Author: Jaya Gupta, Partner at Foundation Capital

Translation: Yuliya, PANews

Editor’s note: In today's rapidly evolving world of AI technology, the boundaries of products are blurring, and technological advantages may disappear within months. When everything becomes easily replicable, what is the true moat for businesses? This article delves into this core issue; here is the original text:

For everyone, everything in the field of AI is heading towards convergence, and this is an undeniable fact. Companies that I once thought were unrelated have now become competitors. The application layer is collapsing into the infrastructure, infrastructure companies are marching upstream, and almost every startup is repackaging itself as some form of a “transformative” enterprise. Buzzwords change every few months: from contextual graphs, action systems to organizational world models. A new concept emerges, and all websites immediately follow suit; within days, the market is flooded with platforms claiming to “change the way we work in the future.”

As AI models iterate faster, software interfaces become more similar, and developing products becomes cheaper, the superficial aspects of starting a company can be easily copied by others. But what is truly difficult to copy is the company's underlying “system”: how a company attracts exceptional talent, how it inspires their ambition, how it concentrates everyone’s wisdom, how it distributes power, and how it turns work into a system of “compound interest” that others cannot replicate.

The top companies have always understood one principle: employees are not tools of the company; employees are the company itself. But in the AI era, as everything else evolves rapidly, this truth becomes sharper. If products can be copied, tracks can be renamed, and technological advantages can collapse within months, then a timeless question arises: what kind of organization should you build around those who can construct all of this?

In simple terms, the very form of the company is becoming the biggest moat.

Great companies view organizational structure as an invention

The most powerful companies are actually innovative in their organizational structure. They create new company systems around a new way of working, providing a platform for a “new type of talent” to thrive.

For example, OpenAI is neither like an academic institution in universities nor like a traditional corporate laboratory or software company. Its core mission is to “train cutting-edge AI models,” with safety, policy, product, and infrastructure all revolving around this core. This structure has birthed a new type of researcher: they understand both cutting-edge science and products while being able to manage geopolitical and human civilization risks simultaneously.

Similarly, Palantir has invented a completely new operating structure for those troubled systems. Deploying people to the client forefront is not just for selling; it reflects the company’s status, talent model, and worldview. In other companies, accompanying clients, managing institutional messes, and transforming political demands into products are often seen as low-level tasks with little reward. However, Palantir has made this a core part of its operations. It has created a new position where these individuals are not just programmers, consultants, or policy experts, but can manage all three roles.

These companies do not fit any predetermined frameworks that existed before their emergence, and the people who established them share this quality as well. Great companies are not only gathering places for outstanding talent, but they also represent a structure that allows specific talents to ultimately express themselves.

The form of the company determines who can stay

The best companies in the world do not compete solely based on track, market, or high salaries; they compete based on “identity recognition.” Ambitious individuals often place great importance on feeling special, accessing power centers, becoming irreplaceable, having limitless choices, participating in great missions, and being part of historical changes. However, they often do not initially know which of these points is most important to them.

Because of this, the most powerful organizations are quick to discover talent and start recruiting them when they are freshmen in top universities. They recruit individuals before their self-awareness solidifies, before they clarify their values, or before they differentiate between the work they excel in and their ideal self.

A great company will extend an olive branch to honor their ambitions, telling them: what you have been thinking about but don’t know how to express can be realized here; you can be the one who advances the Mars mission timeline, the one witnessing breakthroughs in cutting-edge technology, the one navigating broken systems with ease, and the one achieving undeniable success.

This is the significance of great institutions; they are shells built around specific groups of people.

Many individuals only care about money, which is the most uninteresting way to compete for talent for legendary companies (perhaps with the exception of Jane Street or Citadel). Money may attract talent, but rarely can it truly convert them (just ask some new labs or Alex Wang). When a company can offer something more concrete than money, the most exceptional talents become the most loyal: a path that allows them to become the version of themselves they have always wanted to be, or even one they do not yet realize they want to become.

Every emotional commitment is also a structural commitment. If a company claims that being close to customers is important, but customer-facing work is undermined, then that commitment is false; if a company professes to value ownership but concentrates decision-making power, then that commitment is also insincere; if it claims that the mission is important, but this mission offends no one, excludes no one, and requires no sacrifice, then it is still untrue.

So, what kind of emotional experience do people truly desire?

• The desire to be unique: rare, seen, irreplaceable. This sentiment is founded on “only you can do it.” Only if you are unique enough can you come here to build it. It precisely strikes at the secret insecurities of most high performers: doubting their excellence is fragile, doubting others may also be capable of the job, and doubting they have not yet been truly seen. This feeling only works within a sufficiently small organizational form, where one person can indeed alter the company’s developmental trajectory.

• The desire for destiny: feeling that one’s life is heading towards a certain inevitability. Anthropic is currently the clearest example. “We are one of the two or three companies deciding how to safely deploy this technology, and those sitting in this room are the ones doing it.” This sentiment only has credibility in a structurally predetermined space to become one of those two or three institutions.

• The desire not to be left behind: feeling oneself in a room where compounding interest occurs. Look at how many CTOs from landmark companies Anthropic has hired this quarter. Talent density itself is a decision of form: it is the result of how a company recruits, pays, organizes work, and concentrates the best talents in the same physical space.

• The desire to prove oneself: for example, those investment bankers who have been polished to shine, hold various certificates, and have always been praised for their excellence start to doubt that all of this proves anything. Or the desire for options, which McKinsey has perfected. This company’s structure: generalist coverage, two-year analyst cycles, and options to explore different industries, because God knows what you want to do at 21.

