Ciaran Finn Says E-Commerce Has a Learning Problem, Not a Budget Problem

The co-founders of Linear argue that the biggest threat to e-commerce brands is no longer limited advertising budgets, but the inability to generate, test, and learn from creative ideas at the speed modern platforms demand.

For years, conventional wisdom in e-commerce was simple: the brand with the largest marketing budget would eventually win. More money meant more reach, more impressions, and more opportunities to acquire customers.

According to Ciaran Finn and Evan Carroll, that assumption is becoming increasingly outdated.

Automated targeting, algorithmic media buying, and AI-powered optimization have made many of the advantages that once belonged exclusively to large advertisers far more accessible. As the tools have become democratized, a different challenge has emerged.

The hidden risk, they argue, is that many brands are still operating as though media buying is the primary competitive advantage when, in reality, the bottleneck has shifted elsewhere.

“The fastest-growing brands weren’t necessarily the ones with the best ad accounts. They were the ones producing more creative, testing more angles and learning faster than everyone else,” says Carroll.

For Finn and Carroll, that observation became the foundation for Linear.

But neither founder arrived at that conclusion from a traditional advertising background.

Before entering e-commerce, Finn worked in healthcare, an environment where processes, systems, and operational discipline can have significant consequences. That experience influenced the way he approached business problems later in his career. Rather than viewing growth primarily through the lens of marketing, he became interested in understanding where systems were breaking down and why.

“What stood out to me wasn’t that brands lacked ideas,” says Finn. “It was that they couldn’t test those ideas quickly enough. By the time a campaign was produced, reviewed, approved, and launched, the opportunity to learn from it was already shrinking.”

The Decline of Media Buying as a Competitive Moat

In the early years of digital advertising, success often depended on specialized expertise. The ability to manage bids, audiences, and platform mechanics created a meaningful advantage.

That advantage has narrowed considerably as automation has improved.

Finn believes many businesses have not fully adjusted to that reality.

“The biggest constraint became creative throughput,” he says. “Once I saw brands spending weeks producing assets that needed to be tested in days, it was clear the bottleneck had shifted.”

Large brands still possess advantages. They can invest heavily in production, content creation, user-generated content campaigns, and creative talent.

Yet Finn argues that scale alone is no longer enough.

“The question isn’t who can spend the most money,” he says. “It’s who can generate the most learning. Every piece of creativity is effectively a test. If one company can run ten tests while another runs two, the gap compounds very quickly.”

Rebuilding an Agency Around Speed Rather Than Headcount

As artificial intelligence became more capable, many agencies responded by using it to increase output while maintaining existing operating structures.

Linear chose a different approach.

Rather than expanding headcount, the company used AI as an opportunity to rethink how the organization itself was structured.

“Most agencies are structured around labor,” says Finn. “More people often means more meetings, more layers, and slower execution. AI allowed us to remove a lot of the operational work that clients don’t actually value.”

That decision led Linear to rebuild its team around a smaller group of specialists supported by automated systems.

“The product isn’t really the campaigns or the strategy,” Finn says. “It’s the people. The quality of your work will only ever be as good as the team producing it.”

For Carroll, AI’s impact extends beyond agency operations.

“You needed large teams, expensive creative production, and significant media budgets to compete,” he says. “AI is reducing many of those costs. There will always be categories where venture capital makes sense, but for many digitally native brands, profitability and operational efficiency are becoming more attractive paths.”

Why Learning Speed May Become the Defining Advantage

The founders believe the conversation around AI often focuses on automation while overlooking a more important shift.

If creative production becomes cheaper and media buying becomes increasingly automated, then neither function serves as a durable advantage on its own. The differentiator becomes how quickly an organization can identify opportunities, test ideas, and incorporate what it learns.

“Technology keeps lowering the cost of execution,” says Carroll. “What doesn’t get automated as easily is judgment. You still have to decide what to test, what matters, and how to respond when the data comes back.”

That belief informs how both founders view the future of e-commerce.

In their view, the winners may not be the brands with the largest budgets, the biggest teams, or even the most advanced tools. They may simply be the organizations that can learn faster than everyone else.

For Finn, that is the lesson many businesses are still missing.

“Everyone has access to increasingly similar technology,” he says. “The question isn’t who has the tools anymore. It’s who can turn information into action the fastest.”