Momentum is the Moat

The compounding power of energy, attention, talent, and capital.

There’s a lot of talk about moats. Especially in AI, people love to say that moats don’t exist anymore because two smart people with a computer can close your product over a weekend. 

They’re not wrong. Software gets built faster than ever. Launch velocity is wild. 

But here’s the thing: real moats in software were never just about code or IP. They were always about momentum.

Let me explain.

I was lucky to help build Blinkist. For the first years, growth was slow. We iterated, shipped, tried everything. Then one day, something clicked. 

Suddenly, we had momentum. 

Revenue tripled for years (when T2D3 was still the gold standard for growth). The press wrote about us. Apple featured us. Partners chased us. Investors pre-empted rounds. Great people wanted to join.

We didn’t have a real technical moat. But we had a flywheel in motion.

More attention leads to more revenue. More revenue attracts more talent. More talent brings more revenue. More revenue brings attention for partners and press. This becomes a self enforcing cycle.

When you’re in that zone, you probably don’t even notice it. You're sprinting through meetings, decisions, releases. No time to reflect. So at that time, I didn’t really understand that.

Fast forward to today and I see this again among some of the breakout companies in the Interface Capital portfolio. Companies like Lovable, Exploration Company, or ARX Robotics each hit a point where everything started moving faster. They are stacked with growth, talent, press, capital and the speed is only accelerating.

What separates them isn’t just the idea or the founder or the tech. It’s the moment they hit an inflection point and develop unstoppable momentum. 

I think it was the same for software giants like Google or Meta. They hit an inflection point and rode network effects or sheer distribution strength into untouchable market dominance. Did anyone truly see it coming? Probably not—but in hindsight, it feels inevitable.

Investors love to discuss moats. They debate defensibility like it’s a chess match. But I’ve come to believe something simpler: If you build momentum, you build your moat.

That’s what makes a startup hard to kill. The compounding interest of energy, attention, talent, and capital flowing in one direction.

Which is why now—more than ever—you have to find scale fast. Hit the inflection point and catch fire. 

There are many ways to do it. Social. Influencers. Founder brands. Distribution hacks. Anything that gets the right product in front of the right people, fast.

But don’t forget: At the end of the day, it all comes back to the product. If your product can’t convert and retain, all the awareness in the world won’t help building momentum. 

But when these two things come together, magic happens.

Photo by zafree pinano on Unsplash