The Leslie Founders Roundtable series brings in investors and operators to speak candidly with NYU founders,  not to pitch, but to think out loud. This session featured Melody Koh, a partner at NextView Ventures, a five-person firm investing at pre-seed and seed. NextView's portfolio spans the application layer, infrastructure, dev tooling, and AI,  and their entry point ranges from two-person teams with a Notion doc all the way to post-launch companies approaching $100K ARR.

About eight months ago, Melody stepped back from full-time investing to lead NextView's internal AI strategy,  rebuilding the firm from first principles, identifying where human judgment is irreplaceable and where AI can absorb the rest. That vantage point shaped the whole conversation: someone who evaluates founders for a living, now also thinking hard about what human edge actually means in a world where the tools keep getting better.

The Market Is More Efficient Than It's Ever Been

Melody opened with a market observation that reframes how early-stage founders should think about competition. Four years ago, a new idea might have attracted five competing teams over five years. Today, any idea has ten teams attacking it within a month. The window to establish a position has compressed dramatically.

In that environment, the only real edge is better decisions, faster feedback loops, and higher-conviction bets. There's no moat in having the idea. The question is what you know that the market doesn't, and whether that insight is actually rare.

Melody was deliberate about what counts as a legitimate edge. Domain knowledge doesn't require a decade of work experience. Family business background, lived experience, deep personal immersion in a problem,  all of it adds up, as long as it gives you a genuine arbitrage that others don't have. The insight has to be real, and it has to be yours.

Distribution First, Product Second

One of the sharper points in the session was on sequencing. Most early-stage founders are building. Melody's advice: stop building and first answer whether you can solve the distribution problem.

In B2B, the question is what unfair advantage lets you win your first customers in the first few months. In consumer, the structural challenge is that customer acquisition cost (CAC) always rises as you exhaust early adopters,  and without a credible answer to that problem, it's very hard to build a viable consumer business at scale. The product can be exceptional and still fail if there's no clear path to getting it in front of people at sustainable cost.

The distribution question isn't something to figure out after launch. It's the question.

Team Quality Is the Dominant Signal

At the pre-seed and seed stage, there usually isn't much data. What investors are actually underwriting is the team, Melody put it at roughly 80% of the eventual success indicators she sees tracing back to the founding team.

That surfaces a few specific dimensions worth thinking through. Would you work for this person? Not just alongside them, for them. It's a respect test, and it's the same bar the founding team sets for every hire that comes after. Can the team cover the critical functional skills for this specific business model? And are the co-founders actually aligned on what "big" means,  not just in terms of mission, but in terms of what a successful outcome looks like for each of them personally?

Co-founder misalignment is the second most common reason companies fail. Melody cited a sobering figure: roughly 20 to 30% of co-founding pairs split before Series B. Getting into that question early, honestly, is worth the discomfort. 

What Makes a Pitch Memorable

Melody also shared two founder profiles that stuck with her,  not because of traction or pedigree, but because of what each one taught her about a market she didn't fully understand going in.

The first was a consumer social team that had launched roughly 150 apps specifically to understand Gen Z social behavior. They came in with exceptional retention numbers and a coherent articulation of market insight, growth path, and what they'd learned. The clarity of thought was what made it memorable.

The second was a founder with no technical background who had spent years as an ESL coach inside a major hospitality group. She had developed a genuinely granular understanding of frontline worker personas, owners, training managers, workers, and had built investor credibility through her network despite coming from outside tech entirely.

The common thread between them: both founders taught Melody something about the market that she didn't already know. That's the bar. Not impressing an investor with your credentials, actually shifting their understanding of a space.

Pitching in the AI Era

Melody noted that the pitches she's seeing now are heavily AI-native, temporal memory, context management, and enterprise agents. The categories are new, but the underlying questions haven't changed. Who has the insight? Who can actually get to customers? What does the team know that the market doesn't?

The firms that move fast on those questions, founders and investors alike, are the ones making better bets. Everything else is noise.