Investor Protection Quotes

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you must thoroughly analyze a company, and the soundness of its underlying businesses, before you buy its stock; you must deliberately protect yourself against serious losses; you must aspire to “adequate,” not extraordinary, performance.
Benjamin Graham (The Intelligent Investor)
The president operates effectively as head of the national security state as long as he stays within the parameters of its primary dedication—which is to advance the interests of corporate investors and protect the overall global capital accumulation process.
Michael Parenti (Contrary Notions: The Michael Parenti Reader)
British Empire acted as an agency for imposing free markets, the rule of law, investor protection and relatively incorrupt government on roughly a quarter of the world.
Niall Ferguson (Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World)
Liquidity is important to investors. When opportunities arise, businesses need to have sufficient cash available in order to act on the opportunity promptly. Having sufficient cash available can also serve as protection against losses or a tool with which the business acquired solutions in the event of crises. We like to see that businesses have a sufficient amount of available cash.
Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr.
If possible, please introduce her to worthy men. She must marry while she is in London. If she returns, Fanny will force her to marry the fool. Please protect my daughter as I have never been able to. Edward, find her someone worthy of my kind, intelligent daughter. I am enclosing permission to sign marriage contracts for both of my eldest daughters. I have included a letter for Lizzy when she becomes engaged. She cannot return unless she is married. I am sorry that I will miss her wedding, please give her away to a worthy man who will respect and love her. If she does not marry, please send her to the New World. I would prefer that she leaves England than returns and marries my cousin.
Tiffany Ward (Gardiner’s Business Investors: A Pride and Prejudice Variation)
We added that the stock component should carry a fair degree of protection against a loss of purchasing power caused by large-scale inflation.
Mahatma Gandhi (The Intelligent Investor)
Money managers tend to make irrational decisions just to protect their calendar year performances, even if they believe that decision is not in the best interest of investors.
Naved Abdali
Somebody needed to warn the public that the SEC was an out-of-control agency that served no obvious purpose other than to fool people into believing it was actually offering investors protection.
Harry Markopolos (No One Would Listen)
In good years, defensive investors have to be content with the knowledge that their gains, although perhaps less than maximal, were achieved with risk protection in place, even though it turned out not to be needed.
Howard Marks (The Most Important Thing: Uncommon Sense for the Thoughtful Investor (Columbia Business School Publishing))
Digital locks are roach motels: copyrighted works check in, but they don’t check out. Creators and investors lose control of their business—they become commodity suppliers for a distribution channel that calls all the shots. Anti-circumvention isn’t copyright protection: it’s middleman protection.
Cory Doctorow (Information Doesn't Want to Be Free: Laws for the Internet Age)
Business schools teach baby MBAs the same lessons: to avoid industries with high competition, to do what it takes to keep potential competitors out, and, if all else fails, to buy them up.17 Warren Buffett explains that, in business, he looks “for economic castles protected by unbreachable moats,”18 because “the products or services that have wide, sustainable moats around them are the ones that deliver rewards to investors.”19 That
Rebecca Giblin (Chokepoint Capitalism: How Big Tech and Big Content Captured Creative Labor Markets and How We'll Win Them Back)
So I’m just proposing that we level the playing field and make those woke shareholders, like BlackRock or Al Gore’s Generation Investment Management, bear the same liability as any ordinary social activist when they engage in ordinary social activism through the companies that they invest in. Limited shareholder liability was never meant to protect well-heeled woke investors from the consequences of their actions during PR stunts at woke parades.
Vivek Ramaswamy (Woke, Inc.: Inside Corporate America's Social Justice Scam)
By 2016, when the Democrats faced off against Donald Trump, there were virtually no immigration skeptics remaining on the left. The same politicians and intellectuals who had once acknowledged a need to enforce the border and protect workers now disavowed their old views and suggested those who still held them were racist. The Democratic Party had given up trying to represent the working class, in favor of investors and welfare recipients—and by 2016, illegal immigrants.
