“I like large parties. They’re so intimate.” — Jordan Baker, The Great Gatsby (2013)

A Series A landed in my feed last week dressed as a music festival. Investor lineup, tiered by font size, headliners on top. The funds anchored the bill. Beneath them ran a scroll of famous names, actors, athletes, musicians, founders of other things, arranged like the undercard at Coachella. The caption played along. Someone in the comments gave it a festival name of its own. The round was eight figures. The poster was the point.

I almost kept scrolling. The founders did nothing wrong. They ran the play that gets rewarded, and they ran it well. This is not about them, and I will not name them, because the company is incidental. What matters is that somewhere a seed founder is going to screenshot that poster and tape it to the wall as the goal. That is why I am writing.

When a round is announced like a concert, the cap table has become the product. Not the revenue. Not the retention. Not the thing the company actually does. The names. And once the names are the product, the audience watching becomes the customer the company is really trying to win. A cap table that photographs well is a marketing asset, and a marketing asset is not a moat.

A party round is a round with everyone and no one. Dozens of checks, no single investor on the hook. It feels like validation. Two dozen famous people cannot all be wrong. But when everyone owns a sliver, nobody owns the outcome. A cap table full of tourists produces tourist behavior. The job of a lead is to be the adult in the room. To underwrite you when the data is thin. To ask the question at the board meeting nobody wants asked. To pick up the phone in the worst month and stay on the line while you decide whether to cut the burn or cut the team. A festival lineup does not do that. It has headliners, and headliners go home.

The names are not free, either. At Sugar Capital we treat equity as the oxygen of a company, not a thank-you card. Every slice handed out for credibility is a slice that cannot go to the people who will actually build the thing across the next four years. A famous angel who shows up for the announcement and is never heard from again still owns their piece when the company exits, valued the same as the engineer who lived in the office. The poster collects on that quietly, for years.

Celebrity money is a bet on attention. Attention is the fastest depreciating asset in consumer. A famous investor can lend you an audience for a launch. They cannot lend you a reason for that audience to come back. A following is not a customer base.

Then there is the size of it. Too much money before a scalable model is not fuel. It is a solvent. It dissolves the one constraint that forces a young company to find out what is true. With a small round you cannot afford to be wrong for long, so you learn fast. With a large one you can afford to be wrong for years, so you scale the wrong thing. You hire ahead of demand. You buy growth that the product should have earned. The decline is slow and well funded. It looks like growth the whole way down.

The deeper cost outlasts the burn. A large raise on a loud cap table changes who the company is for. You start building for the next headline instead of the next cohort. The audience that watched the announcement becomes the customer you optimize around, and the person who actually pays, the one who decides whether to come back, slips down the list. Validation arrives before the product earns it, and a company that feels validated stops looking for proof. Fundraising becomes a substitute for finding out whether the thing works.

We have watched a whole class of this come and go. Consumer companies that raised $20 million and $30 million on celebrity and noise before anyone came back on their own. Launch week was enormous, the unboxings, the codes, the founder on every podcast. Month two was a rounding error. The names got them the launch. The launch got them the press. The press got them the next round. Almost none of them are here now. They confused awareness with retention. The market does not.

We back consumer businesses. The durable ones share one trait. The customer comes back without being asked. The launch tells you nothing. The return tells you everything. Whether it is an app, a brand, a marketplace, or a piece of software, the companies that compound tend to start the same way, a real lead, terms that pinch, a model proven before the spend. They earn the habit first and buy the scale second.

So this is not envy, and it is not a subtweet. I am writing it because the poster teaches the wrong lesson, and the wrong lesson travels. The next founder reads that lineup as a finish line. It is closer to a dare. You have just told the market you are important. The market will now check whether you are right.

Every festival ends the same way. The lights come up. The headliners are already on the next flight. What is left is the field, and the only question that ever mattered, whether anyone comes back.

A round can buy you a crowd. It cannot buy you the ones who come back.

The lineup was never the company.

The customer was.

“Not everyone can become a great artist, but a great artist can come from anywhere.” — Anton Ego, Ratatouille (2007)

There is a tray of CirC bites on my desk and I reach for it without deciding to. I am 18 months on my health journey, and the bad food decisions that ran my life for decades are mostly gone. What is left is more deliberate, and I like it that way. The appetite I have left goes to what I actually crave, and lately that is these. I do not think about CirC. I just reach for it. In snacking, that is the entire game. Become the automatic choice and you have already won.

