Digital marketing, acquisitions, and emerging tech: a founder conversation

Executive overview

Founders chase new markets instead of doubling down on their edge. The conversation makes the case that staying in your lane — and optimising what you already do well — produces better returns than diversification.

Two practitioners cover digital marketing's undervalued channels, the real constraints on acquisition pace, and why blockchain and the Metaverse are further away than the hype suggests.

The compounding advantage belongs to founders who are great at one thing and go all-in.

Undervalued marketing channels right now

• Influencer marketing works best when the influencer appears on your landing pages, not just their own content
• Influencer audience must already care about your product category — relevance beats reach
• SEO produces massive ROI despite effort; paid ads keep getting more expensive
• Most companies running paid ads fail on the revenue side: no upsells, no downsells, weak conversion optimisation
• Fixing conversion efficiency lets you outspend competitors without increasing CPA
• TikTok ads currently cost roughly half of Facebook for equivalent revenue — the early-adopter window is open now

Why AI won't kill SEO

• Over a billion web pages exist for "auto insurance" with fewer than 200,000 monthly US searches — content supply already massively outstrips demand
• AI tools make mediocre content cheaper to produce; Google already deprioritises mediocre content
• Google ranks brands, sites with strong backlinks, omni-channel presence, and trust signals — AI content doesn't fix any of those
• AI can assist with text creation but can't replace brand-building, live networking, emotional connection, or event presence
• Companies going all-in on AI marketing and skipping the rest are already seeing weaker results

TikTok vs Google search

• TikTok is a genuine long-term threat to Google search but mainly with younger demographics — the timeline is long
• YouTube holds a structural advantage: search-query data enables much better ad targeting than behaviour-only platforms
• YouTube's educational audience is distinct from Instagram and TikTok's entertainment-first base

Acquisition pace and focus

• Buying more than two or three companies a year is hard to execute well unless you have a very large team
• Time — not capital — is the binding constraint when integrating and growing acquired businesses
• Minority or consulting-for-equity deals are less demanding but still limit bandwidth
• The proven private equity model: fewer deals, deeper focus, higher growth per company
• The venture model (small cheque, minimal involvement) is the only framework where doing 12+ deals a year is feasible

Staying in your lane

• The single biggest opportunity heading into 2023: focus on what you are genuinely good at and already have a track record in
• Most founders underperform by chasing adjacent opportunities rather than compounding their core edge
• Example: an ex-Goldman operator buying HVAC and plumbing companies — applying financial engineering to a boring industry — scaled revenue 40–50% in year one with seller financing and minimal capital
• Real estate with social-media capital-raising scales to institutional money: retail LPs first, then funds, then sovereign wealth and pension funds

Metaverse and blockchain: where they're actually headed

• Current Metaverse implementations (avatars, Oculus hardware) have low consumer adoption and real friction
• The compelling future use case: photo-realistic shared virtual environments without bulky hardware — shopping, socialising, gaming — roughly 5–10 years out
• Blockchain's near-term value is in data ownership and payment infrastructure, not crypto speculation
• Real-world use case: real-time wage payments (worked hour = money on your phone immediately) eliminates payday loan dependency
• NFTs establish provable ownership of digital assets — relevant well beyond art to any visual or digital property
• Being too early is costly: first movers often fund market development for the eventual winner (example: pre-YouTube video platforms paving the way for YouTube)

Twitter, Elon, and the super-app thesis

• Elon Musk's goal is a WeChat-style super app combining social, payments, and services
• Execution is hard; product improvement and new features are prerequisites before monetisation can scale
• Unlikely to bet against Musk, but the path is not straightforward

Top entrepreneurs to watch

1. Elon Musk
2. Jack Dorsey (Block)
3. Mark Zuckerberg
4. Matt Mullenweg (WordPress)
5. Brian Chesky (Airbnb) — discipline of staying in his lane and optimising for experience
6. Bill Gates — energy and agriculture plays