Lenny RachitskyHost of Lenny's Podcast | Author of Lenny's Newsletter

Software is not a moat

30 Apr 2026 · 1 min

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Software features get copied fast. Snapchat learned to build moats through creator relationships and an AR lens ecosystem instead, making the whole platform harder to replicate than any single feature. Vertically integrated hardware adds another layer competitors can't easily match.

Chapters

15 years ago, we essentially learned that software is not a moat, which is something that everyone is discovering today with AI. But 15 years ago, because all the software features that we could create were so easily cloned by our competitors, we started to think about how to build a more durable business, how to build a business that had bigger and more effective moats. One of the first things we did was focus a lot on building ecosystems, whether those are the relationships between creators and Snapchatters, whether that's the platform we built around augmented reality where developers have built millions of these lenses. It's very easy to copy software features. It's very hard hard to copy or to replicate a full ecosystem or a platform. We realized that the more that we could build a platform around our business, the more that we could build an ecosystem with creators and developers, the harder it would be for folks to just copy that. And then it also informed a lot of our thinking about investing in other places that are really hard to copy, including hardware, where it's really, really challenging to copy our fully vertically integrated stack around augmented reality.