Mike Duboe is a Greylock partner who previously led growth at Stitch Fix from early scale to IPO and brings that hands-on experience to his investing, focusing on commerce infrastructure like headless commerce and the Shopify ecosystem rather than just consumer brands. He challenges standard VC metrics by pushing founders to think about payback periods and contribution margins instead of CAC/LTV ratios, and specializes in marketplaces and commerce plumbing while co-hosting "The Intelligent Marketer" podcast.

• Interest in the transition from traditional SEO to AI-driven search, often referred to as Answer Engine Optimization. He frequently explores how brands must adapt their organic growth strategies when consumers use AI tools like Perplexity instead of Google, highlighting his work with AirOps and Graphite to help marketers influence these new algorithmic results.
• A thesis on the evolution of marketing measurement in a privacy-restricted world. He argues that because traditional tracking methods like IDFA are broken, marketing teams need a new central nervous system for orchestration—moving from simply tracking past events to predicting future actions, a view central to his investment in Paramark.
• Fascination with agentic commerce and deep personalization. He highlights platforms that move beyond keyword searches to create dynamic, context-aware shopping experiences, such as Daydream for fashion discovery or Postscript using AI to turn SMS into a rich, two-way conversational channel.
• Emphasis on operationalizing creativity and speed. He believes the divide between brand building and performance marketing is artificial, preferring founders who treat creative output like a product with high-velocity testing cycles, illustrated by his praise for MSCHF's ability to engineer cultural moments in a world of cheap AI content.
• Focus on specialized B2B marketplaces and commerce infrastructure. He looks for platforms that modernize complex, traditional industries or specific verticals, such as Pepper digitizing food distribution for independent businesses or Highstock addressing cross-border inventory issues.
• Appreciation for cross-pollinating B2C tactics into B2B environments. He values founders who apply consumer-grade growth strategies to business software, noting how companies like NumeralTax succeed by bringing a direct-to-consumer ethos to otherwise dry sectors like tax compliance.