4.3 KiB
Moats
Re-evaluated: time is not the primary moat. A Phase 4+ Passepartout fed on Wikipedia + Wikidata can build a general ontology in two weeks. The organic growth advantage collapses for general knowledge.
Actual moats (weaker than initially assumed):
- Domain-specific gate rules — thin. A few hundred lines of Lisp data. Write once, trivial to copy. Not a real moat.
- Empirical decision history — every HITL decision is a Merkle fact. A fresh instance has none. Makes your instance more valuable but doesn't prevent competition — it's a switching cost, not a barrier to entry.
- Curated empirical parameter database (provenance store) — force field parameters, solvation model coefficients, scoring function weights, training dataset descriptors, and validity envelopes accumulated over years of use. Each entry carries a source citation, confidence interval, and validation history. A competitor starting fresh has no curated parameters, no accumulated validation comparisons against experiment, and no community-sourced validity envelopes. This is a data moat that compounds with every deployed instance: each instance contributes new validated parameters and benchmark comparisons to the collective provenance store via the social protocol, making the network's cumulative empirical knowledge increasingly difficult to replicate. See evaluation harness for how the same network effect applies to regression test cases.
- Evaluation harness (regression suite) — thousands of test cases accumulated from every bug fix. Cannot be ingested from public data. Strongest residual moat.
- Infrastructure integration — specific Docker compose layouts, Traefik patterns, Authentik configs encoded as gate rules. A competitor's infrastructure is different.
Strongest competitor strategy: Not copying your gate rules — offering the same architecture as a service with their own pre-seeded general knowledge and a consulting engagement to customize gate rules. The AGPL prevents closing the architecture but does not prevent offering it as a service with a customization layer.
The defensible business is services, not product. The defensible entity is "the organization that best understands how to adapt Passepartout to your domain" — not "the organization that owns Passepartout." A verification monopoly on agent safety would change this calculus — competitors would need independent certification. Patent strategy and Licensing protect key innovations and create revenue from the open-source ecosystem.
Infrastructure lock-in and switching costs
A hospital that runs Passepartout with HIPAA gate rules ($50K/yr) for five years has accumulated:
- A fact store with a decade of compliance decisions
- A proof forest of verified rules
- An empirical decision history tied to their specific deployment
- Customized gate rules encoding their specific workflows and approvals
Switching to a competitor means discarding all of it. The accumulated value grows as the fact store deepens. Annual revenue per enterprise grows from $250K in year one to $500K-$1M by year five as more domain packages are added.
This is the strongest residual moat. The evaluation harness (regression suite) is a close second — it grows with every deployment and cannot be ingested from public data. The verification monopoly and upgrade lifecycle compound this lock-in: every new regulation encoded as a gate rule deepens the proof forest, making the deployment harder to reproduce elsewhere.
(See the Social protocol infrastructure requirements for the network topology that creates this lock-in.)