Shahin Farschi of Lux Capital says that given the choice between a great product and great distribution, he would take the distribution and work out the product afterwards. For deep tech companies that ranking feels backwards, which is exactly why so many strong technologies never become businesses.
Farschi is worth listening to on this because he is not a marketer defending his trade. He has a PhD in electrical engineering, he built a company around his own thesis before shutting it down, and he has spent 18 years backing deep tech companies at Lux, including Zoox and Relativity Space. Speaking on the Delphi podcast, he put it like this:
You could have the greatest product on earth, you could have a perpetual motion machine, you can have the cure to all cancers, but if you don’t have distribution, you don’t have a business.
By distribution he does not mean trucks and warehouses. He means the route between your product and the people who will pay for it. The audience that already knows who you are. The channels through which you can reach buyers. The relationships that get you into the rooms where purchasing decisions actually happen.
Why the ranking feels wrong from inside a technical company
If you have spent years getting a technology to work, the claim that distribution matters more than product sounds like something a salesperson would say. It is worth taking seriously why that instinct exists, because it is not stupidity.
The product problem is visible and the distribution problem is not. Your technical risks are written down somewhere: the yield issue, the integration question, the test that has to pass. Nobody writes down the risk that the right buyers have never heard of you, because that risk produces no failing test. It just produces silence.
The training points the same way. A founder who has come through a decade of research learned to win funding by building and proving, and every grant application rewarded exactly that. Pauliina Martikainen, an investor at Maki.vc, lists the sentence she hears from deep tech founders more than any other: we will hire a CMO when the product is done. The plan is not careless. It is what a rational person does when everything in their career so far said the work is the technology.
And then there is the effect Farschi describes with an analogy worth keeping. Watching a company with great distribution is like watching Olympic gymnasts: they make it look so effortless, and we do one pull-up and we’re dead. When a competitor lands a big customer, you see the announcement, not the years of audience building, relationship work and failed approaches behind it. Distribution done well hides its own difficulty, so everyone underestimates it.
What building distribution involves for a deep tech company
Strip the word down and there are three parts, and none of them can be bought quickly.
The first is an audience: the pool of people in your market who know your company exists and roughly what it does before you ever contact them. For most industrial and scientific markets that audience is small and reachable, a few hundred people across the companies that matter, which is what makes this achievable for a small team. It is built with consistent presence where those people already pay attention, which in most B2B markets means LinkedIn, trade press and a handful of events.
The second is proof they can check: a site that survives a skeptical visit, film of the technology actually running, named partners and case studies. A buyer who has just heard of you will go looking. What they find either shortens the sale or ends it. We wrote about the film side of this in our guide to video for deep tech, and the same logic runs through everything a buyer can find.
The third is relationships, and this is the part people skip when they equate distribution with promotion. Most deep tech purchases are decided by a committee you never meet, carried by one internal contact. Arming that person is distribution work as much as any campaign is. So is choosing which part of the supply chain to approach in the first place, which we covered in who to pitch when your buyer is not your customer.
Farschi’s warning is that none of this is a side effect of a good product: there always needs to be some deliberate creativity and hard work that goes into building that distribution, even with a world-beating product. The founders he describes as most at risk are the hyper technical ones operating on the naive assumption that the product will fly off the shelves.
What we can and cannot do about this
A company like ours can build the visible machinery of distribution: the site that holds up when a buyer checks you out, the film and photography that show the technology working, the content that builds an audience over months, the stakeholder materials your internal champion carries into meetings. That work is real and it compounds.
What nobody can sell you is time already spent. If your first serious buyer conversation is eighteen months away from a purchase decision, starting the audience work the quarter before does very little. Distribution rewards early starts and punishes late ones, and no budget fully converts one into the other.
And some companies should not buy any of this yet. If you cannot name the companies that should be buying from you, that is a strategy gap, not a marketing gap, and filling it is conversations with potential customers rather than content. Doing nothing on channels for six months while you work that out is a perfectly good plan.
The ten companies test
A quick way to find out where you stand. Write down the ten companies that should be buying from you in two years, with the role of the person who would sign. Then count how many of those people have ever heard of your company. Not could find you if they searched. Have actually encountered you: seen something you published, met you at an event, heard your name from someone they trust.
That gap is your distribution problem, stated in a form you can work on. Closing it does not need mass marketing, because the list is ten names long. It needs you to be present where those people already pay attention, to have proof ready for the moment they look, and to give the contacts you do have something worth carrying inward. Each of those is ordinary, unglamorous work, and each one started today is worth more than the same work started the month the product ships.
The uncomfortable version of Farschi’s point is that the technical work being hard does not make it the deciding work. Plenty of companies clear the technical bar. The ones that become businesses are the ones somebody was already waiting to buy from.
If you want a straight answer on where your distribution actually stands, including whether it is too early to spend money on it, a 20 minute call is the fastest way to get one, and you can see how this thinking plays out in our LinkedIn campaigns and demand work.
Sam Stratton, founder of Commotion Labs. 15 August 2026.
Frequently asked questions
What does distribution mean for a deep tech company?
Not logistics. Distribution is the route between your product and the people who will pay for it: the audience that already knows you, the channels you can reach buyers through, and the relationships that get you into the rooms where purchasing decisions happen. A company can have working technology and none of these, and it will struggle to become a business.
Who is Shahin Farschi and what did he say about distribution?
Shahin Farschi is a general partner at Lux Capital who has backed deep tech companies including Zoox and Relativity Space over 18 years. On the Delphi podcast he said that given the choice between product and distribution he would take the distribution and then figure out the product, because even the cure to all cancers is not a business without a route to the people who pay.
When should a deep tech company start building distribution?
Before the product is finished, because distribution compounds slowly and cannot be bought at the end. An audience takes years to build, relationships take repeated contact, and a buyer who has never heard of you will not shortcut their diligence just because your technology works. The practical trigger: if you can name the companies that should buy from you in two years, the work of becoming known to them starts now.
Is distribution the same as marketing?
Marketing is most of the engine but not the whole machine. Distribution covers everything that connects you to buyers: content and brand build the audience, campaigns and events are channels, and sales relationships and internal champions carry you into buying decisions. Marketing builds and fuels these; partnerships and direct relationships complete them.
