From the Founder | The Invisible Advantage: Why Mura’s CEO Flew to Manila to Fix the Infrastructure Behind Everyday Business

Why Work Here is a series in which Amit Matani, CEO of Wellfound, has honest, behind-the-scenes conversations with founders, executives, and employees about why their companies are worth joining.

After nearly a decade building LeafLink into cannabis tech’s wholesale backbone, Ryan G. Smith sat down with Wellfound CEO Amit Matani to talk about his next act — a company called Mura.

Its mission: automate the unseen, unglamorous work that keeps American business running.

🎥 Watch the full interview on YouTube | Listen on Spotify

Ryan G. Smith flew to Manila and watched people copy and paste.

Not a typical move for someone who’d just spent ten years building LeafLink into cannabis tech’s wholesale standard, raising nearly $300 million from Founders Fund and Thrive.

But there he was — shadowing workers at an offshore BPO facility, watching the repetitive manual work that keeps American infrastructure running.

“We saw a lot of copying and pasting. We saw a lot of just rote, repetitive work.”

That Philippine visit sparked Mura.

Smith and his co-founder, Claire, his first hire at LeafLink, saw a chance to automate the invisible backbone of commerce — the order-to-cash process for field-service companies.

The ones fixing your office AC in August, or the espresso machine at Starbucks.

“We’re basically helping the mainstream businesses in the U.S. that keep all the things we don’t see every day — and maybe don’t always appreciate — running.”

The 80-Portal Problem

Here’s what Smith discovered:

When something breaks at a Starbucks, corporate logs into a portal to dispatch the job.

That triggers a chain reaction — dozens of vendors, hundreds of logins, emails, and phone calls.

“If you work for Starbucks, you have 80 different systems to log into. These big-box retailers have basically pushed all their operating costs onto their vendors.”

Walmart has a portal. Whole Foods has a portal. Every major retailer built their own.

Field-service companies are drowning in credentials just to keep the lights on.

Smith’s solution? Think cable box circa 2004.

“What if there was an opportunity to pay one monthly fee to get all your channels? That existed 20 years ago — it was a cable box. Then everything decentralized, and now we’re centralizing again.”

“Two and a Half Out of Four”

Most founders won’t admit what they got wrong. Smith volunteers it.

“We built a lot of really cool things at LeafLink. We also made a lot of interesting mistakes we won’t and can’t make again. We probably got two and a half of those four right at LeafLink. I think we’re batting three, three and a half now.”

The four: right industry, right customer, right solution, right time.

At Mura, the timing feels sharper.

LLMs have cut dev cycles from six months to three weeks.

Private-equity firms are consolidating mom-and-pop contractors.

A new generation of tech-first owners is taking over family-run field-service businesses.

“Business for me is just a collection of problems. If you don’t love that, it’s not the right space.”

The Anti-Startup Startup

Four months in, Mura quietly raised a seed round from a few long-time venture partners from Smith’s LeafLink days.

No press releases. No victory laps. They’ve already built 60 percent of the platform and signed five of the largest national field-service organizations.

“I’m literally not taking any investor calls even when they inbound. I don’t care. I just want to be talking to customers and our team.”

Twenty-five customer site visits in four months. Every founder on live chat. Customer calls every other day.

Smith even hired a salesperson straight from the field-service world — someone who’d never worked in tech.

“Our customers don’t need another SaaS platform. The last thing they want is another per-seat tool. If we do this right, the software should disappear.”

He calls it dark software — tools that vanish once they work.

Building Trust at Startup Speed

Ask Smith how he plans to outpace better-funded competitors and he doesn’t mention features.

“The only advantage we have as a company of less than ten people is execution and speed to delivery. The only thing we can do better is build trust through execution.”

That ethos defines Mura’s culture: direct, type-A, “aggressive in a good way,” always accessible.

“We’re not sitting around the office 24/7, but we’re always on call for the customer. That’s the most important thing.”

He learned it the hard way.

“At LeafLink we sometimes prioritized other things over the customer. Here at Mura, that’s the only thing that matters.”

The Precedent Setters

At Mura’s first offsite in Atlanta, Smith told his sub-10-person team:

“Each of us is the first member of the teams being created. When you join this early, you’re disproportionately a precedent setter for what the subculture will be.”

The leadership style? Figure it out.

“We think we’re heading in this direction — give or take a little. Just figure it out. That type of ownership and execution on delivery is what matters most.”

What keeps him up at night isn’t fundraising.

“Do we have the right people in the right places with the right customers and the right solution? Are we setting these pillars in the right spot to build on top of?”

The Post-API Frontier

The next technical leap is ambitious.

Mura’s fourth pillar — automating invoice send-back to those 80 portals — hasn’t been done before.

“We’re co-coding with staff engineers from some of the largest LLM providers, getting first access to things that’ll let us, in almost a post-API way, interact with these systems.”

In plain terms: they’re finding new ways to connect software that was never built to talk — using LLM-driven methods beyond traditional integrations.

The $300 Billion Invisible Market

Field service isn’t flashy. That’s the point.

While cannabis tech drew venture tourists, this industry quietly drives $300 billion a year — profitable, essential, and overlooked.

Smith’s pitch to potential hires skips the hype.

“We’ve learned. We made a ton of mistakes we won’t and can’t make again.”

Instead: join a team of fewer than ten people setting the cultural DNA for departments that don’t exist yet.

Build something genuinely new in enterprise system communication.

Work on problems that actually matter — for businesses that actually make money.

Because when you build infrastructure that disappears, you’ve built something everyone depends on.

Final Takeaways

Founders — Stop the investor update calls. Smith’s focus on customers over capital is the only real speed advantage a small startup has: speed to trust.

Recruiters — Hire your customer. Mura’s smartest move was bringing in a field-service veteran who’d never worked in tech — a built-in reality check for every product decision.

Job Seekers — Look for companies building invisible infrastructure, not shiny consumer apps.

When your work becomes indispensable and unseen, you’ve built real value — and a career that lasts.

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