AI makes every moat temporary
Duration becomes the risk, while compute, payments, and credit re-form into machine-speed markets.
Each week, we share a small collection of ideas that shaped our internal thinking. Inspired by experiments like USV’s Librarian, this series is powered by an AI assistant that helps synthesize recurring themes from our discussions, alongside our own reflections.
What if AI makes every moat temporary? If disruption gets cheap enough, markets may stop paying for year 7+ cash flows because they become unknowable, and equities start trading like short-duration assets priced on near-term cash. That would kill the logic of growth investing and force capital toward short-duration cash flows. We think the new definition of defensibility is “hard to copy quickly,” usually workflow embedding, data advantage, or physical and regulatory constraints. We also think founders should optimize for time-to-scale, because speed is an increasingly important moat.
GPU compute financialization. Oil took a century to evolve from a physical commodity into a full derivatives market. We think GPU compute could do it in years because its secondary markets are digital from day one. Once compute is tradeable, it becomes financeable: spot prices turn into forward curves, and forward curves unlock credit, hedging, and leverage. We think this goes onchain first as GPU-backed financing and forward contracts, then later as a simple “trade compute” market.
Agentic payments stack. Agentic payments are turning into the internet’s missing protocol layer. ACP, UCP, x402, and AP2 all solve different layers: discovery, trust, authorization, and settlement. This matters because agents can’t be autonomous if humans still have to approve every checkout, top up every balance, or mint every API key. We think the long-run unlock is machine-to-machine commerce, agents paying for compute, data, and APIs at machine speed, and stablecoins are the obvious rail.
DeFi credit ratings. Crypto-collateralized lending hit a record $90B, and onchain private credit has more than doubled over the past year to $25B today, but institutions still represent only ~11.5% of DeFi TVL. We think the next unlock is standardized, transparent risk ratings across DeFi. When risk parameters, curator actions, and liquidation logic are onchain and auditable, you can build an open risk layer that’s too opaque or costly to coordinate in TradFi.
Drug discovery search becomes software. Researchers built an AI system that can search billions of possible drug molecules against a protein target in only 7 days, then tested the best picks in the lab and found real hits. This matters because the expensive part of early drug discovery is often “where do we even start?”, and AI is turning that search step into software. If this keeps improving, the bottleneck shifts from finding candidates to running experiments and trials, meaning smaller teams can take more shots on goal.
We’ll share another edition next week.