Tucker Carlson (Ship of Fools: How a Selfish Ruling Class Is Bringing America to the Brink of Revolution)
she’d been offered money to attend parties hosted by Jeffrey Epstein, the billionaire investor, and attended by Trump. Hair-curling allegations of sexual violence followed: the lawsuit contended that the plaintiff and other minors were forced to perform sex acts on Trump and Epstein, culminating in a “savage sexual attack” by Trump; that Trump had threatened the plaintiff and her family with physical harm should she ever speak; and that both Trump and Epstein were told that the girls involved were underage.
Ronan Farrow (Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators)
For years, I observed and experienced the SEC protecting large perpetrators of abuse at the expense of the investors whom the SEC is supposed to protect. The SEC has been very tough, and usually appropriately so, on small-time cons, promoters, insider traders, and, yes, hedge funds. But when it comes to large corporations and institutionalized Wall Street, the SEC uses kid gloves, imposes meaningless nondeterring fines, and emphasizes relatively unimportant things like record keeping rather than the substance of important things—like investors being swindled.
Harry Markopolos (No One Would Listen)
The real nemesis of the modern economy is ecological collapse. Both scientific progress and economic growth take place within a brittle biosphere, and as they gather steam, so the shock waves destabilise the ecology. In order to provide every person in the world with the same standard of living as affluent Americans, we would need a few more planets – but we only have this one. If progress and growth do end up destroying the ecosystem, the cost will be dear not merely to vampires, foxes and rabbits, but also to Sapiens. An ecological meltdown will cause economic ruin, political turmoil, a fall in human standards of living, and it might threaten the very existence of human civilisation. We could lessen the danger by slowing down the pace of progress and growth. If this year investors expect to get a 6 per cent return on their portfolios, in ten years they will be satisfied with a 3 per cent return, in twenty years only 1 per cent, and in thirty years the economy will stop growing and we’ll be happy with what we’ve already got. Yet the creed of growth firmly objects to such a heretical idea. Instead, it suggests we should run even faster. If our discoveries destabilise the ecosystem and threaten humanity, then we should discover something to protect ourselves. If the ozone layer dwindles and exposes us to skin cancer, we should invent better sunscreen and better cancer treatments, thereby also promoting the growth of new sunscreen factories and cancer centres. If all the new industries pollute the atmosphere and the oceans, causing global warming and mass extinctions, then we should build for ourselves virtual worlds and hi-tech sanctuaries that will provide us with all the good things in life even if the planet is as hot, dreary and polluted as hell.
Yuval Noah Harari (Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow)
The tale of America coming out of the Great Depression and not only surviving but actually transforming itself into an economic giant is the stuff of legend. But the part that gives me goose bumps is what we did with all that wealth: over several generations, our country built the greatest middle class the world had ever known. We built it ourselves, using our own hard work and the tools of government to open up more opportunities for millions of people. We used it all—tax policy, investments in public education, new infrastructure, support for research, rules that protected consumers and investors, antitrust laws—to promote and expand our middle class. The spectacular, shoot-off-the-fireworks fact is that we succeeded.
Elizabeth Warren (This Fight Is Our Fight: The Battle to Save America's Middle Class)
How long does it last?" Said the other customer, a man wearing a tan shirt with little straps that buttoned on top of the shoulders. He looked as if he were comparing all the pros and cons before shelling out $.99. You could see he thought he was pretty shrewd. "It lasts for as long as you live," the manager said slowly. There was a second of silence while we all thought about that. The man in the tan shirt drew his head back, tucking his chin into his neck. His mind was working like a house on fire "What about other people?" He asked. "The wife? The kids?" "They can use your membership as long as you're alive," the manager said, making the distinction clear. "Then what?" The man asked, louder. He was the type who said things like "you get what you pay for" and "there's one born every minute" and was considering every angle. He didn't want to get taken for a ride by his own death. "That's all," the manager said, waving his hands, palms down, like a football referee ruling an extra point no good. "Then they'd have to join for themselves or forfeit the privileges." "Well then, it makes sense," the man said, on top of the situation now, "for the youngest one to join. The one that's likely to live the longest." "I can't argue with that," said the manager. The man chewed his lip while he mentally reviewed his family. Who would go first. Who would survive the longest. He cast his eyes around to all the cassettes as if he'd see one that would answer his question. The woman had not gone away. She had brought along her signed agreement, the one that she paid $25 for. "What is this accident waiver clause?" She asked the manager. "Look," he said, now exhibiting his hands to show they were empty, nothing up his sleeve, "I live in the real world. I'm a small businessman, right? I have to protect my investment, don't I? What would happen if, and I'm not suggesting you'd do this, all right, but some people might, what would happen if you decided to watch one of my movies in the bathtub and a VCR you rented from me fell into the water?" The woman retreated a step. This thought had clearly not occurred to her before.
