M13 used to back consumer brands like Bonobos and Daily Harvest. Now it invests exclusively in the infrastructure underneath them. Brent Murri explains why bolting on specialized point solutions creates unmanageable data problems instead of flexibility, and why a trustworthy, single source of truth — the kind major brands like Sonos have built on Chord — is the real precondition for AI actually working.
Behind the Expert
Brent Murri is a partner at M13, an early-stage venture firm investing in seed and Series A companies across commerce, healthcare, fintech, and what he calls "future of" categories, with AI and crypto as horizontal layers across all four. His path into venture began with a student-run fund at BYU, followed by a few years in investment banking at Lazard's M&A group working on buy-side deals for companies like Google and Microsoft, a year at Samsung's mobile division helping the company push beyond hardware into software and services, and a stint investing in later-stage enterprise software at Battery Ventures. He joined M13 as its first employee eight years ago; the firm has since grown from three people to more than 45 across San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York, and is investing out of its fourth fund. M13 led Chord's most recent funding round — a deal that, by Murri's own account, almost didn't happen: he initially passed on Chord's round structure before coming back around once the terms and product direction had evolved.
The Quick Hits
- M13's early portfolio was consumer brands directly — Bonobos, Daily Harvest, Rothy's, FabFitFun, alongside technology names like Lyft, Pinterest, and Ring — before the firm pivoted around 2016–2017 to invest in the commerce infrastructure powering those brands instead. It hasn't made a new direct brand investment in six or seven years, but keeps building its brand network because it gives infrastructure portfolio companies what Murri calls an "unfair advantage."
- M13's differentiator, in Murri's telling, is its "propulsion team": roughly 40 people across three offices, with a 3-to-1 ratio of full-time operators to investors, dedicated entirely to post-investment support — talent recruiting, go-to-market help, brand introductions, product strategy.
- M13 initially passed on Chord's funding round — not on the business or market, but on the round structure — and came back around once a structure that worked for both sides emerged, helped along by an agency partner who was seeing results with Chord's platform firsthand with its own clients.
- What ultimately won M13's investment wasn't the CDP alone — it was the combination of trustworthy, unified data plus an AI copilot layer built on top of it, aimed at sharpening marketers' hypotheses and decisions rather than replacing their judgment.
- Murri's practical hiring filter for an AI-native era: ask candidates what AI tools they use daily and how, and look for people who are already faster adopters of the technology than you are, not people who need to be taught.
- His core thesis on AI and jobs: "Your job isn't going to be replaced by AI. Your job is going to be replaced by somebody that uses AI better than you" — the opportunity is for humans to get more powerful with AI at the helm, not to be removed from the decision.
- Across conversations with brands evaluating AI tools, "single source of truth" kept surfacing as the actual blocker — brands were building point-solution AI on top of fragmented, untrustworthy data, and no dashboard, attribution model, or AI feature works if the underlying numbers can't be trusted.
From a student-run fund to M13's first employee
Murri's introduction to venture came almost by accident — a student-run venture fund at BYU gave him real capital from outside LPs to invest in early-stage startups, an experience he says was eye-opening for someone with no prior exposure to the industry. From there he spent a few years in investment banking at Lazard's M&A group representing large Silicon Valley acquirers, then a year inside Samsung's mobile division working on M&A, strategy, and partnerships as the company tried to shift from hardware-first toward software and services. A stint investing in later-stage enterprise software at Battery Ventures followed before he met M13's co-founders and joined as the firm's first employee.
From investing in brands to investing in what powers them
M13's earliest checks went directly into consumer brands and consumer technology — Bonobos, Daily Harvest, FabFitFun, Rothy's, Tocovas on the brand side; Lyft, Pinterest, and Ring on the technology side. Around 2016–2017, the firm shifted toward investing in the commerce infrastructure powering brands like those instead, and hasn't made a new direct brand investment in six or seven years — though it continues investing heavily in its brand network, because having those relationships gives its infrastructure portfolio companies real advantages once M13 invests.
Passing on Chord, then coming back
M13's investment in Chord followed an unusual path: an initial pass, followed by persistence, a shift in deal structure, and outside validation before the firm came back around and ultimately led the round.
Why trustworthy data was the actual investment thesis
Murri was explicit that M13 wasn't simply betting on another CDP. What made Chord's pitch distinct, in his account, was pairing that data infrastructure with an AI layer built to help marketers make better decisions faster.
Hiring for AI fluency, not AI hype
Asked what practical advice he'd give a brand operator feeling behind on AI adoption, Murri's first answer was about who you hire, not which tool you buy.
AI shopping agents won't replace the joy of shopping
The conversation turned to agentic shopping, and both guests converged on the same limit: agents will absorb the utility purchases nobody enjoys, not the discovery and social experience that makes a purchase feel like a purchase.
Single source of truth kept coming up
Murri traced a recurring theme across M13's conversations with brands: point-solution AI tools for A/B testing, attribution, or personalization were being layered on top of data nobody fully trusted.
He described "can you trust the data?" as the very first question M13 asked Chord's customers during diligence, and the consistency of the answer as a genuine differentiator.