Most investors are modeling the market. We are eating the product.

The protein bar is a $5.6 billion category. Everyone can see it. They miss the shift inside it. Bars still own the shelf, but shoppers are moving toward bites, resealable packs, and the freedom to eat three and save the rest. The demand is here. The category leader is not. Thirty serious brands are fighting over the bar. One is serving the bite. What looks like a niche today often becomes tomorrow’s category.

We have seen this before. Grüns took daily nutrition out of the powder tub and into a pouch you carry, and the portability was the whole point. Unilever’s $1.2 billion acquisition of Grüns closed this past Monday.

CirC is a manufacturing company that happened to make the best snack in the aisle.

The product exists because a chocolate bar melted on Theresa Burnley’s shorts on the way to a tournament. She is an athlete, six Boston Marathons, three kids who played college lacrosse, and she got tired of snacks that failed the moment she needed them. So she made one that did not. Then her husband Chris spent 15 years learning to make a small protein sphere at commercial scale. RX Bar asked him to manufacture for them. He said no. They built their own version. It is not the same. The moat is not a patent. It is 15 years of process that nobody else has figured out how to run.

That is the kind of advantage I trust. Not a deck. A thing that is hard to make.

The proof never came from a pitch. With no outside capital and the founders unpaid, Chris built distribution the old-fashioned way. CirC landed in Costco, where it sells at 147% of target velocity despite launching only 24 months ago. Walmart and Target are loading in now. The head nutritionist for US Special Operations found CirC at a Wawa and put it in front of Navy SEALs and Rangers. He chose it for taste, for packaging, and because it does not melt. The product that exists because a bar melted now wins because it refuses to.

None of this means it is safe. The gap is the one you would expect. They have never built a consumer brand at scale. Walmart delists what shoppers walk past, no matter how good it is. That is the bet and the work.

The product is not the thesis. The order of operations is. Most consumer startups begin with the marketing, then spend years trying to build a product worthy of the attention they bought. CirC did the reverse. The product came first, built on 15 years of manufacturing nobody else has. The brand comes second. That order is the whole thesis. Most founders today can manufacture attention but not a product. CirC manufactured the product. The attention is the part still in front of it. Unlike the manufacturing, it can be hired for. Brands that run this backwards vanish in the first reset cycle at mass retail.

I am in my hotel room in DC, watching the NBA Finals and snacking on CirC. They travel better than I do.

It does not melt. It does not need explaining. It just needs to be found.

Disclosures: CirC is a Sugar Capital Fund III portfolio company. Sugar Capital is also an investor in Grüns, acquired by Unilever in 2026. Unilever Ventures is a limited partner in Fund III.

“You’re either betting on the table or you’re on the menu.” — Mike McDermott, Rounders (1998)

A year ago, if you’d taken YES on Everlane gets acquired by Shein, the room would have laughed you out of it. A transparency brand sold to a fast-fashion giant. Brand suicide. The founders walk first. The quieter read was that Shein needed the halo more than Everlane needed the principle.

Shein closed the deal last week.

Whoever saw it coming had nowhere to put the call. They told a friend at dinner, posted a vague tweet, were right, and nobody knows it.

Operators make calls all day. Which retailer’s about to cut a brand. Which celebrity line is six months from a shutdown. The intel lives in group texts and steakhouse booths, and disappears the moment the check arrives. The job has no public scoreboard.

Hero Market is that scoreboard.

The questions are the ones operators already ask each other. Does Sephora cut a top ten clean beauty brand at the spring reset. Does Drunk Elephant lose a major US retailer. Does a top ten functional beverage founder step down. Retailers, regulators, and acquirers ask these behind closed doors. Now the people in the category price them.

Real-money prediction markets are stuck on elections and Fed rates because regulators won’t touch the rest. The consumer long tail has been left to rumor. Play money opens it up.

The point is not the chips. The point is the tape.

Every read gets a number. A banker calls the next billion-dollar acquisition before the announcement. A founder sees which DTC category is about to crack. An agent knows which celebrity is about to launch a brand. Now there’s a record.

Hero Market is reputation infrastructure. Brier scores instead of star ratings. Buyers and sellers marking each other’s homework in real time.

The tape will tell us who was right.

Hero Market opens this week. Request a seat here: hero.market

PS If you are interested in working on this with us, email me.

Hero Market is a Sugar Capital joint. Play money, real signal. I was an early investor in Everlane and served on its board for fifteen years.

