What Diamandis Got Right — And What I'd Add From My Seat

Moats....

Peter Diamandis published a piece today that every founder and executive should read. He tracked exactly what Anthropic has done in the last 100 days — design, legal, small business — and named the six moats that might protect a company from being dissolved. Read it first. What follows is just one practitioner’s addendum.

He’s right about the moats. He’s right about the scaffolds. And he’s right that the speed is different this time.

Here’s what I’d add from where I sit.

Cash funds inertia. It doesn’t overcome it.

The incumbents Diamandis profiles — Intuit, Thomson Reuters, the SaaS majors — aren’t going away tomorrow. They have the balance sheets to acquire, pivot, and rebrand. But large organizations don’t move at the speed the market is now moving. They move at the speed their org chart allows. Every budget cycle, every reorg, every board meeting where the existing revenue line wins the argument over the transformation investment — that’s organizational inertia. Elon named it correctly. Cash doesn’t dissolve it. In most cases, cash funds it.

The companies I watch don’t fail to build moats because they lack the idea or the capital. They fail because the organization isn’t capable of executing at the speed the moat requires.

But not all SaaS is equally exposed.

This is the part I think gets lost in the disruption narrative. Horizontal SaaS — tools that serve any industry, any workflow, any user — is the most exposed. Figma is horizontal. QuickBooks skews horizontal. One unhobbling, and the value proposition collapses.

Vertical SaaS has more runway. And regulated vertical SaaS has something neither Diamandis nor Anthropic can easily dissolve: structural moats built from compliance infrastructure, certifications, regulatory relationships, and audit trails that took decades to construct.

Here’s the twist: in regulated verticals, organizational inertia — usually a liability — becomes part of the moat. The very slowness that kills a horizontal SaaS company is the same institutional weight that makes a regulated vertical hard to displace overnight. Claude can draft a legal brief. It can’t hold a bar license. Claude can analyze a patient record. It can’t be HIPAA-certified by Tuesday.

The unhobbling is real. The disruption is real. But the blast radius isn’t uniform.

Know which category your business is in. Then move accordingly.