Halfway through building a startup, founders inevitably hit the same wall: what happens when someone bigger, faster, or better-funded decides to copy you? This week's session tackled that question head-on, led by Rebecca Silver and Darren Yee of the NYU Entrepreneurial Institute.

Rebecca is the Director of the NYU Entrepreneurial Institute, where she's led the Institute's Startup Accelerator Program series since joining in 2017 and spearheaded its Female Founders initiatives, work that's helped push NYU into the top 10 universities globally for supporting women founders. Before NYU, she worked as an innovation and sustainability consultant building startup ecosystems.

Darren leads investments on behalf of the NYU Innovation Venture Fund in information technology and consumer products. He's also a Summer Launchpad alum himself, having co-founded a construction tech startup through the program in 2016 before going through Techstars NYC and moving into operating roles across real estate tech, mental health, and online education.

Why competitive landscape slides fall apart

Rebecca and Darren opened with a pattern they see over and over in pitch decks: cluttered competitive slides that confuse more than they clarify. A checkbox matrix with too many variables. Investors left unsure whether a direct competitor even exists. Positioning that sounds "too good to be true" with no explanation of why that's actually defensible.

The pushback founders should expect, almost every time: what stops a competitor from copying you? That question hits hardest when the moat is just UX or workflow, not something harder to replicate. The core principle underneath all of it: investors don't care about the format of your slide. They care about the basis of comparison. Do you actually understand your market? Do you have a unique customer insight? Is there a capability here that's genuinely hard to copy?

Why the product itself isn't the moat

One of the sharpest points of the session: AI has compressed replication timelines from months or years down to days. Product features that used to take a competitor a quarter to build can now be cloned almost overnight. And it's not just software. Hardware isn't safe either, manufacturers can clone a design and Amazon sellers can undercut on price almost as fast.

That means a moat has to be durable, not a single feature a competitor can toggle on. And moats aren't static. What protects you today will need revisiting in two to three years as your resources and the competitive landscape both grow.

The six types of moats

The session walked through six categories, each with a different shelf life and different requirements to build:

• Scale economies: cost advantages that come from volume. These can't exist on day one; they're built over time. The risk is a radically better technology leapfrogging scale entirely, the way LED lighting did to fluorescent.
• Process power: embedded know-how and internal trade secrets that make you meaningfully more efficient. This one requires protecting those secrets and training your whole team, not just relying on the founders' heads. A useful benchmark: 10x efficiency, though the bar depends on your sector.
• Branding: the emotional attachment that makes switching feel wrong. This one takes years and real spend to build, and it's more viable in consumer businesses than B2B. Early-stage founders should focus on reputation first, brand later. There's also a crossing-the-chasm risk: what resonates with early adopters may not land with the mainstream.
• Network effects: value that grows as more users or access points join. A two-sided marketplace is the classic example: more drivers means more value for fleet managers, and vice versa. NFX publishes some of the best public research on the different types of network effects, worth a read if you're building one.
• Switching costs: the friction, sunk cost, and behavior change required to leave. Think beyond price: data migration, retraining, organizational change. The goal is to design natural onboarding friction that makes offboarding harder, without being punitive about it.
• Cornered resources: scarce inputs like talent, data, IP, regulatory clearance, or exclusive contracts. These only count if they're tied directly to your core value, not a peripheral perk. Regulatory moats are especially powerful in categories like medical devices, where clearance alone can take years.

There's a seventh idea that came up alongside the six: counter-positioning, where your business model is different enough that an incumbent can't copy it without disrupting themselves. The classic example is Substack's individual subscription model against an ad-based media business. An incumbent can't chase that without blowing up their own revenue engine. It's one of the few moats genuinely available to early-stage startups right now.

"What stops a competitor from copying you?"

That question came up again and again as founders shared which moats applied to their own ventures, near-term and long-term. One team building in the trucking and logistics space is leaning on network effects between drivers and charging companies on both sides of the marketplace, with switching costs building over time as customers embed their qualification workflows into the product. Another team is starting with switching costs through an end-to-end pipeline, with branding among artists as the long-term play.

Picking the right format for your competitive slide

The workshop closed with three formats for actually presenting a competitive landscape, each suited to a different situation:

• Venn or petal diagram:  best for indirect competitors and white space. Fast to scan in a deck, but it lacks nuance for direct, head-to-head comparisons.
• Feature or benefit matrix:  best for direct, like-for-like comparisons. The advice here was to prioritize your top value drivers rather than list every feature, and to lead with benefits (the outcome) over features (the mechanism). Intellectual honesty matters too: compare your current product to competitors' current state, not your roadmap against their present.
• Two-by-two value matrix: best for naming the two axes that matter most. This format forces discipline, since you have to decide exactly what you're winning at. The catch: those axes need to come from actual customer discovery, not whatever feels self-serving. Investors will push on vague axes immediately.

Founders can also hybridize a petal diagram with a two-by-two to show indirect and direct competitors in the same visual.

Whatever format a team picks, Rebecca and Darren left them with three questions to stress-test it against: Would a competitor call this intellectually honest? Are these the factors your customers actually use to compare alternatives? And how fast could a competitor close the gap on any of these?

Founder takeaways

• Investors care about the basis of comparison, not the slide format. Show market comprehension and defensible capability.
• Product features alone aren't a moat anymore. AI has made replication a matter of days, not months.
• Know your six moat types, and be honest about which ones you actually have versus which ones you're hoping to build.
• Counter-positioning is one of the few durable moats available to you right now, at the earliest stage.
• Pick a competitive landscape format that fits your situation: petal for white space, matrix for direct comparison, two-by-two for forcing clarity on what you're actually winning at.
• Ground every axis and value driver in real discovery evidence, not guesswork.
• Be ready to defend both your near-term and long-term moats. Mentors will push hard, especially on durability.

Founders are now working on their own competitive landscape slides and moat strategies ahead of next week, with mock demo day on the horizon shortly after.