Gary Benerofe, General Partner at Mu Ventures, on the Future of Agentic Commerce and What VCs Really Look for in AI Founders

Dennis Yao Yu: Welcome to AI for business leaders podcast. Today we have a very special guest, Gary Bennafori, who I'm known for a little bit. Gary is the general partner of MOO Ventures, an early stage venture capital fund investing in the future of commerce. Uh, with over 20 years of experience deploying capital across stages and asset classes, Gary brings a unique combinations of operational expertise and investment acumen to the technology space. Gary has a very unique value propos. Uh, unique value proposition to founders is what he calls operating capital. So not just cash, but deep playbooks and strategic guidance backed by a network of, uh, elite commerce operators and anchor LPs. So good to have you on the pod, Gary.

Gary Benerofe: Great to be here. Thanks for having me.

Dennis Yao Yu: Dennis, how are things going?

Gary Benerofe: It's great. I've been. Venture is going through a lot of different changes right now, I think. Thankfully MU Ventures is in a good spot to enjoy that ride and sort of hit it at a good time. Um, I think there's a lot of things going on that are bananas in ventureland right now and maybe we'll get into some of that. But having fun, love the game and feel lucky to be able to play

Dennis Yao Yu: it, uh, that's what it's about. That's why it keeps all of us keep going.

Gary Benerofe: Yeah.

Dennis Yao Yu: So I gave a little bit of background, but I'd love to hear from you. I mean, you have a very interesting background. You're certainly pivoted a couple times in your career very similar to mine. So I can definitely resonate with that. You've gone from investment banking and Lehman during the dot com era, to building e commerce agencies and leading digital transformations, to now investing in move ventures. What made you want to move from operating to investing? And really how does that operating experience shape how you evaluate founders today?

Gary Benerofe: Yeah, so I think maybe to like take a step back. My career has been very circuitous. Right. As you said. Started as a banker, then had a stint as a professional musician, then worked in the music industry.

Dennis Yao Yu: Uh, I didn't know about the musician part. Now that's interesting. Go ahead.

Gary Benerofe: Had a full. Yeah, still, still play. But realized then that it's super hard to make money that way. But, you know, eventually started my first company around 20, I guess it was 2012, which was called Corner Lake Capital, and sort of got a taste for what being a founder was like and what the grind felt like to go from zero to one. And got lucky, I would say a little bit strategic, a little bit lucky. And sold that business somewhat quickly and got addicted to entrepreneurialism and Bought this little software business that became Media Spa, an E commerce agency. For a While we were SEL and SaaS and we built an E Comm platform to try and take on Magento and Shopify for a while, but ultimately decided to become an SI and build on everybody else's platforms. But that process, especially Media Spa, say running that company for seven years as a CEO and getting my teeth kicked in repeatedly, a lot of empathy for what being a founder is like, um, but also gave me a lot of insight into what it takes to be really good. And I kind of figured out where I was not great and where I was maybe quite good. And so I spot that in founders, I think pretty well. Um, and I think the hardest thing about venture is to appreciate that most businesses, the gross preponderance of business, are not fit for venture. Which is another way of saying most founders are not fit to be venture backed founders. And that's because it's only a handful of businesses that can become giant, you know, exceptionally large business. And if you don't achieve that scale, the returns to your LPs are not particularly meaningful. So in a way I look for a lot of founders that look like me because I wasn't a great venture backed founder. You know, when my last company got bought and I was told to grow really, really quickly, it didn't work for me. I was like, I liked a profitable business, a little bit of a lower risk approach. And so I think that operating background has taught me what to look for in founders. Figure out who has the self awareness to be able to actually say clearly what they're great at and what they're not. And hopefully that's making us better pickers.

Dennis Yao Yu: Yeah, no, that's a, uh, that's a great point. And I often hear that about in terms of the patterns and characteristics and backgrounds of founders. I mean just based on your experience, the founders you have come across, have you seen an overarching pattern? What are those sort of backgrounds that characteristic of a uh, good or great venture backed founder? What does that look like?

Gary Benerofe: Yeah, tons of patterns. I mean not to be a cliche, but this is, this game is all about pattern recognition, I think.

Dennis Yao Yu: Yep.