Why "headless with a brain" became a smarter CDP
Late in the conversation, Murri turned the interview back on his host — asking Bryan Mahoney, Chord's founder, about the company's own pivot from a headless commerce platform to a data platform. Mahoney's answer doubled as the clearest statement of the thesis Murri had just described from the investor's side.
Mahoney described the moment the pivot crystallized: prospects kept asking to buy only the data product, and after enough of them balked at his answer — "great, you need to replatform" — the team decided to become storefront- and OMS-agnostic and sell the data layer on its own.
Sound Bites
- “Our differentiator is the support we provide post-investment — we call it our propulsion team. We have a little over 40 people, 10 investors and 30 full-time operators — a 3-to-1 ratio of operational portfolio support to investor. We believe having those proactive resources gives founders a slight leg up on their competition.”
- “There was something that resonated with us from the very first meeting — it was the round structure we passed on, not the business or the market opportunity. I have to give credit to friends at Grow, a leading growth agency, who told us we really needed to double-click on what Chord was doing, because it was a game changer for their clients.”
- “A lot of what we invested in is the AI copilot being built for marketers — taking domain expertise and data to help elevate the right hypothesis and decision-making. That was the big vision we invested in: combining data, which we believe can be done better than others, with marketing activation.”
- “With any platform shift, you want to be surrounded by people native to that technology. I always ask in interviews, what are your favorite AI applications? ChatGPT or Perplexity is always the top one, but then a layer deeper — what else are you using in your daily workflows? I want people who are smarter at the tools than I am.”
- “Your job isn't going to be replaced by AI. Your job is going to be replaced by somebody that uses AI better than you. A marketing copilot doesn't replace the decision-makers — it makes their job so much more lethal and effective.”
- “We can want all we want in terms of agentic workflows or leveraging AI, but if our data is all over the place, we haven't earned the right to get started. I've seen these waves before — ten or fifteen years ago there was a lot of talk about investing in first-party data, but not a lot of action, because it was too easy to acquire customers on Facebook. Now, more than ever, that first-party data customers are trusting you with is gold.”
- “We always had it — I think back to that first pitch deck, we cheekily said we were "headless with a brain." We founded Chord as a software platform we were using ourselves as brand operators, and we started with the data stack, because after 20 years in commerce, getting data right — having that single source of truth — was the hardest problem.”
The Chord take
Murri's account of M13's own diligence process is, in miniature, the same argument he makes about brands adopting AI: a slicker interface or a smarter model doesn't fix a foundation nobody trusts. M13 didn't pass on Chord because the AI vision was weak — it passed on a deal structure, then came back once the underlying fundamentals were re-examined and validated by real customers. That's the exact sequence he describes brands needing to go through with their own data before any agentic workflow or AI copilot is worth building: verify the foundation first, then layer intelligence on top of it, not the other way around. His hiring advice and his line about jobs being replaced by "somebody who uses AI better than you" point at the same idea from a different angle. AI is a multiplier on whatever judgment and infrastructure already exist — multiplying bad data produces confidently wrong answers faster, and multiplying good judgment with the right tools produces exactly the "lethal" decision-making he describes wanting from a marketing copilot. The through-line across his investment thesis, his hiring philosophy, and his read on agentic shopping is the same: AI should widen what a trustworthy foundation — a data platform, a hiring bar, a customer relationship — already lets you do, not substitute for building that foundation in the first place.
Put it to work
- 1Before adopting any new AI point solution — attribution, A/B testing, personalization — verify whether it's built on data you already trust. A better interface won't fix numbers that don't match your other dashboards.
- 2In hiring, ask candidates what AI tools they use daily and how, not whether they've "used AI." Look for people already ahead of you on adoption, not people who need to be convinced.
- 3Audit how many different dashboards your team cross-checks for the same metric. If the answer is more than one, that's the actual bottleneck to fix before investing further in AI-powered analysis.
- 4If a promising deal, partnership, or platform decision gets a "no," ask for the specific reason before walking away — Chord's own funding round only came together after detailed feedback on why the structure, not the business, didn't work.
- 5Treat first-party data as the asset worth investing in before agentic shopping or AI-driven personalization. The brands M13 backs win by combining trustworthy data with human judgment, not by removing the human from the decision.
- 6When evaluating your commerce infrastructure, weigh the "best-of-breed" appeal of specialized point solutions against the data-fragmentation cost each new tool adds. Consolidation around a single source of truth may be worth more than another specialized feature.
Full transcriptShow ↓
Bryan Mahoney
We hear from venture capitalists like, we add value, we are value-add investors — being able to ask that question, well—
Brent Murri
How you could build all the incredible applications on top of them, but if you couldn't trust that the data was accurate, it was all for nothing.
Bryan Mahoney
And it just feels like AI has sort of now become table stakes — it is part of the platform.
Brent Murri
I always ask in my interview questions, what are your favorite AI applications? Google is not going to go away — people have said, oh, this is the Google killer. No, they have Gemini, they're going to be just fine. But it's no longer going to be a 95% market share business.
