The New Moats – Greylock Perspectives

To build a sustainable and profitable business, you need strong defensive moats around your company. This rings especially true today as we undergo one of the largest platform shifts in a generation as applications move to the cloud, are consumed on iPhones, Echoes, and Teslas, are built on open source, and are fueled by AI and data. These dramatic shifts are rendering some existing moats useless and leaving CEOs feeling like it's almost impossible to build a defensible business. In this post, I'll review some of the traditional economic moats that technology companies typically leverage and how they are being disrupted. I believe that startups today need to build systems of intelligence -- AI powered applications -- "the new moats." Businesses can build several different moats and over time these moats can change.