Antithesis and the Multi-Year Build: GTM Strategy When Your Product Takes Years to Ship

Antithesis and the Multi-Year Build: GTM Strategy When Your Product Takes Years to Ship

The startup playbook says ship fast, get feedback, iterate. Antithesis spent years building before they could ship anything at all.

In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Will Wilson, Co-Founder of Antithesis, an autonomous testing platform, revealed how they navigated go-to-market strategy when conventional wisdom doesn’t apply. When you’re rebuilding computing infrastructure from scratch, you can’t MVP your way to product-market fit. You need a fundamentally different approach to GTM.

The Reality of Deep Technical Work

Most startup advice assumes you can ship something quickly. Build an MVP in weeks, get it in front of customers, iterate based on feedback. This works for most software—but not for all of it.

“It took a few years, and that’s a lot longer than most startups,” Will acknowledged. But this wasn’t failure to execute or poor planning. It was the inevitable timeline of genuinely hard technical work.

“In order to build what we’ve built here, we had to go back to the very foundations of how computers work and change a whole lot of stuff,” Will explained. “We had to write our own hypervisor that is able to run virtual machines in a completely different way than anybody else ever has.”

You can’t build a custom hypervisor in three months. You can’t shortcut fundamental computer science innovation. Some problems require time measured in years, not sprints.

The GTM Problem This Creates

Here’s the challenge: standard GTM advice assumes you can get customer feedback early and often. But what do you do when you literally have nothing to show customers for years?

The conventional playbook breaks down:

• You can’t do customer development interviews with a working prototype
• You can’t run beta programs or design partner engagements
• You can’t generate revenue or prove product-market fit
• You can’t show traditional traction metrics to investors or team members

Yet you still need to build relationships, validate assumptions, and prepare for eventual launch. The question becomes: how?

Getting to Customers as Fast as Possible (Which Still Takes Years)

Antithesis didn’t wait longer than necessary. They got to paying customers as quickly as their technical reality allowed.

“We did actually get early design partners and paying customers as early as we possibly could,” Will shared. “But for us, as early as possible was still a few years into the thing.”

This distinction matters: they weren’t hiding or gold-plating. They were building as fast as technically possible while engaging customers at the earliest viable moment. The timeline was long because the problem was hard, not because they were perfectionists.

The lesson: “as early as possible” is relative to your technical constraints, not industry averages. Deep tech companies need to redefine what “early” means.

Setting Investor Expectations From Day One

The most critical GTM decision for multi-year builds happens in the first investor meeting. You must set expectations correctly or create impossible pressure later.

“With our investors, we told them from very early on, look, this is a moonshot,” Will shared. The message was explicit and unvarnished. “Like, it’s probably not going to work. You’re probably going to lose all your money, and it’s going to take a very long time to find out whether it’s working or not.”

He didn’t soften the timeline. “You’re not going to know in a year whether this is taking off or not. So, you know, buckle in for the long haul because that’s what it’s going to be.”

This radical honesty accomplished two things: it filtered for patient capital and eliminated future friction.

“I think the fact that we were just totally upfront about that from the very first meeting, you know, and never shied around that issue is the foundation of us having a good relationship with our investors,” Will explained. “They really appreciated that we weren’t bullshitting them on that.”

The payoff came years later. “When indeed things took a long time to figure out if it was working or not, they weren’t surprised or upset.”

Without this upfront alignment, investor pressure for premature launches or pivots becomes unbearable. You need investors who genuinely understand multi-year timelines, not ones you’ve convinced with optimistic projections.

The Internal Validation Moment

When you can’t get market validation quickly, internal validation becomes crucial. For Antithesis, this came from dogfooding—using their own tool to build their product.

“There was a magical moment when we started using it, too, and we started feeling it, like, really giving us lift and making us go faster,” Will recalled.

This moment mattered because it happened despite the product’s immaturity. “And that was despite the fact that at this stage, what we still had was still a very early prototype, really rough around the edges, really crappy in a lot of ways.”

The insight was powerful: “If this very primitive, very rudimentary implementation of this thing that we’re building is already seriously paying rent for us and for some really big, important companies, we may actually have something here.”

