vs. Practice Fusion
athenahealth
Payer-rules knowledge moat
- What it did
- Largest payer-rules database (2016); 93% vs 70% first-pass (2007)
- Practice Fusion
- Sold to Allscripts for $100M in 2018 after $157M+ raised
Accumulated assets & catch-up barriers
What are Accumulated assets & catch-up barriers?
Some defenses require a history of building assets. Neumann describes scale, collective organizational knowledge and system links as moats developed over time. Dierickx and Cool explain more specifically why accumulating assets can impede imitation and why substitutes can undermine that protection.
How Accumulated assets & catch-up barriers work
Benefit: productive know-how, trusted references or complementary capabilities. Barrier: catching up takes time, with diminishing returns to rushed investment. This explains how several moats form; elapsed time alone proves none.
How companies won with Accumulated assets & catch-up barriers
From the win chains in Strategy Canon case studies: what the winner did, and what its rival did at the same step.
vs. Shift Technologies
Carvana
Scale economies: fill the built network
- What it did
- Retail units 416k (2024) and 597k (2025) through existing plants
- Shift Technologies
- Never exceeded about 23,000 retail units a year
vs. Linode
DigitalOcean
Tutorial library owns developer search
- What it did
- 6,000 tutorials, 30,000 Q&As (2021); about 995,000 vs 47,000 estimated monthly organic visits (2026)
- Linode
- Paid program did not close the gap; a long-time customer used DO guides for his Linode (2022)
vs. Sermo
Doximity
Catch-up barrier: verified reach to most physicians
- What it did
- 85% of physicians and 90% of new graduates registered (2026)
- Sermo
- Rebuilt as a paid survey panel (2013 on); Sermo never appears as a competitor in Doximity filings
Also tagged: Certara · Confluent · Flatiron Health · Guardant Health · LiveRamp · Reddit · Tempus · Tripadvisor · ZoomInfo
The question to ask of a company
What must a rival accumulate, how long would it take, and could it buy or bypass that history?
Constituent forms
| Form | Per | |
|---|---|---|
| Time compression diseconomies | Dierickx & Cool | Rushing accumulation raises its cost. |
| Asset mass efficiencies | Dierickx & Cool | Existing assets help build more. |
| Interconnected assets | Dierickx & Cool | Building one capability requires others. |
| Erosion and causal ambiguity | Dierickx & Cool | Assets decay; their causes may resist imitation. |
Who names it
| Author | What they call it / where it appears |
|---|---|
| Neumann | Discussion of moats developed over time: scale, collective tacit knowledge and system links |
| Dierickx & Cool + | Asset stock accumulation; time compression diseconomies |
Note. A cross-cutting foundation, not an eighth Helmer Power. Neumann supports the broad accumulation principle; the constituent mechanisms below are attributed to Dierickx and Cool. Attribute returns to the resulting defense and test against rivals that already possess similar assets.