The article explains how unglamorous, overlooked industries—funeral homes, parking lots, trash hauling—generate outsized profits because competitors simply ignore them. Steve Ross built a media empire by rolling up these "invisible" businesses, and companies like Constellation Software continue this playbook today by acquiring niche software firms others dismiss as too small or slow-growing.

• Invisible companies exist in plain sight because no one searches for them: they're unknown, their data is private or buried, they're assumed to be mature dead-ends, or they carry social stigma. Since potential competitors don't know what they're missing, they never compete, leaving profits untouched.
• Standard business filters—looking for large markets, rapid growth, novel technology—screen out smaller, operationally mundane businesses that are quietly profitable. The opportunities aren't hidden; the algorithm most investors use just skips over them.
• Constellation Software has returned 34% annually since 2006 by buying boring vertical-market software businesses (marina management, funeral home records, library cataloging) that venture capitalists and other acquirers abandoned as too small. The company estimates 38,000+ similar businesses still exist.

The article argues that true competitive moats aren’t static walls but dynamic engines built through disciplined, low-margin strategies—exemplified by Amazon’s willingness to accept slim profits. It shows how maintaining and evolving that “engine” is the only way to extend a moat’s shelf life before competitors erode it.

• Bezos deliberately kept Amazon's margins razor-thin, making it a barrier that big rivals like IBM or Microsoft couldn't risk matching without hurting their own earnings.
• In 2007, analysts and portfolio managers mocked Amazon's thin margins as a sham rather than recognizing it as a deliberate moat-building strategy.
• Moats built this way aren't static walls but engines requiring constant upkeep—cost control, process optimization, reinvestment—or they decay, as seen in Anthropic's compute-driven efficiency gains in AI.
• Fat profits attract competitors to invest and invade a market, while low margins deter most newcomers from entering at all.