Betting Against the Everything Company

A recurring bit in *BoJack Horseman*, one of my favorite shows ever, is that much of the world is run by "AOL-Time-Warner-PepsiCo-Viacom-Halliburton-Skynet-Toyota-Trader Joe's." The dystopian conglomerate gets larger as the show goes on. Over the past few months, as I've been thinking about how to position my next startup, I’ve been asking myself what its moat will be against the labs, which keep absorbing features from apps built on them. In the olden days, the advice was not to fear Google. Its employees were less motivated than startup founders, bureaucracy would slow them down, and the market your startup was starting from would be too small for their execs to care about. Andrew Chen quipped a few months back that before Google it was Microsoft, and before Microsoft it was IBM. Now, it's the labs. The question today is whether something fundamental changed in this world of abundant but not evenly distributed intelligence. The old analogy might not hold if foundation labs have…