Landon Campbell, Chicago’s “Forward-Deployed” VC: Why the Next Moat Is Built Shoulder to Shoulder With Customers
This article was originally posted on the Momentum Mode Podcast Substack channel, featuring Impruve CEO Mike Shannon
In today’s startup landscape, the speed of building has outpaced the speed of defending. A founder can have an idea on Monday, ship a product by Wednesday, and start learning from users by Friday. That is exhilarating. It is also destabilizing, because competitors can move just as quickly.
In this episode of Momentum Mode, we sat down with Landon Campbell, investor and Chicago General Manager at Drive Capital, to unpack the question every founder is quietly wrestling with: if building is easier than ever, what actually creates defensibility?
Landon’s answer was both practical and surprisingly optimistic. The moat is not a feature. It is implementation. It is engagement. It is trust. And increasingly, it is the founder’s willingness to build in the same physical and operational reality as the customer.
The modern moat is implementation, not invention
Artificial intelligence has lowered the barrier to entry for building products. That reality changes the investment and operating playbook. Landon described a world where early advantage is not primarily defined by who has the most novel model or the slickest demo.
Instead, he looks for companies that can do three things:
Get real customers early
Earn deep usage and retention
Become embedded in a workflow
In other words, you can buy your first customers, especially in an era where every company is trying to “have an AI strategy.” What you cannot buy is durable engagement. Landon kept returning to signals like weekly and daily usage, internal sharing, and whether the product becomes something users feel uneasy turning off.
This is a critical reframe. Many founders treat early traction as a sales milestone. Landon treats it as evidence of workflow adoption. That is where defensibility begins.
“Forward deployed” is moving from a buzzword to a founder requirement
The phrase “forward deployed” has become popular in technical circles, often describing engineers who spend time close to the customer instead of working entirely behind the scenes. Landon extends the idea: in many categories, the best companies are being built by forward-deployed founders.
A forward-deployed founder shows up. They sit with the customer. They implement on site. They build and iterate in tight cycles while the customer’s pain is still fresh and specific.
Landon shared an example from his portfolio: a founder who effectively “moves into” customer offices for weeks at a time, ships improvements in real time, and establishes direct channels like dedicated Slack threads to keep the feedback loop tight. The customers stop seeing the founder as a vendor. They start seeing them as part of the team.
That shift matters because early products are never perfect. Trust becomes the bridge between “this is rough” and “we believe you will get it right.” The founder earns that trust through proximity and responsiveness, not by promising a roadmap.
Go-to-market has become the primary technical skill
One of the subtle insights from the conversation is that go-to-market is now inseparable from product. When iteration is cheap and fast, distribution is the constraint. Landon argued that early go-to-market is less about scale and more about focus.
The best early-stage teams do something meaningful for a small cohort, rather than something average for a broad market. They find a tight group of users, become mission-critical for them, and only then expand outward.
From that perspective, go-to-market capability is proven through retention and intensity of use, not just revenue. The question is not “can you sell?” The question is “can you get a customer to care enough to change behavior?”
At scale, defensibility becomes a data and switching-cost story
Forward-deployed building can unlock early product-market fit. But what prevents competitors from copying your ideas once you scale?
Landon’s answer was straightforward: data and integration depth. In an AI-native world, models are increasingly interchangeable. The durable advantage is created by becoming the system that is always on, absorbing inputs, improving outcomes, and making itself painful to replace.
When a product becomes a daily operating layer, switching costs rise naturally. The moat is not simply the existence of data, but the way the product becomes woven into decision-making, workflows, and institutional habits.
“Tech translator” is the new core role inside companies
We also explored how team structure is evolving. Landon used a phrase that stuck with me: tech translator.
As engineering velocity increases, the old model of overly detailed product specs and slow handoffs starts to break. The teams that win are the ones that can translate messy customer reality into buildable priorities without losing the narrative thread.
This is not only a product management function. It is a leadership capability. Great founding teams create a shared language between what customers say, what they mean, and what the product must become.
In practice, that means:
clear internal storytelling
rapid iteration cycles
tight feedback loops
a culture that treats customer proximity as a core competence
The Midwest advantage is real, but it is not what coastal skeptics assume
Landon made a case for why building “between the coasts” can be an advantage, especially right now.
He emphasized three factors:
accessibility of networks: Chicago is unusually reachable. You can get in touch with people across industries faster than many larger ecosystems.
economic diversity: logistics, healthcare, finance, manufacturing, marketplaces, and more exist in dense proximity. This matters when you need to build next to your customers.
capital efficiency: founders often do more with less, with less dilution and less dependence on hype cycles.
The takeaway is not that geography guarantees success. It is that certain geographies make the forward-deployed model easier to execute, and that model is increasingly the point.
Internal AI adoption is becoming a litmus test
Finally, Landon shared how Drive Capital is advising its portfolio companies to think about AI adoption internally. The most interesting point was simple: many companies building AI for the world are not using AI effectively inside their own organizations.
The companies that adapt best treat AI as a daily operating layer, not a side initiative. They run small hackathons, encourage experimentation, and sometimes even align incentives to internal usage. The goal is not novelty. The goal is institutional learning speed.
Landon also mentioned using Manus as a research and sourcing assistant, gathering fragmented inputs from across the web and helping synthesize themes into action. Whether or not a specific tool is the answer, the pattern is clear: high performers are building new workflows, not just new opinions.
What I’m taking away as a founder
If I had to reduce the episode to one sentence, it is this: the modern moat is earned through proximity, not proclaimed through product.
In 2025 and beyond, defensibility increasingly comes from:
building shoulder to shoulder with customers
translating real pain into rapid iteration
driving deep engagement and retention
embedding into workflows and data streams
telling a compelling story to customers, teammates, and investors
Landon closed with a vision he calls “Chicago 2035,” centered on more ambitious, mission-driven companies being built in the city. His challenge is one worth adopting anywhere: we need more “crazy ideas,” more builders willing to take on hard problems, and more founders who recognize that in an AI era, the edge belongs to the teams that can implement in the real world.
For those who want to follow Landon’s work, he writes a weekly newsletter at Landon’s Loop and shares actively across social platforms under “Landon20s.”
