Two Years to Find Out.

There’s a famous line in venture, credited to Marc Andreessen, that the only thing that matters is getting to product-market fit.

I love that line. I’ve repeated it in more board meetings and investment conversations than I can count. Because I believe it. Nail the product, find the market that wants it, and most other sins get forgiven.

But for the question investors are actually wrestling with right now, I think it’s the wrong lens.

I noticed it over the last four weeks, asking every investor I sat down with the same question: what keeps you up at night? I asked it in board meetings, over coffee, at dinners, on calls. I knew AI would show up in the answers somewhere. What I expected was for it to be spread across the usual places. Pipeline. Exit strategies. Some tactical stuff. Instead, it kept coming back as one theme, almost word for word, every single time.

Will the portfolio remain viable in 2 to 4 years amid AI disruption? Can the current portfolio move fast enough?

Not whether AI is real. Everyone has moved past that. The fear is about speed, whether the companies they already own can adapt fast enough to a world that’s changing underneath them.

And here’s the thing I noticed when we dug into it, conversation after conversation. The worry always started with the product. Can our software survive? Will customers still pay for it? But it never ended there. The more we talked, the clearer it became that this is not just about the product. It’s about the market, the people, and the GTM, and whether the leadership teams can adapt to the new world. Whether anyone inside these companies is investing in the right GTM to sell more effectively under the new rules. You can have a perfectly good product and still lose, because the market moved and the humans and the motion around the product didn’t.

Now, if you looked at the average board pack, you’d think everything was fine. Every company now has an AI strategy. But how real is it? Putting agentic AI in the product is one thing. Knowing how to use AI to execute your GTM, actually to build and close pipeline, and knowing what to do first, is a different thing entirely.

Here’s the simplest test for how real it is. Ask how the GTM team actually works differently today than it did a year ago, how pipeline gets built, how deals get closed. Who decided it should work that way? Most leadership teams can’t give you a straight answer. And a company that can’t answer those questions doesn’t have an AI strategy. It has a slide.

This is the part I keep coming back to, and it’s the part I think investors should care about most. Outside of product, GTM is the biggest lever a company has for surviving disruption. You can’t rebuild a product in a quarter. But how a company goes to market, who it targets, how it builds a pipeline, how it closes, and how effective every seller and marketer becomes can all move fast. If the fear is whether the portfolio can adapt in time, this is the lever you can actually pull. And it’s the one most boards aren’t looking at.

The companies pulling it have made a deliberate choice about people and ownership. Who builds, who decides, who runs the machine. When nobody makes that choice, everyone improvises, and improvisation doesn’t scale into pipeline.

You can see the gap in the data. The 2026 State of AI for GTM shows that 24% of companies are seeing real impact from AI in their GTM, while 53% are seeing none. Everyone has access to the same tools. The difference isn’t spend. Its execution. Half the portfolio is paying the AI tax and getting nothing back, and the AI slide won’t tell you which half you own.

So when investors ask me whether their portfolio can move fast enough, my honest answer is that most of them are measuring the wrong thing. AI spend measures effort. Shipped features measure effort. Neither one measures adaptation.

If you want to see what adaptation actually looks like, you have to look at what’s happening inside GTM right now. Because the ground has already shifted, and it looks like this:

→ Performance marketing is turning into an engineering discipline. The loop of SEO, ads, testing, and optimization is increasingly being run by agents, not people.

→ When AI makes average content and design close to free, taste becomes one of the scarcest assets in a company.

→ Everything is starting to sound identical. Same messaging, same tone, same AI-generated polish everywhere. Standing out is the new problem to solve.

→ Only around 5% of your buyers are ready to buy today. Brand is what wins the other 95% long before they enter the market.

→ Buyers follow humans, not logos. A founder’s voice has become a real growth channel.

→ We spent years trying to digitize connection, and it turns out people crave being in a room together. Events are working again.

→ The bar for change has gone up. Buyers see more risk in a wrong call, so fewer move at all. Salespeople who build the case for change are pulling away from those running an order process.

→ Usage is not value. Retention is earned by customer success teams who can prove a business case, not by those reporting logins.

