The Moat of the Future

What's our problem?

That's the title of a book by Tim Urban, the Wait But Why blogger, who I think is a brilliant thinker.

In it, he says you could think of human history as a thousand-page book, where each page covers 250 years. For almost the entire book, page after page, humans live in small hunter-gatherer tribes. Farming doesn't even show up until page 950. And most of our modern world only emerges on page 1,000.

If you took a human from any of the first 998 pages and moved them one page forward, they'd be a little shocked. For most of the book, they'd probably wonder, "Where did my people go?" But they'd recognize the world they were in. Take someone from page 999 and drop them onto page 1,000, and they'd die of shock.

Now consider this: page 1,001 will likely be as different from page 1,000 as page 1,000 was from everything before it. The technology of today builds on all the technology that came before it, so the pace keeps accelerating. Which means our ability to predict what comes next is probably the lowest it's been in human history.

That's the water we're all swimming in. Every article declaring that moats are disappearing, that AI can copy whatever you've built, is a prediction being made at the moment predictions have never been harder to make.

So in a world where no one can predict what's coming, what will still matter?

Grasping at Certainty

Fear tends to exaggerate all risks.

We've seen this pattern through every boom and bust cycle: over-optimism in the short term, then over-pessimism right after. Right now, we're seeing both at once.

And fear lives at the edge between the known and the unknown, between the familiar and the unfamiliar. We are entering the most unfamiliar time any of us will have ever experienced. So it makes sense that there's so much fear.

Here's what I notice in that fear: people are trying to pretend they have certainty. All these articles claiming to know exactly what the new moats will be, how business will work now, how everything will work now. People are grasping at certainty.

The truth is, we just don't know. We don't know how this will evolve.

What's Genuinely at Risk

Some moats have seemed to persist through every disruption: a trusted brand, deep relationships with customers, regulatory advantage. And a lot of people are talking about data and ontologies. Those probably will be an advantage too.

Software is the one being called into question. For decades, the argument held that a dedicated team building one product for many customers would always beat what any single customer could build themselves. History proved that right, which is why so many effective SaaS companies exist. But AI is collapsing the cost and friction of building.

If anyone can essentially hire the most talented software engineers in the world, it's worth considering the possibility that the software itself will no longer be an advantage.

But look at what that leaves open. If the software you spent years building may stop being what makes you hard to copy, what will?

The Moat Nobody Can Copy

One of the things I find most interesting about human beings is that, for whatever reason, different humans get genuinely energized by different things.

And if a founder is so energized by solving a particular problem, they're going to spend more time and more energy on that problem than anyone else. I think we could argue that authentic alignment, at a human level, will matter more than ever. If everyone has the same tools and the same capacity to create, then the people who are truly most energized and excited to spend their time on a specific problem are likely to win.

The founder who thinks "that's an interesting problem, that will probably make money, I can go do that" is playing a game AI just equalized. The founder who can't stop thinking about their customer's problem is playing a different game entirely.

And here's why this holds up in the market: you can't fake it. Are you operating out of lack and scarcity, making choices to squeeze more money from others for yourself? Or are you operating out of sufficiency, genuinely trying to create value in the world? Customers can sense the difference, and as everything accelerates, the extraction game stops working faster than it used to.

In Eric Ries's book Incorruptible, he tells the story of Costco's $1.50 hot dog. The price hasn't moved in roughly twenty years. At so many points, Costco could have squeezed out more margin the way competitors did. They chose the customer promise instead, and that promise became the business. Caring about your customers over time is how you create value for the business you're running. It's the ultimate win-win.

Attuning to Your Own Truth

So how do you find your authentic alignment? Nobody can hand you the problem you're built to care about. You have to be quiet enough, and present enough, to hear it.

This is why the inner work of recognizing when you're in threat and reacting, and shifting into presence to respond, matters more than ever. It's how you attune to your own truth amidst all the noise.

Some questions worth sitting with:

1. What genuinely lights you up? Pay attention to which work makes you feel alive versus which feels like obligation. When you feel genuinely excited about something, there's often wisdom there your intellect hasn't caught up with yet. And here's a way to test it: would you still pursue this if nobody were watching? The thing that energizes you when there's no one to impress, no one to approve, no one to even know about it. That's yours.
2. Is this authentic desire, or ego desire? If this problem stopped looking like a good market tomorrow, would you still want to spend your years solving it? Your answer tells you whether you're aligned with solving the problem or with what you can gain from solving it.
3. Where are you extracting, and where are you creating? Look at the choices you make with customers. When you set a price, is the intent to squeeze as much as you can from them, or to build a business that can keep providing for them? Choices made from scarcity look reasonable in the moment. They compound into a company customers can feel.
4. When uncertainty spikes, what do you reach for first? A confident prediction, or the willingness to say "I don't know"? If ever there was a time to acknowledge all that we don't know, now would be a good time. In that acknowledgement comes curiosity and creativity. The founders who let fear get the better of them will cower, retreat, or pretend to know things they don't. The founders who stay present get to adapt.

Learning to Surf the Changes

Page 1,001 is coming whether anyone predicts it correctly or not.

And navigating it ultimately comes down to some deeply personal patterns: sourcing your sense of safety, freedom, and worthiness externally, versus learning to see that you have no lack of them in the present moment.

When you source these from within, you can attune to your own truth. You can hear what you're authentically aligned with. And in the world we're entering, that alignment is your biggest advantage.

I'm seeing it already: the founders who have done this work are both curious and excited about all this change.

Because, as Jon Kabat-Zinn says, "You can't stop the waves, but you can learn to surf."

With love,

Dave Kashen