Eric Lay

founder & ceo | b2b gtm for vertical saas

Building virio.ai

A done-for-you content service and AI coworker for B2B companies to turn LinkedIn into their #1 GTM channel.

Founding Partner

Hosting private dinners, socials & events for Toronto's top VC backed founders. Partnerships with companies like Amazon, Microsoft, Collision, Elevate, Inovia VC, Forum VC & many more!

MrBeast just raised $200M at a $5B valuation.

They hit $400M+ revenue, and are about to triple down on something big:

For context:

2012: Jimmy Donaldson uploaded his first video from a bedroom in Greenville, North Carolina
2026: $5B valuation, 400M+ subscribers, 450+ employees.

They built verticals:
- chocolate
- burgers
- games
- analytics
- creator marketing platforms.

Each one becoming a distribution channel.

Here is the ops team behind all the hype:

Jeffrey Housenbold (CEO): SoftBank MD bringing institutional discipline to viral scale - projecting $700M across media, consumer products, and technology.

Noah Wieseneck (VP Brand Partnerships): 18+ years in creator-advertiser infrastructure. Now scaling Fortune 1000 partnerships.

Kelly Calabrese (VP Global Media): Ex-TikTok. Building cross-platform distribution legacy media can't replicate.

Sinan Deriş (Head of Marketing): Turned cultural moments into repeatable revenue at a multi-million dollar lifestyle brand.

Beau Avril (SVP Global Head of Media): Ex-TikTok/Meta/Google. Monetization across every platform, every format.

Corie Henson (President, Studio): Ex-NBCUniversal. Building scripted/unscripted pipelines that rival traditional studios.

Byron Kendal (VP Talent & Tech): The infrastructure guy making viral repeatable at 450+ employees.

Tia Silas (Chief People Officer): Building the operating rhythm for a "Disney-style entertainment colossus."

The pattern:

Feastables doesn't sponsor videos. It IS the product.
Beast Games isn't a YouTube series. It's a Prime Video production.

The analytics tool, the brand partnerships platform, the merch: each vertical's distribution compounding the brand.

So here's my prediction:

They've conquered consumer platforms. Next is professional.

LinkedIn is the last major distribution channel Beast doesn't own. And it's where decision-makers controlling millions of $$ live.

When Beast horizontalizes into B2B, creator marketing for enterprises, content infrastructure for brands, talent systems for scale, they'll need to reach B2B buyers directly.

That's LinkedIn content. That's your feed.

The B2B content playbook is next.

Founder & CEO @ Virio | The AI Marketer for Enterprise

I made $100k at 16 while failing high school and eating cup ramen.

Here is my story:

0: Born

5–15: Gifted program, skipped grades, was a straight-A student 

(Friend introduced me to League of Legends at 13 and was instantly hooked)

16: 
- Went pro and was top 30 in North America (0.001%)
- Made my first $100k
- Skipped all my classes senior year
- Failed highschool (had to take grade 13)

17:
- Almost failed grade 13 (would have without summer school)
- Dad bribed me with a gaming PC (got straight A's in the summer and graduated)

21: Top 3 highest grossing esports coach in NA & Europe

23: Consumer content agency ($50K MRR)

25: Co-founded largest startup community in Canada

27: Built more stealth startup ideas (failed, failed, and failed again)

28: Met Emmett, started Virio

29: Virio now adds over $1M+ ARR per month, building with a team of 15. You guys are seriously the best <3. I'm feeling more grounded than ever and I take my responsibilities very seriously.

Looking back, I'm grateful for the struggle.

Without failing alone, I wouldn't know I could survive it.
Without losing to addiction, I wouldn't understand what integrity actually costs.
Without twelve failed startups, I wouldn't have recognized Virio when the opportunity showed up.

I stopped running away and started building something that truly meant something to me. Fourteen years and probably 10,000+ hours of games played before work became intrinsic instead of just another distraction.

Took a long time to figure things out.
But weirdly, worth it all.

Grateful for you <3

Major milestone, just crossed 40k followers!

Here's the growth framework you can use at each stage:

0–1K: Look like a real person
- Maxed out connection requests (500/month)
- Connected with everyone I knew IRL
- Cleaned up headshot and banner (this is your digital handshake)
- Simple goal: have more than 500 connections so you are credible when someone checks your profile.

1–5K: Document, don't create
- Posted personal updates tied to founder-life (in this phase, you are the moat, people will follow you for you)
- Hosted 3 dinners / week and shared results publicly. Attendance numbers, what went wrong, what surprised me.