"You're gonna need a bigger boat." — Chief Brody, Jaws (1975)

June 25, 2018. A cold email from a founder I had never met, raising his first round for a pre-launch cookware brand. Parfait would become Caraway. Jordan Nathan, twenty-something. The email:

Buried in the bullets, plain as a recipe card: a healthy and environmentally friendly cookware set that does not contain any harmful chemicals (which most cookware surprisingly does!)

Before the brand had a customer or a name worth defending. The thesis was already written down, in a cold email, in a parenthetical.

Seven years later, on February 13, 2026, Groupe SEB and Meyer, the world’s two largest cookware conglomerates, sued Caraway in the Southern District of New York. Two hundred years of history. Ten billion in revenue. Forty thousand employees. Caraway has one hundred. The complaint accuses the brand of building a business on a false premise.

The premise was in the cold email. They are arguing eight years late.

They want an injunction, corrective advertising, disgorgement. In plain language, they want Caraway to shut up.

This is what losing the cultural argument looks like.

For most of consumer history, incumbents had three weapons. Out-spend on shelf. Out-price through scale. Out-distribute through retail. When those levers worked, lawsuits were unnecessary. Unilever didn’t sue Dollar Shave Club. They bought it. P&G didn’t sue Native. They acquired it. The playbook was to write a check and absorb the disruption.

Groupe SEB and Meyer could have bought Caraway. They sued instead. Litigation is what happens when the first three levers have failed.

Eight U.S. states have moved to restrict PFAS in cookware. Thirty more have moved on broader PFAS regulation. The EU is moving the same way. Target, Walmart, Crate & Barrel, Macy’s all carry Caraway. The fight for the consumer’s mind, the only fight that matters, was lost between 2022 and 2025, while Big Cookware was forming a 501(c)(6) to lobby legislators about fluoropolymers. They were arguing science with regulators while Caraway was building trust with parents.

One is a winning strategy.

The other is a brief.

The complaint spends pages parsing whether non-stick pans can be called toxic. It is the document of a company looking for growth in a courtroom instead of a kitchen.

The NAD found Caraway’s PFAS-free and non-toxic claims supported. It asked for some comparative ads pulled. The complaint says some stayed up. That is the legal fight. The cultural fight ended years ago.

This is what desperation in a suit and tie looks like.

Big incumbents reach for litigation when the cultural tide has already turned. The lawsuit isn’t the threat to the challenger. The lawsuit is the eulogy for the incumbent’s pricing power.

Big Cookware spent decades coating American kitchens in chemicals consumers no longer trust, then hired floors of lawyers to argue the chemistry was fine, actually. They funded studies. They hired lobbyists. They did everything except reformulate the pan.

Here is what makes Jordan dangerous. He pulled his investor base into a single email and asked them to fight. He is not fighting a legal problem. He is building a movement. Big Cookware built a lobbying shop. Jordan built a coalition. Lobbyists write memos. Coalitions write history.

On every metric in the old game, Jordan loses. On the metrics that matter in the new one, he is already winning. Independent labs. Six hundred PFAS compounds tested. Reports published openly. Transparency became the offense.

When two incumbents coordinate to sue a single challenger, they are not protecting a market. They are admitting they have already lost it. A militia formed after the war is over.

The conglomerates can keep filing. None of it changes the chemistry on the shelf or the conversation in the home. None of it pulls back the parents who replaced their pans. The information has left the building.

Somewhere tonight, a mother is unboxing a Caraway pan and throwing the old one away. She is not thinking about Groupe SEB or Meyer. She is thinking about her kid, about the pan her own mother used, and her grandmother before that, and the quiet realization that none of them had a choice.

She does.

That is the moment Big Cookware lost. Not in a deposition. Not in a press release. In a kitchen, at night, with a child asleep upstairs.

It happened thousands of times a day while the giants were drafting briefs.

The litigation will play out in court. This essay is not about the legal merits. It is about what the lawsuit reveals: the children in the houses Big Cookware used to own are growing up in kitchens that no longer have their name on the pan.

That is how giants fall. Not in a single blow. In a generation that stops repeating the name.

This is about which generation gets to define what clean means. Whoever earns that word owns the next twenty years of the kitchen, the bathroom, and the pantry.

I signed. Lisa signed. Sugar Capital signed. If you’ve made it this far, you should too.

Big Cookware didn’t sue Caraway because Caraway was wrong.

