Your proof, your people and your moat

If you spend any time around founders or investors, you'll hear the word "moat" thrown around constantly: that defensible edge that protects your business from competitors. For years in edtech, that moat was often the technology itself. In other words, if you build something that is genuinely hard to build, you're protected. 

But that assumption is shifting fast, and June gave me plenty to think about. 

June was all about edtech for me — London EdTech Week, plus new projects with old colleagues that brought me back to the world I know best. And the conversations happening in that world are changing, just as everything else is, because of AI.

I spoke with a multi-academy trust in the north of England that had identified a problem affecting all of its schools. Rather than buying existing edtech to solve it, they used AI to build their own solution — and it's genuinely fit for purpose, with real potential to be shared, or even sold, to schools outside the trust.

That got me thinking: if anyone can use AI to build their own edtech solution, is there still a need for edtech companies at all? Or, asked more broadly: 

If technology is no longer your moat, what is? 

I had the chance to explore that question in two conversations on stages at London Edtech Week.

The first was a fireside chat I hosted as part of the UCL EdTech Labs global minisummit, with Ekaterina Almasque, a deep-tech investor. When I raised the multi-academy trust example, she pointed out that the real moat for that product is the dataset the trust builds over time to train the AI. That data becomes genuinely unique to the product — something a competitor can't easily replicate, no matter how good their technology is.

The second was a panel discussion with the Edtech Evidence Board at the BESA x BETT event, held at the beautiful London offices of Cooley LLP. Alongside Dr Neelam Parmar FCCT, Kristy Evers, and Laurie Forcier, we discussed the growing importance of evidence in edtech: not just proof that your product does what you say it does, but a clear understanding of the contextual conditions needed to achieve real outcomes. That evidence is unique to your product, your environment, and your practice, and as your evidence base grows, so does its value in the sales process.

So we have two answers to the same question: data and evidence. Both are things you build over time, through use and through trust, which is, fittingly, also true of the third theme running through this newsletter.

Moats aren't only built through data or evidence. They're also built through relationships — the kind that come from genuinely knowing your community, your peers, and the people who've walked the path before you. That's exactly what this month's networking update is about.

What connection sounds like

We're loving how our women in edtech online networking, in coordination with SHINE, is taking shape. We've had great attendance at each of the two events so far, and we're already hearing some wonderful success stories as a result of connections made on the calls.

On our June call, we asked women to share a highlight from the past month — and two attendees said that our networking events themselves were the highlight.

• One had made a connection in the May call that led to an opportunity to publish an article on a blog, a reminder that she is capable of producing writing other people want to read, and a real confidence boost.

• The other was a first-time joiner in June, in the process of leaving a big corporate job to become a founder. She had questions (which were answered) and, for the first time, was able to speak about her leap into entrepreneurship — to women who understood exactly what that meant.

Laurie, Kate Lee Carey, and I have been taking feedback from the group on what they'd like to see from this community, and we'll be using it to shape our autumn events.

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See you again in September!