Rajaram: No amount of distribution will save a company without remarkable products
Gokul Rajaram · Gokul Rajaram: How to Analyse for Durability and Defensibility in a World of AI · 20VC with Harry Stebbings · Mar 16, 2026 · at 1:46
Gokul Rajaram is an investor at Marathon Management Partners and former executive at DoorDash and Google. He reflects on how Google's product-focused culture shaped his core investment thesis.
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“So I think I ultimately, my core investing thesis is that if there is not remarkable product, all the go-to marketing distribution in the world will not save you.”
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More from Gokul Rajaram
Rajaram: B2B software switching costs will drop to zero within two years
“I think switching costs is less going to go to essentially zero because over the next one or two years, ability to port data, your data as a business or consumer from any ecosystem to another ecosystem is going to be very easy.”
Rajaram: The public market software selloff due to AI is 100% overreaction
“I think this is 100% overreaction because not all software companies are created equal, and we can talk about what the differences are.”
Rajaram: AI will enable pixel-by-pixel cloning of software products
“And then people are going to be able to replicate almost pixel by pixel. The experience you have with one product in a different products, you'll have clones popping up left, right, and center and data portability is going to be easy in that case.”
Rajaram: Scale is no longer a competitive moat for pure software companies
“Software earlier was a scale game where because you had produced a lot of software, it was cheaper for you to produce a lot of the guess what? Now everybody can produce software as cheaply as anybody else.”