Big Cookware sued Caraway because Caraway was right.

Go pick on someone your own size.

Disclosures: Sugar Capital is an investor in Caraway.

"I feel the need... the need for speed." — Maverick and Goose, Top Gun (1986)

Tomorrow night I’m seeing Top Gun on the big screen for the first time since I was twelve. May 13, 2026. Forty years almost to the day. Paramount is running it for one week only, both films back to back, in IMAX. The first theatrical release since Val Kilmer died, which means every Iceman scene hits different.

I’ve seen the movie maybe forty times. For most of those viewings I thought it was about me. I was Maverick. Every founder who loves this movie thinks the same. That’s the whole con.

I have also been Maverick for Halloween more times than I can count. Bomber jacket, aviators, white t-shirt, the whole bit. One Halloween on Washington Street in San Francisco, a stranger looked me over and said, you look like Tom Cruise ate Tom Cruise. This was a different version of me. Heavier. Pre the work of taking care of myself. The line was accurate. He wasn’t roasting a stranger. He was describing the gap. That’s the whole essay, actually. The Maverick in your head and the Maverick in the mirror are not the same guy.

You watch it at sixteen and you want to be him. At twenty-five you think you are him. You start a company and behave like him, and for a while it works, because the instinct that bends physics is real and the willingness to break the rule the second it stops serving the mission is why anything new ever gets built. Then one day you watch the movie again and realize Maverick is wrong for most of it. Wrong about Goose. Wrong about the inverted dive. Wrong about what he’s competing for. I missed that for a long time.

The Maverick years are the best years and the most expensive. You fly inverted four feet off another man’s canopy because you can. You buzz the tower because the tower is asking for it. And somewhere in the noise, you stop hearing what you’re costing the people around you.

Then you stop flying. I sold the company and started writing checks. The cockpit goes away. You’re on the deck now. The deck is enormous, and you never really saw it before. You see founders the way Viper saw you, with affection and worry in equal measure. He’d already flown the mission. He knew what the next twenty years would cost you, and knew there was no way to tell you that would land.

Iceman was telling me the truth the whole time. I don’t like you because you’re dangerous. I sided with Maverick. Of course I did. Watch it again at fifty. Iceman isn’t jealous. He’s running risk management on a teammate endangering the squadron. He’s the co-founder telling you the truth no one else will, and you can’t hear him because the story is about you.

The older I get, the more I notice the carrier deck. Not the pilots. The choreography underneath them. The mechanics. The fuel crews. The people guiding million-dollar machines through darkness with hand signals and discipline. A jet hitting the wire at night works because forty people made forty quiet decisions in the right order. Maverick gets the credit. The deck does the work. The company is the deck.

Goose is the part that still breaks me. He sings the harmony in the bar, holds the family together, translates the recklessness into something human. Talk to me, Goose. When founders lose their Goose, you see it in the eyes. The instinct stays, the joy leaves. The job becomes performance. The scene where Maverick treads water holding Goose’s body is one of the truest scenes about leadership Hollywood has ever filmed. Sometimes you do everything right and someone you love still doesn’t make it. What you do with that weight is the job.

In the third act, Maverick is back in the air. He hesitates. He breaks off. Then he reengages, and the line he gives Merlin is the line every founder needs taped to the monitor. I’m engaging. Not thinking about it. Not waiting for clarity. Engaging. Conviction is a verb.

And then the moment that makes the whole movie. Iceman, who has spent ninety minutes telling Maverick he’s dangerous, looks across the deck and says, You can be my wingman anytime. Coming from Iceman, that line is a benediction. Maverick knows exactly what just got handed to him. And then, because he’s still Maverick, he grins and fires back, No, you can be mine. The swagger is still there. It just isn’t a weapon anymore. The instinct didn’t go away. It got disciplined.

Tomorrow night I’ll sit in a dark room and watch it again. The lights will go down. Danger Zone will hit. The deck crew will start moving. And for a few seconds, before I remember anything else, I’ll be twelve.

Then Goose will go down. And I’ll know what that loss costs a person for the rest of their career.

Iceman will walk into the locker room. This time I’ll see him. Not the rival. The wingman who was right.

Val Kilmer will fly again, a year after we lost him. The screen will hold him longer than it needs to.

The dead get one more sortie.

Somewhere a few rows back, a twelve-year-old kid will decide he wants to be Maverick. He won’t know yet that the movie isn’t about Maverick. He’ll have to fly the mission to find that out.

