Your story is your moat.

It used to be that your product was your moat.

Better features, faster shipping, and a technical edge your competitors couldn’t match. Build something hard enough or innovative enough, and you likely bought yourself years before anyone could even think about trying to catch-up with your brilliant idea.

But that window is closing faster than most founders realize. Now that everyone basically has access to the same models and tools, a competitor can attempt to ship your feature in weeks, or standup a website (even an entire company!) that looks and sounds just like yours in an afternoon.

That doesn’t make what you’ve built any less impressive - it just means that what you’ve built is no longer enough to set you apart.

So, in a world where almost anyone can build almost anything, the advantage starts to shift. And what can’t be copied overnight is something far more difficult to earn: your story. That is, the belief the market holds about who you are and what you stand for. Or in other words: your brand, your reputation, and the way people (customers, investors, talent, partners, and anyone else in your ecosystem) perceive the value you provide.

Storytelling is both a craft and a strategic function.

The companies winning in today’s digital economy understand that their story is their moat. If you look at the signals, it’s hard to ignore.

A few months ago, I noticed something on the job boards. OpenAI and Anthropic, the companies building the tools most of us now use to write faster (among other things 😉) were themselves hiring strategic communications roles where skills like “storyteller” and “strong writer” were top requirements.

Think about that for a moment. The very companies whose tools are making sameness effortless are themselves hiring actual people to make sure they don’t sound like everyone else. The companies flooding the internet with competent but forgettable content are hiring humans to help them stand out.

That alone should tell you everything you need to know.

Judgment, perspective, and taste.

The brilliant marketing and business guru, Scott Galloway, recently dove on this concept in one of his latest podcasts: Why Storytelling is Now the Most Valuable Skill in Tech. Galloway believes - and I couldn’t agree more - that the ability to make people feel something about your product, your company, or your idea, is worth as much (and in some cases more) than the technical skills that got you in the door.

He specifically calls out three skills that are an increasingly rare commodity as more and more companies start to look, sound, and feel identical to one another: judgment, perspective, and taste.

Judgment is knowing what matters. AI can generate endless information about your company, your competitors, and your market. But the ability to decipher what matters, and what doesn’t belong, comes from a deep understanding of that market: from being close to your customers, seeing what works, and learning (sometimes the hard way) what doesn’t.

Perspective is having a point of view. AI can summarize every opinion that’s ever been written about your market. But a point of view of your own, a way of seeing the problem that’s specific, earned, and unmistakably yours, comes from having experienced it and lived inside it: the customer conversations, the wins, the losses, and the patterns you start to notice that no one else has named yet.

And taste is having the ability to recognize quality - to know what’s actually good. AI can produce something polished, but it can’t mimic taste. Taste can’t be prompted because it isn’t information. And it’s something your audience feels even if they can’t name it.

Hire for the Moat.

Leaders are starting to pay a premium for these skills. Galloway points to strategic communication as one of the fastest-growing jobs in the digital economy, and it’s not hard to see why.

At the end of the day, a great storyteller is someone who can look at data, craft a narrative, and then articulate that narrative in a way that reaches the right audiences.

Hiring writers who think like strategists is how to build your moat in an economy where everything else can be copied. Or, in other words: where your biggest asset is no longer what you’ve built, but what people believe about it.

I help founders and leadership teams build the story that becomes their moat. If that’s something you’re thinking about, I’d love to hear from you!