Episode 003 - The VC Candy Trap & The Physics of Moats - The Critical framework for a startup def... скачать в хорошем качестве

Episode 003 - The VC Candy Trap & The Physics of Moats - The Critical framework for a startup def...

In early December at the Future Telecom Hub Conference in London, I heard Simon Clement from Liberty Global lay out, very plainly, what actually matters when you try to commercialize deep R&D. It didn’t change my thinking so much as confirm it, and that’s the playbook I was planning to go through in today’s deep dive. But then, while I was cleaning up my tabs, I noticed this heatmap, a classic LinkedIn/Twitter chart that makes you instinctively right‑click and save. It was one of those “Top Early‑Stage Investor Scoring Framework” diagrams, or something along those lines, and it stopped me enough to rethink today’s deep dive. I’ve been building in deep tech long enough to know a specific kind of frustration. You’re scrolling through LinkedIn or Twitter and you see another viral post: “The Ultimate VC Scorecard.” “The Series A Framework That Raised $50M.” Beautiful charts, clean graphics, thousands of likes. And you think » Oh this doesn’t apply to me at all or does it? Here’s the thing, though. these frameworks aren’t wrong; they’re just not for everyone. If you’re building a simple SaaS tool or a consumer app, this advice is solid: follow the playbook, hit the metrics, get funded. But if you’re building something harder for example enterprise software, or defense tech, and specially deep tech, following this advice can actually kill your company.​ I’ve watched it happen. Founders with genuine technical breakthroughs pivot to selling consulting services just to show “revenue” on a scorecard that was never designed for them. Teams abandon the hard, slow work that would make them defensible, all to chase numbers that look good in a pitch deck but mean nothing for their actual business.​ I call this the VC Candy Trap. The advice is everywhere, it looks great, it feels clarifying, but for a lot of founders, it’s the wrong diet entirely. Why does this matter right now? We’re in a weird moment in tech. AI has made building software incredibly cheap. You can describe an app to ChatGPT, and it writes the code. You can launch something in a weekend. The barrier to building has never been lower. But here’s the flip side: because it’s so easy to build, it’s harder than ever to win. Think about it. If anyone can copy your product in a weekend, then your product isn’t really a business. It’s just a feature. A novelty. So what actually separates the startups that disappear from the ones that become Palantir, or Stripe, or NVIDIA? One word: defensibility. You need something that protects you. A moat. Not just a brand or a head start. those aren’t enough anymore. You need a real, structural advantage that makes it nearly impossible for someone to take your customers. But here’s what the generic advice misses: different companies build moats in completely different ways. First, figure out what kind of company you’re building! Before you worry about fundraising or metrics, you need to understand which “tier” you’re in. Because the rules are different for each one. Tier 1 is simple SaaS and lightweight software, where the playbook is clear: move fast, get users, show revenue, and the generic VC advice mostly works. Tier 2 is complex enterprise » cybersecurity, financial infrastructure, supply chain, where you can’t “move fast and break things” with hospital records or banking data, and trust matters more than speed. Tier 3 is deep tech » chips, biotech, fusion, quantum, where you’re fighting physics, not competitors, and early revenue tells you almost nothing; technical progress is what counts.​ The catch is that most viral startup advice is written for Tier 1. When Tier 2 and Tier 3 founders follow it, they optimize for the wrong things. Magic Leap is the classic example: they raised $2.6 billion on real breakthrough tech, but chased consumer hype and flashy demos instead of playing a long enterprise and defense game, burned billions, laid off half the company, and eventually pivoted back to the market that made sense for their moat. Second, The 3 moats that actually matter! Once you know your tier, the question is how you actually become defensible, and there are really three options. You can build a Pain Tolerance moat (go deep with hard, high‑switching‑cost customers), a Network Effects moat (the product gets better with every new user), or a Product Velocity moat (you move faster than anyone else, then layer on a deeper moat). The punchline is simple: most founders don’t fail because they lack a moat. they fail because they tell the wrong story to the wrong investors. Your tier, your moat, and your metrics all have to line up, and your pitch has to go to people who actually understand that game. Pitching a deep tech company to an investor who only funds consumer apps is a waste of everyone’s time. You have to match your story to your strategy. In this episode, we break down how to do that in practice. What we cover in t...