Last week, I watched a college sophomore build a clone of a $400 million company over a weekend.

He didn’t steal their code.

He didn’t poach their engineers.

He just described their product to an AI and iterated until he had 90% of the features working.

This isn't an anomaly.

Technology that once required millions in venture capital and years of engineering effort can now be replicated in days.

By the end of this year, we’ll reach prompt-to-company capabilities—where an entire product can be generated in minutes.

We’re entering an era where technology itself is becoming worthless as a competitive advantage.

Not because technology isn’t valuable, but because the barriers to replicating it are collapsing.

The specialized workflows, polished UX, and proprietary integrations that once differentiated companies are being absorbed into the infrastructure layer—commoditized and distributed at negligible cost.

It's obvious that this is just the beginning.

It’s technology’s nature, just accelerating.

What was once specialized becomes standardized.

What was once scarce becomes abundant.

What was once expensive becomes cheap.

So what happens when your technology is no longer special?

How do you build a business that actually lasts?

I see two paths forward—and neither looks like the traditional playbook about “building moats.”

The first is enterprise relationships.

Companies like Salesforce don’t win because their CRM is magical.

They win because their sales and implementation teams have burrowed so deeply into corporate workflows that replacing them feels like open-heart surgery.

In this world, the advantage isn’t technical—it’s human.

It’s reliability, support, and the sheer organizational inertia that makes switching costs unbearable.

But the consumer side presents a different challenge—and a much more interesting one.

Here, where technology evaporates, the thing that remains is attention: the ability to capture it, hold it, and direct it at will.

In a world where anything technical can be copied, attention isn’t just another resource.

It’s the foundation that everything else rests on.

And when you flip the model—when you stop treating attention as a means to sell technology, and start seeing technology as the vehicle for attention—you realize two forces dominate everything else: brand and distribution.

The Twin Engines: Brand and Distribution

When technology commoditizes, two questions matter above all:

• Can you reach customers faster than anyone else? (Distribution.)

• Can you charge a premium once you’ve reached them? (Brand.)

These aren’t just marketing concepts.

They’re the physics that govern who survives when technology stops being a moat.

Distribution: The Power of Being First

Distribution isn’t just about being everywhere.

It’s about how quickly and reliably you can occupy the customer’s mind before alternatives appear.

The company that captures attention first gains three compounding advantages:

• Default Status: People anchor to the first thing they see. Once you’re the mental default, everything else feels like an imitation.

• Data Advantage: Early customer interactions generate proprietary insights that compound before competitors even show up.

• Time Arbitrage: While others are spending resources to acquire users, you’re already monetizing and iterating.

When Superhuman dominated premium email, it wasn’t because they built better infrastructure than Gmail.

It was because they captured early mindshare—and turned their waitlist into a scarcity engine that generated distribution without marketing spend.

When Figma opened with a frictionless free tier, it wasn’t just generosity.

It was a bet that once designers started thinking inside Figma’s canvas, they’d be too anchored to leave.

The strongest distribution isn’t measured by ad budgets or headcount.

It’s measured by how quickly you become the default.

Brand: The Architecture of Pricing Power

Brand isn’t magic.

It’s engineered.

At its core, brand is the system of associations that lets you command pricing power—regardless of how many competitors match your features.

Effective brands work by layering three forces:

• Brand Osmosis: Tying your product to identities, emotions, and status markers that transcend functionality.

• Taste Leverage: Shaping perception of quality in ways that technical specifications can’t replicate.

• Time Integration: Compounding small, consistent impressions over time into a durable emotional footprint.

Apple doesn’t charge a premium because their technology is always superior.

They charge a premium because using their products signals identity, aspiration, and taste—associations they’ve engineered relentlessly for decades.

When Liquid Death sells canned water at beer prices, that’s brand architecture in action.

When Airbnb charges more than hotels for riskier accommodations, that’s brand trust overpowering rational friction.

Brand isn’t created through a single campaign.

It’s built—impression by impression—until it becomes an asset competitors can’t easily copy or undercut.

Where Brand and Distribution Meet

The strongest companies don’t choose between brand and distribution.

They build systems where each reinforces the other.

• Strong distribution creates more chances to build brand impressions.

• Strong brand reduces distribution costs by increasing conversion, loyalty, and word-of-mouth.

Together, they form a loop that’s nearly impossible to disrupt.

Glossier didn’t just build a beauty brand.

They engineered a social distribution engine where every customer post, every unboxing, every peer recommendation simultaneously strengthened their brand and expanded their reach.

In a world where technology melts into the background, the companies that endure will be the ones who deliberately engineer brand and distribution as intertwined forces—not as isolated departments.

Because when the technical edge disappears, belief is all that compounds.

The future won’t belong to the best engineers.

It’ll belong to the best storytellers.

The ones who turn products into myths.

The ones who turn tools into symbols.

The ones who make people choose them—not because they have to, but because they want to.

Technology is just the bait.

Meaning is the product.

And the future belongs to those who can build both.