Hacker News Reader

arnavsahu336on Better Auth, by a self-taught Ethiopian dev, raises $5M from Peak XV, YC

This is Arnav Sahu from PeakXV. I used to work at YC. Really excited for them and Bereket, the founder. He is an outlier founder.

arnavsahu336on Why its a bad idea to invest in Treasury money market funds

Longer-term notes are very attractive now too. I buy 1 year T-Bills because I don't want be too illiquid beyond a year.

arnavsahu336on Google “We have no moat, and neither does OpenAI”

The only moat in technology are the founders and team. I think this concept of having a moat sounds great when VCs write investment memos - but in reality, cold, hard execution everyday is what matters and that all comes from the quality and tenacity of the team.

Every piece of application software is a wrapper on other software with a set of opinionated workflows built on top.

Yes, there are some companies that made it hard to switch from - Snowflake, Salesforce - because there are data stores and its a pain to move your record of data. But even they don't have true moats - its just sticker.

So I think Google is right in saying there is no moat. But given their size, Google has layers and bureaucracy, which makes it hard to execute in a new market. That's why OpenAI I think will win - because they are smaller, can move fast, have a great team and can hence, execute...till the day they become a big company too and get disrupted by a new startup, which is the natural circle of life in technology.