Dave Kellogg

The next hot categories in enterprise commerce tech? Three jump out. CommerceGPTs, Order Orchestration, and Product Orchestration & Enrichment. We all know that the commerce platform market remains on simmer, but there is heat elsewhere on the stove. These are heating up because they solve both immediat challenges while being critical for the agentic commerce future and transformation of the commerce experience and the businesses delivering them. 🔎 CommerceGPTs will be critical to both human and agent experiences - context-driven, immersive, conversational, and highly personal. Commerce GPTs are domain-specific LLMs and transformers that will not only replace the commerce search, personalization, and on-site merchandising solutions used today but support the evolution of the commerce experience - for both humans and agents. Leaving keywords in the dust, these solutions understand and deliver the same kind of rich, personalized context we are learning to expect from ChatGPT, Gemini, et al, and powered by far more than a product index - and connected to the other systems of engagement to drive benefits across marketing and channels. These solutions will emerge from established Product Discovery solution leaders and a host of emerging players looking to finally unlock the potential of personalization - for both humans and agents. 🗯️ Product Orchestration & Enrichment is about taking the catalog to the next level. POE streamlines labor intensive processes while enriching the product content for all digital sales channels - infusing it with enriched attributes, use-cases, and UGC; syndicating it to sales channels with tailored 'optimized' content. AEO has turned this up to eleven. A host of established players are chasing this - from PIM/PXM to feed/syndication and marketplace solutions, and competing with a host of new "AI-native" market entrants. The competition is pushing the solutions forward fast, while the channel requirements evolve at the same time. The good news is that better product content benefits all channels - sites, marketplaces, AEO/SEO, etc. 📦 Order Orchestration is about optimizing the increasingly complex fulfillment and supply-chain environment. Tariffs only amplified the pain of managing a complex inventory landscape - with multiple owned and 3PL warehouses, stores, drop-ship, and factory-direct fulfillment. The fragmentation of demand channels - selling across multiple marketplaces, social commerce, stores, wholesale and anticipation of Agentic Commerce - makes the back-end of the business a critical differentiator and capability, and the key to profitability. OMS has long been a slow moving market, but this new class of solutions is emerging to complement or replace legacy OMS and ERP-reliant systems. Check out Cocktails & Commerce on Substack if you want to dig deeper on Order Orchestration or CommerceGPTs. C&C is free and growing fast, would love to have you join... and there are cocktails! Cheers!

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C.C. Gong is a principal at Menlo Ventures focused on early-stage consumer tech and SaaS investments. Drawing on her extensive experience as a product leader and team builder, C.C. goes all in on supporting founders who optimize for impact. She believes that personalized AI will revolutionize the next generation of human-computer interaction and how humans live, work, and play. C.C. started her career at Microsoft, where she worked in product at Bing Ads and HoloLens, and ran an incubation team that shipped novel consumer experiences in mixed reality. At Meta, she led teams building the future of search and ranking in its suite of messaging apps. Guided by her passion for mission-driven impact, she left big tech when she was selected as one of 20 top technologists in the nation to serve as a White House Presidential Innovation Fellow, during which she used design thinking to advance service delivery at the United States Department of Veterans Affairs. Following her stint in public service, C.C. joined Bain Capital Ventures, then became NFX’s first Venture Fellow. She also helped run one of AngelList’s most prolific syndicates and scouted for multiple funds, including Menlo and Wing VC. She proceeded to delve deeper into the startup world, leading product and growth at multiple early-stage companies from seed to Series A, as well as launching her own company in the AI video editing space. She knows firsthand how hard it is for founders to get from zero to one, so she created a community and resources for entrepreneurs and hosted five AI hackathons in 2023. C.C. received her bachelor’s degree from Harvard University and her MBA from Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business. In her free time, she loves performing standup comedy, dancing salsa, and hosting poker nights. She grew up in Anaheim, CA next to Disneyland, and went to Disney Elementary School, so theme parks have a special space in her heart. An adventure aficionado, she’s traveled to 80+ countries and has infinite travel hacks to share. Topics: - The intersection of AI and consumer products - What sectors within SaaS are still undervalued or overlooked - How consumer behavior changes are creating new SaaS categories

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I’ve been talking with founders about how painful enterprise customization still is — even in 2025. David Dworsky and Gordon Ritter just put words to what we’ve been seeing: the age of point-and-click configuration is ending, and the next category winners will make customization conversational. For early-stage founders, this is the wedge: - Own one painful workflow - Capture the data - Build toward becoming a system of record If you’re building in this space, I’d love to hear how you’re approaching it. Link to the full article on this in the comments. 

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