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A comment on AI agent startups at Y Combinator’s Spring ’25 Demo Day. Parent comment

Re:AI agent startups at Y Combinator’s Spring ’25 Demo Day by forrestthewoods on Saturday June 14, 2025 @03:02AM (#44274724)
> There needs to be a moat. I see all these startups with a moat that is no bigger obstacle than a puddle.

Cursor doesn’t have a moat. And yet…

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Re:AI agent startups at Y Combinator’s Spring ’25 Demo Day by flyinglizard on Saturday June 14, 2025 @04:16AM (#44275016)
The guys right in front of the user usually win. The rest are just price-sensitive commodity.
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Re:AI agent startups at Y Combinator’s Spring ’25 Demo Day by dangus on Saturday June 14, 2025 @05:41PM (#44279030)
The difference is that this time the price sensitive commodity is right in front of the customer with very little value surrounding it.
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Re:AI agent startups at Y Combinator’s Spring ’25 Demo Day by tough on Saturday June 14, 2025 @03:27AM (#44274820)
Cursor's moat is it's user's data.

they have SOTA completion models (bought NineTab, founder left already, but still).

Cursor moat is they're the touch point with customers, not the big labs. imo

they can use all that data to better improve the ux/ui and piggyback on general models improvements

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Re:AI agent startups at Y Combinator’s Spring ’25 Demo Day by dangus on Saturday June 14, 2025 @05:40PM (#44279021)
Have they done that? In my opinion they’ve built an AI IDE consisting of 90% forked open source code that has an identical experience to competitors with less of a chance to integrate with big tech Google/Microsoft/Apple-style ecosystem products.

The “step one: get user data, step two: ???, step 3: profit” business model is well established, and it definitely doesn’t always work.

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