Michael Dorris (A Yellow Raft in Blue Water)
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Asa Yoneda
The mantle of a great power (was) inescapable. Was it better to extend diplomatic recognition to an unattractive regime and thereby hope to achieve a measure of political stability – or to refuse to recognize the regime on principle, thus emboldening its opponents and running the risk of losing both American investors' money and the lives of American investment in the widening civil war which might follow? Was it preferable to intervene militarily to protect American interests and bring stability and freedom – or rather to maintain the purity of neutrality and avoid a potential quagmire, but run the risk of appearing weak, and leave the outcome to be determined by forces beyond one's control?
Charles Emmerson (1913: In Search of the World Before the Great War)
This is also a good lesson in patience. A new investor or trader usually lacks patience and has the tendency to want to jump in, fearful of missing out on an advance. Don’t make that mistake. Wait for the confirmation. Buy at the bottom, not at the top. And, always use a Stop Loss to protect your capital. “Nothing gives one person so much advantage over another as to remain cool and unruffled under all circumstances” ~Thomas Jefferson
Fred McAllen (Charting and Technical Analysis)
Those with a broader view—investors who recognize that the world has changed considerably since Markowitz first enunciated his theory—can reap even greater protection because the movement of foreign economies is not always synchronous with that of the U.S. economy, especially those in emerging markets.
Burton G. Malkiel (A Random Walk Down Wall Street: The Time-Tested Strategy for Successful Investing)
Regulation and more orthodox economic knowledge are not what protect the individual and the financial institution when euphoria returns, leading on as it does to wonder at the increase in values and wealth, to the rush to participate that drives up prices, and to the eventual crash and its sullen and painful aftermath. There is protection only in a clear perception of the characteristics common to these flights into what must conservatively be described as mass insanity. Only then is the investor warned and saved.
John Kenneth Galbraith (A Short History of Financial Euphoria)
Highly profitable stocks only beat the market if Buffett’s moat protects the profits. Without the moat, highly profitable stocks will get beaten up by the competition. Mean reversion acts on profits to drag down winners and push up losers. Investors should use some common sense and natural skepticism about profit charts that march all the way to heaven.
Tobias Carlisle (The Acquirer's Multiple: How the Billionaire Contrarians of Deep Value Beat the Market)
in the CRB group companies got nothing, the investors of the mutual fund received a part and would get something. Only after the CRB case, SEBI tightened the regulations and introduced stringent measures for the protection of the investors’ interest. In short, MF investments are safe and it is practically very difficult for sponsors or managers to run away with the money. 
Jigar Patel (NRI Investments and Taxation: A Small Guide for Big Gains)
We know the economics of these startups,” Eb says. “We begin with nothing but the idea. That’s what the NDA is for—to protect your idea. We work on the idea together—put our brainpower into it—and get stock in return. The result of this work is software. The software is copyrightable, trademarkable, perhaps patentable. It is intellectual property. It is worth some money. We all own it in common, through our shares. Then we sell some more shares to an investor. We use the money to hire more people and turn it into a product, to market it, and so on. That’s how the system works,
Neal Stephenson (Cryptonomicon)
The big banks and the exchanges have a clear responsibility to protect investors—to handle investor stock market orders in the best possible way, and to create a fair marketplace. They’ve been paid to compromise investors’ interests, while pretending to guard those interests. I was surprised more people weren’t angry with them.