Put it all together, and it’s not just the CMO role that flips; it’s every GTM leadership role: from proven playbooks to first principles. Marketing from pipeline hero to brand builder. Sales from running a process to building the case for change. All of them, from leading humans alone to orchestrating humans + agents.

Read that list again and notice what it means for the people running GTM in your portfolio. Most of them were promoted for mastering the old playbook. Demand gen built on search and paid. Pipeline built on headcount. Content built on volume. Sales were built on running a process for buyers who had already decided—retention built on usage.

Every one of those muscles is depreciating, and the new muscles, taste, judgment, brand, founder voice, orchestrating humans and agents, are ones most leadership teams have never had to build. That gap is the succession conversation nobody has scheduled. And it’s why the people question and the GTM question are really the same question.

So here’s what I’d do with all of this. At the next board meeting, skip the AI spend line and ask the questions that measure adaptation instead. Ask who owns AI in the GTM. Ask how the team builds and closes pipeline differently than it did a year ago, and who is accountable for making that better every quarter. Ask marketing how the company shows up in AI search results, because that’s where buyers are discovering vendors now, and a blank look is a value-creation workstream waiting to be funded. Ask where taste lives in the company now that average content costs nothing. Ask whether the founder’s voice is being built into a real growth channel, and who is helping them do it. Then move past marketing, because that’s where most board conversations stop. Ask sales how they decide which buyers are genuinely willing to change, and what they are doing to build the case for change rather than run an order process. Ask customer success to show the business case they have proven inside their top ten accounts, because usage reports will not survive a renewal negotiation in this market. Ask who owns RevOps, and whether every customer interaction lands in one place or in five systems that don’t talk to each other. And ask, quietly, whether the current CMO can make the flip from playbooks to first principles, because that answer sets the clock on everything else.

None of these questions will make anyone comfortable. But the companies that can answer them are the ones that can move fast enough. The ones that can’t are one CFO question away from finding out the hard way.

And if you’re sitting on a portfolio right now, worrying about whether the products will survive, I’d gently suggest you’re pointed at the wrong end of the problem. The product question takes years to answer, and there’s not much you can do about it this quarter. The GTM question can be asked next week. Start there.

This Week’s Tangible Prompt

Paste this into Claude or ChatGPT. Once per portfolio company if you’re an investor, once for your own company if you’re a founder. Fill in the brackets honestly.

“I want you to assess whether this company will still be viable in two to three years as AI reshapes its market. Here’s the company: what it sells, who buys it, how it’s priced, and how it goes to market today: [four or five sentences]. Here’s the leadership team and the playbooks they were promoted for: [two sentences]. Stress test it across four areas. Product: if agents can do the job customers pay for, what’s left that they’d still pay for? Market: How are these buyers discovering and choosing vendors now, and does this company show up in those channels? People: which skills on this leadership team are depreciating, and what’s missing for the next two years? GTM: If an AI-native competitor launched tomorrow, how would it build and close pipeline against this company, and what would it do differently? Then give me a verdict: viable as is, viable with changes (listed in order of priority), or not viable. Finish with the three moves you’d make in the next two quarters.”

Run it honestly, and you’ll have a better answer to the viability question than any AI slide in a board pack will give you. It won’t be a comfortable read. But you’ll have it before the market hands you the same answer the hard way.

That’s all for this week.

See you next Sunday.

Cheers,

Ed & Josh.

Worth your time this week:

1. Win the AI Answer Engine or Lose the Buyer — 84% of CMOs now discover vendors through AI tools. Your funnel maths just broke.
2. AI Search, Zero-Click and the B2B Buyer Journey in 2026 — why your website traffic is lying to your board.
3. The GTM Skill Stack Leaders Didn’t Need Until Now — Forrester — the leadership gap nobody is budgeting for.
4. How Lovable Is Building Its GTM Leadership Team — what a $2bn AI-native company hires for.
5. The 2026 State of AI for GTM: What’s Actually Working — the gap between the 24% seeing real impact and the 53% seeing none.

PS… If you want to know where your GTM motion stands in the age of AI...

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