Buzzword Alert: Competitive Moats

What’s are your competitive moats?

Huh?

Apparently this is a fairly common term in the start-up world.

Before you go off dropping buzzwords like they’re hot you should know where they come from.

Today’s lesson: Competitive Moats.

For some reason, I caught myself watching the GroupOn Roadshow as they try to convince investors their business model is sound and are indeed worth billions of dollars. And their were lots of talk about competitive moats.

What the hell is a moat? Time to investigate.

The word means a deep and wide ditch. It was either dry or filled with water and used to surround castles as part of a defensive strategy. Kinda hard to use a battering ram back then if you had to cross a large ditch. Makes sense.

Today, the word is used to describe how a business maintains competitive advantage. Competitive moats are the specific assets that they have.

Now you know. Moats.

Damn. That’s one hot moat.