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AI founders have a distribution problem disguised as a product problem. Two founders can build equally strong products, raise similar rounds, and land in opposite outcomes 18 months later, one compounding revenue while the other rots in permanent pilot purgatory, because they answered a go-to-market question they never consciously asked. A16z partner Joe Schmidt and Julian Marx named the split in a recent essay, “Lighthouse or Landgrab?”: there are two fundamentally different enterprise AI sales motions, and many founders default to the wrong one.
The diagnosis rests on two questions: how exposed is the person signing the deal, and does social proof travel in that market. Answer them correctly, and you know whether to spend the next year courting 3 Fortune 100 logos or signing 300 mid-market accounts. Answer them wrong, and you burn a funding round finding out the hard way.
That’s exactly why the rest of this guide:
Breaks down the two-question test to run before you hire your first salesperson
Explains why 95% of enterprise GenAI pilots die before production
How Sierra, Glean, Abridge, Rogo, Legora, Clay, and Cursor each picked their lane
The traps that kill both strategies, and a 7-point checklist for winning your market before an incumbent like Salesforce or ServiceNow closes the gap.
It also connects the framework to the two guides that pair with it: How to Build an AI Monopoly, on whether your market can be owned at all, and Attention Is the New Startup Infrastructure, on the distribution engine both motions run on.
And for the first time, the playbook ships as working software: at the end of this piece you can download lighthouse-landgrab, a Claude skill that runs the full two-question diagnostic on your company, drafts your motion plan, and audits the traps, with installation taking about 2 minutes.
Let’s dive in.