Clearly, people also desire proximity to power and status.

Some people hope to sacrifice for a greater meaning than just salary, which was once termed “mission” by most companies, but now resembles a kind of fervor stemming from internal beliefs within the team. In these new lab fields, some new value propositions are sharper than the previous cycle's mission statements, as they choose sides. Open-source positions you against closed lab models; sovereign AI places you against the assumption that “the model of one country will dominate the world.” The most powerful missions are those that cause some people to refuse to work there because that is the same as making the right people desperately want to go there.

At the end of the day, people are just people. The best companies have accurately captured one or two kinds of emotions that specific candidates deeply desire and have tailored their organizational forms for these individuals.

The questions facing founders

For founders, the real question is not “How do we tell a better story?” but rather: “What kinds of people can only become themselves here?”

Most companies market the literal version of what they do: “We are building a model,” “We are making rockets,” “We are building CRM for X,” “We are automating Y.” This may be accurate and honest, but today, simply being accurate is no longer enough to recruit exceptional talents.

The best companies today operate on a higher dimension; they describe the changes brought about by their existence: which industry will be revived, which institution will be rebuilt, which civilization's gamble will win, and which human efforts will finally become possible.

At times, people mistakenly assume this “extra” height is merely a marketing tactic, or that it differs from the narrative of funding. The posture of your story must match the form of your company. Telling a grand story in a small framework sounds like boasting; while telling a small-scale story in a grand framework misses out on attracting the best talents. The fit between the two is what candidates are actually assessing, even if they cannot articulate it clearly.

• If you believe proximity to customers is a moat, then customer-facing work must hold a higher status.

• If you believe speed is a moat, then decision-making power must be decentralized to the margins.

• If you believe talent density is a moat, then mediocrity must not be allowed to define operational rhythm.

• If you believe deployment is a moat, then those closest to reality require power, not just responsibility.

Advice for job seekers: Being selected vs. being seen

For those considering their next job, you must learn a different lesson. You are betting years of youth on someone’s vision and the structure of a company, but interviews often fail to reveal the truth about these two factors. Interviews will show you polished PPTs, great missions, impressive colleagues, and a bright future. They rarely reveal the actual distribution of power, and they almost never let you see what everyone is like under pressure.

These truths only expose themselves later: when the company encounters difficulties, when your work becomes tricky, when you apply for resources they are reluctant to provide, or when they say “we believe in your potential” but you need them to deliver titles, power, money, business scope, or resources.

For ambitious individuals, the emotional value companies offer can easily create an illusion of “I am the boss” before they truly own a stake. The result is that these high-performing employees end up doing the work of founders, shouldering pressures that executives should manage, and carrying the heart of partners, but still earn the pay and power of ordinary employees.

The company has exploited your founder-level vigor while you have only received a cheap sense of “belonging.” If the actual treatment from the company ultimately catches up, then it’s a good story; if it doesn’t, then it’s one-sided exploitation.

Those with experience will warn you: you are using your “identity recognition” to exchange for the “actual treatment” the company should provide you. For example, they may offer you a “sense of specialness” instead of a promotion, “proximity to the boss” instead of real power, “verbal guarantees” instead of tangible benefits, or “trust me” instead of signing a written contract. This is why a person can feel deeply valued yet materially stand still.

Although companies have many retention tactics (such as options and salaries), the most dangerous promise is “wait until later.” “It will be big later,” “You will earn more later,” “The treatment will catch up later.” However, the passage of time is silent. When you reach the next stage of your life, you will find that those promises painted for the future never came to fruition (unless you are lucky).

Ambitious individuals must understand that “being selected” and “being seen” are two different matters.

• “Being selected” is emotional: you are special, we believe in you, you are one of us.

• “Being seen” is concrete: this is your scope of business, this is your power, this is your share, this is your decision-making authority, and if you succeed, what real changes you will achieve.

If you truly have potential, go to a place that can truly “see” you, to a place willing to write your value into the company’s system and treatment.

The new moat

You can certainly view the above words in a very dark light. You may think every recruitment is brainwashing, every mission is a disguise, and every company is trying to make you feel special just to cheaply rent your youth.

But deep down, we indeed need some beliefs. We hope our work is meaningful, that our sacrifices have value, and that our talents are recognized by those who truly understand and can achieve great things. Having such thoughts does not mean we are foolish; it is simply human nature. Great companies have always been new vessels that carry this demand. They are not just machines for making money or products, but structures that house ambition.

Silicon Valley loves to label people: technical, non-technical, researchers, operations, founders, investors, missionaries, mercenaries… but they forget that most truly amazing individuals will not be trapped in a box. They thrive across disciplines, leveraging knowledge from one field to break rules in another, blending together things that should not be related, ultimately creating new forms that others find obvious.

The current opportunity is not to become the next OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Palantir, or Tesla. Rather, it is to ask: what kinds of companies were previously impossible? What kinds of people have been eagerly waiting for such a company to appear?

AI will make many things easy to replicate: software interfaces, workflows, product prototypes, sales pitches, and even early development speed. But no matter how many PPTs boast that AI makes it easier to start a company, AI cannot establish a “new system” easily. AI cannot help you easily craft an organizational structure that brings the right people together, assigns them the right power, addresses the right problems, and over time allows their judgment to compound interest.

The talent market of the past rewarded companies that could make employees feel “selected.” The future talent market will reward companies that break conventions and create entirely new organizational forms. And the people in these companies will transform into talents that could never emerge in the old companies of the past.

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