Dinner with Indy Guha from VMG: 📈 Customer Access Is the New CAC
Reflections from a dinner with VMG’s Indranil Guha on building durable AI companies, earning trust, and staying grounded as a founder.
Last week, I hosted a Icons dinner with Indranil Guha, GP at VMG Partners, who co-leads VMG Technology and invests in commerce infrastructure, RevTech, and go-to-market innovation.
It was one of those dinners that makes you pause and rethink your assumptions about building durable companies.
Here are a few reflections that resonated deeply with me as a founder building KODIF 👇
1️⃣ Complexity is the new moat.
Durable AI companies don’t chase simple problems. They go after hard, high-value, first-party-data problems - the kind that live inside enterprise firewalls. If you’re solving for simplicity, you’re racing against the foundation models. If you’re solving for complexity, you’re building structural advantage.
2️⃣ AI search is moving up-funnel.
Referral traffic from AI search engines is already growing fast in categories like travel and home improvement. Smart founders will rethink the journey from search to checkout - and for us, from support intent to sale.
3️⃣ Trust is the new GTM motion.
Early-stage founders obsess over CAC and conversion, but the real unlock is trust. High willingness, low trust - that’s the starting point. Your job as a founder is to close that gap. And as Indy put it perfectly: “Customer access is the new CAC.”
4️⃣ Start in a vertical, then earn the right to expand.
Winning founders don’t boil the ocean. They dominate one vertical, integrate deeply, and then generalize once the platform and learnings can travel.
5️⃣ Enterprise GTM beats prosumer when margins matter.
AI compute is expensive. Trust, pilots, and high-value deployments create real, durable businesses. We cannot build negative margin businesses for too long.
Everybody has AI mandates - nobody buys without a successful pilot.
6️⃣ Stay grounded in focus and first principles.
Half of global tech spend is in North America - one language, mature procurement, fewer distractions. Focus still matters. Most startups stall at $30–50M ARR not because TAM runs out, but because repeatability does. Founders who stay disciplined on execution, trust, and complexity break through.
Favorite quotes from Indy:
💬 “When you see an exponential phenomenon, you jump on it.”
💬 “Own the complexity and the organizational memory. Foundation models are not coming for that.”
💬 “Everybody has AI mandates; nobody buys without a successful pilot.”
On a personal note, Indy also shared how he stays present with his kids - nightly rituals and dinners without phones.
A reminder that success isn’t just scale - it’s harmony. Grateful to Indy for sharing both his intellect and humanity with us.
