In April 2020, Quibi launched with $1.75 billion in funding, Hollywood’s biggest names, and a library of premium content built by people who had run studios. Six months later it shut down, having burned roughly $1.4 billion and converted about 500,000 paying users. The product mostly worked. The content won Emmys. What Quibi never had was a commercial answer: who is this for, why now, why pay, and why stay.

The fastest-to-$100M record broke so many times this year it stopped being a record. Meanwhile the median AI-native company keeps just 40% of its revenue. Speed tells you the market noticed. Retention tells you it cared.

As companies bring AI into decision-making, the advantage is moving upstream: to better problem framing, reliable data, and experienced judgment. Faster answers are useful. Clearer decisions are what make them valuable.

Tech is no longer the moat. Everyone has access to the same models, APIs, and no-code tools. What now defends a company is not what it can build, but how clearly it thinks, how deeply it embeds, how efficiently it operates, and how powerfully it reaches the market. In 2026, the winners won’t simply have AI. They’ll have a point of view.

You built a great product. The market isn't moving. The team is busy. Nothing's compounding. If that pattern feels familiar, you're not having a marketing problem, a sales problem, or a product problem. You're having a GTM problem. We unpack what GTM actually is, where most companies get it wrong, what good looks like, and why the function is shifting faster than most teams realise.