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Comment by traceroute66 | Hacker News Reader

> use infinite stacks of cash to catch up to your moat quickly and make you irrelevant

Some might say that if all it takes is cash to catch up your moat then you don't have a moat.

Sadly most businesses who claim to have a moat are infact just doing the same thing a tiny bit differently and just dressing it up in marketing bullshit to make it sound like they have some amazing secret sauce. The old rolling a turd in glitter routine.

A real moat is something like ASML. Throw as much cash as you want at it but its going to take you decades to catch up, if you ever do.

Less extreme examples than ASML exist, of course. But you get my point.

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SpaceX is a great example too. Literally the world is throwing so much money at the problem, and they're still a decade behind at least. Waymo is another example, remember when Uber tried to get into self-driving? Very few heavily capitalized players can even attempt to try to catch up to these guys in a decade.

Agree with SpaceX but not sure about waymo. Sure they're the most technically advanced, but I can't use their product and very few people can. And raising hundreds of billions has warped their incentives. The market has to be gigantic to justify the existing cap table. So they keep getting deeper and deeper into a perfect future product and fail to ship simpler intermediaries.

Someone like comma ai competes very well because you can buy it today and it'll make your drive somewhat more pleasant.

Waymo needs ridiculously detailed maps before it can operate somewhere, so its expansion is necessarily slow, along with the legal impediments they face but they're expanding. Phoenix and San Francisco, and now LA and soon Austin. If no one else has the technology to do it as well as they do, that's a pretty strong moat. No one else has access to the same resources they do. Which, since they're owned by Google, we can assume Google is helping them a lot. Unfortunately Waymo can't ship a simpler intermediary because they refuse to do it, because that kills people. A self-driving car that works right up until the moment it disengages and you get into a car crash that kills you isn't a product they want to sell, unlike others in the market.

They have a product and it works and a lucky few can use it right now. Unlike other products, they can't just spin up a factory and make 10 million more and just sell them world wide like you can with an iPhone. They're undoubtedly working on a new vehicle platform that won't have a steering wheel or driver's seat.

> Some might say that if all it takes is cash to catch up your moat then you don't have a moat.

Well the amount of cash matters. With infinite cash you could take on and surpass pretty much any company you want.

But it has to be an amount of cash where the ROI makes sense.

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