5–10K: Study patterns obsessively
- Started researching what actually goes viral in startup content
- Experimented beyond my own events: broader industry/cultural trends, storytelling frameworks, capitalizing on news cycles
- Heavy TOFU to cast wide and learn fast

10–20K: Capture intent with lead magnets
- Introduced comment-to-receive frameworks and playbooks
- Turned passive scrollers into active leads by giving away real value upfront instead of just building awareness

20–30K: Build in public + announce loudly
- Shared our launch out of stealth through storytelling rather than product pitches.
- Big announcements tied company milestones to broader market narratives: why this matters for B2B GTM, not just what we shipped.

30–40K: Go niche AND go big simultaneously
- Pipeline-generating ABM posts targeting specific accounts led to meetings booked directly from content.
- Viral authority posts on major trends happened from a position of credibility, not just chasing noise.

Here's what will make this work for YOU:

You need A/B testing discipline and enough volume to either find and/or create your own formats. 

It's become a cliche at this point, but just click the post button. There's a quality aspect to volume. Put up the shots and you'll develop intuition for what great content looks like.

– some additional notes:

1. I invested in support early. As we scaled, it was became more difficult to handle ops without a dedicated team.

2. 90/10 rule: content generally works on power laws - one format will get you 90% of your results. For example: one post hit 7,900 comments and ~1 million views. Drove about 10,000 followers in a single week.

Can't replicate that week on demand but I can replicate what created it.

Grateful for all your support :)

What stage / type of content are you posting?

Most people didn't believe our $500k-$1.5M TC Head of CEO Content role.

We filled that position 12 weeks ago. Today, we're quadrupling down.

Virio is hiring Content Engineers to join us in our San Francisco office, immediately.

Max Rascher (124k followers) joined Virio 12 weeks ago. Since then:
→ $50M+ in pipeline generated for clients
→ 3 Content Engineers already hired
→ $1M ARR added in 30 days

Our clients are B2B Founders and executives at the fastest-growing companies in the world. They need content that drives pipeline and we need more people to keep up with demand.

That's where you come in.

Writers, liberal arts majors, because with the amount of AI slop...

Taste matters more than ever.
We're looking for someone who has an instinct for what looks "right". 
Someone who deeply understands the art of storytelling.

What you'll do:
- Write daily for founders and executives who need to drive revenue, not just engagement
- Operate systems that turn thought leadership into meetings and pipeline
- Grow Virio from $XM - $100M

Who we're looking for...
• you have the "it" factor
• you're a top 0.1% writer
• you understand how content actually drives B2B demand gen

This is an in-person role in San Francisco. We cover relocation, sponsor visas, and pay monthly wellness stipends.

Comp: $150K–$Uncapped TC (we will go all-in for top tier talent)

If you're a storyteller who also happens to be a top tier operator looking to grind for something larger than yourself, apply in the link in the comments.

Let's get you down to SF.

This is Virio's org chart.

Some fun details about it...

→ Max number of direct reports: 6
→ Former founders on the team: 100%
→ Biggest team: customer success
→ Newest team: customer success
→ Fastest-growing team: customer success

(Yes, our CS team is exploding, our customers are always #1 priority)

We're a very flat company and have been expanding the team like crazy over the last 2 months.

Content is a hot market with a lot of demand, so we're hiring aggressively. Here's our priority list:

1. Content engineers
2. More content engineers
3. Actual engineers
4. Chief of Staff
5. Account Manager

If you want to be part of a rocket ship and work with incredible people, apply in the comments.

Profound just raised $96 million at a $1B valuation.

Here’s what their data is showing about how LinkedIn content affects AI search.

In November 2025, LinkedIn sat at #11 on ChatGPT's citation rankings. By February 2026, it was #5. A 2x increase in three months.

In their latest report, Davis McCain and Brandon P. wrote that LinkedIn is now the #1 most cited domain for professional queries across every major AI platform. ChatGPT. Claude. Gemini. Perplexity.

Here's the part that caught my attention.

The growth isn't coming from your website. Profound's data shows the sharpest jump is in posts, long-form articles, and newsletters. Organic content created by individuals. That slice went from 27% to 35% of all LinkedIn citations in 90 days.

Your CEO's quarterly reflection. Your Founder's weekly growth stunts. Your PM's product update. That's what AI is reading, citing, and treating as a source of truth.

Most companies publish executive content once a month (if at all). The AI citation window is 7-14 days for trending topics. If you're not in the feed consistently, you're not in the training data.

→ The window is open right now and the brands that move will build a compounding advantage as AI keeps leaning on LinkedIn as a trusted source.

