There is no moat.
(but that doesn't mean we're cooked)
In software, there is no technological moat anymore. It doesn't matter how cracked your engineering team is... Now, another team can reverse engineer your API in less than a week and v0 can replicate your UI in 10 minutes. Every AI lab is optimizing for coding ability in LLMs because it's the most profitable and immediately useful thing to get really really good at. So just imagine that every 3 months, bigger and bigger chunks of software engineering will be completely 'solved' by AI. Trivialized.
So what do we do?
We need to cultivate a rare combination of valuable skills that are hard to replicate.
It used to be enough to JUST learn to code. You could get by being a mediocre front-end engineer, ending up with a modest salary and an okay day job. Unfortunately, that won't be enough by the end of 2025.
Single skill roles are cooked. The new era belongs to people who can cross domains and handle multiple parts of the stack and/or business. Past 2025? 'Front-end engineer' won't even be a job title anymore.
But you know what will work?
- A front-end engineer who can do automation and data pipelines.
- A product manager who has a deep grasp of marketing and distribution.
- A graphic designer who can handle branding, sales, and run social media.
These are combinations of valuable skills.
What skills are valuable?
As a startup employee you need 3-5 of these, but as a founder you should be dangerous in all of them.
People Skills
Relationship Building: Making people feel seen, important, and validated. People will move mountains for you just because you were the first person to actually listen to them in a long time.
Leadership: Getting stuff done through people. It's one thing to make someone do something. It's another thing to make them want to do something.
Technical Skills
Shipping Tech: You need to be able to ship an idea quickly. From v0 to Bolt, Webflow, Framer, Notion, Carrd, etc.. There's more tools than we know what to do with. But you need to know how the front end, database, logic and external services fit together if you want to ship anything consequential.
Data & Analytics: Turning data into decisions. Setting up pipelines, querying the right stuff, and knowing what metrics actually matter.
AI & Automation: Being able to work with AI is an entirely new form of 'upper management' skills. Knowing what to automate, what to delegate to AI, and what needs the human touch should be a baseline for everyone, just because it's so powerful.
Design: If anyone can build anything, then design is going to be a massive differentiator. And I don't mean just the interface, but how it feels. Currently there's a lot of applications ripe for disruption because they perform some necessary function, but they're actually terrible to use and people just have to deal with it.
Business Skills
Market Sense: Spotting opportunities before they're obvious. Knowing why things work, not just what's working.
Distribution: Growing stuff - an audience, hype, raving fans, etc. You need to be able to get people to use your product and then get them to tell their friends.
Brand Building: You might think the best designed product would always win. But consider the initial failure of the Diaper Genie. Even though it was the best product on the market, consumers thought it must be too cheap to be good (brand issue). By increasing the price, it reframed the product as a high quality, effective product and sales took off. The product never changed! It's pretty insane that a price change (it more than doubled in price, by the way) could be a part of a brand image. But every outward expression of a brand is a part of the brand image - something Apple does really well.
Differentiating Skills
Execution Speed: Faster is almost always better. There's this weird obsession with trying to get things right on the first try, but even if you think you got it right, you probably didn't. So it's better to get 80% of the way there, then get feedback and iterate. I'll write more about this in a future post.
Learning Speed: The world is changing so rapidly, you need to be able to learn quickly just stay up to date, let alone be ahead of the curve.
Systems Thinking: Intuitively seeing how pieces fit together in a large system is a huge advantage in an AI world where basically the only limitation is context. Like to work with an LLM, you need to give it sufficient context. And that's a whole practice in itself. So being able to naturally understand the interplay between different parts of a system without spending a ton of time gathering context is a huge advantage.
Predictions
Unique, unusual combinations of skills will be the new moat. A marketing person who can automate their whole stack. A designer who can design and deploy an entire app. A product manager who understands brand better than anyone else. An engineer who can also cast vision and inspire a team to do amazing work. Small teams of hyper-competent generalists will be the winners in 2025.
The future belongs to doers.
ā ethan