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Written by: [Drue Stinnett Maybell](https://www.hubspot.com/startups/resources/author/drue-stinnett-maybell)[](https://www.hubspot.com/startups/author/phoebe-gill) Send DataSend DataSend DataSend DataSend DataSend DataSend DataSend Data    The first time Eric Lay made money on the internet, it took him five hours and he earned five dollars. A high school classmate paid him to boost a League of Legends account to gold rank for a dollar an hour. But something clicked; "I got addicted to the game of making money doing what I love," he says. Eric was ranked top 30 in North America in League of Legends. That's the top 0.01% in the world. The kind of person who reaches the top 0.01% of anything has a specific relationship with obsession, optimization, and pattern recognition. The instinct not to merely win, but to understand why he was winning, is the best explanation for how a video game-loving kid from Toronto ended up running what he describes as [the most successful LinkedIn content company](https://www.virio.ai/?utm_source=hsfsblog&utm_medium=eric-lay-profile&utm_campaign=virio) in the market, from an office in the heart of San Francisco. ## __Why Virio is building in San Francisco__ When Eric left Toronto for The Bay Area, he was leaving behind a vibrant community that he had worked hard to create himself. He co-founded Toronto Tech Fest, one of the city's largest startup communities. He built that community partly as a strategy to stay. He intended to grow the ecosystem instead of abandoning it. But an earlier stint in an SF hacker house had planted something he just couldn't shake. "The game is different," he says. "Everyone is just so ambitious in San Francisco." So a year and a half ago, he made the trade with his eyes open. He walked away from a strong network, government grants, and tax credits. What he walked toward: talent density and a city he describes as for "the techno-optimist. People who believe that impossible can be possible, and are actively working towards their goals." The real reason wasn't access to capital or talent. It was psychological. Virio values something Eric calls the "swing big” mentality: when you're tasked with a challenge, do you think about the 10x bigger outcome, or is your first reaction man, this is so hard? He wanted swinging big to be engrained in Virio’s DNA, so that as the company grows globally, any employee can open an office anywhere in the world and carry that bar of excellence with them. ## __Why B2B content, and why now__ Eric had been building audiences for years before Virio, experimenting in consumer content, creator communities, and the founder network in Toronto. The pattern he kept seeing was that B2B companies were five to ten years behind B2C on adopting new channels. Not because the channels didn't work, but because B2B moves slower. They have lower risk tolerance, more red tape, more layers of approval before anyone tries something new. The decision-makers were already on LinkedIn, and Eric had spent years learning how to build audiences and how to get people to pay attention. The gap was obvious. Virio started in what he freely calls "a tiny niche" (LinkedIn content) and is using that position to expand into the broader go-to-market stack: outbound, rev ops, even setting up and managing HubSpot for clients. The mission: "Help every company show up and grow." The thesis underneath: AI made building products easy.  The methodology is ABM content. Virio identifies a high-priority account, researches what the executives there actually engage with on LinkedIn, and creates content targeted directly at them. The post itself is the outreach. When it works (and Eric has the numbers to show it does), meetings get booked before a cold email ever goes out. That play now runs at scale through [Virio's HubSpot integration](https://lnkd.in/p/gTSNUZwY), launched this past Q2. The system pulls pipeline data to identify the deals that matter most: late-stage, high-priority, biggest contract sizes. Then it generates content matched to those specific accounts. The content is one half. Attribution is the other. Virio tracks engagement through to deal movement: who saw the post, who got follow-up, who became a customer. "If you can’t track what's working, how do you experiment and make your stuff better?"   ## __Eric Lay's three principles for B2B content that drives pipeline__ Ask Eric what most B2B companies get wrong about content, and he’ll give you three ideas. They’re simple enough to fit on a napkin, specific enough to run a company on, and all three are baked into the very core of [how Virio actually runs](https://www.virio.ai/blog/how-virio-uses-content-gtm-add-1m-arr?utm_source=hsfsblog&utm_medium=eric-lay-profile&utm_campaign=virio). ### __1. Know your customer, not your peers__ The most common mistake founders make with LinkedIn content: creating for their peers instead of their buyers. The YC "how I got in" post, the build-in-public update. Great engagement, wrong audience. "If you're selling to insurance companies, if you're selling to the enterprise, they don't even know what YC is," he says. In San Francisco, everyone knows. Their customers don't. And don't care. His prescription: know your ICP, talk to them, figure out what content they actually want to learn from. What would invoke an emotional reaction. If you're selling to CIOs at Fortune 500 banks, tell stories about them: *I was just at the JPMorgan conference and spoke with three CEOs who are all struggling with the same thing.