My guest today is Vanessa Piacente, who leads global adoption at ElevenLabs. She started on an equity trading desk, joined Wealthsimple at about twelve people, and built the enterprise customer experience function at Ada before landing at ElevenLabs almost two years ago. A few weeks before we recorded, she stood up a brand-new team focused on what happens to an AI agent after it goes live.

In this conversation we discuss:

• Why the adoption gap shows up across AI-native companies
• The four measures they added on top of raw usage volume
• Scaling in reverse: bespoke enterprise deployments turned into a repeatable motion
• Three pillars of a deployment that sticks, and why change management matters more now than ever
• The hiring agent she built for her own team: roughly 900 conversations, about 40 hours of call time
• Why she wrote scope volatility into the job description

Connect with Vanessa on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vanessapiacente/

"Quality over quantity. It is never about the number."

Albert Chun is the Founder of AI Circle — a vetted community for business leaders, founders, and operators building at the frontier of AI. Before AI Circle, Albert was a teacher in two of the country's poorest congressional districts, a Harvard grad student, an insurtech operator who scaled from 3 reports to managing 211 people across 13 M&As, and a senior leader at Invisible Technologies — where his team helped train what became the #1 open source frontier model in the world.

In this episode, Dennis and Albert get into what it actually looks like inside an AI company building on the frontier, why the AI ecosystem is over-indexed on credentials and under-indexed on experience, and the deeper human problem AI Circle is really solving.

In this conversation, we cover:

• Why Albert walked away from C-level offers at triple the pay to take an AI role that "felt like the A+ problem in the A+ space of the industry"
• What training a frontier model actually looks like day-to-day — and why reading one arxiv paper can put you ahead of almost everyone
• How Albert thinks about AI ROI when model outputs are stochastic, loss functions don't map cleanly to revenue, and causation is a finger in the wind
• The gatekeeping problem in AI — why polysyllabic jargon like "chain of thought reasoning" is really just "me sharing what I thought and why I did it"
• Why Andrew Ng and Andrej Karpathy are both building education — and Albert's theory that education, not GPUs, is the biggest bottleneck in AI acceleration
• Writing in public since Xanga and Friendster, the story of a broken pair of glasses that led to a $250K donation, and why corporate "stay in-house" advice was the wrong tea leaf
• Why AI Circle is bootstrapped, not VC-backed — and the fight story from sophomore year that shaped how Albert thinks about community size forever
• The deeper problem AI Circle is really solving: community, connection, and relationship as life gets harder and friend circles get smaller

If you are a business leader trying to separate real AI signal from buzzword noise — or a founder thinking about how to build trust-based community in an era of vanity metrics — this is one of the most honest conversations on the pod.

What separates a genuine AI commerce startup from AI theater? Gary Benerofe is the General Partner of Mu Ventures, an early-stage venture capital fund investing in the future of commerce. With over 20 years deploying capital across stages and asset classes, Gary brings a unique combination of operational expertise and investment acumen — what he calls "operating capital."

In this conversation, we cover:

• What "operating capital" means and why it matters more than just a check
• The pattern recognition behind picking venture-backed founders — magnetism, talent attraction, and repeat founder advantage
• How Mu Ventures expanded from pure commerce enablement to any transaction that removes friction
• OpenAI's instant checkout vs. Google's agent payments protocol — two completely different approaches to agentic commerce
• Why Gary's AI red flag is when the AI IS the thing, rather than AI making the thing better
• The return to grassroots brand building as CAC rises and attribution breaks down
• TikTok Shop, experiential marketing, and why hand-to-hand combat is back
• Why the next 5 years of commerce infrastructure will be defined by buyer-agent-to-buyer-agent transactions
• The real etymology of Mu Ventures (hint: it involves Yale, quarters, and beer)

If you're a founder, operator, or investor trying to separate signal from noise in the AI commerce landscape, this is the investor's lens you need.