Ryan G. Smith and the business of making work disappear

Before Ryan G. Smith was moving wholesale orders through LeafLink, he was moving things out of his parents’ house. He sold items on eBay. The family joke was that a missing possession had probably become a balance in his PayPal account. It is an unusually tidy childhood anecdote for someone whose career would revolve around marketplaces: the goods were already there; he had found a better way to move them.

Both his parents were entrepreneurs. His early ventures included dog-walking, house-sitting and selling merchandise online. Later came software for investors, a marketplace for cannabis businesses and automation for commercial contractors. Across that assortment, the recurring interest is the transaction and everything that must happen around it. Someone needs something. Someone else can supply it. Between them sits a surprising amount of work.

By June 2026, that interest had produced another acquisition. ServiceTrade bought Mura, the company Smith had co-founded in 2024. Its speciality was the administrative stretch between a completed service job and money arriving in a contractor’s account. The distance from a childhood eBay listing to an automated invoice is considerable. The underlying question has remained rather consistent: why must getting paid involve so much fuss?

A liberal arts education, delivered by the ream

At Colgate University, Smith majored in international relations and graduated in 2013. He joined Thought Into Action, the university’s entrepreneurship programme, during his sophomore year. There he and Brendan Karson built EcoCampus, an office supply business selling sustainable products to the campus. Their customers included academic departments and libraries. Entrepreneurship arrived with a delivery obligation.

The paper made the venture distinctive. It used recovered sugarcane fibre, material that would otherwise have gone to landfill, rather than trees or recycled paper. By their senior year, Case Library and more than two dozen other campus departments were using it. The business paired an environmental proposition with a very ordinary purchasing need. A library could support a different supply chain without abandoning its printers.

As graduation approached, Smith and Karson sold EcoCampus to four juniors. They reported a 28 percent profit on their initial investment, although the sale price was not disclosed. The buyers were fellow Theta Chi members, and the founders wanted the company to remain a place where students could learn to run a business. A campus enterprise could have a succession plan, too.

Smith described the experience as being as much about learning as profit. That makes the sale more interesting than an early exit on a résumé. The company had customers, deliveries and new owners who could carry it forward. He had helped make something that would continue after his own timetable changed. For a student business, the academic calendar is a fairly formidable competitor.

A dining table, then a whiteboard

Trupoly followed. Smith began the investor relationship platform while still a Colgate senior; after selling EcoCampus, he worked from his parents’ dining room table. RCS Capital acquired Trupoly in July 2014. By then he had experience with both physical supplies and software for investment relationships. His next company would combine an interest in commerce with the constraints of another regulated market.

He and Zach Silverman began researching cannabis businesses in 2015. Silverman brought experience from eBay Enterprise. Smith brought an appetite for marketplaces and a previous encounter with financial regulation. They went to Denver, sat with operators and listened. The work they encountered was dispersed across calls, emails, text messages and, in some cases, fax machines. An expanding industry was making do with a very improvised office.

One early customer’s process captures the problem. An order arrived by text, then went onto a whiteboard. Production staff used the board to determine what to make and recorded progress there. Fulfilment received another text about what should be packed. Each handoff made sense to the person doing it. Taken together, the sequence asked people to act as the connections between systems.

A whiteboard has virtues. It is inexpensive, legible and rarely asks for a password reset. It also depends on someone being close enough to read it, update it and know what the marks mean. Smith and Silverman were looking at the practical limits of that arrangement. Their opportunity lay in giving an order a consistent home, so that purchasing, production and fulfilment could refer to the same information.

One cart for a very busy industry

LeafLink processed its first order in Colorado in March 2016. Keef Cola made the first marketplace sale. The initial proposition was straightforward: licensed retailers could order from multiple brands in one place, while sellers could manage incoming orders and customer relationships. A purchasing manager no longer had to assemble the entire buying process from separate conversations.

In a 2017 interview, Smith described a subscription model in which brands paid monthly and retailers shopped free. The sellers received tools for customer relationship management, reporting, tracking order status and organising fulfilment. The marketplace and the business software reinforced each other. A cart made buying easier; the tools around it helped a seller do something useful with the order once it arrived.

The timing mattered. Cannabis companies needed everyday commercial infrastructure while their industry was still establishing its routines. Smith was learning the vocabulary, too. He later recalled Googling unfamiliar terms, including the meaning of 710, an industry shorthand formed by turning the word OIL upside down. There is something reassuring about a founder admitting that the first research tool was a search box.

