Suhail Posts on Finding AI Moats Later
Suhail shares advice on building AI products before seeking moats, retweeted by Garry Tan.
Suhail, founder of Playground AI and former Mixpanel CEO, posted the line "Just make great things. Find your moat later." Garry Tan, President and CEO of Y Combinator, retweeted it. Packet summaries describe an accompanying thread arguing that AI companies across models, IDEs, infrastructure, inference, data labeling, and generative media lack durable competitive advantages, with venture firms holding the only moat. Players named include OpenAI and Cursor. The summaries present these points as claims in the posts rather than confirmed facts.
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Just make great things. Find your moat later.
the models have no moat (OpenAI, Anthropic, XAI) the IDEs have no moat (Cursor, Windsurf) the harnesses have no moat (Cognition, Factory, LangChain) the app builders have no moat (Replit, Lovable, Bolt) the wrappers have no moat (Harvey, Abridge, OpenEvidence) the inference…
Just make great things. Find your moat later.
the models have no moat (OpenAI, Anthropic, XAI) the IDEs have no moat (Cursor, Windsurf) the harnesses have no moat (Cognition, Factory, LangChain) the app builders have no moat (Replit, Lovable, Bolt) the wrappers have no moat (Harvey, Abridge, OpenEvidence) the inference…
@Suhail Moats only exist in MBA case studies, discovered long after they were in place. To any normal person if you try to a priori engineer a moat then you're almost certainly doing something hostile to customers.