Gary Benerofe: Uh, Um, I would say the sort of first thing that we look for is somebody that can attract capital, customers and talent. Right. So that's just like a, just to be able to have the conversation and move to the next step. Does the founder or the founding team have the magnetism, the energy, the confidence to. Yeah. Walk into a room of any kind and Just like create opportunities. Right. And that's attracting talent to the vision so they can hire the best of the population that's out there, the best talent available. It's convincing guys like me that like, I just can't miss this opportunity and I have to be involved. And it's getting customers to believe the vision. Often when half of it is built or none of it is built. So it's like this balancing act of trying to find teams that have that magnetism and the um, you know, just a spirit that makes you want to work with them and be in the room with them and be on the journey with them. Um, and balancing that with not buying snake oil. Right. So sometimes the most confident people in the world, um, are too good at making. So it's like a balance of knowing that they can keep getting the capital to keep the dream alive, but then have the um, experience, usually actual experience in that we like to back repeat founders of feeling what it means to grow a business for a decade and to commit to something for a long time. Because if you don't get 5, 6, 10 years of work, you're just rarely going to build something big enough to matter to a venture investor.

Dennis Yao Yu: Right. That's really interesting. I think we'll, we'll talk a little bit more about that later in the conversation. In the world of AI, few people have talked about the importance of domain expertise and having sort of existing distribution channel. I, I assume that's also the same way as you evaluate from founders, you talk about second like you know, second time founder. It's essentially that balance of understanding what they're selling is not snake oil business because they have the background experience to back to sort of back whatever they're, they're claiming. Would you say that's, that's pretty accurate in that sense?

Gary Benerofe: Look, I would say the perfect scenario is like, hey, I was an operator, I lived the problem, now I'm going to build the solution to fix the problem. That's wonderful. When you, that uh, and you know, the domain expertise is great. That's great. Although that story does often come not with a repeat founder because they were operating at something that they may not have been the, you know, founder of that company. They may have been sort of a rank and file employee. And so you're sort of pushed to consider when does the domain expertise matter more than the repeat founder and we'll back both. Like some of our strongest companies were first time founders. But having been a first time founder and seeing how much easier it gets the second and Third time you start a company. We do not wade into first time founders lightly. Like there has to be a real reason why they're going to win. Like you said, they lived that industry, they felt the problem. They can speak to the customer like others can't. But because we believe so much in the repeat founders and the value of having done this work before, like we backed a guy in Fund two who's not from the insurance agency or uh, from the insurance industry and he's starting a insurance carrier. You know, it's like what gives you the confidence to do that? Well this guy has done some really difficult work as a founder of creating Net new Technologies and has shown that he has the adaptability to move from one industry to another. So I think there, you know, if there's one rule, it's like there's no hard and fast rules. You have to be open to opportunity, try not to develop too much scar tissue and read too much much from the past, but ultimately get really confident how you read people and how people are going to react when they get into the battle.

Dennis Yao Yu: Yeah, that short term memory is important. And you invest in companies that reduce friction in commerce as part of your portfolio. Can you walk us through a little bit about how you land on that thesis and uh, why friction reduction is a defining characteristics of winners, especially in that commerce infrastructure? Yeah.

Gary Benerofe: Ah, look, so we started as ah, somebody who had built and sold uh, a commerce agency and partnered to some extent with a Shopify uh, executive. It made sense that we would be looking into commerce at the, at the core of our thesis. As we dug into it deeper and realized that there would be months and quarters and years when we weren't that interested in commerce enablement software. Maybe the market was overbuilt. Maybe we didn't think there'd be some huge exits. What we realized is that it wasn't necessarily commerce. It didn't need to be ad tech or martech for brands and retailers to grow. It could be taking what we learned growing up in commerce, so to speak, and watching what happened with Shopify and being a part of that ecosystem and applying it to other places. So vertical software like Shopify is sort of a wonderful canonical case of how to build a beautiful piece of vertical software and nurture a ecosystem to support that software. And it turns out that that same playbook is being run all over the place. Right. We have uh, an investment in a bail bond software, a hospice operating system. All of these things are sound, completely disparate. And it's like, hey, what does this commerce guy know about hospice or bail bonds? And it's like, well, what we know and what we understand is how to activate a sector with a piece of tech that removes frict from all the annoying work and the network effects that come from automating the lowest level work and making it easier for people to do their job and to elevate the roles that they're playing. That recipe works every time. And so I think the thesis, which started as like a pure commerce enablement thesis, has expanded to really any type of transaction. That transaction could be, you know, a buyer agent talking to a buyer agent on some new agentic rails and having that take zero brain power. Or it could be, you know, the fact that as an email comes in, my AI reads it, puts it into my CRM, adds it to the proper lists and does an outbound email to them at the appropriate time based on when I complete my LP quarterly update. Right. Any type of transaction that just makes doing work easier and elevates the type of work that's possible is sort of how we got there. Um, and then if we have time at the end, I'll tell you the real etymology of MU Ventures and how we came up with that. But that's sort of like uh, a chat over at Beer thing. We'll see if we get there.

