Guest Landon Campbell on Why the Next Moat Is Built Shoulder to Shoulder With Customers

Описание: Building a startup has never been easier, and defending one has never been harder.
In this episode of Momentum Mode, we sit down with Landon Campbell, investor and Chicago General Manager at Drive Capital, to unpack what moat really means in the AI era. When anyone can ship a product in days, what actually creates defensibility?
Landon argues the answer isn’t better models or flashier features. Its proximity. To customers. To data. To real-world workflows.
From hosting Chicago’s AI builder community to backing companies across supply chain, healthcare, and enterprise software, Landon shares what he’s seeing at the earliest stages and what founders consistently get wrong about go-to-market, culture, and scale.
Here’s what stood out:
The Real Moat Is Implementation
AI projects don’t fail because the tech is weak; they fail because companies can’t implement them. The winners are forward-deployed founders who build shoulder-to-shoulder with customers, embedding themselves directly into daily workflows.
Engagement Beats Early Revenue
In a world where anyone can “buy” early customers, retention and obsession matter more. Daily usage, internal sharing, and switching costs created by real data, not vanity metrics, are what signal true product-market fit.
Why Data, Not AI, Creates Defensibility
AI is becoming table stakes. The lasting advantage comes from owning the data layer, especially where structured systems meet messy, unstructured information like emails, documents, and operational processes.
Why the Midwest Has an Edge
Between-the-coasts founders often do more with less: less capital, less dilution, and tighter feedback loops with real industries. Chicago’s density of healthcare systems, logistics firms, and enterprise customers makes it an ideal place to build companies that actually scale.
This episode is a must-listen for founders navigating the AI arms race, investors thinking about defensibility, and leaders who believe the future belongs to teams that execute closer to reality, not farther from it.
🎧 Tune in and rethink what moat really means in 2025.