The 8 Moats
Every moat is scored 0–3 on structural durability — not how useful or popular the feature is. The score measures whether the position holds when a better-funded competitor or horizontal AI enters the same space.
The eight-moat frame was laid out by Gokul Rajaram — board director at Coinbase, Pinterest and The Trade Desk, formerly DoorDash, Block and Facebook — in his March 2026 conversation with Harry Stebbings on 20VC, The 8 Moats of Enduring Software Companies: How to Analyse for Durability and Defensibility in a World of AI. His argument: building a moat is harder than it has ever been, because AI has made the playing field more accessible than it has ever been. No single moat suffices — he puts the bar at four of the eight, held together. Notably, brand isn't on his list; he treats it as the visible signal of a structural moat rather than the moat itself.
Listen: 20VC · Mar 2026 →What he didn't do is say how each moat fails, or how they combine. That's the gap this instrument fills. Krzysztof Czubak and I spent three months working out the failure mode for each of the eight — the specific way a data moat, a workflow moat, a distribution moat stops working — and the six compound stacks that hold when single moats don't. We've since run the diagnostic on more than 45 companies, and published 15 of the scorecards — four of them below. The 0–3 structural scoring and the four tiers below are what came out of that: Rajaram's threshold, made measurable, which is why Fortified begins at four moats scoring 2 or higher rather than at a total out of 24.
How the tier is assigned
The tier is set by counting how many moats score 2 or higher — not by the total out of 24. Every moat has an independent way it stops working, so depth in one is a wall and several reinforcing each other is a position. That's the argument in No single moat is durable. Stack them.
| Tier | Threshold | What it signals |
|---|---|---|
| Exposed | 0 moats at 2+ | No structural defenses. Open to attack from every direction. |
| Partial | 1–2 moats at 2+ | Some defense, but below the stack threshold. |
| Stacked | 3 moats at 2+ | Stack threshold met. Defensibility begins here. |
| Fortified | 4+ moats at 2+ | Multiple moats compound. The strongest state. |
Published scorecards
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