Startup Moats
December 8, 2025
Watch now | Today, we’re talking about a startup’s “moat” or competitive advantage. An investor usually has to believe that your competitive advantage is different enough for customers to care and is defensible.
Today, we’re talking about hiring large teams at fledgling startups. We live in the World of remote work and that makes hiring a lot easier. Now startups can access comparably low cost, high quality talent from all over the World.
This is a huge opportunity but don’t take it as a sign that you should immediately run out and hire 16 people, before you have customers. That’s a bad idea.
Hiring and managing that many people is tough work but it’s almost impossible to do properly if you’re still working on the basics of the company — like launching your MVP, getting your first customer or signing your first contract.
A good rule of thumb is to: try to stay under 5 people, regardless of their individual cost, until you’re generating at least $100K Annual recurring revenue.
