Why Marketing, Sales, Customer Success & Product Are the New Power Quartet
Few years ago – I told my leadership team that we are seeing the peak of software engineering. Some disagreed with that statement as it was pessimistic. Yet, here we are a few years later with the realization that the peak software engineering is solidly behind us. The universities will keep churning out more and more graduates that the industry is not ready to absorb. Early career engineers will not get the mentorship and experience required to become senior engineers.
I have been using Claude Code for several months now to build products, advise portfolio companies, and test ideas. It has been a game changer for me. Having cut my teeth on embedded C programming – I never quite got used to GUIs – so the prospect of going back to good old command line was comforting. I was able to code so many amazing things without really having to worry about the minute details of different platforms etc. I was able to put my 25 years of experience to use, myself. However, I can see when someone is busy with their full time job – it’s hard to look outside and learn new things. I was fortunate to now be managing my own time at the perfect inflection point.
The productivity gains with AI Assisted coding are mind-boggling. 84% of developers are now using AI tools and 41% of all code being written is AI-generated. I see this first hand every day.
But here is something worth thinking about — when every developer has these tools, the product advantage disappears. If I can build something in a weekend that used to take a team of fifty engineers three months, so can my competitor. So can a two-person startup in Bangalore. So can an intern with Cursor. This is why we see small feature releases by the hyper scalers wiping out tens of billions of $ worth of market cap in companies.
More fishermen fishing in the same pool.
For many product ideas – there are about 15 companies building the same thing, calling on the same people and trying out the same things.
I have been thinking about this a lot and talking to founders, investors, and operators about what actually propels companies forward when the product moat is shrinking. I keep arriving at the same answer: four things working together. I call them the Four Horsemen — Marketing, Sales, Customer Success, and Product.
The Product Moat is Shrinking
Look at what is happening. Cursor hit $200M+ ARR. Lovable is at $200M ARR with a $6.6B valuation. Gamma became profitable with 50 million users. These are AI-native companies with tiny teams doing what legacy software companies needed hundreds of engineers to do. And this is just the beginning.
McKinsey’s research shows go-to-market transformation is now one of the fastest-rising strategic priorities for software executives. The people who build software for a living are saying the product alone isn’t enough anymore. They need to fix how they sell.
The build-vs-buy calculus is flipping. Non-technical users can prototype solutions that used to require entire engineering teams. I see this with our portfolio companies — the ones winning are the ones who figured out distribution, messaging, and customer relationships early.
In the long term, almost every SaaS product in a category will converge to similar capabilities. We’ve seen this movie before with LLMs — the models are converging, the cost of inference is heading toward commodity pricing. The same thing is about to happen with software products across every vertical.
The Four Horsemen
My partner at Sankat Mochan Capital, Sumana, said something recently that stuck with me: “Marketing is as important as Product… if not more.” She’s not being provocative. She’s reading the market correctly.
The companies that will win are the ones that get all four of these right, working together, not in silos.
1) Marketing — The Storyteller
SaaS buyers spend less than 20% of their time talking to vendors. The buying decision is largely made before your sales team ever picks up the phone. This means marketing is doing the heavy lifting on education, trust, and differentiation.
Product-led growth used to be a differentiator. Now it’s table stakes. The SaaS market is heading toward $1 trillion by 2032 and every category has twenty products that look almost identical. You need people to know you exist, trust you, and choose you.
2) Sales — The Closer
Gartner says B2B buyers spend only 17% of their time with suppliers. By the time they talk to your rep, they’ve already done their homework. The spray-and-pray era is dead.
81% of sales teams have already deployed or are experimenting with AI tools. But the interesting thing is — the teams winning aren’t replacing salespeople with bots. They’re giving salespeople superpowers. AI does the research and prediction. Humans bring empathy, creativity, and the ability to read a room. Consultative selling, deep account intelligence, and precision timing. That’s the new playbook.
3) Customer Success — The Compounder
This one doesn’t get enough attention. McKinsey found that replacing one lost customer requires acquiring three new ones. And 80% of value creation from the most successful growth companies comes from existing customers — not new logos.
Customer success is not a support function. It’s a growth engine. Every customer is a renewal, an upsell opportunity, and a source of social proof. The tribal knowledge that CS teams accumulate — the pain points, the workarounds, the unexpected use cases — that’s competitive intelligence that is genuinely hard to replicate. Much harder than code.
4) Product — The Foundation (Not the Moat)
Product still matters. You can’t market or sell your way out of a bad product. But the role has shifted. Product is now the foundation the other three horsemen ride on, not the moat that protects you by itself.
The real product moat in 2026 comes from proprietary data, deep domain expertise, and superior user experience. These are inherently human things — tied to how well you understand your customer, not how fast you can ship features. Kevin Weil from OpenAI compared AI adoption to onboarding a new employee in a recent podcast with Lenny Rachitsky — and that analogy extends here. The product is the employee’s skills. Everything else is what makes them effective in your specific organization.
The Real Value is in “Soft Skills”
I put soft skills in quotes because there’s nothing soft about them. These are the hard things. Storytelling, empathy, relationship building, active listening, the judgment to know what not to build — these are what the four horsemen actually run on.
The data backs this up. LinkedIn found 92% of hiring managers consider soft skills equally or more important than technical skills. PwC found 77% of CEOs see the lack of soft skills as a major growth hurdle. HBR’s 2025 research says soft skills matter more now than ever.
It’s inherent that machines don’t sleep or stop to eat food — they keep crunching away as long as they have power and cooling. The self-improving aspect of AI is pushing an incredible pace on the technical side. But the human side — understanding a customer’s unspoken needs, crafting a narrative that resonates, building trust over time — AI can’t do that. Not yet, and I’d argue not for a long time.
What This Means
For founders — stop treating marketing and customer success as afterthoughts. Align all four horsemen under one revenue strategy. The companies in our portfolio that do this are the ones growing fastest.
For investors — look beyond the tech stack. Distribution, brand, and customer relationships compound value regardless of the technology cycle. History is full of cases where the best product didn’t win. We’ve all seen this play out.
For people building careers — invest in soft skills with the same intensity as technical skills. Learn to tell stories. Learn to sell. Not in the sleazy way, but in the way where you deeply understand someone’s problem and can articulate how you solve it. That skill set is becoming incredibly valuable.
The future is bright, but it’s going to take a lot more than great code to get there. Marketing, Sales, Customer Success, and Product — all four, working together. That’s how companies win now.
Sharing some thoughts as Sumana and I build Sankat Mochan Capital. We see this pattern across every deal we look at and every company we advise. The four horsemen are riding — the question is whether you’re on one or watching from the sidelines.
Sources & Further Reading
Research: McKinsey — The AI-Centric Imperative (2025) | McKinsey — Experience-Led Growth | Gartner — B2B Buying Trends (2025) | HBR — Soft Skills Matter Now More Than Ever (2025) | LinkedIn Global Talent Trends | PwC Global CEO Survey
Podcasts: Lenny’s Podcast (Kevin Weil episode) | Y Combinator Startup Podcast | The Artificial Intelligence Show
Industry: BetaNews — Generative AI: Closing the Developer Gap | Mind the Product — AI-Generated Software & Competitive Moats | Stack Overflow Developer Survey 2025