Founders Are Raising the Bar for PM Hires. Vibe Coding Is Why.

Our portfolio founders are raising the bar for PM hires. Vibe coding is exactly why.

This and many other reflections were sparked by a working lunch last week with Melody Koh and Dorothy Chang. The plan was to swap learnings on agents/tools and work through a few more technical ‘how to’s’, but the biggest lightbulbs for me were higher-level.

PMs were out of fashion when everyone could vibe code. But great PMs are excellent at prioritizing, distilling, and editing. Melody trained that muscle as a PM long before AI made it a universal prerequisite, and I think it’s a huge part of why she’s killing it with VC x AI experimentation now. The skillset venn diagram is basically a circle.

What surprised me more is how relevant people management experience has been. Running eCommerce at Cape Union Mart meant sorting through a weekly matrix of 50+ ‘urgent’ feature asks from across departments. Deciding which agents to build and how to design them feels a lot like that… except now I have to make the matrix myself too 😉

A few ways we discussed ‘managing’ our agents:

Treat the agent like an employee.

Start with low stakes, straightforward tasks as you’re calibrating and building trust. Give timely, direct feedback when the agent ‘underperforms’. The feedback loop is among the most important things to nail. Vague prompting = vague output, like vague management = a mediocre team.

Historical data is your agent’s onboarding packet.

FC has over a decade of reasoning, misses, near-misses, and other patterns waiting to be recognized in our CRM. I’m realizing how much of a blessing that depth is. It’s been thrilling to start querying the unstructured parts like we do the structured ones.

Unique training can find alpha (maybe).

This is something I think about a lot, from the other side. Will AI make us all come up with the same ideas, chase the same founders, make the same investments, write the same LinkedIn posts? The counterpoint from lunch: You’re training the agent on your judgment, taste, and context. That’s what’s actually distinct, and that’s still hard to copy.

Version control matters.

When collaborating with teams, ‘who changed what and when’ is critical, so set up a shared repo to bring your colleagues with you (and rewind when you break things).

Founders are hunting for strong PMs because the cost of weak prioritization and vague direction has skyrocketed, and UX/differentiation matters more than ever. You feel it immediately once you’re the one managing the agents… vibe coding doesn’t often evoke ‘user delight’.

Grateful to Melody and Dorothy for swapping tips and tricks with me, and would love to hear what other friends are building.