Dennis Yao Yu: Yeah, we can grab a beer at the end of this podcast. We can do that.

Gary Benerofe: Uh, all right, all right.

Dennis Yao Yu: But that's actually a perfect segue, right, when it comes to gentech commerce. So you definitely have heard. A few weeks ago, OpenAI launched the instant checkout on ChatGPT with the Agentic commerce protocol. And Shopify is bringing millions of merchants to that ecosystem. And Shopify is also working on a bunch of other stuff when it comes to AI. So you've been talking about AI agents handling transactions for a while. So do you feel like this is the inflection point that we've been waiting on or are we still early and love to hear a little bit your, you know, your thesis behind that.

Gary Benerofe: Yeah. So I mean this is the type, this is the topic that I like talking about the most and may also be one that is the hardest I find to invest in. And so, you know, are we early or are we not? Like, yeah, we're early. Like we're early. Like I don't know how many people, uh, that are doing buyer to buyer agent transactions. Right. It's pretty few. Now we are in the business of investing in today, you know, that which will be big tomorrow. So this might be the time to be writing checks into that world. But kind of what I see is like this is, this is the land of the incredibly big boys, right? This is like Amazon finally has somebody that is trying to eat their lunch and OpenAI is a credible threat. I sort of think about instant checkout. You know OpenAI's instant checkout is, it's an opportunity for the attention based folks, the meta Amazon. Like these guys have ad powered platforms that kind of get your attention and run you through and they each have their own mode, right? Like meta's got the social mode, Google's got the search mode, Amazon's got the fulfillment mode. Um, and then OpenAI shows up and they're like well we got context.

Dennis Yao Yu: Mhm.

Gary Benerofe: We know all the time, right? Like my wife thinks I'm cheating on her with OpenAI right now because I do it all the time as a solo gp. People to talk to uh, in that context is powerful and they're trying to run the game without ads. Let the merchant be the, you know, the merchant of record, you know, super merchant friendly way to transact. And so that is really exciting for, for Amazon to have somebody that might take the, you know, the 40% of commerce that runs through their Rails and bring it somewhere else. And I think that moment is now. It's real, but it's also early because you can, you know, if you're lucky enough to find somebody that's enabled on um, OpenAI for their checkout, like it's still just one product that you can check out and you can't take multiple products. It's still only in the us they still have to ride on somebody else's fulfillment Rails and maybe that's a forever feature but so there's a lot that needs to happen for this to take a meaningful chunk of commerce. And if you want to think about like other agentic commerce opportunities, you know, whether it's like Perplexity's Comet browser or Atlas, like all these, where you can set up all of this work to happen autonomously. I don't know if you've played with those tools but you know those browsers. But it's, it's still, you know, it's, it's not like the average berry is going to show up and have 20% of their transacting just be automated. You know, you have to be super comfortable letting in, letting all of your information become available. Your calendar, your email, you know, your credit cards, your passwords and like I'm fine with that but not everybody is. But Then you also have to have some, you know, reasonable amount of, you know, tech acuity to like get the, get the work moving and have it be, have the juice be worth the squeeze. So I think we're early on that front. They were early on all of the fronts, but the investments being made today are going to certainly drive the winners and losers.