Michael Lewis (Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt)
Balance your risk portfolio. When you’re going to take a risk in one domain, offset it by being unusually cautious in another realm of your life. Like the entrepreneurs who kept their day jobs while testing their ideas, or Carmen Medina taking a job to protect against security leaks when she was pushing the CIA to embrace the internet, this can help you avoid unnecessary gambles. 7. Highlight the reasons not to support your idea. Remember Rufus Griscom, the entrepreneur in chapter 3 who told investors why they shouldn’t invest in his company? You can do this, too. Start by describing the three biggest weaknesses
Adam M. Grant (Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World)
Many financial analysts will find Emerson and Emery more interesting and appealing stocks than the other two—primarily, perhaps, because of their better “market action,” and secondarily because of their faster recent growth in earnings. Under our principles of conservative investment the first is not a valid reason for selection—that is something for the speculators to play around with. The second has validity, but within limits. Can the past growth and the presumably good prospects of Emery Air Freight justify a price more than 60 times its recent earnings?1 Our answer would be: Maybe for someone who has made an in-depth study of the possibilities of this company and come up with exceptionally firm and optimistic conclusions. But not for the careful investor who wants to be reasonably sure in advance that he is not committing the typical Wall Street error of overenthusiasm for good performance in earnings and in the stock market.* The same cautionary statements seem called for in the case of Emerson Electric, with a special reference to the market’s current valuation of over a billion dollars for the intangible, or earning-power, factor here. We should add that the “electronics industry,” once a fair-haired child of the stock market, has in general fallen on disastrous days. Emerson is an outstanding exception, but it will have to continue to be such an exception for a great many years in the future before the 1970 closing price will have been fully justified by its subsequent performance. By contrast, both ELTRA at 27 and Emhart at 33 have the earmarks of companies with sufficient value behind their price to constitute reasonably protected investments. Here the investor can, if he wishes, consider himself basically a part owner of these businesses, at a cost corresponding to what the
Benjamin Graham (The Intelligent Investor)
As Robert Kiyosaki learned during his study of admiralty law, corporations came into common usage in the 1500s to protect investors in maritime ventures. Prior to the popular use of corporations, investors would come together as a partnership, outfit a ship, and send it out for trading purposes. If the ship was lost at sea, the investors could not only lose everything but also be personally sued by various creditors. Of course, this exposure deterred people from risk taking and discouraged economic activity. Seeing this, the English Crown and courts allowed for the charter of corporations whereby risks and liabilities could be limited to the corporation itself. The shareholders, the investors in the corporation, were liable only to the extent of their contribution to the business. This was a significant development in world economic history.
Garret Sutton
But Anita Roddick had a different take on that. In 1976, before the words to say it had been found, she set out to create a business that was socially and environmentally regenerative by design. Opening The Body Shop in the British seaside town of Brighton, she sold natural plant-based cosmetics (never tested on animals) in refillable bottles and recycled boxes (why throw away when you can use again?) while paying a fair price to the communities worldwide that supplied cocoa butter, brazil nut oil and dried herbs. As production expanded, the business began to recycle its wastewater for using in its products and was an early investor in wind power. Meanwhile, company profits went to The Body Shop Foundation, which gave them to social and environmental causes. In all, a pretty generous enterprise. Roddick’s motivation? ‘I want to work for a company that contributes to and is part of the community,’ she later explained. ‘If I can’t do something for the public good, what the hell am I doing?’47 Such a values-driven mission is what the analyst Marjorie Kelly calls a company’s ‘living purpose’—turning on its head the neoliberal script that the business of business is simply business. Roddick proved that business can be far more than that, by embedding benevolent values and a regenerative intent at the company’s birth. ‘We dedicated the Articles of Association and Memoranda—which in England is the legal definition of the purpose of your company—to human rights advocacy and social and environmental change,’ she explained in 2005, ‘so everything the company did had that as its canopy.’48 Today’s most innovative enterprises are inspired by the same idea: that the business of business is to contribute to a thriving world. And the growing family of enterprise structures that are intentionally distributive by design—including cooperatives, not-for-profits, community interest companies, and benefit corporations—can be regenerative by design too.49 By explicitly making a regenerative commitment in their corporate by-laws and enshrining it in their governance, they can safeguard a ‘living purpose’ through times of leadership change and protect it from mission creep. Indeed the most profound act of corporate responsibility for any company today is to rewrite its corporate by-laws, or articles of association, in order to redefine itself with a living purpose, rooted in regenerative and distributive design, and then to live and work by it.