This internal validation sustained the team through continued development. They knew the technology worked because they experienced it working daily, even before it was ready for broad release.

Building Relationships Before You Can Sell

Multi-year builds require relationship development that precedes sales by years. You’re not selling yet, but you’re building the network that will buy later.

Will and his co-founder had an advantage here: they’d built credibility at FoundationDB. “People have often asked us, how do we build that thing? And what was our secret weapon?” The secret weapon was autonomous testing—the foundation of Antithesis.

This prior credibility created initial interest and patience. Prospects who knew their previous work were willing to wait and watch because they’d seen what Will’s team could build.

For founders without this existing credibility, the challenge is harder. You need to build relationships and trust before you can demonstrate product value. This means years of:

• Conference speaking on related technical topics
• Publishing research or blog posts about your problem space
• Contributing to relevant open source projects
• Building personal relationships in your target market

The GTM work starts years before you have a product to sell.

The Strategic Stealth Period

Antithesis made another unconventional choice: they stayed in stealth long after getting their first customer.

“Even after we got that first paying customer, we actually stayed in stealth for, like, another three years, just, like, making the thing better, iterating on it, like, slowly growing our customer base through word of mouth,” Will explained.

This wasn’t hiding—it was strategic. “We did try to, like, cultivate, like, an aura of secrecy. We sort of tried to make it, like, a badly kept secret that many people in Silicon Valley whispered about.”

For multi-year builds, extended stealth can work because you’re using that time to iterate with real customers while building mystique. By the time you launch publicly, you have both proven technology and pent-up demand.

When You Know You’re Ready

The validation signal for multi-year builds isn’t just about product functionality—it’s about customer behavior.

“We did start to notice that our customers, like, loved it, couldn’t get enough out of it. And, like, you know, we’re putting more and more of their eggs in this basket,” Will shared.

When early customers start depending on your rough prototype for critical systems, you have product-market fit—even if the product isn’t polished. This behavior-based validation matters more than feature checklists or roadmap completion.

The Multi-Year Build Playbook

For founders facing similar timelines, Antithesis’s journey reveals a distinct playbook:

Year 0-1: Set foundations correctly

• Raise capital from investors who understand multi-year timelines
• Be radically honest about risks and timelines
• Build credibility in your problem space through non-product channels
• Begin relationship development with potential customers

Year 1-3: Build and validate internally

• Focus on solving the hard technical problems
• Use your own product extensively
• Document and share learnings about your problem space
• Cultivate strategic mystique rather than broad visibility

Year 3+: Selective customer engagement

• Engage design partners as soon as technically possible
• Choose early customers who can succeed with rough products
• Stay in selective mode until technology proves itself
• Build customer dependency and advocacy before broad launch

Post-launch: Emerge from strength

• Launch publicly only when you have proven technology and customer advocates
• Leverage years of mystique and relationship building
• Scale from a position of validation rather than hope

When This Approach Works

Multi-year builds make sense for:

• Fundamental infrastructure innovations
• Category-creating technologies
• Problems requiring deep technical breakthroughs
• Markets where customers value correctness over speed

This approach doesn’t work for:

• Incremental improvements to existing solutions
• Markets with fast-moving competition
• Products where customer feedback drives core features
• Teams without patient capital

The Uncomfortable Truth

Will’s most important insight is the simplest: some problems just take time.

The startup world’s obsession with speed creates pressure to rush, to MVP everything, to ship before you’re ready. But when you’re writing custom hypervisors or fundamentally reimagining how computers work, rushing doesn’t create velocity—it creates failure.

The discipline isn’t moving faster. It’s accepting that your timeline is what it is, setting expectations accordingly, and doing the work properly rather than quickly.

For deep tech founders, this might be the most valuable GTM lesson: resist the pressure to conform to timelines that don’t match your technical reality. Find investors who understand. Build internal validation early. Cultivate relationships before you can sell. And emerge publicly only when your technology can prove itself.

As Antithesis demonstrates, sometimes the smartest GTM strategy for a multi-year build is having the discipline to actually take multiple years—and using that time strategically rather than apologizing for it.