Dennis Yao Yu: Yeah, no, I think it's very interesting space where you just mentioned Perplexity browser or any sort of vertical agentic AI platform marketplace. There's one called Daydream, funny enough, a few months ago, excuse me, a few months ago, play around with just one use case. So I was looking for a pair of Nike Lunarlon that I had back. I had bought years ago and I bought. I uh, love their shoes. It's just so comfortable and it's no longer around. They discontinue. But I was looking for a very specific one in my size obviously and in very specific color. So I use ChatGPT, I use perplexity, I use Plod as well as Daydream just to look at. Just the prompt is obviously all the same just to see what kind of results and outputs will come, will come across. And I will have to say every single one of them is very different at this point, if anybody's interested, this is, I will say my. The best experience was actually on Daydream because it was built specific for consumer behaviors and shopping behaviors. And I think it's still very early on. As a matter of fact, we're going to have the head of product for shopping and Perplexity on the POD later on as well to speak a little bit about what they're building. So I think to your point, totally agree. We're still early on, but it is very interesting. I do use Perplexity browser one time giving all the context to run my essentially analyze, review and run my whole entire email and calendar just to see if I can really build a sort of an EA for myself. Um, you do need still a level of awareness where a level of understanding of how to orchestrate a system in order to make it work. Right. It's not automated with sort of the, the brain function of a human being right away.

Gary Benerofe: So right, that's kind of like the next, next level we need is. Okay, so here's the tools to do it now somebody like give me the framework to work on top of it, you know, like what tasks I should be focusing on if I'm going to have, you know, the Agentic browser do my travel for the next year. Like how much detail do I need in order to pull the trigger? Does it even matter that they actually buy things or do I just need them to surface all the information and you know, send it to my wife?

Dennis Yao Yu: Yeah, yeah, no, a hundred percent. And this is the part that I definitely feel a little bit better in terms of I'm still useful in this world. I'm m still not going to be completely replaced by AI. But you also, I think a while ago you have posted about two protocols. OpenAI's Agentic Commerce Protocol and Google's Agent Payments protocol having completely different versions of agentic commerce. And I'm going to post this question as almost like if you're Scott Galloway. So can you break that down for us? Which approach in your opinion is going to win and what does that mean for starters? Building on top of. On top of.

Gary Benerofe: Yeah, look, uh, I'll preface by saying I'm no engineer and I'm no protocol expert but like I think in those two situations, you know, OpenAI is just saying, hey, here is a protocol to allow transactions to happen. You as a merchant can bring in all of the stack that you've previously been utilizing, whether it be Shopify or you know, Amazon Fulfillment. And like here's just a new destination for you to transact. You know, I think Google's like hey, let's talk about building the roads for all net new applications. Right? So it's like a longer term play for use cases that are probably still being uncovered. Whereas OpenAI is like here's the use case. Here it is. Today we have hundreds of millions of users on this platform. We are going to enable it. Right. Not too different from you mentioned perplexity, you know, like they have like their shopping integration which launched not too long ago and I know they're working with one of our portfolio companies firmly on that. I think OpenAI is like today, here's the use case, here's this protocol. Great. Google's like, all right, all you pre seed founders that think that you have a new set of um, agentic commerce rails that you want to enable, like here's your toolkit. Great. Different animals, different use cases, different timelines. One's now, one's five years from now, probably till it scales.

Dennis Yao Yu: Yeah, yeah, it's um, two different approaches. Let's see what happens. At the end of the day, let's kind of take a little pivot really quick onto the brand side of it with CACs going up and also attribution down. Right. The days of reliable scaling DTC on um, paid socials are always, you know, I wouldn't say over, but certainly very much challenged. So what's going to replace it? And what does first party data acquisition and activation actually look like in practice?

