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Thenuka Karunaratne
CEO at Flixed
Thenuka Karunaratne is a tech entrepreneur based in the San Francisco Bay Area. He is currently the Founder and CEO of two companies: Flixed and daydream.1
Professional Experience
Thenuka founded Flixed in June 2020, a company that helps consumers make smart streaming decisions.1 In September 2023, he also launched daydream, a startup focused on automating programmatic SEO from end-to-end.1
Prior to his current ventures, Thenuka's experience includes:
- Entrepreneur in Residence at Hustle Fund (June 2022 - May 2023)
- Chief of Staff to the COO and Growth Advisor at Pango (May 2019 - June 2020)
- Founder and CEO of AdMark Technologies Ltd. (September 2015 - April 2020)1
Education and Skills
Thenuka attended The University of British Columbia.1 He is multilingual, with native proficiency in English, limited working proficiency in Sinhalese, and elementary proficiency in Mandarin.1
Recent Activities
Thenuka has been actively sharing insights on LinkedIn about various topics:
- The future of SEO and programmatic SEO34
- His journey to success and the role of privilege5
- The impact of working with a writing coach5
Interesting Note
Thenuka has a unique line at the top of his LinkedIn biography that states, "If you are a VC, please do not cold email me or cold LinkedIn message me."2 This suggests he prefers more formal or introduced connections with venture capitalists.
Highlights
Earlier this year, we hosted a dinner at First Round Capital's San Francisco HQ and invited ten of the best SEO leaders in Silicon Valley across companies like OpenAI, Netflix, and Perplexity.
The topic of discussion was AI and the future of SEO.
Here a few key takeaways 👇🏾
- SEO as a role will become more product-focused
Companies will realize that "they don’t have the right people in place to help them pivot their strategies — largely because SEO roles have been increasingly focused on project management, rather than product strategy.” - Eli Schwartz
- Analysis > testing will be critical for smaller companies
Ethan Smith stressed the importance of distinguishing analysis -- looking for patterns in what is ranking and executing accordingly -- vs. testing (A/B tests) that have questionable ROI early on.
- Search will expand well beyond Google
SEO is synonymous with Google Search. But industry leaders like Paige Ford, SEO Lead at Netflix, believes that this association will broaden in the near future, expanding to platforms like TikTok.
- Almost all SEO will become programmatic SEO
90% of companies investing in SEO are not investing in programmatic SEO. Instead, most organizations deploy nearly all their budget into traditional SEO efforts. This is poised to change drastically. (a prediction from yours truly!)
- Community will become a critical part of SEO strategy
According to Becky W., Director of SEO at Fandom, "as AI-generated content becomes more prevalent, users will increasingly seek out authentic, human-driven experiences."
Should we hire an agency or build our SEO efforts in-house? This is one of the most common questions we receive at daydream. Here's the 80/20 answer to this question.
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Regardless of whether you choose an agency or build an SEO program in-house, understand that SEO is a long-term channel that you should expect to invest years into.
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The top tier of agencies are expensive ($30K-$50K+ per month), but so is building out an in-house SEO effort. The top tier of SEO practitioners can charge upwards of $200K+ per year in base salary, and that won't include other associated costs like hiring writers.
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Building a team in-house can make more sense if you plan to execute a programmatic SEO strategy given that there are often engineering dependencies and deep entwinement with your product. Hiring an agency can make more sense for a more content-led SEO strategy, and save you a significant amount of internal bandwidth.
For more deets read our latest piece! 👇🏾
