I don't even think the current AI companies really have technical moats. It seems like the differentiator is just how much money they have to throw at compute.

Most moats are actually regulatory, ranging from copyright and patents, to anti-competitive regulation, to explicit wealth transfers from taxpayers to the company.

Their moat ended up being two fold. One, they were the only tech stack that could handle the scale needed back then. Two, they had a crazy culture of never letting adversaries win and would push daily updates to keep attackers off their customers. Both took a long time to iterate and build towards and nobody thought it was cool while they worked through it.

While, everyone is trying to bast off, we're creating a new category and changing the way people think about sleep.

I don't expect to be able to change the world in a day. This is a movement, and it is going to take time.

I compare it to sunglasses, which existed for centuries as medical aids but didn't become part of everyday life and fashion until they were made "cool" by pilots in WWII.

Throwing rocketfuel might help, but we can build momentum market after market as we go from this somewhat strange activity, monitoring your brain during sleep, and directly increasing slow-wave activity through micro-pulsed auditory stimulation.

The industry is still obsessed with measuring sleep time, we're directly influencing what your brain is doing during that time.

The early momentum of a slingshot takes a bit to get up to speed. Building a comfortable EEG headband for consumers is a challenge, realtime analysis and stimulation take time do develop, among other things.

The momentum begets more momentum. At some point the momentum of the slingshot provides enough force to launch the projectile.

BUT, slingshots don't work forever. Once the projectile is out of the slingshot, it's downward trajectory has already begun.

So I'd prefer an analogy which takes that into account.

If you're curious about our work, check out https://affectablesleep.com