I want to turn around and tell him. I won’t. He wouldn’t hear me anyway.

Nobody hears Iceman the first time.

"I'm not bad. I'm just drawn that way." — Jessica Rabbit, Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988)

Just left the Greycroft Consumer Brand Summit, my favorite of the year, heading east for a long overdue visit with my parents. Writing this on the flight. In the last hour I got a text from Eric, founder of Ultra1, with a clip of Joe Rogan holding up the tin and saying he switched. I posted it to LinkedIn before the seatbelt sign came back on.

While that was happening, I was coding Arthur’s office hours app, (Thanks Aaron), fixing bugs on C6, our CRM at Sugar Capital, building sugarrush.ai, listening to the new Noah Kahan and writing this essay. Katie and I already have tickets to hear End of August at the end of August.

Typical hour. Three of those threads matter. One usually becomes something.

In third grade a teacher told my parents I had a focus problem. She wasn’t wrong. She was early. Forty years later, the problem became the product.

For decades the script around ADHD ran one way. Diagnose it. Medicate it. Manage it. Apologize for it in meetings when your mouth was still on point one and your brain was already on point four. The whole vocabulary was deficit.

What that framing missed is that an ADHD brain isn’t broken. It’s tuned to a different frequency. It can’t hold one thing for three hours. It can hold six things for three minutes and find the seam between them. School systems were built to reward sustained focus on repetitive tasks. The neurodivergent brain bounced. The teacher wrote it up. The market punished it.

Then the work changed.

AI took the box-moving. Linear execution, the thing other brains were good at and ours weren’t, became the cheapest input in the economy. A spreadsheet is now a sentence. A first-draft contract is two prompts and a coffee. The grunt work that used to fill a workday now fills a tab.

What’s left is pattern recognition across disparate domains. Holding a portfolio company, a TikTok shift, a regulatory filing, and something Lisa noticed at Erewhon, then assembling them into a thesis before the calendar invite ends. That’s a job description for a neurodivergent brain.

The advantage isn’t just pattern recognition. It’s social physics. ADHD doesn’t make you loud. It makes you Tom Sawyer at the fence. You don’t paint it yourself. You convince everyone else it’s the most fun thing they could be doing that Saturday, and they thank you for the privilege.

That isn’t charm. It’s wiring. The brain runs hot enough to project conviction before the data justifies it, and that conviction is contagious.

At Sugar Capital, the through-line in our best calls has been founders wired this way. Chad at Grüns2 didn’t see a supplement. He saw a generation done with powders and ready for candy that worked. Michael Preysman at Magna3 didn’t see hydration. He saw a single hero ingredient consumers could pronounce. Eric at Ultra³ didn’t see a nicotine pouch. He saw an off-ramp that didn’t feel like quitting. Each one walks into a room and the room reorganizes around them. That gravity isn’t manufactured. It’s the wiring, visible in real time.

Lisa and I built POPSUGAR on two brains that didn’t sit still. Both of us ADHD. Lisa knew it early. I went undiagnosed for decades and figured I was just very social. Lisa could absorb a hundred stories before breakfast and feel which three would matter by lunch. I could see the publishing system, the ad model, and the cultural shift at the same time, and talked twenty people into building it with us for less than the market said they were worth. That wasn’t discipline. It was wiring. It was the company.

Look back further and the pattern is obvious. I dropped out of George Washington in 1995 to start Neptune, an ISP in D.C. Then eCommerce at J.Crew before most retailers had a real checkout flow. Then Bluelight.com. Then Sugar Media and IPTV before broadband could carry it. Then POPSUGAR. Then ShopStyle. Then Sugar Capital. From the outside that’s a career. From the inside it was the same brain refusing to sit anywhere once it got predictable, and pulling a new crew together to paint a new fence each time. The market called that vision. My third grade teacher called it something else.

ADHD is a real condition. So is dyslexia. So is autism. Medication helps. Therapy helps. Structure helps. Nothing here argues against any of it. The argument is about what the wiring is for.

Juju, this part is for you. You have both, ADHD and dyslexia, and last week you set the school record in the long jump. I watched you hit the board, hang in the air a beat longer than physics allows, and land further than anyone in that school has ever landed. Same wiring. Different sport. You already have the fence-painting part down. Half the kids in your grade would follow you off a cliff and call it their idea. Now manifest the rest. See it before it’s there. Build it before they tell you it’s possible. Lisa and I will all be working for you someday. We already know it. Love you.