Kate Raworth (Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist)
Using a familiar template, the King had authorized a group of Virginians to form the Ohio Company, granting it the right to settle half a million acres and sell this land to other private investors. Given that the primary economic activity of the French in the region was trading with the Indians, they had established trading posts where Indians could bring their furs. To protect this valuable trade, they started building forts to support a military presence. In response, with commercial interests and colonial interests often one and the same, the Virginians built their own presence to rival that of the French.
Bhu Srinivasan (Americana: A 400-Year History of American Capitalism)
JP Morgan was protected from the risk of the loans going bad, and investors were paid premiums for taking on the risk.
Andrew Ross Sorkin (Too Big to Fail: The Inside Story of How Wall Street and Washington Fought to Save the Financial System from Crisis — and Themselves)
It is not the responsibility of the Federal Reserve—nor would it be appropriate—to protect lenders and investors from the consequences of their financial decisions.
Ben S. Bernanke (The Courage to Act: A Memoir of a Crisis and Its Aftermath)
The problem was a crazy problem. It wasn’t going to have a non-crazy solution. Still, she’d sort of shocked herself. She’d never had the slightest interest in business. But if she wanted to save the country, she’d need to become an entrepreneur, and create a company—though in business, she quickly learned, she couldn’t talk like that. When she said she wanted to build a tool “to save the country,” people just smiled and thought she was goofy in the head. But when she said things like “I’m going to create a data-based tool for disease prevention that companies can use to secure their supply chains,” serious business types nodded. “Five smart people have replied with confusion when I said the company was to save the world and protect our country,” said Charity, after her first attempts to explain her vague idea. “Then when I said, ‘We’re going to do private government operations, like Blackwater,’ their eyes lit up and they said, ‘Oh wow, you could take over the world.’ ” She’d entered the private sector with the bizarre ambition to use it to create an institution that might be used by the public sector. She’d already hired twenty people, among them public-health nurses and some of the team at the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub responsible for genomic sequencing, including Josh Batson and David Dynerman. Joe DeRisi had signed on as an adviser; Carter Mecher was about to. She’d raised millions of dollars in capital. Venrock, a leading health care venture capitalist, had taken a stake in the new company. As a local health officer, she hadn’t been able to get the tens of thousands of dollars she needed for some new disease-stopping machine. In the private sector, people would throw tens of millions at an idea: if she failed, it wouldn’t be because investors wouldn’t give her the money to try. The Public Health Company, she’d called it.
Michael Lewis (The Premonition: A Pandemic Story)
One enterprising U.S. brokerage firm, Interactive Brokers, announced that, unlike its competitors, it did not sell retail stock market orders to high-frequency traders, and even installed a button that enabled investors to route their orders directly to IEX, the stock market created by Brad Katsuyama and his team, who would protect them.
Michael Lewis (Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt)
By 1977, Institutional Investor declared that “indexing is likely to be an idea whose time will pass.”38 At any rate, there was widespread skepticism that ordinary investors would ever adopt index funds. After all, they were completely unaware of the research being pumped out by academia on the poor average performance of their mutual fund managers, and anyway, who would want to just settle for mediocrity? “It seems unlikely that the public will ever embrace buying the averages in this way, since individuals usually seek dramatic gains, not a market-linked performance many equate with mediocrity,” the industry magazine wrote.39 Fouse later jokingly quoted the Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels to explain why the general public was slow to cotton on: “Only small secrets need protection. Big secrets are protected by the public’s incredulity.
