What Happens When AI Can Copy Your Software? | Coyne Lloyd

Yeah, I think there's a few things to pull on here, but for founders listening or founders seriously thinking about this, my view is a few things.

One is you have to be maniacal about the thought exercise and you have to do this thought exercise probably every quarter with your executive team, right? Like let's just assume the model company can do everything that we can do and they can enable somebody to spin up exactly what we have from a pure software basis tomorrow, right? What is valuable? So you named a few things, but I think it's worth just doing a little laundry list.

Like number one, some sort of hardware lock in with with point of sale payments, like something, you know, we had Alex from SenseOn.

He has literally physical hardware point of sales installed on every laundry machine.

You know, I want to jump in on that a little bit because that one, like, I think that one is a little bit overrated.

And I think that it is a moat in the sense that you will retain your cash flows.

It is not going to be easy for someone to rip you out.

But it is not a moat in the sense that it is in the sense of an accumulating advantage.

You know, the reason that a software company or a technology company is valuable is because it is expected to grow.

And so if you think that your existing revenue base is the most important thing about you.

Great hardware.

That's your moat, right? People don't want to rip out the hardware.

But the fact that you have an iPad that is like a commodity thing that you bought from China.

Um, or even if you have something that's a little bit more proprietary or proprietary or complex, like that is not going to assure your continued growth.

Okay.

So this is a good point because you're,

you're thinking that moat is more from a zero like philosophical standpoint, right? Yeah.

It's like a constellation software.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, totally.

Yeah, Constellation Software will buy your thing because you have iPads or cameras in the docks of all these things, for sure.

But, like, you know, someone was pitching me a while ago, and I don't know actually if this startup exists, but someone was pitching me a while ago on a camera that would go onto sports fields and help people, like, basically make game tape and review game tape.

um and you can imagine in the like in the very early days like what can ai do what can i do with that camera um they can just sort of identify hey here's every time that a tackle occurred um but as you get towards super intelligence um if you have one thing that has seen every game on every field then you can see the home games and the away games and like and you can see oh well here are all these different situations where this you know quarterback can do it can't do it in the rain not and uh and your super intelligence actually the better the model gets the more value you can by the way

that one of us too

right yeah totally um yeah and um and and if you imagine i mean i just like love this idea i i don't again i don't know if anyone ended up building this or if this company exists someone should look into it if they haven't done it someone should build this i love this idea um because this is something that yeah you've got that hardware lock-in constellation will be like oh this is on every high school or college like football field But also, if you imagine like AI God coming to Earth and your competitor is on 10 fields and you are on a thousand fields, you are more valuable to the one thousandth and one customer.

Right.