A pitch night observation on the increasingly vague, endlessly repeated jargon question that nobody seems willing to define precisely
Four times. I counted, because by the second occurrence I had already started keeping score out of pure disbelief. Four separate investors, across a single twenty-minute pitch, asked the founder some variation of “what’s your moat,” a question that, by the fourth repetition, the poor man was visibly struggling to answer in any way that hadn’t already been said, slightly differently, three times already.
What “Moat” Is Supposed to Mean, Roughly
In theory, the moat question asks what sustainable competitive advantage protects a business from being easily copied once it starts succeeding, a genuinely important and entirely reasonable thing to ask any founder. In practice, watching this particular pitch unfold, I began to suspect that at least two of the four investors asking it had only a loose, somewhat different understanding of what specific answer they were actually hoping to hear.
The Four Answers, Each Slightly Different
His first answer focused on proprietary data accumulated over time. The investor asking nodded, seemingly satisfied, then a second investor asked essentially the same question fifteen minutes later, prompting a second answer focused instead on network effects among existing customers. A third investor, apparently unsatisfied with either prior answer despite having heard them both, asked again, receiving a third answer about brand loyalty. By the fourth ask, the founder simply combined all three previous answers into one increasingly desperate, run-on sentence, and the room, remarkably, seemed to accept this as a satisfying conclusion.
What This Revealed About the Question Itself
Watching this unfold, I became genuinely convinced that “what’s your moat” functions, for a meaningful share of investors, less as a precise technical inquiry and more as a kind of ritual incantation, a phrase that signals seriousness and rigour regardless of whether the person asking has a specific, consistent definition in mind, or whether they’re simply repeating a question they’ve heard other investors ask in other rooms.
The Founder’s Post-Pitch Reflection
I spoke with him briefly afterward, and he described the experience as “genuinely disorienting,” noting that he’d prepared one solid, well-reasoned answer to the moat question and ended up needing three additional variations on the fly, none of which he felt fully confident about by the fourth delivery. He has, sensibly I think, decided to prepare a single, more comprehensive moat answer covering all three angles simultaneously for his next pitch, rather than hoping he guesses correctly which specific flavour of moat any given investor happens to be fishing for.
A Broader Pattern I’ve Started Noticing
This is not, I should note, an isolated incident specific to the word moat. I have watched similarly repetitive, loosely defined questioning happen around “unit economics,” “product-market fit,” and, on one particularly chaotic evening, the phrase “defensibility,” asked by three different investors who each seemed to mean something at least slightly different by it.
What I’m Taking Away From This
I increasingly suspect that pitch night jargon functions less as a precise shared vocabulary and more as a kind of collective performance, where everyone in the room broadly agrees the right questions are being asked, without necessarily agreeing on what a genuinely satisfying answer would actually sound like. I don’t know how to fix this. I simply now attend pitch nights with a small private tally system, and last Thursday’s moat count remains, for now, my personal record. Further London startup pitch diary entries continue at bohiney.com, with additional London business coverage available at prat.uk.
SOURCE: https://prat.UK/