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 once consumes time and attention, and he has had to work deliberately at protecting room for life beyond the work. “Building and operating businesses at a young age has required a substantial commitment of time and energy,” he says, often at the expense of being present for the people closest to him. The acquire-and-improve model is, in part, his answer to that tension.
The answer is structural. Hamak wants businesses that can eventually run without him hovering over each one, a diversified group of companies that operate independently. A portfolio of well-run, improved internet businesses is precisely the kind of asset base that can deliver that independence, generating value while freeing the operator to think, to start new things, and to step back.
Diversification is the other half of the discipline. By spreading his work across several businesses and asset types rather than betting everything on one, Hamak takes calculated risks instead of all-or-nothing ones. If a single acquisition underperforms, it does not take the whole enterprise down with it. The structure itself is a form of risk management, the corporate expression of a mindset he applies everywhere.
The operational side is where the model actually lives or dies, and it is the part Hamak seems most comfortable in. Once a business is acquired, the work becomes unglamorous and continuous: understanding why customers stay or leave, tightening the product, and finding the small inefficiencies that, corrected, compound into materially better performance. This is the same incremental discipline he praises in his investing philosophy, applied to a company’s day-to-day rather than to a portfolio. It rewards attention and consistency over inspiration, which suits a founder who openly prefers durable progress to dramatic gestures.
It is worth stressing how much technical literacy this requires. Evaluating an internet business is not only a financial exercise; it is a judgment about product quality, infrastructure, and the durability of whatever advantage the business holds. Hamak’s years of coding and security work let him perform that judgment himself rather than outsourcing it, which sharpens both his acquisitions and the improvements he makes afterward.
That instinct has had a great deal of practice. Over the years Hamak has built and tested nearly 100 online ventures, most of them never launched publicly, which gave him an unusually wide read on what makes a digital business work and what quietly kills one. His current build applies that pattern-recognition directly: Closr, an AI-powered sales platform that helps agents win website clients by finding local businesses, generating a personalized demo site in under a minute, and handling the fulfillment so the user only has to sell.
For founders drawn to the headline version of entrepreneurship, Hamak’s approach can look almost too patient. But the patience is the strategy. Buy what works, improve it relentlessly, hold it, and let the years do the dramatic part. Readers can follow his ventures and notes on operating internet businesses at his website.
Learn more: akamhamak.com | Connect on LinkedIn
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