When Everyone Has AI, Nobody Has a Moat

There's a moment in every founder's journey when the ground shifts beneath them. For the current generation, that moment arrived the day AI became too good, too fast, too cheap.

We're living through what future historians will call The Great Inversion—when abundance became the constraint and scarcity became the advantage. When having access to everything meant differentiation came from choosing almost nothing. When the technology that was supposed to be the moat became the water table.

Marcus Aurelius wrote: "The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way." He was describing Stoic philosophy. He was also, unknowingly, describing the only viable strategy for building companies in 2025 and beyond.

THE DEATH OF TECHNICAL DIFFERANTIATION

Consider the founder journey circa 2020: you had a brilliant technical insight, maybe about NLP or computer vision. You raised seed capital on the innovation. You hired ML engineers. You built proprietary models. You pitched your "technical moat" to Series A investors. This was the playbook.

Now consider 2025: Llama 3 is open source and outperforms your proprietary model. Claude and GPT-4 are accessible via API for pennies. Every SaaS founder can add "AI-powered" features in a weekend sprint. Your technical differentiation—the thing you raised $3M to build—is now a commodity available to every competitor, including the one launching tomorrow.

Of course, some moats remain genuinely technical—infrastructure plays at the chip level, security companies defending against evolving threats, and vertical AI trained on proprietary datasets that can't be easily replicated. But here's the tell: if you're a B2B SaaS founder building a copilot or an automation layer, you're probably not in that category. And most founders aren't.

The first response to this reality is grief. The second is panic. The third, if you're paying attention, is clarity.

When everyone can build the same technical features, nobody wins on technical features. The game hasn't ended—it's just revealed what the game actually was all along. Innovation was never the moat; it was table stakes. What mattered was everything we built around the innovation. We just couldn't see it clearly when we could still hide behind "proprietary technology."

The constraint of commoditization forces a question most founders spent the last decade avoiding: if the tech is free, what are we actually selling?

THE CONSTRAINT BECOMES THE WAY

The Stoics had this practice of turning obstacles into advantages—not through positive thinking or reframing, but through cold recognition of reality. When you can't change the circumstances, you change what the circumstances mean.

LATAM founders have been practicing this longer than most. When your currency devalues 40% in a year, you can't differentiate on price. When regulations change quarterly, you can't build on regulatory arbitrage. When infrastructure is unreliable, you can't compete on speed alone. The constraint forces you up the stack—into territory that's harder to commoditize.

AI is now doing globally what emerging-market volatility did locally: it's pushing founders to compete on dimensions that don't scale linearly with capital. You can't buy taste. You can't growth-hack trust. You can't blitz-scale brand.

That's the inversion. The very thing blocking technical differentiation—commoditization—is the forcing function that makes execution, taste, and brand matter more than ever. The founders who see this aren't fighting the constraint. They're riding it up the stack to where defensibility actually lives.

THE EXECUTION BECOMES THE INNOVATION

There's a company that understood this long before AI made it obvious: Mercado Libre. They didn't invent e-commerce—eBay and Amazon did that. What they built was the ability to make e-commerce actually work in Latin America.

Collections in markets with spotty credit history. Logistics in cities where addresses aren't standardized. Payment systems that integrate with local banks and cash ecosystems. Fraud prevention where identity infrastructure is unreliable.

The innovation wasn't in the concept. It was in solving ten thousand local problems excellently, repeatedly, across more than a dozen countries with different regulations. A better algorithm can be copied. A clever feature can be replicated. A new interaction pattern diffuses. But the organizational muscle to execute the same boring process excellently, repeatedly, across thousands of transactions? That's built over years and embedded in culture, systems, and tacit knowledge that can't be downloaded from GitHub.

In the age of commodity technology, this kind of execution superiority isn't a nice-to-have—it's one of the only things worth building. And it comes down to: operational excellence in boring domains, go-to-market craftsmanship that feels like art, and the discipline to say no to most opportunities so you can execute a few things extraordinarily well.

AI flipped the economics of what's hard. Technical innovation was genuinely scarce for a decade. Building models required specialized PhDs, millions in compute, years of patient iteration. That scarcity was real and it created real moats. Then AI collapsed that scarcity overnight. What took Google five years and $100M to build, a founder can now access via API for $50. The game shifted to an entirely new playing field. Execution was always hard. It just stopped being optional.

THE TASTE BECOMES THE ASSET

Taste is the ultimate intangible asset—hard to define, harder to quantify, and probably one of the last frontiers AI won't cross.

