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Akam Hamak on the “Acquire and Improve” Playbook for Building an Internet Portfolio
By Adam Most founder profiles open with a single big idea, a product the world had never seen until its creator willed it into existence. Akam Hamak’s reads more like a portfolio strategy. The young entrepreneur, who operates through his group of companies in Miami, has built much of his work on a less romantic premise: buy internet businesses that already exist, then make them better.
It is a quieter approach than launching from scratch, and Hamak prefers it for reasons that are easy to defend. The single most dangerous question any startup faces is whether anyone wants the product at all. Most never get a clear yes. By acquiring a business that already has customers and revenue, Hamak sidesteps that question entirely and channels his energy into the parts he can actually control: operations, retention, and steady improvement over time.
“I became interested in entrepreneurship, investing, and acquiring digital businesses at an early age,” he says. The phrasing is telling. Acquiring sits right alongside entrepreneurship and investing, treated as a discipline in its own right rather than a fallback for people who cannot build. In Hamak’s world, buying a company and improving it is a creative act.
That said, he is not dogmatic about it. When a real problem has no good solution, he builds. TabSlice, the platform he co-founded to simplify splitting a restaurant bill, is an original creation born from his habit of solving everyday problems with technology. The choice between buying and building is situational for him. An overlooked business with room to improve is a buy. A genuine, unsolved problem is a build. Both serve the same end.
The end, in every case, is durable value. Hamak talks constantly about compounding over many years and resisting the pull of short-term trends. “Small improvements made consistently over time can produce results that seem impossible in the short term,” he says. Applied to an acquired business, that means resisting the temptation to flip it for a quick markup and instead grinding out the incremental gains that compound into something larger.
This is harder than it sounds, especially for someone young and ambitious. The internet rewards visible motion, and acquiring a stable business to slowly improve it produces very little of that. Hamak seems comfortable with the quiet. He has a pointed view about the alternative: “People should spend less time trying to appear successful and more time developing skills, building relationships, and owning assets.” Operating an unglamorous but profitable business is exactly the kind of ownership he means.
His technical background gives the model an edge. Hamak has been writing code since his teens, well before AI tools made development accessible, and he later did security research and penetration testing. That depth lets him evaluate an internet business on more than its financials. He can read the product, understand the infrastructure, and judge where the real risks and opportunities sit, the kind of diligence that separates a good acquisition from a costly one.
He is candid that the playbook has a cost. Operating several businesses at …read more
Source:: Social Media Explorer
