{"id":229665,"date":"2026-03-31T11:27:00","date_gmt":"2026-03-31T15:27:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/2026\/03\/31\/vcs-rethink-startup-moats-as-ai-compresses-time-to-build\/"},"modified":"2026-03-31T12:45:19","modified_gmt":"2026-03-31T16:45:19","slug":"vcs-rethink-startup-moats-as-ai-compresses-time-to-build","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/2026\/03\/31\/vcs-rethink-startup-moats-as-ai-compresses-time-to-build\/","title":{"rendered":"VCs Rethink Startup Moats As AI Compresses Time To Build"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.forbes.com\/sites\/josipamajic\/2026\/03\/31\/vcs-rethink-startup-moats-as-ai-compresses-time-to-build\/\">VCs Rethink Startup Moats As AI Compresses Time To Build<\/a><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.forbes.com\/sites\/josipamajic\/2026\/03\/31\/vcs-rethink-startup-moats-as-ai-compresses-time-to-build\/\">https:\/\/www.forbes.com\/sites\/josipamajic\/2026\/03\/31\/vcs-rethink-startup-moats-as-ai-compresses-time-to-build\/<\/a><\/p>\n<p>Publish Date: <a href=\"publish_date]\">2026-03-31 11:27:00<\/a><\/p>\n<p>Source Domain: <a href=\"www.forbes.com\">www.forbes.com<\/a><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"-webkit-line-clamp:2\" class=\"Ccg9Ib-7 _8XF2kHYM\">Attendees view an AI data center at the SK networks stand during the MWC (Mobile World Congress), the world&#8217;s biggest mobile fair, in Barcelona on March 3, 2025. Surrounded by investment and innovation projects, the Mobile World Congress (MWC) kicks off today in Barcelona amid a context of euphoria but also tensions over artificial intelligence (AI), whose rapid advancement is shaking up the tech sector. (Photo by Manaure QUINTERO \/ AFP) (Photo by MANAURE QUINTERO\/AFP via Getty Images)<\/span><\/p>\n<p>AFP via Getty Images<\/p>\n<p>A viral post on X by Robert Scoble this week flagged a widely shared investment thesis from Michael Bloch, a partner at early-stage firm Quiet Capital, arguing that artificial intelligence has permanently reordered what makes a business defensible. The post has accumulated nearly 467,000 views. The core argument is simple: AI compresses the time it takes to do things. It does not compress the time it takes for things to happen.<\/p>\n<p>The distinction matters to investors. Bloch frames defensibility around two categories: things that are hard to do, and things that are hard to get. AI, he argues, is rapidly eliminating the first. Building software, maintaining integrations, and embedding a product deeply into a workflow were once meaningful barriers. They are becoming engineering problems measured in hours, not months. What remains are assets that required elapsed, real-world time to accumulate,  and that no improvement in AI capability can replicate faster.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Five Moats That Survive the AI Compression<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Bloch identifies five categories. The first is living, compounding proprietary data; not static datasets that were merely expensive to collect, but information generated continuously through operations that are themselves defensible. He cites his portfolio company Orchard Robotics, which mounts cameras to farm equipment to track billions of fruit across millions of trees, season after season. Orchard raised a $22 million Series A in September 2025 led by Quiet Capital and Shine&#8230;<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.forbes.com\/sites\/josipamajic\/2026\/03\/31\/vcs-rethink-startup-moats-as-ai-compresses-time-to-build\/\">Source<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>VCs Rethink Startup Moats As AI Compresses Time To Build https:\/\/www.forbes.com\/sites\/josipamajic\/2026\/03\/31\/vcs-rethink-startup-moats-as-ai-compresses-time-to-build\/ Publish Date: 2026-03-31 11:27:00&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":229666,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/imageio.forbes.com\/specials-images\/imageserve\/69cbe725099c2af98036f16c\/0x0.jpg?format=jpg&height=900&width=1600&fit=bounds","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[20],"class_list":["post-229665","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificial-intelligence"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/229665"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=229665"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/229665\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":229667,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/229665\/revisions\/229667"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/229666"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=229665"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=229665"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=229665"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}