The GTM insight is the bet now, not the product

Technical execution used to be the differentiator. It mostly isn't anymore. Building the product is closer to a solved problem than it's ever been, which means the actual bet at seed has moved somewhere else.

It's moved to go-to-market. Not go-to-market as a checklist, a paid channel here, a partnerships motion there, but go-to-market as a specific, non-obvious insight about how this exact company reaches its exact customer, the kind a generic playbook would never have told them.

The sequence matters as much as the insight itself. Founders who master one channel before moving to the next save the time, money, and energy that gets burned by founders spraying across five channels at once, hoping one of them sticks. Getting that order right is its own skill, and it's one I look for directly, not something I assume follows automatically from a big budget.

What I'm actually underwriting is whether the team has an ear for this. Not a fixed GTM plan, an actual, working ability to notice a real distribution insight when it shows up and move on it fast, instead of sticking to the plan that was written before there were any real customers to learn from. The product tells me whether the team can build. The GTM instinct tells me whether they can win.