Gary Benerofe: Yeah, good question. No obvious answers other than I think we're going back to the days of you have to build a brand from grassroots. You have to actually your customer and um, not just roll into somebody else's walled garden, spend a bunch of money and hope that what comes in the funnel are your most valuable, most easy to retain customers. So what does that look like? I think it looks like founders that have, you know, that are social native folks who can, either they or their team can orchestrate viral moments on their own channels that they're figuring out how to monetize TikTok and, and Instagram and WhatsApp and mobilizing these communities wherever they are without like some explicit performance marketing approach. It I think will continue to look like, and increasingly look like harnessing influencers in a way that works for your customer base and relying as little as possible on somebody else's identity graph. Right. So, um, I'm looking at a few businesses right now that are automating the responses to social comments. Right. This is a good example of uh, how you operationalize first party data. Right. If, Dennis, if you come to my website and I'm able to quickly review your LinkedIn, your, you know, your Twitter feed, your, your Instagram feed, I might know like, wow, this guy loves commerce. He's got a podcast. All right, so I'm going to now automate a response to some comment you had on a post and it's going to have contacts. It's like, Dennis, my E commerce homie, you should check out this new special we have. Right? And the ability to do that at scale on own chann channels is a way of taking first party data and turning it into a, uh, an acquisition channel and a performance channel.

Dennis Yao Yu: Do you feel like because of that TikTok shop is going to become more and more powerful and more and more important?

Gary Benerofe: I mean, there's no question that that's happening and will continue to happen in my opinion. But I think if anything it's an indication of what else needs to happen next. So like there's no brand you're going to run into who's going to be like, oh man, TikTok shop. I didn't think about that. Right? The thing is like, um, because TikTok shop is a thing, what else does that mean I need to be doing? Right? Like, is there a experiential in person type of marketing that can pick up or connect your TikTok. Your TikToks. Right. Can you run? I'm just making some stupid idea but like a activations in certain GEOs where you have scavenger hunts that start on TikTok to offer clues and then they're, you know, executed in person in different cities where the CEO might be stopping for a roadshow. I don't know this I think just sort of taking an absolute fresh look at you as a company, as a founding team, as a brand where you have, you know, where your customers are living, what you have as a skill set that is different and what can you try.

Dennis Yao Yu: Uh-huh. Right.

Gary Benerofe: Because you just like. I think it's just the idea of not accepting this playbook of. All right, I started on this email list. Now I'm going to go over to you know, Facebook and Google Ads, you know.

Dennis Yao Yu: Huh.

Gary Benerofe: That's just. This is going to be a hard road until you're scaled. Once you're scaled, great, right. You can, you know, you have the, the heft um, to make money that way. But until then you need to like really just do the work of building a brand and finding the people that love you, um, understanding why they do and leaning into it.

Dennis Yao Yu: I like this new world or the old world sort of coming back full circle, right? Yeah. I came from the days of you know, working with different brands at Casio G Shock incase and selling them into retailers and wholesale commerce before I went to E commerce and technology companies like Shopify. It is truly feels like it's a full circle with the advent of AI and I will say even for B2B out there, the software world where we're deeply into right now, commerce technologies, as you know, outbounds isn't what it used to be and it's hard to build where everybody the days of calculating each sdr, sending out a, ah, hundred emails a day and conversion rate of 1% and you know back calculating the uh, salaries and also projections at think that those days are over. And so now it becomes Even on the B2B side it's about how do you build relationship, how do you build trust whether that's just content online or in person. That's why conferences still work so well. That's why conferences are still charging people so much money even for like intimate dinners. Right. Like exclusive dinners like those really in a sense, quote unquote work because you want to buy from people you trust and whether that's from brands or just Technology companies, which I think it's all the same. So.

Gary Benerofe: Yeah, I met a, uh, I met a business the other day which is sort of leaning into this in person thing and you know, by like actually setting up like guilds or places to go to in person to do things with your hands. Right. It was a complete, um, I'm so a complete like turning on the head of everything that we've, we've thought about of like how like, you know, kind of it's just like there's no free lunch. Right. You can't just like go pay somebody else to do the hardest thing. That's always been the hardest thing that it's been to grow business, which is to find the best possible customers on repeat and keep them. And yeah, I do think it's a good thing that like hand to hand combat and in person relations are important for that now.

Dennis Yao Yu: Yeah, I know. So if anybody who's lacking soft skills, communication skills, now it's time to learn it.

Gary Benerofe: Yeah, exactly.

