Last month, I went cycling with friends around the North Coast—62 kilometers. After returning, I used the tools at hand to turn the exercise data into a 3D trajectory video and posted it on Facebook. Friends thought it was cool and asked how I made it.

I started taking inventory and was shocked.

The Multinational Supply Chain Behind One Video

Hardware: iPhone 6S for photos, Garmin Edge 520 for recording GPS trajectory, speed, heart rate, and elevation. Two devices from two companies in the US and Taiwan respectively.

Data transmission: Garmin’s data syncs via Bluetooth to Garmin Connect cloud, then automatically pushes to Strava. The two platforms have API integration—I don’t need to manually operate anything. After finishing the ride and showering, the data is already organized.

Video generation: Strava’s data is then read by Relive, which automatically generates a 3D terrain trajectory video. Add free background music from YouTube’s music library, convert the file, and a professional-looking video is complete.

From start to finish, I mobilized products and services from at least five multinational companies: Apple, Garmin, Strava, Relive, and Google (YouTube). Their conversations—through APIs, standardized data formats, and open integration interfaces—run smoother than any conversation I’d have with customer service from any of them.

An amateur cyclist’s weekend record is backed by an entire digital collaboration supply chain.

The New Definition of Moats

This is worth writing about not because the technology itself is impressive, but because it reveals a profound shift in business logic.

Over the past decade, one of business textbooks’ favorite concepts has been the “moat”—what is your core advantage? What would it cost competitors to catch up? The underlying assumption of this entire discourse is: competitiveness comes from “things others can’t do.”

But in the API economy world, the source of competitiveness is flipping.

Garmin’s strength is hardware and sensors. If they also wanted to build their own social platform, create 3D videos, and handle music licensing, these peripheral functions alone could drain their R&D resources. Conversely, Strava doesn’t need to make GPS watches, and Relive doesn’t need to build communities—each company focuses on their strongest link, then connects to others through APIs.

Moats have shifted from “keeping others out” to “bringing others in.”

The more you open up and integrate, the more seamless the user experience becomes. Users stay in your ecosystem not because they can’t leave, but because the cost of leaving is too high—because you’ve deeply integrated with other tools in their lives.

Transformation Challenges Seen Through Running a Company

In running my company, I’ve deeply experienced the brutal side of this logic.

Many of Taiwan’s SMEs still operate with a “do everything ourselves” mindset. Build their own websites, write their own ERP, handle their own CRM. Not because they don’t know better tools exist, but because “integration” requires not just technical capability, but a mental openness.

Many business owners’ first reaction to hearing about sharing customer data with third parties through APIs is fear: “Will my data be stolen?” “Will they use my customers to do business?” These concerns aren’t groundless, but they reflect zero-sum thinking—what I give you is what I lose.

Companies that truly understand digital collaboration think about something else: the data I give you, after your processing, returns to me with greater value. This is a positive-sum game.

I’ve spent a lot of time explaining this principle to clients. Some understood; others ultimately closed off their systems and went it alone. The results a few years later were clear: those willing to integrate mostly survived and thrived; many who insisted on going solo were eliminated by the market.

Cooperation Isn’t Virtue, It’s Efficiency

I want to emphasize something: cooperation in the digital age isn’t a “moral choice” or some utopian vision of “mutual benefit.” It’s cold, hard efficiency calculation.

How many people, how much money, how much time does a company need to build a complete user experience from scratch? If that experience can be assembled in two weeks by integrating three existing services, then “doing it yourself” isn’t just slow—it’s wasteful.

This is why today’s most successful companies often aren’t those that “do everything,” but those that “assemble best.” Apple doesn’t manufacture memory, but it assembled the world’s best phones. Shopify doesn’t do logistics, but it integrated the best e-commerce experience.

Assembly capability is the new core competitiveness.

And the prerequisite for assembly is openness. You must be willing to expose part of yourself to partners and trust that they’ll expose their best parts to you. This requires not technology, but vision.

Insights From a Cycling Trip

Back to that 62-kilometer video.

I’m not actually a great cyclist. My average speed that day was about 22 kilometers per hour, with only a few hundred meters of climbing. But this ordinary ride, with an entire cross-national digital ecosystem operating silently behind it, could become professional-looking content.

This is the power of collaboration. It doesn’t make the strong stronger—it enables ordinary people to produce extraordinary things.

If you’re an entrepreneur, ask yourself: among the things you’re currently spending the most resources on, which actually don’t need to be done in-house? Which could be accomplished by integrating existing services?

Learn to open up, learn to integrate. In this era, cooperation isn’t a bonus—it’s the entry ticket.