Bryan Mahoney
The more best-of-breed components you brought to bear on a problem, the more data problems you ultimately created. Thanks for tuning in to the Brilliant Commerce Podcast, where I get a chance to sit down with the brightest minds in commerce, where we unpack the secrets behind some of the industry's most iconic, or soon-to-be-iconic, brands. Normally I have a chance to sit down with brand operators, but today we're flipping that script a little bit — thrilled to be joined by early-stage investor extraordinaire Brent Murri, partner at M13. Brent, thanks for being on the pod.
Brent Murri
I'm very happy to be here, and it's going to be a fun format, because literally we're flipping the script and I get to interview you a little bit as well — that'll be fun.
Bryan Mahoney
Well, we'll see — depends if you get through all my questions successfully, and how much time we have. This is fun to be able to do live, together in Las Vegas — day one of ShopTalk, or day two, I guess, in the books. Busy day, we're doing this at the end of the day, so we'll try to bring the energy. But I appreciate you sitting down with me like this.
Brent Murri
We got some energy drinks for later if we need them — but ShopTalk is the Super Bowl for e-comm every year, so there's a lot to look forward to these next couple of days.
Bryan Mahoney
Yeah, absolutely. I've known M13 for a little while, gotten to know you over the last year or so, but before we dive in — give me the three-minute rundown on who Brent Murri is, and how you got to M13.
Brent Murri
Yeah, of course. My journey into venture actually started in my undergrad — I went to BYU in Utah, and we had a student-run venture capital group called University Venture Fund. I came from rural Washington state, that's where I grew up — my dad was a home builder, my mom was a stay-at-home mom, and I had no idea what venture capital was. Getting that exposure in college, with a real fund from LPs that we got to invest in early-stage startups, was such an eye-opening experience — taught me a lot about entrepreneurship, and that's what I wanted to do eventually coming out of undergrad. Nobody really gets into venture that early in their career.
Brent Murri
So I went the finance route, spent a couple years in investment banking in San Francisco — most of my time at Lazard, in their M&A group, where we represented a lot of the larger corporations in Silicon Valley. We did a lot of buy-side acquisitions for Google and Microsoft, and got to know that part of Silicon Valley very well — which led to me leaving and joining one of those firms. I joined Samsung's mobile team, and for a year was tasked with disrupting from within — I was on the M&A group, the strategy group, the partnerships team, really helping Samsung morph from being a hardware-first company to more software and services, similar to what Apple's done with their ecosystem.
Brent Murri
Then I finally made it into venture, at a firm called Battery Ventures — I was there a couple of years, cut my teeth investing in later-stage, more enterprise software. Then I met the co-founders of M13, and that's where my life changed for the better — moved to Los Angeles from the Bay Area, joined M13 as the first employee. It's been crazy looking eight years back — we've grown from three employees to a little over 45, from one tiny office that almost seemed like an attic in Beverly Hills to three offices now, San Francisco, LA, and New York. We're on our fourth fund right now, so it's been quite a transformation.
Brent Murri
It feels like we're just scratching the surface. But the whole time at M13, I've really been investing in leading software, and now AI, for the e-commerce category — that's where I've spent the bulk of my career, building my venture track record.
Bryan Mahoney
Yeah, that's awesome. I've known M13 for five years, and what always fascinated me about the fund was the early focus on consumer and on brands — some really good early investments in that first wave of direct-to-consumer. And even today, although you're less focused on the brand side and more on the infrastructure powering those brands, when I see the events and the ecosystem you contribute to, it's really all-in on consumers. So for those listening who don't know much about M13, in your own words, what makes the fund really special?
Brent Murri
Yeah, great transition, because in the very early days of M13, we were investing directly in consumer brands — the first investments made at the firm were basically all consumer technology and consumer brands. On the technology side, some early investments were Lyft, Pinterest, Ring, the doorbell company — great names. On the brand side, Bonobos, Daily Harvest, FabFitFun, Rothy's, Tocovas — really great, transformational brands now. Our DNA and start investing in e-commerce gave us the right to win in a lot of the commerce infrastructure investments we started. We transitioned, I'd say in 2016, 2017, to start investing in the e-commerce infrastructure that powered a lot of those brands, and we haven't made a brand investment in six or seven years.
Brent Murri
But because it's such an unfair advantage for us, we've continued to build out that ecosystem, because we realize having brands in our network helps our portfolio companies once we invest in them — we do a lot of events and networking connecting commerce technology and brands. That's one part of how M13 operates. But at a high level, we're a seed and Series A focused firm — we lead rounds in seed and Series A companies, not just in commerce. I spend a lot of my time in commerce; a lot of my partners focus on healthcare, fintech, 'future of' — those are our four verticals, including commerce, that we spend a lot of time in.
Brent Murri
We invest in AI and crypto as horizontal layers across those verticals, where we have extreme expertise, and then really, our big differentiator — and hopefully part of the reason we sold you to take our investment instead of others — is the support we provide post-investment. We call it our propulsion team; in venture, people know it as a platform team or portfolio support. We lean heavily and invest a lot of the firm's resources into building out that side of the house, because we believe it's going to help move the needle with our portfolio companies. If you look at M13 today, across those three offices, we have a little over 40 people — 10 investors and 30 full-time operators.
