What was the moat of Dropbox? Of Instagram? Of GitHub? Or of countless other very successful startups when they started?

Anyone know when this "have no moat" meme appeared? Even 5 years ago I don't remember seeing it on every post.

Whether a product has network effects makes a difference.

I would argue Dropbox did have a moat. It didn't merely store your data. It made it possible to make backup efficiently when bandwidth wasn't all that good.

Reading "no moat" so often is also tied to the fact those companies happen to be getting surreal valuations, at a quite early stage, showing no profit, building a tech that doesn't seem difficult to reproduce.

Dropbox had a super smooth UX that somehow nobody else replicated (seriously Google wtf). Instagram and Github won on network effects.