Kevin Rose

This episode originally aired on The Kevin Rose Show.

When anyone can build a Slack competitor in a weekend, what actually makes a consumer startup worth backing?

For decades, software moats meant engineering effort.

When Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger were hand-coding Instagram's filters, copying them cost you months.

That window is now 48 hours.

But Anish argues the moat was never really the code.

When Hipstamatic and a dozen others launched alongside Instagram, it still wasn't obvious which would run away until it was too late.

That pattern may hold, but the cost structure has shifted.

One founder told a niche he'd need $25 million just to reach 100,000 monthly actives because AI inference isn't free.

So the real tension isn't whether great consumer products get built.

It's whether venture economics can survive a world where the best companies skip early rounds altogether.

Kevin Rose speaks with Anish Acharya, general partner at A16Z focused on consumer investing.

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