Growth has flipped. Acquisition mechanics aren’t the constraint anymore. Trust infrastructure is.
What Elena Verna’s read from inside a $400M run rate confirms about scaling in the AI era.
The most useful sentence we’ve heard from a hypergrowth operator this year came from Elena Verna, Head of Growth at Lovable - a company at $400 million ARR eighteen months from launch. Verna previously ran growth at Dropbox and Miro. Her sentence:
“Growth is a trust problem now. Who do I trust to actually purchase it from? Do I believe in the team that is building behind it?”
What she is naming is a structural shift in where the constraint on growth now sits. For roughly fifteen years, scaling a software business was an acquisition-mechanics problem. SEO worked. Paid worked. Sales enablement worked. The operators who won optimised the funnel hardest. Verna is now saying, from inside one of the fastest-growing companies in the world, that the funnel has stopped being the constraint. It has moved upstream - to whether the buyer trusts the company on the other side of the transaction enough to choose it from a shortlist they have largely constructed before any seller is in the room.
The numbers behind her sentence
Ninety-four percent of B2B decision-makers used an LLM during their purchase process in 2025. Ninety-five percent of the time, the winning vendor is already on the day-one shortlist before any direct contact. Buyers spend as little as five or six percent of their journey with any single sales representative. All well known now, but… taken together, these describe a discovery and shortlisting layer the buyer constructs independently, using inputs the seller did not write, before the seller knows there is a deal to win. The question that decides commercial outcomes is no longer “how well do we convert the people we reach?” It is “what do the buyers who never speak to us decide about us before we know they exist?”
That is what Verna is calling a trust problem. It is what we have been calling a strategic infrastructure problem. Same observation, two sides of the desk.
What Lovable actually does about it
What is worth attending to is not just Verna’s framing but the operational decisions that fall out of it. Every employee at Lovable ships to production. Employee-led content is operationalised - engineers and designers are expected to post about what they are building. Revenue is traded for share of market deliberately.
What those decisions have in common is not a clever marketing tactic. They are infrastructure decisions about how the organisation is wired to produce coherence at every point of contact - the product, the people, the pricing, the public posture, all saying the same thing. That is what trust means, operationally, when an operator at $400 million ARR uses the word. Not a feeling. The cumulative output of how an organisation is built.
The strategic claim
Most CEOs we work alongside are not running an AI-native product at $400 million ARR. The instinct, reading Verna, is to assume the argument applies to a different kind of company. It does not. The mechanism operates on every business scaling through the Series A to Series C transition. The buyer researches independently. The shortlist sets before the first conversation. The decision rests on whether the company is who it appears to be at every visible touchpoint.
What changes between Lovable and a Series B fintech is not the mechanism. What changes is how much of the strategic infrastructure has been built deliberately to produce the coherence the buyer is now reading for. Most companies at this stage have built it accidentally - the founder’s instinct held it together for the first £5 million, new hires picked up the cadence by osmosis, the market story evolved one sales conversation at a time. And what worked at forty people stops working at two hundred, when the buyer is constructing your shortlist position from sources you did not know existed.
The companies that compound through the next three years will not be the ones with the best acquisition mechanics. They will be the ones whose strategic infrastructure has been built deliberately enough that every visible touchpoint earns the kind of belief that gets them onto a shortlist they never see being set.
The operators at the front of this shift are already saying so in their own language. The question is how long the gap remains between what they have figured out and what the businesses one growth stage behind them are still treating as a marketing problem.
Sources:
Verna interview: 20VC, April 2026.
Supporting data: Forrester 2026 B2B Predictions; 6Sense buyer behaviour data; Gartner B2B sales journey research.