* Now you're speaking directly to the person who signs the contract. ### __2. Tie content strategy to the business objective__ "Most people who think about content are just chasing virality, I need views," Eric says. But views aren't a strategy. "Once you have really strong clarity on the business objective you're trying to accomplish, then you can actually have much more clarity on the strategy." His own feed is the case study. Early on, when Virio needed pipeline, his content targeted CMOs, heads of marketing, and founders who were growing. The people who buy. Now the company has found product-market fit and moved into its next chapter, where the top priority is hiring and the job of the year is brand. So his content switched to authentic, build-in-public founder storytelling designed to make Virio a company people want to work at, partner with, and buy from. ### __3. Measure what actually works__ "Our hack is a data play," Eric says. "Once we understand the business objectives, we can just look at the data of what actually works for that target demographic." This is the logic behind [Virio's HubSpot integration](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/wolfofsaas_announcing-virio-x-hubspot-virio-writes-ugcPost-7487918546958798848-Y0PS/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop&rcm=ACoAACDAAMcBzqdwG02xxy9gkl1GkwyEAnorC9M): track who engages with a post, who enters the CRM, who gets outbound follow-up, and who becomes a meeting or a customer. Cross-reference all of it against deal movement. "If you cannot track what's working, how do you experiment and make your stuff better?" Most companies treat content as a top-of-funnel activity and leave it there. Virio closes the loop. The measurement feeds back into Principle 1 (are we reaching the right people?) and Principle 2 (is the content serving the business goal?). That feedback cycle is the product. ## __What Virio is actually building__ The LinkedIn content business is real, and it's growing. But when Eric talks about it, there's always a second layer that most people never even think about: the infrastructure that took years to build and that makes everything else run. Underneath the content work, Virio has been building something most of their clients probably don't think about.Virio's internal models, trained on millions of samples, can judge which content will resonate with a specific person’s audience. Their tools and technicians draft posts with customer messaging and context that are informed by that data to best perform. After new content has been shipped, post-publication engagement feeds back into the models via RL so predictions keep improving. With this methodology, Virio has achieved up to ~74% accuracy in predicting post engagement. That number sounds like a party trick until you think about what's actually happening. Virio has built a system that understands, at a mechanical level, what makes certain content resonate with certain audiences. Why this post works and that one doesn't. What separates a post that books a meeting from one that just gets likes. They've been assembling that understanding, client by client, post by post, for years now. And all of that data compounds. Eric wants to use it to build a social network. That's a big claim, and Eric is aware of how it sounds. But he's specific about why he thinks the opening exists. In the last 15 years, only two genuinely new platforms have broken through: TikTok and Discord. Everything else that generated early excitement, BeReal, Clubhouse, the rest of them, flamed out. Eric has spent a lot of time studying what separates the two categories, and his read is that the next platform that actually sticks can't just be a better version of something we already have. It has to change the relationship between content and the person who made it. His bet is provable authenticity. Always-on AI capturing real-world context, serving content that is verifiably rooted in things that actually happened in your life. At a moment when most people's feeds are filling up with AI-generated noise, Eric is building in the opposite direction. He thinks the winning platform won't be the one with the best algorithm. It'll be the one where you can trust that what you're reading is real. And the content business is how he gets there. Every client engagement trains the model. Every campaign generates signal about what authentic, high-performing content actually looks like across industries, audiences, and business objectives. The prediction engine gets sharper. The dataset gets deeper. The content operation isn't a stepping stone Eric plans to leave behind. It's the machine that feeds everything he wants to build next. ## __The long game__ Eric will tell you directly: B2B content is not the endgame. To him, it's just a vehicle to get there. He wants to fund the kind of ideas that sound insane until someone actually does them. But, to do any of that, you need capital and influence first. You need to win a game before you can pick a bigger one. That's what Virio is. The game he's winning now so he can pick the next one he’ll beat. And the thing about Eric is that he just seems to keep picking harder games. A five-dollar account boost became a business. A local community became the largest founder network in Toronto. A "tiny niche" in LinkedIn content became one of the fastest-growing GTM players, an RL engine predicting content performance, and a five-year roadmap to build the next social network. Each time, the thing he built became the foundation for something he couldn't have attempted without it. He's been doing that since high school. There's no reason to think he plans to stop. ## Send DataSend DataSend DataSend DataSend DataSend Data Send DataSend DataSend DataSend DataSend DataSend DataSend DataSend Data ## You might also like these...  ### Valerie Chapman Wants AI to Earn Women’s Trust Ruth AI founder Valerie Chapman isn't waiting for the industry to close the gender gap in AI. She's building the company that does. [Read post](https://www.hubspot.com/startups/resources/founders/valerie-chapman-ruth-profile)  ### How to Build a Founder-Led Content Strategy in 2026 This is a playbook for founders who'd rather build their company than their posting schedule, and why LinkedIn is one of the only channels that matters for B2B right now. [Read post](https://www.hubspot.com/startups/resources/sales-and-marketing/founder-led-content-strategy)  ### Natalie Barbu Is Building AI Worth Keeping The Rella co-founder on building the tool she needed, waiting to add AI until it could act like a teammate, and doing it all with an audience watching. 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