Episode 6 of the @GTMnow_ VC Series is live! I sat down with @bqueener (Partner at @bonfire_vc) who joined Salesforce early, a co-founder of SmartRecruiters, and is one of the sharpest seed-stage investors I know, to talk about what three decades of building and investing taught him about what actually wins in a world where anyone can build anything. Before the conversation with Brett, @PaulGTM and I also talk through what we're seeing across founders, funds, and go-to-market teams right now. A few takeaways that are particularly worth sitting with: 1. The GTM playbook most of us learned is already gone. The entire motion from SDR to CSM was designed around one problem: the product didn't do the job, so humans had to explain it. When the product actually does the job, that whole layer of explanation collapses. You're showing product earlier, deploying before you close, and tracking outcomes from day one. The people who built careers on translating software into value have to find a new edge. 2. Your right to win becomes table stakes every 30 days. In SaaS, you could build a wedge, raise a Seed round, hit $1M ARR, and spend 18 months turning that into a go-to-market machine. That’s a thing of the past. The rate of change in what your product does (and what your competitors can ship) means the messaging, positioning, and value prop have to move in lock step. 3. The founder profile that wins now looks inherently different. Brett looks for founders who are building, not managing people who build. You need to be actually in the tools, shipping, and learning what the product can do firsthand. If you're not building, how can you expect to have a clear enough point of view on what you're selling or how to sell it? 4. Face-to-face matters more in the AI era. Buyers right now are more nervous than ever. They're betting their careers on products that are evolving fast and vendors who might look completely different in 6 months. They're buying whether they trust you to build what they'll need tomorrow. That trust is still built in person. It’s no surprise that events are creating 75%+ of the pipeline for Brett's early-stage portfolio companies. 5. Vertical software is the most defensible bet in AI right now. In vertical markets, customers hand you everything: their workflow, their edge cases, their entire context. That data is the moat. And to make matters even better, the non-technical buyer is now one of the most attractive customers in the market because AI finally makes their job meaningfully easier without requiring them to learn anything. Big thank you to our series partner, @AngelList, who have been instrumental in helping GTMfund scale since the early days.