Michael Truell: belief

Transcript context

…This leads to a discussion that a lot of AI founders always think about and investors, which is moats, and defensibility in AI. So it feels like one is custom models, is a moat in the space. How do you just think about long-term defensibility in the space, knowing there's other folks, as you said, launching constantly trying to eat your lunch? I think that there are ways to build in inertia and traditional moats, but I think by and large, we're in a space where it is incumbent on us to continue to try to build the best thing, and everyone in this industry. And I truly just think that the ceiling is so high that no matter what entrenchment you build, you can be leapfrogged. And I think that this resembles markets that are maybe a little bit different from normal software markets, normal enterprise markets of the past. I think one that comes to mind is the market for search engines at the end of 1999, or at the end of the '90s and beginning of the 2000s. I think another market that comes to mind that resembles this market in many ways, it's actually just the development of the peripheral computer and many computers in the '70s, '80s, '90s. And I think that, yes, in each of those markets, the ceiling was incredibly high, it was possible to swish. You could keep getting value for the incremental hour of a smart person's time, the incremental R&D dollar for a really long time, you wouldn't run out of useful things to build. And then in search in particular, not on the computer case, adding distribution was helpful for making the product better too, in that you could tune the algorithms, you could tune the learning based off of the data and the feedback you're getting from users. And I think that all of those dynamics exist in our market too. And so I think maybe the sad truth for people like us, but then the amazing truth for the world is, I think that there are many leapfrogs that exist, there's more useful things to build. We're a long way away from where we can compete in 5, 10 years, and it's incumbent in our state to keep that going. So what I'm hearing, this sounds like a lot more like a consumer sort of moat, where it's just, be the best thing consistently so that people stick with you versus creating lock-in and things like that, where they're just... Like Salesforce, where it's just contracts with the entire company, and you have to use this product.…

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