Getting there first: Why pre-seed demands a different playbook

Early-stage venture has always rewarded speed. And the window between “this person might build something” and “this person is raising and everyone knows it” has never been shorter.

“By the time a deal is out in the market, you’re in a knife fight,” says Casey. “You're competing with every other VC who’s seen the same signal. We’d rather be in the conversation before that moment arrives.”

Getting there first has required GTMfund to rethink how it sources entirely. The target is no longer just a founder who’s in market. It might be someone who just left a high-growth company and is still figuring out what to build, or someone with an idea they haven't told anyone about yet.

Casey sees a direct parallel in how other elite talent markets have evolved. “Before I got into VC, I was trying to get into investment banking,” he recalls. “The recruiting process kept moving earlier, targeting college sophomores, even high school students. Everybody’s trying to access the same human capital alpha before someone else does. Venture is no different now.”

For GTMfund, that means building relationships well ahead of any raise, monitoring people rather than just companies, and having the infrastructure to do that across hundreds of targets without losing the personal touch that makes the difference when it counts.

For GTMfund, that infrastructure is Harmonic.

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The spike factor: Finding exceptional founders before they’re findable

GTMfund’s approach to founder evaluation starts with a loose profile: strong educational background, experience at reputable companies, or evidence of having built something before. It’s a starting point, not a filter. “That’s a guiding light to at least find a universe of founders we can draw from,” Casey explains. “We don't adhere to it a hundred percent, but it helps us build the field.”

What the team is actually hunting for, once inside that field, is what they call “the spike factor”: something in a founder’s background that very few other people have done, or a quality that marks them as exceptional in some domain.

The examples span industries and archetypes. One GTMfund portfolio co-founder previously built the largest social gaming company in Latin America. Another was closely affiliated with Oscar Health from its early days. There’s a founder who raised and sold a company for $250 million and wants to go at it again.

“It’s that element of excellence,” Casey says. “You hope it translates, and when you meet them, it usually does. They’re switched on. They know their story. They’re firm about the vision and mission. They’re malleable enough to adjust, but they know what they’re talking about, what they want to build, and why. It’s hard to articulate. But you feel it in the meeting.”

Vaibhavi puts it more viscerally. “It’s that feeling you get from somebody that’s a little uncomfortable, where you’re like, wow, this person is just wired differently, and they’re going to do something amazing that most people wouldn’t even attempt.”

But you can only get that feeling if you’re in the room first. Harmonic’s People Search is how GTMfund gets there. The platform’s database spans more than 200 million people profiles, searchable by prior employer, educational background, job title, location, and founder highlights—whether that’s a deep technical background, a prior VC-backed exit, or attendance at a top university. Casey uses it to find the operator who just left a foundational AI company, the repeat founder who hasn’t announced their next venture yet, or the Stanford engineer whose LinkedIn went dark three months ago. By the time those people are raising, GTMfund has already been in touch.

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Building a sourcing engine: From target lists to stealth signals

Vaibhavi has constructed a library of Saved Searches that function as a persistent, always-on radar across the founder universe. Harmonic’s Saved Searches let investors define precise criteria (geography, background, funding stage, headcount, and more) and receive automatic alerts when new profiles match. Rather than manually scanning for signals, the team gets notified when the right person surfaces.

The searches Vaibhavi returns to most often reflect GTMfund’s core thesis. One tracks stealth and under-the-radar companies: organizations with no public footprint, no website, no announcement, but a detectable signal in Harmonic’s data. Another monitors alumni of FAANG companies and foundational AI model companies: people with elite technical backgrounds who may be weighing what to build next. A third targets Stanford and MIT profiles - “that undergrad who’s out there, scrappy but brilliant,” as Vaibhavi puts it. Vertical-specific searches round out the library: fintech, healthcare, and others that shift as the fund’s thematic interests evolve.

Running alongside these searches is a curated target company list the team built deliberately. Starting from roughly 125 companies, they narrowed it to 25 or 30: nominally unicorn-level businesses that haven’t exited yet but have generated significant economic output over the last two to three years. The list serves two purposes: identifying operators credible enough to join the LP base, and monitoring for future founders.

“These are the best companies in their categories,” Vaibhavi says. “If someone is leaving one of those companies and thinking about building something new, we want to know.” 

Harmonic makes that monitoring systematic. Casey has set up filters to extract relevant profiles from those target companies continuously, flagging people who have recently departed or dropped off the radar entirely—the earliest possible signal that someone might be starting something. “We try to find people who aren’t even in stealth yet,” Vaibhavi says. “If there’s a good profile and some overlap with what we do, we reach out. Maybe there’s no deal there… but there could be a referral to one.”

It’s not hypothetical. A former employee at one of those target companies left to start his own company and had been building in stealth. Harmonic surfaced the departure, and GTMfund made contact. “Being able to capture those people,” Vaibhavi adds, “is exactly what these searches are designed to do.”

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Scout: Research tool, diligence accelerator, and talent discovery engine

Once a profile surfaces, the next question is simple: is this worth pursuing? At GTMfund, that question increasingly gets answered by Scout.

Scout is Harmonic’s AI-powered research agent, accessible across searches, company profiles, and people pages. It goes beyond what a typical filter can cover: rather than searching by fixed criteria, you describe what you’re looking for and Scout finds it. Casey uses it in conjunction with Whispr Flow, a voice-to-text tool, dictating his search criteria in plain language instead of constructing filters from scratch. “It just goes beyond what a typical filter can cover,” he explains. “I describe what I'm looking for and Scout surfaces it.”

Working through due diligence on a company recently, Casey used Harmonic’s standard report for market analysis and ran Scout alongside it. Where the report gave him a broad view of the market, Scout reframed the competitive landscape from the startup’s own vantage point: who they’re actually competing with, and how they fit. “It was a viewpoint I wouldn’t have gotten from a filter or a static report,” Casey says.

Scout also functions as a thesis-validation tool. GTMfund has team members with deep expertise in specific verticals: every healthcare deal, for example, gets routed to someone who has worked in that space and has a sharp view on what’s interesting and what isn’t. When the team wants to pressure-test a theme beyond their own expertise, Scout helps. “We might read from some expert, or see a prediction about where a category is heading,” Casey explains. “YC’s call to startups is a good example: here’s where smart people think the market is going. Scout helps us validate whether people are actually building there. It gives us that much more specificity.”

Casey describes Scout in two ways: research tool and talent discovery engine. He’s applied it beyond deal sourcing, using it to surface candidate profiles for roles the fund is helping portfolio companies fill. The same tool that finds GTMfund’s next investment also helps its portfolio companies find their next hire.

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A small team running at full speed

“The saved searches have helped to uncover some real gems,” Casey says. “They’ve driven a lot of our outbound.”

For a seven-person team leading pre-seed rounds in one of the most competitive markets in venture, that efficiency matters. GTMfund’s diligence timeline is two and a half weeks. Being able to gather and process information quickly—on founders, markets, and competitors—is the job.

“Finding those exceptional, abnormal people is the priority,” adds Vaibhavi. That’s what every search, every alert, and every Scout report is ultimately built around. Harmonic doesn’t find the next great founder… but it helps to ensure that GTMfund does.