Everyone wants to invest in the startup with the best AI model. I’m increasingly interested in the company with the best proprietary workflow. Models will keep getting better, cheaper and more interchangeable. But if your product is where customers actually do the work every day, you get something much harder to copy: The data. The feedback. The customer relationship. The distribution. The model might be the reason someone tries your product. The workflow is why they stay.

AI is making it cheaper than ever to build software. I think that means distribution is getting more valuable, not less. When everyone can build, building stops being the moat. The advantage becomes having the audience, customers, brand, data or relationships that let you get the product in front of people. We’re going to see tiny teams build products that used to require 50 people. But we’re also going to see thousands of nearly identical products competing for the same customers. AI is making software abundant. Distribution is still scarce.