Foresight Ventures Former Co-founder Forest Bai: Startups Cannot Have Barriers
Foresight Ventures former co-founder Forest Bai stated that top venture capitalists often ask where the product barriers are and how to ensure users make money; both questions are foolish. He believes that startups cannot have barriers; barriers come from monopolistic licenses, or long-accumulated network effects, brand, user habits, and high switching costs caused by the ecosystem.
He wrote that software has no technical barriers; the barriers of hydrogen bombs, photolithography machines, and heavy gas turbines mainly come from the supply chain, not the technology itself. Companies with large language models also have no barriers; otherwise, they would not be chasing each other. Coca-Cola can maintain its market share without changing its formula, which is what constitutes a barrier. No company, individual, or platform can guarantee that everyone makes money, not even the Federal Reserve, the two parties, or major religions; asking startups for such guarantees is short-sighted speculation.
Bai also mentioned that honesty applies not only to people but also to objective things; founders rely not on intelligence or experience but on an athlete-like will and killer judgment. Public records show that he founded and led Foresight Ventures, participated in the acquisition of crypto media The Block, later worked at Bitget responsible for listing and asset management, and founded an AI agency trading company about six months after disclosing his departure in March 2026, positioning it as an "investment exoskeleton": machines are responsible for execution and discipline, amplifying rather than replacing traders, and emphasizing that the market mistakenly interprets agency trading as fully automated trading.
Simultaneously, English venture capital research describes the remaining moats in the AI era as business models and network structures, rather than model quality; in the Crunchbase sample, those that can survive "tomorrow's better model competitors" are often not based on a feature list. Coca-Cola's market share, the photolithography supply chain, and the iteration of LLMs are three comparisons he uses to dismantle the "barrier question" rhetoric.
This judgment directly impacts the due diligence templates in the primary market. If agency trading products are financed based on "guaranteeing profits," he categorizes them as speculative rhetoric; financing based on execution discipline aligns with his publicly stated company positioning. Will and judgment are described as rarer founder elements than intelligence, explaining why early-stage companies should not be hindered by barrier questionnaires.
In market mechanisms, this is a conflict of financing rhetoric, not product launch. The buyers are venture capitalists who still filter projects using moat checklists; the sellers are founders who treat execution systems as products and refuse to promise returns. The beneficiaries are mature networks that can write "switching costs, brand, licenses" as verifiable assets; the pressured side must prove monopolistic AI applications and trading agencies in the seed round. Funds will continue to flow to rounds that can articulate barriers, but pricing power lies in whether users stay, not in whether questionnaires can answer Coca-Cola.
Source: Public Information
ABAB AI Insight
Bai's journey from media, funds, and exchanges to agency trading startups repeatedly places him at the interface of "helping others make money." Foresight invests in projects, Bitget lists tokens, and The Block provides information, with a common failure mode being users having opinions but unstable execution. He shifts the concept of barriers from code to licenses and habits, effectively rejecting the idea of using model parameters as a moat—because he himself sees LLM companies still chasing each other. Coca-Cola serves as a comparison with its unchanging formula and century-old channels, not quarterly updated weights.
The capital path involves selling due diligence questions back to investors. Asking about barriers means funds want defensible shares; asking about guaranteed profits means funds want marketable returns. If startups engage with these two questions, they will allocate resources to create demonstrable moats and profit backtesting, rather than building what he calls an execution exoskeleton. The motivation is to protect new companies by financing product discipline rather than profit promises. Examples of supply chain barriers shift the discussion from algorithm fortifications to capacities that cannot be purchased, like photolithography machines and gas turbines.
Similar structures include Peter Thiel defining monopolies as goals from 0 to 1, and Hamilton Helmer framing 7 Powers as forces that only establish after scaling. Applying the Coca-Cola test in the seed round would filter out all companies that have not yet achieved monopoly. The industry phase belongs to the rhetoric of expansion period: the model layer is racing, while the application layer is required to prove irreplaceability, with mismatched time scales. Crypto trading agencies are particularly risky because "guaranteeing profits" can turn products into implicit asset management.
Structural judgment indicates a transfer of pricing power. The mechanism is that the value of early companies does not lie in existing barriers but in whether they can survive until barriers begin to grow. Treating questionnaires as entry conditions will allocate capital to those who can best write monopoly stories. True switching costs only emerge after users remain; before that, will determines who stays in the game.
ABAB News · Cognitive Laws
- Handing the exam of mature monopolies to companies that have yet to survive.
- Technology can catch up, but supply chains and habits cannot be delivered next week.
- Guaranteeing everyone makes money is never about the product, but about the slogan.