Pretty long piece, but seems like the overall point is:<p>> I expect the true market crushers of the next two decades to be companies that are willing to venture into doing something that few would bet their professional lives on: applying the data flywheel to the world of atoms. That can range from defense tech, to biotech, from space tech, to robotics, from consumer hardware, to anything in between.<p>and also<p>> There are not many success cases I can mention to support my argument: these companies are being built <i>right now</i>. It will take many years to see them flourish and thrive. I don’t think it’s a coincidence, for instance, that some pure software companies like Midjourney seem to be getting ready to make a consumer hardware play.[16] Conceptually, the archetypical company that I think will win the biggest will look like Waymo. Hardware-first, ultra-high capex, more than a decade of R&D and deep technical work before seeing the light at the end of the tunnel, but an incredibly defensible position that will be very hard to attack. And the moat is not simply technical. It’s a data advantage too, as they are not a car company, they’re an AI company that is constantly harvesting data and improving their models. Physical companies applying AI to their verticals will be a marvel to witness, and at the risk of being proven completely wrong, I don’t think they run the risk of being disrupted in a hypothetical post-AGI world.<p>I guess it's cohesive: we're about to enter a compute/programming-as-commodity world. So your next moat is something physical that can't be replicated/made irrelevant overnight.<p>I personally think this is a little overblown, do we really think the era of SaaS is over? Maybe those companies are not getting the price premiums they used to, and I think thats partially the market itself maturing. But the article says:<p>> The more obviously good an idea is, the more competition there will be, the more an entrepreneur's likelihood of succeeding will eventually regress to the mean — in this case, average market returns.<p>This has always been true, and perhaps you could argue that until the early 2000s there wasn't much competition in some given arenas online, but that surely isn't true anymore. I can't think of a single emerging major startup that I can't also think of a few major competitors for, often huge companies.