a16z's Anish Acharya says companies like Cursor and Decagon prove moats don't need to be designed, they can be discovered: "There's two important ideas. One is something @thejessezhang from Decagon said, which I love, and that is moats are most often discovered, not designed." "It's really easy, and I've done this as a founder, to get in your own head about needing a business plan that survives scrutiny from MBAs and VCs... And for that team, they just started shipping and it developed over time." "Another great example is Cursor. They were criticized a lot for not having a moat, but it turned out that initially being a high NPS, high DAU product was really good. And over time they captured all the reasoning traces, they trained their own models... We know how that story plays out." "The other idea is that we seem to have forgotten that none of the classic moats are based on how hard it is to make the software. Most of us aren't building self-driving cars. So it's network effects, scale advantages, brand effects, proprietary data, or what was historically called a cornered resource." "Every moat from five years ago generally is still a good moat. We just need founders that have ambition in those directions. We need more multiplayer products. We need consumer social. We need products that get dramatically better the more you use them." @illscience w/ @lennysan