Can't Google just build it?

Yes. Yes they can.

And any reply hinting that they can't will be (and should be!) received with skepticism.

I personally don't like the question. Of course the $1T companies can rebuild your feature. They have infinite capital, talent, and market penetration. Pretending otherwise in a pitch just makes you look naive to not say something else.

And yet that question is thrown. We also got it when we partnered with Oracle "What if Oracle will build it?"

What saved the ones who made it

Look at Calendly vs Google. Or Google vs Facebook in 2006. Or Microsoft vs Google in early 2000.

The one thing that "saved" them was market velocity. They got a slice of the market so big that customers were too integrated with them, or too used to them, to just leave.

The bigger company could copy the product. It couldn't copy the fact that customers were already using it every day.

Google vs Calendly

Google launched appointment slots in Calendar on June 6, 2011. Calendly was founded in 2013, bootstrapped for years on about $550,000, and by January 2021 raised $350 million at a $3 billion valuation with roughly $70 million in 2020 subscription revenue and about 10 million monthly users. Google rolled booking pages to Workspace editions in March 2022 and to free personal accounts on June 21, 2023. That September Calendly still reported more than 20 million users and adoption at 86% of the Fortune 500. It did feel the pressure: Calendly cut about 10% of its staff in July 2023 and about 13% in December 2024.

Google vs Facebook

In 2006 Google already had Orkut and had just signed a $900 million ads deal with MySpace. Facebook had about 12 million users. In 2007 Microsoft beat Google to a $240 million stake in Facebook at a $15 billion valuation. When Google+ launched in 2011, Facebook had 750 million users. Sure, the year ended with Google having 90M users, but...Google later admitted 90% of Google+ sessions lasted under five seconds, and shut it down in 2019.

Microsoft vs Google

Microsoft launched its own search engine in 2005, bid $44.6 billion for Yahoo in 2008, and launched Bing in 2009. That year Google had 64.6% of U.S. searches, Microsoft 9.3%, and Microsoft's online division lost $1.65 billion. Today Google has 91.1% of worldwide search. Bing has 4.5%.

All three times the bigger company built the product. Customers stayed where they already were.

The answer I'd put in your deck

So when that question comes, the answer I'd have in your deck is this: can you capture a significant enough share of the market within 5 to 7 years that you can't simply be "featured out"?

In financial terms, can you get to >$1B valuation before the big ones even notice you? Can you prove it with your current traction and GTM motion?

That means showing how fast you acquire customers, how deep they integrate you, and how hard it gets for them to switch.

MOAT is (and has always been) fast distribution and deep market penetration.