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The Seven Powers: How AI Startups Build Moats
In this episode of Y Combinator's Lightcone podcast, hosts Garry Tan, Jared Friedman, Diana Hu and Harj Taggar revisit Hamilton Helmer's 'Seven Powers' framework and reboot it for the AI era. Prompted by anxious college founders who fear their AI-agent companies are just easily-cloned 'ChatGPT wrappers,' the group argues that durable moats absolutely exist in AI, they're just not obvious. They walk through process power, cornered resources, switching costs, counter positioning, branding, network economies and scale economies, adding an eighth power the book leaves out: speed. Along the way they use concrete, current examples like Cursor, Windsurf, Casca, Greenlight, Plaid, Happy Robot, Salient, Legora vs Harvey, Giga ML, Speak vs Duolingo, Avoca, Exa and OpenAI vs Google to show how founders should think about defensibility, and when.
Grotto AI
Grotto AI builds an AI coaching platform for multifamily leasing teams, listening in on calls and tours and nudging agents in real time toward the behaviors - curiosity, rapport, a well-timed laugh - that its data shows actually close leases. Founded in 2025 by Nick Deveau and Ben Epstein, veterans of the AI-in-insurance startup EvolutionIQ, the company raised a $10 million seed round led by ICONIQ Capital in February 2026 and already runs on portfolios for operators like Weidner Apartment Homes.
Nick Deveau
Nick Deveau is the co-founder and CEO of Grotto AI, a New York startup building real-time AI coaching for apartment leasing teams. A Stanford-trained AI engineer who helped build the technology behind EvolutionIQ's $730 million sale, Deveau now bets that humans, not bots, close the deals that matter most. His platform, Guidance, listens to leasing calls and tours, decodes what makes top agents great, and whispers that playbook to everyone else in real time. In February 2026 Grotto raised a $10 million seed round led by ICONIQ Capital.