for all your favorite podcast links, or listen right from our Substack: