Have you ever noticed that across centuries of private equity and venture capital investing, the bottleneck was not ideas, it was the build. The startup that cobbled together a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) paying off the tech debt were deemed worthy of investment because they built something no one else could.
This is now complexly inverted with AI. I can point any of a few AI agents I have, to any product in the marketplace, and it can replicate the functionality and look the same day. Thus, the bottleneck has moved from build, to distribution edge, and that is where startups traditionally lack.
PE/VC now sees the startup as the bottleneck as both an inexperienced execution resource, and having no distribution edge. Across my investing clients I’m seeing new trend called “outside in diligence.” Investment groups are just building the concept in house, which is an evolution of the studios model.
Outside-in due diligence analyzes a target using only external evidence, public filings, regulatory disclosures, review streams, peer benchmarks, without NDAs or management data, producing a decision-ready read on the business the way the market sees it, not the pitch founders.
This article on Bain vibecoding replicas of software acquisition targets is a prime example. By asking AI to rebuild the target’s product, it’s possible to see whether the moat was ever real and it’s rewriting the M&A playbook. According to a Financial Times report from June of 2026, Bain staff have vibe-coded hundreds of rough prototypes as part of the firm's private equity diligence work.
From my role as Head of Technology at Verizon in 2019, to now being the Chief Innovation Officer at XERAPHINA, I’ve lead many of these types of teams inside commercial enterprise and it’s called intrapreneurship. The term “intrapreneur” is a portmanteau of the two words “internal” and “entrepreneur.” An intrapreneur is an employee or team that owns the responsibility to cultivate an idea into a new product or service. They bring entrepreneurial thinking and speed, but with enterprise-class resources.
And there my friends, is the distribution edge on your idea. If you’re an investing firm tired of waiting 3-5 years to exit and want to see ROI in just a year, let’s talk about building out your outside-in delivery team.
