Elaine Zelby crossed from investing at SignalFire to co-founding Tofu, an AI platform reinventing B2B marketing. She walks Patrick and Somrat through her first pitch for Tofu — and what the leap from VC to founder really taught her.
Key takeaways
Founder-market fit beat a crowded category. Deep GTM expertise plus technical co-founders let Tofu out-execute in martech rather than avoid it — landing on text-based personalization after validating with 40-50 CMO interviews.
Pipeline is the only thing that matters right now, and interfaces are shifting from UI to chat/agents — Tofu moved into Slack as a headless agent, which cut friction and pulled sales teams in.
Data quality is the next big opportunity, along with overlooked non-tech verticals (manufacturing, pharma) where AI-driven vertical products can build huge, low-competition businesses.