There is a sequence most teams assume without ever stating it: build the thing, prove the thing, then work out how to sell it. It is a comfortable order, and it quietly treats distribution as a wrapper you fit around a finished product.
The companies that compound treat it as a structural question asked on day one. Who already holds the attention we need, and what would make them want to hand it over? Which channel is currently mispriced, and how long does that last? What would this product have to become for the channel to carry it without being paid to?
Answer those late and you get a good product with an expensive route to market — a business that works exactly as long as the marketing budget does. Answer them early and the answers change what you build. That is the tell: distribution thinking that never once changed the product was never really thinking.
Ideas move because something carries them. Deciding what will carry yours is not a later problem to be handed to a hire in year two. It is part of the idea.