Being Weird Is The Moat

I was watching a recap of Google I/O, and the main feeling I had was: oh right, everyone can copy everyone now.

Not literally everyone. Not perfectly. Not instantly.

But close enough that it changes the feeling.

A company can look at what someone else is doing, absorb the shape of it, and ship something adjacent very quickly. The frontier labs can copy each other. Big companies can copy startups. Startups can copy big companies. Agents can copy workflows. Tools can copy interfaces. Taste can be copied badly. Features can be copied quite well.

And then the whole question becomes slightly terrifying.

What is defensible?

The old answer was often execution. Can you build it? Can you hire the team? Can you raise the money? Can you grind through the boring work?

But if AI keeps eating the boring work, or at least compressing it, then execution changes shape. More things become buildable. More businesses become possible. More people can produce more things with fewer people and less time.

That is exciting.

It is also quite rude.

Because if everything can get done, then “we can get things done” is not enough of a personality.

It is not enough of a company either.

The moat starts moving somewhere else.

Distribution matters. Attention matters. Trust matters. Taste matters. The emotional association someone has with you matters. The tiny thing in their nervous system that says, “I want to see what this person does next,” matters.

For a company, this becomes flavour.

Not brand guidelines flavour. Not a colour palette flavour. The actual flavour. The feeling that this company is not just another smooth object from the same machine.

That is a strange moat.

It is not clean. It is not a feature checklist. It does not fit neatly into a pitch deck, unless the pitch deck has become very honest and slightly unwell.

But I think attention is partly an association game.

People do not just pay attention because a thing is useful. They pay attention because it has a charge. It has a feeling. It has a world around it. It has a frequency they recognize, even if they cannot explain it.

And this is where the funny thought arrived.

Maybe being weird is the moat.

For a person, yes.

But also for a company.

Not performatively weird. Not “look at me, I am building a personal brand and my differentiator is whimsy.” That is hell. That is a person turning themselves into a content garnish.

I mean actually weird.

The thing you already are when you stop trying to become legible to everyone.

The odd association. The strange joke. The non-natural connection. The slightly embarrassing obsession. The way your mind moves when it is not asking for permission.

In a company, that does not appear from a workshop where everyone agrees to be “more distinctive” by Thursday.

It usually comes from the authentic nature of the leadership. The founders. The team. The taste of the people making the calls. What they care about. What they refuse. What they find funny. What they find unbearable. What they keep noticing that everyone else walks past.

That might be the thing AI cannot easily average into existence.

AI can produce competent normality at scale. It can produce decent writing, decent designs, decent code, decent plans. It can help anyone become less blocked. That is good.

But it also means the middle gets very crowded.

The average gets louder.

The safe version of everything becomes easier to make.

So maybe the work is not to become more polished. Maybe the work is to become more unmistakable.

Which is annoying, because being unmistakable requires a level of acceptance. You have to be okay with some people not liking it. You have to be okay with looking a bit stupid. You have to be okay with the fact that the thing that makes you alive will not be universally approved by a committee of imaginary adults in your head.

Permission to be oneself is not a binary thing.

Permission for a company to be itself is not binary either.

It is not like one day you wake up and become fully free, wearing a dramatic coat, saying strange things in cafes.

It is smaller than that.

You notice the sentence you almost deleted. You keep the joke. You publish the thought before it has been deodorized. You let the weird connection survive the edit. You build the thing in the way that feels alive, not just the way that sounds reasonable.

Inside a business, the same thing happens through tiny decisions. The page you do not make generic. The product choice that carries taste. The customer you decide not to chase. The tone that sounds like an actual human made it. The leadership not hiding every living edge because a more normal company might convert slightly better this week.

And there is now a business argument for this, which is hysterical.

The deepest business strategy might be: be more itself.

Or, less dramatically: let the company have the flavour of the people actually leading it.

Very annoying.

Very funny.

Probably true.

Because if AI handles more of the boring work, the highest leverage human work moves toward taste, direction, imagination, judgment, and weird creative combination. To embody that level of creativity, you probably cannot live like a frightened spreadsheet. You need space for strange inputs. You need play. You need aliveness. You need enough nervous system softness to let new associations appear.

That does not mean everyone should become eccentric on purpose.

That would be another costume.

It means the moat may be the part that survives when you stop trying to be generic.

For a company, that part is rarely invented by committee. It is revealed by leadership that is willing to let the real taste show up in the work.

The product still has to be good. Distribution still matters. Trust still matters. You still have to make the thing work. Unfortunately, reality remains involved.

But once the thing works, the question becomes:

Why you?

Why this?

Why should anyone care?

And maybe the answer is not only better features.

Maybe the answer is the world you make around the thing. The taste. The tone. The strange little weather system. The feeling that this could only have come from you, or from this company, led by these particular people.

So yes.

Embrace the weirdness.

Not as a performance.

As a practical moat.

Ridiculous. But useful.