Andreessen Horowitz, "The Empty Promise of Data Moats" (Casado & Lauten, 2019) — most "data network effects" are really scale effects that diminish

Claim: Andreessen Horowitz (Casado & Lauten, 2019), "The Empty Promise of Data Moats": "there generally isn't an inherent network effect that comes from merely having more data." Most "data network effects" are really scale effects that diminish — the marginal value of incremental data falls while the cost of collecting/cleaning it rises, so "the defensible moat erodes as the data corpus grows."

Source: https://a16z.com/the-empty-promise-of-data-moats/

Confidence: Verified (the piece, the argument).

Notable: a16z is a tech investor with incentive to hype data, yet argues against the hype. That asymmetry is itself a credibility marker.

Why this matters for Candid: This is the centrepiece of the brief — the single most powerful independent voice against the "data = competitive advantage" frame. Anchors R7 — Test defensibility with one question: would your competitor's version of this look exactly like yours? If yes, it's a commodity and Synthesis: data is a defensible asset only when proprietary + hard to replicate + tightly coupled to a feedback loop + continuously refreshed — otherwise it is an operational byproduct any competitor can buy or collect.