Dennis Yao Yu: Going to a question where this is truly how this podcast started, where people are trying to figure out or separate signal from the noise when it comes to AI and, and me sort of living in Silicon Valley, in a way, it's very much echo chamber. You have a lot of builders, you have a lot of product engineers who are just risk on. Right. This is the greatest time ever. Greatest thing ever. But when I go speak with operators with a C level or VP level from enterprises and, or even sometimes SMB and mid market, there's just a big disconnect in terms of what they're using, what they understand what AI is and also what the builders are doing, doing. So this is truly like the foundation of it in your opinion? Uh, you live through these like multiple hype cycles from dotcoms to like today's AI. When founders pitch you AI power, E commerce or AI native startups, what separates that general innovation from AI? Sort of theater or smoke and mirror. And do you have any sort of red flags you recognize when you hear them?

Gary Benerofe: Yeah, for sure. So I would say more and more, anyone who's pitching me something where the AI is the thing, as opposed to the AI being a way to do something better. Um, my red flag is already starting to rise. And what I mean by that is I want to find. I get excited when I meet people who are like, this is a huge problem now. Maybe it was the problem could now only be solved because of AI and that's why this is like this play. Okay. More times than not it's I have this unique insight and this insight is solving a problem that the incumbents can't solve or don't understand. And by the way, now that I can solve this problem with AI, it's going to go 10 times faster. And so, you know, the growth curve here is going to be exceptional. I'll buy that. I think the lens that I use is if this AI hype cycle goes the wrong way and like a bubble pops and everybody finds that the efficiencies are less than we thought, like does this thesis still hold right? Or is this idea completely tethered to AI being the end all and be all? And if the answer is like the opportunity persists beyond the AI hype cycle, I'm very excited if I have to evaluate the efficiency of this guy's agents versus that next guy's agents.

Dennis Yao Yu: Mhm.

Gary Benerofe: That's not my game. A, I'm personally ill equipped to underwrite that and B, I just don't buy that at scale because you're always going to have to compete with like OpenAI, who's going to have more money to build faster, better, smarter agents. So like, it just doesn't, it doesn't get me to conviction.

Dennis Yao Yu: Right. And I think we can kind of see that now. We had a previous conversation regarding just the usage of different foundational models and they're in such arm race where it feels like somebody's up, somebody from a new feature, new product, even better week after week. And I have to admit, even for me using ChatGPT, Claude and all of a sudden uses Sonnet 4.5 where I was blown away and all of a sudden I have to switch up the way that I do things or, or what model I use for what type of task. It's exhausting. So to your point, it's actually more about the long lasting value than the tools themselves. As you kind of look at different startups, is that, does that sound about right?

Gary Benerofe: Yeah, I mean I just think that's. It's the underlying model again where I invest. The underlying model is a commodity where most everybody has like a little switcher. Depending on the use case, it'll choose a different model. Many of them are driven off of several models. So that's not the thing for me. The thing is like, wow, there's a brand new interface now we can do conversational stuff, we can do chat stuff and we can do agentic stuff. In what use cases is this new modality, this new interface with this new brain, remake the world of a particular sector, Right? Hey, here's this company, I, uh, like to say in the corner of boring and complex that has had not a lot of venture dollars put in there and therefore not a lot of tech innovation. Wow. If they could have a chat interface where customers could say anything they want and get an automated response that's better than any of the rank and foil rank and file employees currently working there, that's pretty special, right? You know, like I was, I'm going to give you an example here of like I told you earlier, we invested in a company that's making an AI native supplemental insurance carrier.

Dennis Yao Yu: Okay.

Gary Benerofe: Not m. A lot of people build new carriers, right? It's like a super legacy business in this instance. The founder has an incredible story to tell that is super credible that if you built an insurance carrier from the ground up today and you were using AI and agents to do your underwriting and you're interacting with your members and your paybacks you get, money would flow through the system much more efficiently, much more instantly and everybody, the providers and the customers, everybody would be happier. And so I'm like, okay, this is a great story for AI, but I didn't back this founder because I thought he was going to build the best AI that was going to make the most efficient an AI company or insurance company. I, uh, backed this because he's a killer and he proved to me that he can hire incredible talent, he can raise capital and he can land customers. And so like, this is a perfect example of if the AI becomes a, uh, nothing burger. I still think this guy's going to build an incredible insurance carrier. And that's kind of how I think about AI.

Dennis Yao Yu: Yeah, yeah, that's a really good point. Let's kind of look ahead really quick. In five years, what does commerce infrastructure look like, what's obsolete and, and what may have been some of newer technologies or categories that have emerged.

