The New Moats

A 'moat' is whatever protects a business from being copied or out-competed. Older moats were things like distribution deals, brand, or economies of scale. Chen's argument: in the era of cloud and AI/ML, the new durable moat is a 'system of intelligence' — a product that continuously collects proprietary data from how it's used, feeds that data into machine learning to get smarter, and becomes better and more entrenched the more it's used, in a way a new entrant can't just copy by writing similar code, because they lack the accumulated data and usage history.