Jaeden Schaefer

So it's really interesting.

what is actually being seen as defensible today.

So Abdul Abdirhan of F prime added that vertical software without any proprietary data moats is no longer super compelling.

So they actually want you to have a data moat, maybe you ran a you know, an

an FAQ legal website.

So you have all of this data on, you know, legal FAQ questions.

I've seen some startups do this.

And that is like a proprietary data moat where maybe you have, you know, information that no one else has, or maybe you have information because you have a company and you can see what your users, you know, what their behavior is.

And so that could be a proprietary data moat.

But basically, you want some sort of data that your competitors can't just easily knock off and clone.

Igor Ryabinsky of Altol R Capital said that basically was arguing that shallow product depth is a really red flag, a big red flag.

He said, if your differentiation mostly lives in UI and automation, that's no longer enough.

The barrier to entry is dropped, which makes building a real moat a lot harder.

I think for new companies, that means that building around, you know, true workflow ownership and a really clear understanding of the problem from day one is super, super important.

Massive code bases are not an advantage anymore, right?

Just being like, look, we have this massive code base we've worked on for a long time.

Speed, focus, adaptability, all of those things, I think I would argue are much more important.

And even pricing models are shifting a lot like these kind of I think there's a lot of software today that has like these really kind of

set in stone pricing per seat or per subscription.

These are looking a lot weaker compared to the consumption based approaches where it's like, look, we just need to use like X amount of tokens every month, which is kind of the approach that I'm doing at AI Box, where you get an account and you can just get more tokens.