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Comment by ngngngng | Hacker News Reader

Good luck building a moat when 95% of your app is just calling the API everyone else has access to.

Paul English (founder of Kayak, exited at $2 billion) said this in response to the exact comment you are making: "Kayak was just a thin layer above ITA, and ITA sold for $700m and Kayak sold for $2b. So don’t dismiss thin layers. The ultimate power is the app and UX."[0]

I would also add "distribution" to the "app and UX" part, but you can certainly build a valuable business upon an API "everyone else has access to" - plenty of companies out there that do that.

[0]https://twitter.com/englishpaulm/status/1623701758781558784

I can appreciate this, but there's a reason I said 95%. The stuff I see being built so far is really an extremely thin veneer on top of the API, but that could change with time.

Kayak would never have succeeded today. Competition is far too hungry

100% of all existing code is just calling an OS-API that everyone else has access to. That's just nonsense

Yes, but also, come on now.

I mean, it refutes the argument. Everyone has access to the internet, to conv nets, to C/python/pandas/TCP, you name it. Yet, nobody would seriously argue that one can not build a moat with products based on those stacks for the reason that everyone else has access to the same stack. Its just not an argument, at all.

We can now write software that interprets language under the hood (to some degree). The value propositions enabled by this change in the world are so vast, and partly so complex - to make absolute statements like "yeah but you don't control the model, so anyone can copy your solution" seems out of touch to me. What subset of technology doesn't get reverse engineered? Either this applies almost nowhere (because every piece of tech that an engineer can get their hands on is effectively open), or everywhere.

Anyone can build an OS without needing billions of dollars, and in fact there are state of the art open source OSes. Not quite the same.

Moat does not come from compile time but runtime. The company, the operation, and the accumulated data, the brand, the trust and the reputation.

There are technology moats as well, but for the most part, you're correct. Everything else usually matters much more.

by this logic, you can just copy facebook, twitter and pretty all software as they are just calling some high level api (http protocol , ios/android api..) etc .

there are plenty of FB, twitter and reddit alternative, they just don't have the data of the original. but openAI provide the API and the data

more like utilizing prompts that anyone can figure out

what does this moat even mean in this context ? I see it throw around but cannot infer the meaning

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