In a conversation with Windsurf CEO Varun Mohan, Garry Tan dropped a bomb that really resonated with me: "Moat is not a noun. It's a verb."

This one line explains why giants like Blockbuster, Nokia, and Kodak went from kings of the hill to cautionary tales. They thought their competitive advantages were permanent fortresses, but they were not. A moat isn't something you build once and forget about—it's something you have to dig deeper every single day.

The Depreciating Nature of Strategic Insights

The core observation here is that "Every single insight that we have is a depreciating insight." Companies don't win because they had a brilliant breakthrough three years ago. They win because they solidify and compound their advantage consistently.

Take Nvidia as a prime example. Despite being one of the world's largest companies with gross margins of 60-70%, Varun points out that "if Nvidia doesn't innovate in the next two years, AMD will be on their case and Nvidia will not be able to make 60-70% gross margins." Even the most successful companies are just two years away from losing their edge if they stop pushing forward. Varun puts it in very clear terms: "If we don't continually have insights that we are executing on, we are just slowly dying."

The Founder’s Dilemma: Ego vs. Reinvention

Even as markets shift and disruption becomes evident, egos can pose a powerful barrier to change. Many founders and senior leaders grow emotionally attached to their original ideas or business models, seeing them as extensions of their identity and past success. This attachment is especially common in companies that once had first-mover advantages and can create resistance to necessary pivots… Even in the face of clear evidence that what worked before may no longer drive future growth.

What got you here may not keep you here. History shows that resting on yesterday’s victories is risky—insights depreciate as technology, consumer behavior, and competition evolve. Founders who cling to old successes can unintentionally stifle reinvention, leaving their companies vulnerable to irrelevance. 

Masters of Reinvention: Netflix and Garmin

Netflix: From DVDs to Streaming Supremacy

Netflix could have rested on its DVD-by-mail success, which was revolutionary in the early 2000s. Instead, leadership recognized that physical media would soon be in decline. They cannibalized their own profitable DVD business to bet everything on streaming—a move that seemed risky at the time but positioned them as the category king when broadband became commonplace.

Garmin: Beyond GPS Navigation

When smartphones with built-in GPS threatened to make standalone navigation devices obsolete, Garmin could have doubled down on making better car GPS units. Instead, they pivoted hard into fitness wearables, aviation systems, and marine electronics.

The company recognized that their core competency wasn't GPS devices—it was location-based technology and precision instruments. By reframing their identity around these deeper capabilities, Garmin found new markets just as their original market disappeared. Today, they are a leader in fitness tracking and specialized GPS applications, proving that reinvention can lead to entirely new growth trajectories.

The Banking Industry's Crypto Crossroads

Traditional banks face a similar inflection point with cryptocurrency and decentralized finance. Many financial institutions initially dismissed crypto as a fad. But forward-thinking institutions are recognizing that blockchain technology represents a fundamental shift in how value is stored and transferred.

Bitcoin is emerging as a new instrument for wealth preservation, offering digital scarcity in an age of monetary expansion. Stablecoins are revolutionizing payments, making them instant and low-cost compared to traditional methods like wire transfers that are slow and expensive. Crypto wallets are democratizing self-custody, allowing anyone to hold the keys to their assets without relying on institutional intermediaries. And tokenization is broadening access to investment opportunities that were previously reserved for the most privileged among us.

Just as Garmin realized their true value wasn't just in GPS hardware, progressive banks and financial institutions are discovering their core competency isn't in physical branches or traditional payment rails—it's in trust, compliance, and financial expertise.

The smartest companies aren't waiting for transformation to happen around them—they are positioning themselves at the center of it:

  • Fidelity allows customers to buy, sell, and hold Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies directly on its platform, establishing itself as a trusted brand for mainstream crypto investing. They are even pushing for in-kind Bitcoin ETF redemptions.

  • Franklin Templeton has started integrating stablecoins like USDC for instant fund settlement and offers tokenized money market funds, pushing boundaries in both stablecoin adoption and tokenized investments.

  • PayPal has launched its own stablecoin (PYUSD) and now pays users yield on balances, aiming to make stablecoins core to payments, international transfers, and commerce—even in business-to-business use cases.

These companies are reshaping finance by embracing Bitcoin as a store of value, leveraging stablecoins to enable seamless payments, and using tokenization to create new, accessible forms of investment.

The Adaptation Imperative 

The stories of Garmin, Netflix, and today’s forward-thinking financial giants offer a simple lesson: Adaptation isn’t optional. Keep moving, keep learning, and never let pride block progress.

This isn’t about chasing every shiny object or panicking at the first sign of disruption. It’s about having the courage to ask questions like “What business are we really in?”, “What needs to change?” and the discipline to make it happen.

LFG.