The Seven Powers: The Foundations of Business Strategy

The talk adapts Hamilton Helmer’s Seven Powers framework to AI startups and argues that moats matter only after a company has found a real, painful problem worth solving. It explains how speed helps early startups discover valuable products, while process power, cornered resources, switching costs, counter-positioning, brand, network effects, and scale economies can help defend them as they grow. Examples include Cursor’s rapid shipping, enterprise agents’ custom workflows, and Exa’s investment in web crawling. The speakers close by urging founders to focus first on finding a customer with an urgent problem and getting from zero to one.