Beyond the Moat: Building Enduring Strategies in an AI-Native World | Jeremiah Owyang | Step SF 2025

Jeremiah Owyang, General Partner at Blitzscaling Ventures, shares a practical blueprint for building an enduring startup in an AI native world. He breaks down what a real moat looks like today, why agents change hiring and product strategy, and how network effects and distribution matter more than ever.

🔥 Key Highlights:
🔹 Why most founders admit their technical moat lasts months, not years, and what to do about it.
🔹 AI natives vs AI first vs AI forward cultures, and why culture is the real moat.
🔹 The agent shift: fewer hires, more AI agents; how this changes operations and cost structure.
🔹 Data as a moat and its limits when synthetic data can mimic your corpus.
🔹 Network effects you can actually design for: data, marketplaces, communities, app platforms.
🔹 Viral and product-led growth beats paid marketing when evaluating durable distribution.
🔹 Eye-opening metric: AI native startups at ~3.4M revenue per employee vs ~200k for typical SaaS and ~610k for top-10 SaaS.
🔹 CrewAI as a case study: rapid Fortune 500 penetration, small team, hundreds of agents.

🔗 Helpful Resources:
– Jeremiah Owyang:   / jowyang  
– Step SF: https://sf.stepconference.com/
– Llama Lounge: https://luma.com/llamalounge

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