The SLG / PLG Hybrid

What if I told you, you don't need to pick one GTM

This morning I read this beautiful post Trading Margin for Moat: Why the Forward Deployed Engineer Is the Hottest Job in Startups by Joe Schmidt at a16z, and several things resonated based on my own experience as an early stage founder in 2025. The physics of AI-driven value creation in enterprises is such that going beyond demos and wrapper-ware requires building a deeper understanding of the business context in which the product will be deployed, and delivering somewhat of a tailored solution that solves for the end outcome. This typically requires some form of “professional services” or “forward deployed engineers” or “solution engineers” (or, simply, consulting).

The obvious question is whether the Service Led Growth (SLG) approach can drive the rapid revenue scaling that is necessary to achieve venture returns. There’s a philosophical discussion here that we won’t get into about founder motivations, investor alignment, and the risks of short-termism to a business’s terminal value. You can be Bezos and “trade margin for moat” to build a multi-generational behemoth, or you can be a tourist-founder looking for a quick flip to land a fancy VP role in an acquihire once you’ve spent all of your seed money, or you can be somewhere in between. All are respectable life paths.

The interesting thing to me though, is that a second order effect of AI destroying the capital needs for product development may be that startups no longer need to pick one GTM. What if SLG could be paired up with PLG in a “greater than the sum of its parts” way?

In March, as we were going through our customer discovery and ideation process, I shared the following diagram with my cofounders to structure how we could think about our activities at this early stage:

SLG provides an edge in understanding enterprise problems deeply and spotting non-obvious productization opportunities. PLG provides rapid feedback, wide top-of-funnel, and brand identity to close large enterprise deals.

The popular maxim in startup-land is that trying to do both can kill your company so you should only stick to one. But what if “this time is different”?

1. The costs of building and distributing are falling precipitously. The scarce resource is a precise articulation of real underserved problems and a product positioning that becomes the obvious choice to solve them.

2. There is a lot of buyer fatigue around shallow products / wrappers that don’t add lasting value beyond shiny demos. People want stuff that solves their specific problems well.

3. In order to make the best strategic decisions, an early stage application layer team needs clarity about both the ground reality of enterprises (to know what can be sold) and the rapidly shifting contours of the AI research/tech/product frontier (to know what can be built). SLG helps with the former and PLG with the latter.

Obviously, time and bandwidth is the limiting factor. One may need to double down on a single GTM once further along to maximize burn efficiency. But at an early stage, the hybrid approach could uncover differentiated perspectives about the market that serve as the “earned secrets” to build your Thiel-esque monopoly on.