Shoutout to some of the awesome people behind Profound who are building the  edge to win in the AI search game: Trevor Pyle, James Cadwallader, Dylan Babbs, Mark Ebert, Nick Lafferty

We've closed over $1M ARR in the last 30 days at Virio.

Here are the 5 pillars of our Linkedin-only GTM strategy:

For context: We're an AI-native service. Our product helps executives and their teams build LinkedIn presence that drives pipeline.

–

1/ BUILD FOR THE ICP THAT CLOSES FASTEST

Before the first outbound message, we pulled our own data. Which accounts converted fastest? What did they have in common?

For us, this meant $10M-$25M ARR vertical SaaS companies selling to legacy industries (fintech, proptech, data infra). Most had already tried content before, either internally or with an agency. Some failed, some with okay.. success.

A failed attempt is better than no attempt. It means they've felt the pain.

We quickly future-opp’d accounts that didn’t feel a strong need and focused on high-intent.

–

2/ YOUR FIRST CUSTOMERS ARE YOUR PROOF, BUT SO ARE YOU

Most companies build case studies after closing deals. We didn't have that luxury.

So we built our own content engine first.

-> 20M+ impressions
-> 200k+ followers
-> $50M in pipeline generated

When we got on calls with prospects, we could say: "Here's exactly what we did last month. Here's the pipeline it generated."

Enterprise buyers are risk-averse. Show them you've already run the experiment on yourself.

–

3/ SHOW PROSPECTS WHAT THEY'RE LOSING TO

In one of our $100K ACV deals, we kept getting polite interest but stalled decisions. The champion liked us. The CMO was cautious.

Before the next meeting, we researched their top 3 competitors. One of them had a CEO with 50K+ LinkedIn followers driving consistent inbound pipeline.

We brought that to the call. As a market reality (and FOMO tactic)

"This is what your competitor is doing. This is the gap. Here's what it's costing you."

We tied ourselves to something leadership had already committed to: winning their market.

–

4/ MULTI-THREAD BEFORE YOU NEED TO

Most deals stall because you're talking to one person. They gets busy, go on vacation, or leave the company.

We started multi-threading on day one. 

We mapped 4-5 stakeholders to each of Virio’s accounts:

CEO = Eric
CRO = Melissa
CMO = Jeremy
…
Head of Sales = Jonathan

We created content and outbound messaging that spoke to each role's specific pain.

Competitive positioning -> CEO
Attribution -> CMO
Warm outbound -> Head of Sales

By the time we asked for a meeting, 3-4 people in the account had already seen at least 1/5 accounts with Virio’s name. When we finally got the decision-maker on a call, they'd say: "Actually, I've been seeing your posts, my {champion} mentioned you last week."

The result: $1M ARR in 30 days.
From a replicable system on the most underutilized gtm channel in 2026.

Growing Tofu 🌱 • Fun B2B Marketing in the AI era

I moved from Toronto to SF, went from founder to sales to first marketing hire, and now lead growth at Tofu.
I think a lot about how to build things that actually matter ~ in work, in community, in life. 

Call it ikigai-seeking. 💛

I'm a marketing leader with a revenue-first founder mindset. A lot of my work lives at the intersection of community, experiences, and growth ~ building value-creating engines that actually drive pipeline, not just impressions!

Most of what I share here is how I actually use AI as a marketing lead. Real constraints, real tradeoffs, real learnings from an operator just trying to keep up with the pace of how fast technology is changing. 

Always learning. Sharing what I find along the way. ✨

—

I host events at least once a week, I'm obsessed with the art of communication (shoutout NVC), and mindfulness teachings changed my life.

Livia Han

Marketing friends in SF! I have a question for you! 


Thinking about doing a Tofu Cafe for Women in Marketing in March, similar to what we've done in NYC. (it was awesome) Super chill, would be 8-10am, we'll have yummy coffee and treats. Intention is to bring together amazing marketers in the city and learn from/support each other. 💕 

QUESTION THOUGH: I'm curious what part of the city y'all would want it in? 

- Soma / Fidi 
- South Park
- Russian Hill
- North Beach
- Pac Heights / Marina
- Hayes Valley 
- Mission 

LMK if the comments, help a girl out pls & thank you! 🙏

Growth Lead @ Tofu | Optimistic shares about how I use AI in Marketing

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Performance Score.css-goub6s{font-size:var(--chakra-fontSizes-md);font-weight:500;color:var(--chakra-colors-gray-600);display:block;margin-top:var(--chakra-space-1);}Eric Lay's LinkedIn Performance

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