Sophie Buonassisi is an investor at GTM Fund, an early-stage venture firm that surrounds B2B SaaS founders with the best go-to-market operators in the business, and a driving force behind its media brand, GTMnow. She came to venture from a marketing and growth background and works hands-on with portfolio companies on scaling and winning in competitive B2B SaaS markets. Based in Vancouver but frequently on the road for the globally investing fund, she is known for the surfer/wave/surfboard evaluation model, the idea of 'earned secrets,' and a personal 'guiding triangulation' framework built around innovation, education, and community.
“There's a wave, a surfer, and a surfboard. The wave is the macro trend, the why-now that creates the opportunity. The surfer is the founder — their skill, vision, tenacity to ride that wave. And the surfboard is the product: super important, but a little more flexible, because naturally it will evolve and adapt over time.”
“You can have a great team and the wrong timing, or a massive wave with the wrong surfer, and neither works. The magic really happens when both line up.”
“Earned secrets — founders who have stumbled upon a deep, non-obvious insight into the problem space. Sometimes it's through lived experience, and sometimes it's obsession, founders who dive so deeply into a problem that they discover truths others might have missed.”
“We're not looking for founders who are well-rounded at everything. We really want N-of-one people who are world-class at something.”
“Tech moats are declining, especially now with AI. It really is your go-to-market strategy and execution that determines whether you win or not.”
“It's not necessarily about your track record anymore, because of AI. It really is that distribution, that earned secret, that creates the leverage.”
“Revenue is nice, but it's not predictive. We'd rather see a hundred K from ten deeply aligned customers who rave about your product than five hundred K from a bit of a grab bag of unaligned logos.”
“There's an extremely strong correlation between great companies and speed of iteration. So fast shipping pretty much equals fast learning.”