Brent Murri
So we have a 3-to-1 ratio of operational portfolio support to investor, and it really shows where we're investing our resources — everything is focused on post-investment, working with founders on everything from talent recruiting, go-to-market help, brand introductions, product strategy help. We believe having those proactive resources for our founders gives them a slight leg up on their competition, and we're really in it together.
Bryan Mahoney
Yeah, and as a founder, you need that support — that's a great question for any early-stage or less experienced founder to ask. When we hear from venture capitalists, we add value, we are value-add investors — being able to ask, well, what does that look like? The more I got to know the M13 team, that ratio is amazing, and we felt it early on. You kind of casually buried the lede there — by the time we're talking, we're at ShopTalk 2025, and by the time this podcast comes out, we will have announced that M13 led the latest round of funding into Chord.
Brent Murri
So, very exciting.
Bryan Mahoney
First — thank you for that. Maybe a non-traditional story, but when we decided to go raise that round, M13 was the first fund I called, because I was impressed with your track record in commerce and the focus you all had on commerce infrastructure. I thought what we were building was really going to resonate, and that some of these value-added services could help us get to the next level. And you politely passed. We remained persistent, shifted our strategy, and you gave us really good feedback during that process. So maybe another lesson for founders — keep going, don't give up, and when you hear a no, don't be too discouraged. Take the feedback and get back to work.
Bryan Mahoney
But I say all that because I'll selfishly turn the conversation to Chord now — traditionally on the podcast I don't like to go there too much. But you've seen, given your experience, a ton of data platforms focused on the marketer and commerce infrastructure — there's a reason you decided to invest in Chord. I'd be curious, in your own words, what was it about our smarter CDP that gives us a real shot to break through in this next wave of commerce?
Brent Murri
Yeah, going back to the point of us passing — rarely do investors pass on a company and then come back around. Once you decide in the investor seat, you're barraged with an unlimited number of companies to invest in, so you allocate your time accordingly. For you guys, there was something that resonated with us from the very first meeting — a combination of you, your skill set, and what you were doing in the market. It was more just the round structure we passed on — it didn't make sense for us at that time. But as we dove in more, there was a structure presented that was very appealing to both parties.
Brent Murri
We didn't really pass on the business or the market opportunity — once we found a round that made sense to everybody, we got very excited and leaned in heavily. I have to give credit to friends at Grow — John and Kevin, one of the leading growth agencies out there — who brought it back to us and said, you really need to double-click on what Bryan's doing, because it's a game changer for our clients. When somebody like that, who works day in and day out with these technologies, tells you that, it's a good proof point to dive in a little more.
Brent Murri
What I saw with you guys — yes, we'd seen a lot of data plays — was first, you and the team building what you'd built before with the headless platform, investing so many resources into that data infrastructure, and the CDP gave you an unfair advantage I don't believe a lot of other founders in the category have, coupled with your vision for what you wanted to bring to market. A lot of what we invested in, a lot of what we've talked about post-investment, is the AI copilot you're building for marketers — taking your domain expertise and data to help elevate the right hypothesis and decision-making for marketers, giving them a leg up.
Brent Murri
That was the big vision we invested in — combining data, which we believe you can do better than others, with marketing activation. That end-to-end platform is something we've heard time and time again that marketers want and desire, and we felt like you painted the most clear and articulate picture of that.
Bryan Mahoney
Yeah, I think back to that conversation, even the email exchange we had when you did pass, and you gave us more feedback than most investors would normally give. I've been out raising money for a couple of years now, so you hear no a lot, and you've got to get good at hearing no. We really took that feedback to heart. I think we did have infrastructure we were really proud of, but we were perhaps lacking direction — and this opportunity was sitting there in front of us, to take that infrastructure, leverage what was happening with AI, and come back with a clearer sense of purpose — and, yes, a clearer sense of purpose in terms of deal structure too.
Bryan Mahoney
But I think it was really unique. I want to bring it back to ShopTalk a little — I went back through some of my notes from 2024, and AI was everywhere. It was this sort of, if you're not investing in AI, if you're not building with AI, you've been left behind. I don't know about you, but today, walking around the show floor, it just feels like AI has become table stakes — it's part of the platform. We're doing all of these things, and we're using AI to make our product better, to make the user of our product better. And I think this is playing into maybe Chord's book a little bit, but that's resonating more than ever for me.
Bryan Mahoney
If you've got really good data and really good infrastructure, what are the opportunities to leverage — whether it's an agentic workflow, or being able to tap into the wealth of LLMs available to us — to get more from the hard work you've ultimately been doing? As an investor, walking around the show floor, are you feeling the same thing? Are you looking for something in particular in AI this year that maybe you weren't looking for last year?
Brent Murri
Yeah, I've noticed the same thing. If you go back in time — ChatGPT released at the end of 2022, ShopTalk 2023, people weren't really sure if it was going to stick.
Bryan Mahoney
Right.