Because while AI excels at creation, taste is fundamentally about judgment and constraint. It's the ability to see that adding this feature would make the product better—and choosing not to, because it would make the company worse.

In an innovation-obsessed culture, subtraction feels like cowardice. Every feature request becomes a referendum on ambition. Every competitor launch triggers FOMO. The instinct is to match features, to never be caught lacking. That's how products bloat and companies lose focus.

Taste is the discipline to resist that instinct. It's strategic constraint that creates clarity.

In 2015, founders competed by adding features. In 2025, they compete by having the conviction to remove them. Every feature you don't build is a distraction you never have to fund, maintain, or explain.

And taste—unlike technical innovation—doesn't commoditize. You can't copy it. Taste is the accumulated residue of ten thousand micro-decisions, each informed by the ones before. It's path-dependent in a way that can't be replicated by hiring better designers or licensing better tools. It's organizational scar tissue formed through repetition and constraint.

Taste turns decisions into identity. And identity, expressed consistently over time, becomes brand.

THE BRAND BECOMES THE MOAT

Let's retire the idea that brand belongs to marketing. In the age of commoditized technology, brand is infrastructure—as foundational as your database architecture, as critical as your unit economics.

Brand is how you turn technology into a business. It's how you reduce CAC without spending more. It's how you increase retention without adding features. It's how you create pricing power in commodity markets. It's how you attract talent when everyone offers the same equity package.

One of the most critical elements of modern brand is distribution infrastructure. When Lenny Rachitsky, Packy McCormick, or Sarah Tavel share something, their audiences trust it. That trust is distribution infrastructure built over years of consistent value creation. For founders, the lesson is simple: own your channels. Build community. Craft narrative clarity so compelling that others retell your story accurately. Don't rent reach from platforms—build distribution that travels with you.

This is especially critical for LATAM founders, who already face a brutal Series B-plus funding gap. Local capital dries up after Series A, and international investors remain deeply skeptical of emerging-market plays. Combine that with founders who have no brand presence and avoid visibility, and you get the same picture every time: global investors evaluating a company they've never heard of, led by a founder with no public track record, in a market they don't understand.

The irony is brutal. LATAM founders operate in environments where brand matters more than in stable markets, yet invest in it less. In the U.S., you can sometimes win on product alone because institutional trust exists. In LATAM, where institutional trust is weak, company-level brand becomes the substitute for institutional credibility.

The viable strategy for building companies in 2025 and beyond isn't having the best technology. Technical features are the floor, not the ceiling. The strategy is understanding that brand is how you turn a product into a company people want to work for, invest in, buy from, and stay loyal to—even when competitors can copy every feature you launch.

THE TECHNOLOGY BECOMES THE HUMANITY

There's a paradox at the heart of The Great Inversion: the more technology automates, the more human the work becomes.

Innovation is abundant—judgment is scarce. Features are abundant—taste is scarce. Information is abundant—trust is scarce. Reach is abundant—owned distribution is scarce.

The Great Inversion follows a familiar pattern. Every major platform shift—mainframe to PC, desktop to mobile, on-premise to cloud—looked like the end of the world to those caught off guard, a gold rush to those chasing quick wins, and an open field to those who saw the constraint coming and built for it.

Marcus Aurelius would recognize this moment. The obstacle—commoditized technology—has become the way. Building in the era of AI means being unapologetically human. It means obsessing over the ten thousand boring details that make execution excellent. It means having the taste to say no when competitors ship features like assembly lines. It means building brand as deliberately as you build product.

I'm finishing this essay in Rome, looking at the Forum ruins in the heart of the eternal city. Maybe that's why the Stoic parallels feel so clear. Rome's military advantage eroded over time. The empire fell. What survived were the ideas—philosophy, law, principles of organization that compounded across centuries. The technology changes. What humans value doesn't. In a world where AI makes everything buildable, perhaps the only advantage left is being worth remembering. 

THE J CURVE HALL OF FAME

We have a new YouTube winner this week. My conversation with Daniel Vogel, founder and CEO of Bitso, just hit 160K views — and keeps climbing for all the right reasons.

Daniel’s story is a rare, first-hand account of real disruption. In 2014, he left Silicon Valley to build Bitso — a crypto exchange in Mexico when crypto was still dismissed as a scam. A decade later, Bitso moves billions in cross-border payments and stands as one of Latin America’s first crypto unicorns.

Check it out here:

Or if you’d rather read it, The Insider edition has you covered

Thanks for reading,

Olga 

 P.S. If this issue was valuable to you please share it with a founder who needs to hear it. Let’s build LATAM’s next tech leaders—together

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