This episode of Functional & Fabulous welcomes Dave Morrissey, author of "Grow Like Tech" and a former executive who drove digital commerce growth at Meta and TikTok. Dave shares his experience of the radical shifts in ecommerce, mindset demands, and scaling strategies he learned from years on the front lines of Big Tech.
Dave’s conversation with the hosts is a whirlwind tour through the play of commerce and what the future holds, ultimately boiling down to two fundamental factors: mindset and mandate.
The Democratisation of Commerce
Dave's central thesis on the state of retail is clear: “Every person is a shopkeeper now.” The high street has relocated to the mobile phone, where millions of ordinary individuals are converting social platforms like TikTok and Instagram into storefronts. Consumers no longer trust corporate made ads. Instead, they seek the authenticity from someone who they identify with and follow.
However, he warns that democratisation has introduced a new problem he calls“ the slop”. With AI-generated content officially overtaking human content, the internet is rapidly filling with undifferentiated clutter. Dave argues that the most valuable skill for any marketer or brand is no longer technical proficiency, but the ability to inject high-end flair to cut through the obvious AI-generated content.
The AI Mandate: Why Doing Beats Talking
The biggest blocker is not technology, but cultural fear. Employees are often hesitant to share their AI-driven efficiencies for fear of proving their jobs may become redundant. To overcome this, leadership must actively demonstrate the power of AI to unlock capacity, shifting the culture from seeing AI as a threat to a non-negotiable tool for speed and scale. He argues AI fluency should be implemented from the top down, much like Shopify has done by including it in performance reviews. Dave argues that the true innovation and the future of customer-centricity lies in using AI to instantly process real-time customer feedback into marketing strategy.
The Scaling Secret: Experimentation and Investment Mindset
If a company wants to "Grow Like Tech", they must abandon instinct-driven decisions and adopt the scientific playbook: Test and Learn. The goal of this engineering approach is to create proof points that justify aggressive scaling. Instead, many companies take the opposite approach, a bootstrapping mentality that often limits spend but also ambition.
Dave argues that the fundamental block to growth is financial policy, often enforced by a risk-averse CFO who sees marketing as a fixed cost rather than an investment. The fix is simple: change the P&L, so marketing is accounted for as a percentage of income, not a fixed expense. This allows the business to scale with its results, enabling a 10x investment to chase a 10x market opportunity.
Dave concludes that Irish businesses are particularly powerful globally due to their inherent social fluidity and storytelling prowess. The only thing limiting their growth is a self-imposed psychological barrier—the "small-island syndrome." By adopting the financial and experimentation mindset of Big Tech, Irish founders can finally shed their modesty and allow their highly effective brand to go global.
Want to learn how to implement an AI mandate, measure your "taste," and finally break through your scaling barriers? You can watch the full version of the podcast here or listen to the episode now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or YouTube.
