Sharing a moat instead of defending it

Sharing a moat instead of defending it.

Recently I've been meeting a lot of experts who have spent years, sometimes decades, mastering their fields and are now ready to turn that experience into software that empowers their peers. Not just automating their own workflows, but building tools that raise the floor for everyone in their space. Codality is finding our niche helping those people get there, turning experience-backed visions of a better way to work into actual, running platforms.

It's a refreshing shift. For most of my career I was building a single organization's competitive advantage, their moat. This feels different. It reminds me of projects I did building applications for groups of nonprofits with overlapping services, where the win wasn't one org pulling ahead but the whole ecosystem getting stronger.

That same instinct seems to be gaining traction in the broader consulting world too. Smaller firms building referral networks. Practitioners sharing playbooks instead of hoarding them. Growth mentality pushing back against false scarcity.

I'm not naive about competition. But I studied evolution and know that symbiosis does a lot of the heavy lifting that dog-eat-dog gets all the credit for.

Which makes me curious: are we collectively moving past the idea that the only legitimate tech career arc runs through a big tech org? I've been there, having had a few opportunities to work for Salesforce over the years but choosing my own path instead. My odd duck behavior feels less... odd these days. What say you?