Gary Benerofe: Five years, okay, so not that long from now. What do I think? What do I think is meaningfully different? I do think that the foundational models start to figure out commerce at scale, right? OpenAI does not let you just buy one product. You can search it like a regular marketplace and have some of the UX of a Amazon. So I think that happens gradually over time. I think there'll be the introduction over the next couple years that some of those transactions are eventually happening with, with buyer agents. And so there are no human interactions. And so this like application layer gets built that makes it really easy for me to export from my email, from my calendar, from my wife's email and calendar what it is that we want to purchase, um, and experiences we want to have over the next six months and some chunk of that gets fed to us and transacted for us. And so I think that starts to happen with increasing growth over the next five years. I think, I think where I'm focused on the evolution of commerce here. So by the way, to make that happen, what does that mean? It means that there's been a way to authenticate buyer agents, right? You figured out instead of walking into a transaction and shopify wanting to text you a code to put in like that, two factor authentication gets figured out how to happen robot to robot, which is no small task. So there's lots of rails and security that gets built in to let people feel comfortable taking the risk of letting robots do their work. But I think there'll be like far less exciting and futuristic sounding stuff that happens when just the commerce that is available today moves down from, you know, the Amazons and the Open A and soon to be the OpenAI's of the world, but goes into the vertical software set. Right. So one of our first investments out of fund two was into this hospice operating system, right? Over time they want to become a system of record that helps hospice operators run their business. Today it's a ton of calling a lot of people, um, you know, managing multiple systems, having a lot of employees, trying to figure out how to um, distill clinical records and whatnot in five years. I think that is, you know, everybody in these hospice companies that is doing this low level billing work and accounting work and auditing work and matching work gets to do a lot more interesting work. And so I think there's like this evolution, there's a little bit more big picture, but that people are doing less annoying shit and jobs are more fulfilling. Because what's going to happen in five years is that as we figure out how to get rid of hallucinations and we figure out how to let people who are not very tech savvy manage agents, you're going to be able to start to bang out a bunch of tasks that make life laborious and slow progress. And I think that filters from the center of Silicon Valley to the Midwest, to developing nations, to everywhere. It's just that life like your day to day is just different whether you're a consumer or employee or what have you. And that's like the essence of removing friction from transactions, which is what we are all about.

Dennis Yao Yu: There you go. I think you just put a full circle moment to this podcast. So that was fantastic. But that is a great note. We do want to end on a note for you to share a little bit about how did the name Move Venture come about?

Gary Benerofe: All right, so the quick story is this. So it's MU Ventures and M. Mu is the co fiction of friction in physics. Right. We're lowering the mu. That's lowering the friction. And so when we started MU Ventures, it was me and this guy, Jeff Weiser. And Jeff has a full time job at El Catterton. But he, you know, he's a thought partner. He's an anchor LP for me. Jeff and I used to go to parties when we were in college and we would wonder what is the mew of this table? Because we'd be bouncing a quarter off that table trying to make that quarter here. And we'd want to know is the quarter going to bounce high or low? Like what's the mew? And that was sort of our inside joke. And when I got this thing off the ground, it was like, what is a thing that will remind us where we came from back at Yale in 1999? Um, but we could apply some product marketing to that is about commerce. And there you have that.

Dennis Yao Yu: That's awesome. I think the takeaway is get all the inspiration from the parties you go to. The more alcohol you consume, the more creative you could be.

Gary Benerofe: I'll take it. I'll take it.

Dennis Yao Yu: Yeah, yeah. So for folks who want to learn more. I'm sorry, for folks who want to learn more about you or connect with you, where should they go?

Gary Benerofe: Yeah, um, you can reach out to me on LinkedIn. You can send me an email. Gary. Com. You can submit a form. If you're a founder looking to do a raise on our. On our website, I'm easy to find. And that is, um, that's a feature that's part of MU Ventures ethos is, um, we're here to help people be supportive and demystify a lot of this venture capital stuff and be readily available

Dennis Yao Yu: to everyone listening if you found this valuable. Subscribe to the podcast AI for business leaders on Spotify, Apple podcast, YouTube and leave a comment. Please also share with others navigating the future of AI. Thanks for listening and we'll catch you on the next one.