Robin Wigglesworth (Trillions: How a Band of Wall Street Renegades Invented the Index Fund and Changed Finance Forever)
TWO AND A HALF CENTURIES AGO, Amsterdam was the world’s commercial center, but many of its wealthy merchants were reeling from one of the world’s first financial crises. The shares of the British East India Company had collapsed, culminating in a series of bank failures, government bailouts, and ultimately nationalization, a debacle that rippled across the continent’s nascent markets. For a little-known Dutch merchant and stockbroker, it proved the inspiration for an idea ahead of its time. In 1774, Abraham von Ketwich set up a novel, pooled investment trust he called Eendragt Maakt Magt—Dutch for “Unity Creates Strength.” This would sell two thousand shares for five hundred guilders each to individual investors, and invest the proceeds into a diversified portfolio of fifty bonds. These were divided into ten different categories, from plantation loans, bonds backed by Spanish or Danish toll road payments, to an assortment of European government bonds. At the time, bonds were physical certificates written on paper or even goatskin, and these were stored in a solid iron chest with three locks, which could be opened only by Eendragt Maakt Magt’s board and an independent notary. The aim was to pay a 4 percent annual dividend, and disburse the final proceeds only after twenty-five years, hoping that the diversity of the portfolio would protect investors.1 As it turns out, a subsequent Anglo-Dutch war in 1780 and Napoleon’s occupation of Holland in 1795 wreaked havoc on Eendragt Maakt Magt. The annual payments never materialized, and investors didn’t receive their money back until 1824, albeit then receiving 561 guilders a share. Nonetheless, Eendragt Maakt Magt was a brilliant invention that would go on to inspire the birth of investment trusts in Great Britain and eventually the mutual fund we know today. It is also arguably the ultimate intellectual forefather of today’s index funds, given its minimal trading, diversified approach, and low fees, charging a mere 0.2 percent a year.
Robin Wigglesworth (Trillions: How a Band of Wall Street Renegades Invented the Index Fund and Changed Finance Forever)
One way to make yourself less vulnerable to copycats is to build a moat around your business. How Can I Build a Moat? As you scale your company, you need to think about how to proactively defend against competition. The more success you have, the more your competitors will grab their battering ram and start storming the castle. In medieval times, you’d dig a moat to keep enemy armies from getting anywhere near your castle. In business, you think about your economic moat. The idea of an economic moat was popularized by the business magnate and investor Warren Buffett. It refers to a company’s distinct advantage over its competitors, which allows it to protect its market share and profitability. This is hugely important in a competitive space because it’s easy to become commoditized if you don’t have some type of differentiation. In SaaS, I’ve seen four types of moats. Integrations (Network Effect) Network effect is when the value of a product or service increases because of the number of users in the network. A network of one telephone isn’t useful. Add a second telephone, and you can call each other. But add a hundred telephones, and the network is suddenly quite valuable. Network effects are fantastic moats. Think about eBay or Craigs-list, which have huge amounts of sellers and buyers already on their platforms. It’s difficult to compete with them because everyone’s already there. In SaaS—particularly in bootstrapped SaaS companies—the network effect moat comes not from users, but integrations. Zapier is the prototypical example of this. It’s a juggernaut, and not only because it’s integrated with over 3,000 apps. It has widened its moat with nonpublic API integrations, meaning that if you want to compete with it, you have to go to that other company and get their internal development team to build an API for you. That’s a huge hill to climb if you want to launch a Zapier competitor. Every integration a customer activates in your product, especially if it puts more of their data into your database, is another reason for them not to switch to a competitor. A Strong Brand When we talk about your brand, we’re not talking about your color scheme or logo. Your brand is your reputation—it’s what people say about your company when you’re not around.
Rob Walling (The SaaS Playbook: Build a Multimillion-Dollar Startup Without Venture Capital)