Brent Murri
You could feel the AI wave coming, but it wasn't as strong yet. Then ShopTalk 2024, it was clear this was going to be the future — a lot of technology vendors, startups, and e-comm enablement companies rushing to build the right AI solution they could eventually sell to brands. But it was still sort of that smirk — 'we are an AI company,' and investors would think, oh yeah, heard this one before, a little bit of a smirk when they said it. Now it's so clear it's just embedded in everybody's workflows, everybody's product roadmap, that you don't even need to say it.
Brent Murri
You assume, yes, you're utilizing AI in one way or another — whether you're AI-native building LLMs or applications on top of LLMs, or just utilizing the best off-the-shelf technology in your current business. Whatever it is, it's unspoken now, it doesn't need to be said as much.
Bryan Mahoney
Yeah, I think that's true. What I'm struggling to wrap my brain around is practical advice you can give a brand, or specifically someone in the marketing seat, who's feeling overwhelmed — like, are we not leveraging AI to the extent we should be, are we suddenly being left behind? So what advice would you have for a brand operator, out of all the platforms you've seen, on what things they should be thinking about adopting first that might have the most impact for their business?
Brent Murri
Yeah, one of my best pieces of advice — with any platform shift, you want to be surrounded by people native to that technology. So hire people who've been using AI day in and day out. I always ask in interviews, what are your favorite AI applications? ChatGPT or Perplexity is always the top one, but then going a layer deeper — what else, what are you using in your daily workflows, how are you leveraging AI in your personal and professional life? I want people who are smarter at the tools than I am.
Bryan Mahoney
Yeah, right.
Brent Murri
Because I'm a millennial, I grew up using social platforms, and I've tried to adopt AI as much as I can, but I want to hire people who are so much faster at adopting this than me.
Bryan Mahoney
Yeah.
Brent Murri
So that's one recommendation right out of the gate. The other is, it just takes time — you need to set aside a block of time to experiment with different platforms, because the learning curve on something like ChatGPT was fairly steep at first, but it's pretty easy to adopt now. Other workflow tools inside an organization — the AI features of Notion, Airtable, Superhuman — take a little more time. But once you really start using them, you can never get rid of them, it's a sticky experience. Investing that time to really understand the AI tools at your disposal makes a difference in your everyday workflows.
Bryan Mahoney
Yeah, I think that's really great advice — this idea of investing time to learn the workflows, because we're in fact learning something different. One of my interview questions is, how are you using ChatGPT, let's open it up — have you trained your own models, are you using this differently than anyone else? Because when you first dive in it feels like magic, and then it can feel somewhat generic, but there's real power there if you're willing to invest in making it your own — and it can be ChatGPT, or any number of things.
Brent Murri
Yeah, and there's just so many — if you're a commerce operator or merchant, there's so much at your disposal. I could plug so many SaaS and AI solutions, but there's no shortage of tools available — it's just finding the right people who want to employ those strategies. We talk about this a lot — one of my favorite quotes is, your job isn't going to be replaced by AI, your job is going to be replaced by somebody that uses AI better than you. I fully subscribe to that. There are so many more opportunities for humans to be at the helm of decision-making, made more powerful and better through the use of AI. Coming back to Chord, that's what got us very excited about what you were building.
Brent Murri
A marketing copilot does not replace the decision-makers — it makes their job so much more lethal and effective.
Bryan Mahoney
Yeah.
Brent Murri
And that's what we got excited about.
Bryan Mahoney
Yeah, that's what I'm excited about too. So taking my technologist hat off, or asking you to take your investor hat off for a second — let's put our consumer hats on. You said you're a millennial, I'm not — considerably older. I've been in commerce since '97. If I think back to my biography, I've seen a number of different waves, a lot of technology that was suddenly going to make commerce easy. Commerce is not easy, it has never been easy. I don't think AI is necessarily going to make it easier, but it is going to change it. For me, I love the term iconic brand.
Bryan Mahoney
As I think about what makes a brand iconic, it's the connection the brand has with its customer, the understanding of the product and experience they really want. Sometimes I get worried that when we're so focused on data, or being data-driven, we lose that — we run the risk of losing that connection with the customer, losing a little of that magic. I love to shop, we're in Vegas, you're surrounded by gambling and shopping.
Brent Murri
Yeah.
Bryan Mahoney
But there's something nice about walking into a store and being treated the right way, and discovering something on your own. So I think a lot about the products we're building — our ability to leverage AI to give marketers or brand operators data superpowers, to make them super lethal — because I never want to lose that connection, I never want a brand to lose its connection with me. I want to be friends with that brand. So, A, does that resonate with you as a consumer, and B, is that a lens you'd look through as an investor when finding the right tools that give someone that lethal competitive edge?
Brent Murri
Yeah, we think about this a lot — using data is very important, but it's just one of the tools at your disposal as the decision-maker. A lot of times it's just being in the industry, having a sixth sense for things, relying on the quote-unquote gut to make decisions, and pairing that with data. A lot of when we were looking at Chord, talking to customers like Ruggable and Sonos, and you have a ton of really great, iconic brands with incredible communities and followings — they said, time and time again, that they're in search of a better data platform that gives them the single source of truth to make decisions. It's not making decisions for you.
