"Startups don’t have moats. If they did they wouldn’t be able to start up in the first place (with very few exceptions in extremely technical or regulated industries). But every founder should be thinking about the eventual moat from inception."
Would you agree that an exception for network effects is a middleman/gig economy platform model like Uber and Airbnb. They need network effects from the beginning? Or else they can't take off.
this is the "cold start" problem and is one of the reasons marketplace businesses are so hard to work. generally the way around this is spending aggressively to subsidize one side of the market or both until the network effect kicks in. or if not a "capital" hack some other kind of hack
This was a lightbulb moment for me:
"Startups don’t have moats. If they did they wouldn’t be able to start up in the first place (with very few exceptions in extremely technical or regulated industries). But every founder should be thinking about the eventual moat from inception."
Would you agree that an exception for network effects is a middleman/gig economy platform model like Uber and Airbnb. They need network effects from the beginning? Or else they can't take off.
this is the "cold start" problem and is one of the reasons marketplace businesses are so hard to work. generally the way around this is spending aggressively to subsidize one side of the market or both until the network effect kicks in. or if not a "capital" hack some other kind of hack