Unfortunately, I don’t have enough inside access for that...
Yeah, with you there. I am just speculating based on what I’ve heard online and through the grapevine, so take my model of their internal workings with a grain of salt. With that said I feel pretty confident in it.
if one is after VC funding, one needs to show those VCs that there is some secret sauce which remains proprietary
IMO software/algorithmic moat is pretty impossible to keep. Researchers tend to be pretty smart, enough to figure it out independently, even if they manage to stop any researcher from leaving and diffusing knowledge. Some parallels:
The India trade done by Jane Street. They are were making billions of dollars contingent on the fact that no one else knows about this trade, but eventually their alpha also got diffused.
TikTok’s content algorithm which the Chinese government doesn’t want to export only took a couple months for Meta/Google to replicate.
if one is after VC funding, one needs to show those VCs that there is some secret sauce which remains proprietary
IMO software/algorithmic moat is pretty impossible to keep.
Indeed.
That is, unless the situation is highly non-stationary (that is, algorithms and methods are modified fast without stopping; of course, a foom would be one such situation, but I can imagine a more pedestrian “rapid fire” evolution of methods which goes at a good clip, but does not accelerate beyond reason).
Yeah, with you there. I am just speculating based on what I’ve heard online and through the grapevine, so take my model of their internal workings with a grain of salt. With that said I feel pretty confident in it.
IMO software/algorithmic moat is pretty impossible to keep. Researchers tend to be pretty smart, enough to figure it out independently, even if they manage to stop any researcher from leaving and diffusing knowledge. Some parallels:
The India trade done by Jane Street. They
arewere making billions of dollars contingent on the fact that no one else knows about this trade, but eventually their alpha also got diffused.TikTok’s content algorithm which the Chinese government doesn’t want to export only took a couple months for Meta/Google to replicate.
Indeed.
That is, unless the situation is highly non-stationary (that is, algorithms and methods are modified fast without stopping; of course, a foom would be one such situation, but I can imagine a more pedestrian “rapid fire” evolution of methods which goes at a good clip, but does not accelerate beyond reason).