Brent Murri
It's not relying 100% on the data — you still need experienced operators to translate the data and figure out where you want to go with things. You still need that human, that experience. AI can do so many things to connect the dots for the human marketer, but nothing replaces the human touch. And I agree, by the way — as an investor in e-commerce, one of the areas we're doing a lot of work in right now is the agentic shopper. There's a point in the very near future where you and I are going to be asking our personal agent shopper to shop on our behalf. Are they going to do 100% of our shopping?
Brent Murri
No, I believe that will never happen, because there are utility ways to shop — I just need my toilet paper, my razor subscription — and there are entertaining or social ways to shop, where you want to go to the mall or discover something new, and that's actually part of the shopping journey. There's that human touch to it. So while the technologist side of my brain is very excited about agentic shopping, and I believe it'll be a huge part of the overall shopping TAM, you're not going to replace the whole pie with agents crawling the internet everywhere. You want to still have that joy of shopping, finding something, the joy of discovery, the joy of the social interaction that comes with it.
Bryan Mahoney
Yeah, like buying that thing, being excited to receive it on your doorstep, and opening it up. I have this slide in a presentation where I've got this pile of Amazon boxes — nothing against Amazon, I think it's an iconic brand in its own right, a great example of a data-driven brand — but the way I tell this story is, you kick over the boxes and forget what you ordered, and maybe the way I should be telling it now is, agents bought the things in those boxes, so you actually don't know what's in it.
Brent Murri
Yeah.
Bryan Mahoney
You just know you probably need to open it, you need it, but you kick those boxes out of the way because there's that other box you're really excited to open.
Brent Murri
Yeah.
Bryan Mahoney
And actually, the picture you just painted is something I'm really excited about — I'd like for 60, 70, 80% of the shopping I need to do but don't really want to do to be done for me, so I can really focus my time on discovering products or interacting with brands that truly bring me joy.
Brent Murri
Yeah.
Bryan Mahoney
And I think the same applies to our workflows — if a lot of the things I know I need to do, but that are difficult, can suddenly be made easier, then I can focus on the things that really bring me joy. I think our customers are going to feel that, or at least that's my hope.
Brent Murri
What was the last box for you where you kicked the Amazon boxes out of the way — what's the brand?
Bryan Mahoney
I'm going to plug a guest who was on my last episode of the podcast — I discovered a brand called Born Primitive. I'm sort of a fitness junkie, and I like discovering these next new brands. I'd done my research before she came on, and the brand seemed super cool, so I did some shopping, and the product arrived — I was excited to try their shoes, their shorts. So I did kick some Amazon boxes out of the way.
Brent Murri
Brand Collective?
Bryan Mahoney
No, Born Primitive.
Brent Murri
Born Primitive, sorry — yeah, Born Primitive.
Bryan Mahoney
All right, I'm going to look — super cool brand, community-driven. They're trying to do more with first-party data to strengthen the connection with their customer. The other thing you said in there too — this notion of a single source of truth — I don't think we're talking about that enough. If I were to give listeners any practical advice to take back to their organization, it's this: we can want all we want in terms of agentic workflows or leveraging AI, but if our data is all over the place, we haven't earned the right to get started.
Bryan Mahoney
Whether you use Chord or something else, that's what I'd focus on — how do I get most of my data in one place? I've seen all these different waves of commerce. I remember ten or fifteen years ago there was a lot of talk about investing in first-party data, but I didn't see a lot of action — it was just too easy to acquire customers on Facebook, that's what everyone was doing. But now more than ever, I want to encourage brands to think about that first-party data customers are trusting them with as gold — gold to leverage AI to extract more value from, yes, but really, that's where you're going to make those better connections with customers.
Brent Murri
Yeah, the single source of truth kept coming up. I'm not a brand operator, I don't pretend to be, but as part of my job I talk to a lot of them, and I start to pick up on different complaints and things people love, things people hate. In our multiple conversations, this single source of truth kept coming up. It's almost — it still happens a little bit with hallucinations in some of the LLMs, but remember a year ago, a bit before, Gemini had all these issues, ChatGPT had all these hallucinations, and you could build all the incredible applications on top of them, for research, video creation.
Bryan Mahoney
Yeah.
Brent Murri
But if you couldn't trust that the data was accurate, it was all for nothing.
Bryan Mahoney
Right, and I think that's a theme we've been hearing from a lot of merchants — they're using cool point-solution AI applications for A/B testing, landing page optimization, multi-touch attribution, but occasionally marketers know their job, and in their gut they're thinking, that just doesn't look right.
Bryan Mahoney
That data source, in our dashboard, just seems off — and if I cross-check it with Google Analytics or one of my other dashboards, which is a problem in and of itself, that you're checking two or three or four sources—
Brent Murri
—different.
Bryan Mahoney
Yeah, the numbers are different. So you can't rely on the data, and you can eventually get to it because you have the source of truth, it just takes time.
Brent Murri
Yeah.
Bryan Mahoney
And one of the common complaints we're getting is, you just can't — there's not a single source of truth to trust. There's a lot of dashboards, analytics, and attribution tools out there. But when we really started diving into the value prop you were solving at Chord — starting with the data, the integrity and reliability of the data — in our opinion, that gave you the right to win and build applications on top of it, because people could trust it. That was the first question we asked all your numerous customers: can you trust the data?
