JME.VC Partner Emphasizes Speed as the Only Moat
JME.vc partner Ivan Landabaso posted that in the current entrepreneurial environment, the only real moat is execution speed.
This viewpoint comes from his analysis of the Perplexity growth case, emphasizing that startups in the AI era need to iterate products and expand at extremely high speeds to avoid traditional moats being quickly replicated.
In market mechanisms, early investors and founders accelerate capital allocation to high-execution AI growth companies by recognizing speed-first strategies. Under event-driven conditions, funds are shifting from projects relying on technological barriers to efficient startup teams, benefiting fast-expanding companies like Perplexity, while traditional slow software companies face valuation pressure.
Source: Public information
ABAB AI Insight
Ivan Landabaso previously worked at Facebook Reality Labs, later founded R2 which was acquired, and as a partner at JME.vc focuses on early-stage founder investments. His Substack, Startup Riders, often analyzes high-growth cases like Perplexity and Depict.ai, repeatedly emphasizing the decisive role of execution speed in the AI tools sector.
In terms of capital pathways, JME.vc invests 100K–3M euros in rapidly iterating companies from pre-seed to seed rounds, while Landabaso's content creation amplifies the exposure of invested projects. The motivation is to apply the growth playbook learned during his time at Facebook to AI startups, helping portfolio companies establish temporary advantages through speed and attract subsequent rounds of capital.
Similar to Perplexity's path from 0 to 450 million ARR and early Facebook's product expansion strategy, Landabaso's current observations indicate that AI startups are at a critical stage of transitioning from technology innovation dominance to speed and execution control, consistent with the historical trend of SaaS companies capturing markets through product iteration in the 2010s.
Essentially, this represents a technological substitution: the rapid iteration of AI tools replaces traditional moats (such as data accumulation and technology patents) with execution speed. The mechanism is that open-source models and low-cost AI generation lower entry barriers, forcing companies to concentrate resources on daily high-frequency product updates and market expansion, achieving a structural shift from static barriers to dynamic speed competition.