Growth followed in measurable steps. LeafLink reached $100 million in annualized orders in August 2017, $1 billion in July 2019 and $4 billion in March 2021. Those figures describe the pace of orders passing through the platform. They give the story scale while keeping the mechanism visible: many individual purchasing decisions, repeated often enough to become infrastructure.

Payments and logistics widened the work. In 2019 the company launched financial and payments services; in 2020 it announced a $250 million debt facility and introduced logistics. Once customers could place orders more easily, the surrounding tasks still needed attention. The original marketplace had opened a route into the rest of the transaction. Smith’s interests kept following the order after checkout.

The numbers need people

Smith made Forbes’ 2016 30 Under 30 list in enterprise technology. LeafLink later appeared on Fast Company’s 2018 list of innovative enterprise companies. Recognition arrived early, but his accounts of running the company tend to return to routines: setting goals, meeting people and learning where work gets stuck. The award is a moment. A functioning team has to repeat its work on Monday.

As LeafLink grew, he described working with managers on numerical goals, usually looking a year to 18 months ahead. Annual objectives became quarterly plans, supported by one-to-one meetings. This is a less photogenic version of entrepreneurship than the launch announcement. It also explains how a founder’s intentions become tasks other people can understand and complete without waiting for him to enter the room.

By 2022, Smith was discussing recruitment as a funnel, much like sales, and using customer interviews, platform analytics and observations of user behaviour to guide product decisions. He also acknowledged a problem familiar to any growing organisation: having plenty of data does not mean everyone knows where to find it or which measures deserve attention. More information can create another kind of administrative work.

His earlier formulation was blunt: “Business ideas are worthless; execution is everything.” It is easy to put that on a wall. His career makes it more useful to imagine it beside a delivery schedule, a hiring plan or an unanswered customer question. The phrase assigns value to the part of entrepreneurship that happens after the pitch has been admired.

“Business ideas are worthless; execution is everything.”Ryan G. Smith

A new chair, a familiar problem

On February 1, 2023, LeafLink announced a $100 million Series D financing, to be funded in two tranches, alongside a leadership change. Smith moved from CEO to executive chairman. Artie Minson became president and CEO. Smith’s remit included long-term strategy, innovation, customer relationships and government relations. The daily responsibility of running the company moved to a different desk.

The next venture grew from another close look at other people’s work. Smith and Claire DeRoberts travelled to the Philippines and worked the night shift alongside a retailer’s back-office staff. They watched people manually bridge disconnected platforms. DeRoberts had been his first hire at LeafLink. The new company also brought in technical co-founder James Mackey. Familiar working relationships accompanied a different customer base.

Mura, founded in 2024, focused on commercial field service businesses. These are the companies that keep equipment working in shops and buildings. A technician can finish a repair while the office still has a queue of tasks to reconcile, bill and collect. Smith had moved into a mature industry, where successful businesses already existed and the administrative burden could be examined directly.

In his 2025 account of building Mura, Smith emphasised visits to customer offices and attention to pricing from the outset. He wanted fees tied to transactions and the value delivered. The lesson carried some mileage: he described a recent week visiting customers in North Carolina, Louisiana, Texas and Colorado, with hotels that did little to improve the experience. Research, in this version, came with a room key.

The software gets quieter

Mura’s approach was to work with existing field service management systems. Its website describes automating purchase orders, invoice creation and collections. That choice respects a basic reality of business software: customers have already invested time in the systems they use. A useful new service can remove repetitive work around them while letting the rest of the operation continue.

Smith calls the approach dark software. In conversation with Wellfound, he returned to the idea that customers did not want another tool demanding their attention. The ambition is for the software to become less visible as it becomes more useful. For someone who once built a marketplace people visited to shop, this is a revealing evolution. The interface itself need not be the destination.

The acquisition gave that approach a larger setting. ServiceTrade announced that Mura would extend its Stella suite with invoicing and collections capabilities. The announcement reported three times faster invoice processing and 33 percent shorter billing cycles among contractors using Mura. These are company-reported results. Their appeal is concrete: less time between a finished job, a bill and the collection of cash.

Smith’s own acquisition announcement returned to the Philippines visit and the question of putting time, cash and control back into contractors’ hands. That is a useful place to leave him: looking at the work behind the work, alongside people who know its awkward details. The childhood marketplace has become a career in removing small obstructions. A missing household item once became PayPal money. A completed service job should make the same journey with fewer people copying things along the way.