Brent Murri
Yeah.
Bryan Mahoney
And everybody came back with a resounding yes — like it's the only one. That gave us a lot of excitement about what you were able to do. On top of that, we don't believe just building a CDP is going to do it for this market — they want a lot of the tools, and AI-powered applications on top, which we think you guys are well positioned to build. But that was a through-line in the many conversations we've had.
Brent Murri
Well, I appreciate you bringing that up — something we're really proud of. Sometimes it doesn't sound all that sexy to talk about having trustworthy, reliable data that's all in one place. Sometimes you don't like what the data tells you, but I think it's definitely the place to be.
Bryan Mahoney
It's sexy to CTOs, sexy to CIOs, sexy to a certain contingent of e-comm operators.
Brent Murri
Yes — given my background as a CTO, maybe it's not surprising that's what we focus on. Okay, that's awesome, I appreciate all of that. Any key takeaways so far for you? I know it's only been two days at ShopTalk, but is there something that's really surprised you, that you've already taken back to the team, or want to dig into more?
Bryan Mahoney
ShopTalk is doing something new this year — they have almost like a—
Brent Murri
A new—
Bryan Mahoney
—world inside ShopTalk called, I think, the New World. It's all about AI's impact on advertising and marketing, and that's where I have a lot of internal passion at M13, looking at tools impacting the way e-commerce merchants advertise and market to consumers, and how consumers interact with advertising. Kind of like what I talked about before with agentic shoppers, which I think is much closer than we actually realize. And on the merchant side, how do you build your website infrastructure to cater to agentic shoppers versus human shoppers? Very different buyer profiles, shopping in a very different way.
Bryan Mahoney
So a lot of the themes I've been tuning into are, in this new world where people are searching for your brand on ChatGPT or other search engines, using an AI agent to shop on their behalf, where AI is really powering discovery for consumers — how are merchants reacting, what are they using to convert not only humans but agents on their website?
Brent Murri
Yeah, it's fascinating that you just called ChatGPT a search engine.
Bryan Mahoney
Yeah.
Brent Murri
It's really my go-to search now.
Bryan Mahoney
Yeah, the data's pretty clear — Adobe just came out with their latest trends report a few weeks ago, and it was a very high percentage of shoppers now going first to ChatGPT over Google. Google's not going away — people have said, oh, this is the Google killer, no, they have Gemini, they'll be just fine. But it's my belief it's no longer going to be a 95% market-share business like it's been for the last 20 years. It's going to be much more fragmented — ChatGPT is a clear leader, Gemini.
Bryan Mahoney
But people love and swear by Claude, people love and swear by Perplexity, and there are several others coming up too, but it'll be much more fragmented. It'll be a very interesting search engine landscape — not to mention social platforms leveraging Meta with Llama, X with Grok — infinite ways to search for things now. They're all search engines.
Brent Murri
For me it's going to be interesting — I find myself hopping from platform to platform, and that feels somewhat inefficient. So it's, which platform is going to be able to do more of what I need in a single place, so that if I train it to be smarter, to know me better, that's ultimately—
Bryan Mahoney
Yeah.
Brent Murri
—how I'm going to choose, because they do feel like they're getting somewhat commoditized. On the technology side, what you bring up there is fascinating — for years we built websites in a certain way to be SEO-optimized, the entire keyword industry, and now you not only have to think about SEO optimization, but how am I optimized for agents crawling this, how is ChatGPT or Gemini going to interpret this page, so that when it shows results to the end user, they think, yeah, that's the thing.
Bryan Mahoney
Yeah, there are a lot of terms being thrown around, we'll see what we end up on — generative engine optimization, GEO, LLM engine optimization, whatever you want to call it — it's definitely changing how marketers think about brand messaging and how they optimize for these, because instead of SEO, which has been cracked for a number of years, with a number of things you can do to show up on the first page of Google results — now with generative AI engines, it's more about being the first answer, because there are no longer blue links to click through.
Bryan Mahoney
You just want the answer, so you get the answer, and it might give you a couple of options within that answer, but there's no more being the seventh or eighth blue link — you need to be one of the answers.
Brent Murri
Yeah, and those pages are getting pushed further down — not only do we have sponsored results, we now have the Gemini consolidated answer, and there's no more first page.
Bryan Mahoney
Correct, correct.
Brent Murri
And it's not just search listings — I was talking with a brand last night, a Canadian retailer, huge presence, going through a replatform right now, and there was a debate around whether to put product reviews back on the page. I said, well, where do product reviews go — are you going to go through 20 pages of reviews to decide if that's the Nike you want to wear, if it's going to be a comfortable shoe, or are you just going to ask Claude or ChatGPT, can you tell me what I should know about the shoe? It's still going to need that content somewhere, so we're still going to have to generate it somehow.
Brent Murri
But yeah, this whole shopping paradigm, the traditional PDP and experience, how we optimize it to make sure someone adds to their basket and then checks out — we've got to be very open-minded, it's all going to be changing. So, to the point I tried to make earlier, commerce is not easy, and there's going to be a balance we need to strike between having that intuition as consumers, marketers, and technologists to use it the right way, but still bring the customer along. I hope we do.
