If you're starting a company this year, start looking for a co-founder with 8 million YouTube followers and give them 20% of your cap table.
I've been doing web shit since late '93 when Wired issue number five turned me onto a BBS called MindVox (aka Phantom.com). Less than two years later I had dropped out of college and moved from Florida to SF.
I've lived through every era of this thing, and every era has one function that matters more than everything else combined.
1995 to 2001 was the era of the product visionary.
The web and self publishing was an entirely new paradigm. Anybody could put content online, but what did that mean? You needed someone who could imagine what an online product even was.
2005 to 2015 was the era of the technical co-founder.
The first generation had paved the way and people knew how the web functioned. The rules and social mores had more or less been set. And you didn't need to buy Sun Sparks anymore because everything was hosted. You just needed an engineer who could build your vision.
2015 through COVID was the era of the salesperson.
Building got easy. SAAS was everywhere, markets started saturating and closing deals became the hardest part of launching a business. Your CRO became a day-one hire. Hell, a day-one co-founder.
Now we're in 2026 and channels are fully saturated. Cold email is dead. LinkedIn is noise. Paid is brutal. SEO is being eaten alive by LLMs. Every founder I coach is asking the same question: how the hell do I get anyone to notice this?
So I'm no-shit telling founders to go find somebody with a ton of YouTube/Instagram/TikTok followers and bring them on as a co-founder. Give them a meaningful chunk of the company. Give them a real say, like any previous generation's founders.
You can't just say "hey, advertise us." That's a sponsorship. That's transactional. That's not what this era requires.
You need someone whose mutant power (the thing they've spent a decade becoming world-class at) is capturing human attention en masse and making people fall in love with something. Treat that attention machine like it's half the company. Because right now, it kind of is.
Every other function on your team can be augmented by AI in 2026. Distribution at scale still can't.
The product person, the technical co-founder, the CRO... those roles haven't disappeared. They just stopped being the thing that decides who lives and who dies.
In 2026, distribution decides. Act accordingly.