Bryan Mahoney
I know, I hope we all do as well. Throwing it back at you — what was the insight to move on from Chord? A lot of people know it started as a headless platform, building that infrastructure for consumers to interact differently with a website. As an investor in the space in 2019, 2020, when it really started going, it was a very exciting time, the forefront of technology. And then somewhere along the way, you guys made the decision to change direction and build a CDP. What was that insight for you?
Brent Murri
Well, we always had it — I think back to that first pitch deck we had when we became Chord, we cheekily, jokingly said we were 'headless with a brain.' As there was this move toward building your technology stack with best-of-breed components — I, having done that for a long time before headless was even coined as a term, found that the more best-of-breed components you brought to bear on a problem, the more data problems you ultimately created. We founded Chord, or started it, as a software platform we were using as brand operators ourselves — we really dogfooded it through the creation of our own brands.
Brent Murri
But we started with the data stack, because after 20 years in commerce, getting data right, having that single source of truth, was the hardest problem for me — but it was the problem no one saw, because in commerce everyone was so focused on the storefront, the shopping cart, the order management system — that's what was 'e-commerce.' But data was always the thing, so we always had it. I was a real purist that in order to get the best data, we as a platform wanted to control everything — the transactional layer, the storefront. There was a ton of interest, both from brands and investors, in this emerging space called headless commerce, which later became composable.
Brent Murri
Commerce is a further acknowledgment that you need the best-of-breed component for every part of your stack, and academically that's interesting — practically, it just doesn't work. In all the meetings I had at ShopTalk, the trend I was seeing was, we want consolidation. Best-of-breed sounds really great, but it means hiring a really big technology team, and then there's this real risk of brain drain — say you hire that team, they put it all together, they leave the organization, now what do you do? So we basically adjusted to what the market was telling us. I used to do these demos where I was so proud to show the platform.
Brent Murri
We'd start with the data product and then show the rest of the commerce platform, and prospects would say, well, we want to use the data product. I used to tell them, great, you need to replatform — and they'd look at me like I was kidding. I'd say, no, seriously, that's what you need to do, and it's easy, replatforms are easy. They'd say, no, commerce is hard enough, you're asking me to replatform, absolutely not. So I got tired of hearing no, and we brought this idea to the product team — what if we just sold the data product? What if we listened to the market and became storefront-agnostic and OMS-agnostic, and sat on top of something the market seemingly wanted to use.
Brent Murri
We understood OMS, we understood storefront, because we'd built our own products, and we started getting traction there. Early on, very transparently, I had pushback from the team — our DNA was a commerce infrastructure company, that's what we did, but we also did data, we always did data. So it was really listening to the market, responding, working for product-market fit, starting to feel it, and then you get that momentum, and you go in that direction. But the way I tell the story is, we didn't suddenly decide to be a data company — we were, we always had data, it was the first thing we worked on. It just took us a while to figure out that was enough, that we didn't need to do the full platform.
Bryan Mahoney
Do you remember the moment, or the brand conversation, where you felt like, this is product-market fit, this is incredible?
Brent Murri
I think I can be convinced we had it on a number of occasions — we're still working on it, honestly, it's tough, the landscape's changing really quickly. I remember demoing an early version of Chord to the Sonos team as we were starting this pivot, and the brutal feedback was, we're not quite sure what you do. Six months later, I remember tapping them on the shoulder, saying, would you mind having a look at the product again — they said, what is that? I said, well, this is Chord. They said, no, it's not, that's not what you showed us.
Brent Murri
That next demo was so impactful that it informed how they wrote an RFP when they went to market to buy a CDP, and they said, we're going to include you in this RFP. So, almost against all odds — an early-stage company going through a pivot — we got invited to compete against some platforms I hold in extremely high regard, great products. Our solution started to show me that we were differentiated — we were end-to-end, we were a CDP, but more than a CDP, we now say smarter CDP. What I mean by that is we're bringing in data not just through a CDP, but modeling that data, providing business intelligence, and crucially, allowing them to activate the data. We eventually won that RFP.
Brent Murri
So if I were to answer the question in a less long-winded way — when Sonos chose us, and through that process, they said, you're not a CDP, you're a Commerce Data Platform, capital CDP. We tried to cling to that for a little bit, but I think when these iconic brands took a chance on what we were building, and gave us great feedback, that was really validating. I thought, if we can solve it for them, then there's more behind them. That was a really proud moment.
Bryan Mahoney
Amazing, great.
Bryan Mahoney
Yeah, I think that's probably a pretty decent note to end on — I'm going to get out of the hot seat here, didn't let you turn the grip down on me too much. But Brent, thank you so much — we put this together at the last minute, really appreciate your willingness, at the end of a long ShopTalk day, to sit down with me and chat all things data, investment, Chord, and brand. It's a real pleasure.
Brent Murri
Of course. Thank you for having me on, and looking forward to being in the trenches with you — this is going to be a fun ride.
Bryan Mahoney
Yeah, I can't wait. Awesome, thanks, man.