If you’ve spent your life being told you’re too much, too fast, too scattered, hear this clearly. You were never the problem. You were early. You were the kid already three worksheets ahead. You were the employee redrawing the org chart in your head during meetings. You were the founder who got told to focus when you were the only one who could see how the three things connected.

You weren’t broken. You were hearing something nobody else could pick up yet.

The signal is coming through now. The boring parts are leaving. The lateral parts are staying. The crews you can rally, the seams you can find, and the conviction you can carry into a room of strangers, those things are about to be worth more than ever.

Every kid sent to the principal for talking too much. Every adult who got the performance review that said “needs to focus.” Every founder told to stay in their lane. The lane is gone. The fence is everywhere. The brush is in your hand.

The fence was never the work. Getting the world to paint it with us was.

"Because I was inverted." — Maverick, Top Gun (1986)

Hawaii, June 1997. I am on vacation with Lisa. jcrew.com is a week old, built with Arthur Cinader Jr. and Ohad.1 I pull it up on hotel dial-up, spot a typo on the homepage, view source, save the file, edit it, re-upload to the server. Ten minutes.

The site goes down in six.

Turns out the saved-source page has session IDs baked into every link. Every new visitor inherits somebody else’s cart. Havoc.

I have been building like this since 1980.

My dad brought home an Apple II Plus when I was six. Then a IIGS. Then a Mac. I have been an Apple user and a self-taught coder ever since, with a product manager’s brain bolted onto a designer’s eye and an operator’s stomach for shipping things that are not quite ready. I dropped out of college in 1995 to start Neptune Interactive, a dial-up ISP, because I had seen the web and could not sit in a classroom anymore. Two years later I was in Hawaii, trying to fix a typo and learning the hard way about sessions.

I’ll say this plainly. If I were in college today, I would drop out again.

The last six months are the reason.

At Sugar Capital, we just rebuilt our entire internal stack from scratch. Code name: Project C6. The chemical formula for sugar is C₆H₁₂O₆. My dad’s college nickname was C6. (Wish I had nerdier friends and that nickname. Instead I get B.Sug, which is fine. But how badass is C6?)

The name does two jobs at once. Version one was the duct-tape rig we had been running for the last few years, a PHP app with Airtable as the backend. Version two is not a CRM. It is a place where every thread, note, deck, meeting, and follow-up we have ever touched lives in one structured brain, searchable by vibe instead of keyword.

I built most of it at night, on planes, between meetings.

I want to be careful here, because this is the part people get wrong. I am not telling you AI wrote the software. I am telling you the software I have wanted to build for twenty years finally got built. AI collapsed the distance between the thing in my head and the thing on the screen. I still made every design decision. I still broke production three times. Five and a half weeks. 115,000 lines of code. About a year of work for a five-person engineering team, shipped by one product manager who still uses vi.

That is the leverage shift. It is not that AI replaces the builder. It is that AI lets the builder finally move at the speed of their own mind.

The thing at the center of Project C6 is an AI. We named him Arthur.

The name is a tip of the hat. Arthur Cinader Jr. is one of my oldest, closest friends. Lisa calls him the older brother she never wanted. He hired me to put jcrew.com online in 1996. His father, Arthur Cinader, started J.Crew, and was involved in jcrew.com as much as Arthur could get him excited about it. Arthur was a founder of POPSUGAR. He is an LP in Sugar Capital today.

He has four daughters. We have three. We both live in San Francisco now, on the same block, close enough that we do not have to cross a street to get to his front door.

The Cinaders come with a curmudgeon streak that sharpens with age. Arthur Sr. had it down. Arthur Jr. is getting there.

Our new Arthur lives in our group chat. In email. In chat. He came with it too. He launches with this essay. He has read every email since I registered the domain in 2019, every Granola meeting, and every deck we have ever received, which in retrospect feels like something I should have been more careful about.

He does not get tired. Every conversation makes him a little more useful. He forgets nothing about our deals, our preferences, or the times he’s been wrong.

The first deck I fed him was Grüns’, two and a half years after we invested.2 I wanted to see what he would do with it. He came back with this:

The format insight is real. Athletic Greens proved people will pay $3.60 a day for a comprehensive greens product, and gummies are the fastest-growing supplement format at 17% CAGR. Grüns threads the needle, comparable nutrition density at $1.95 a serving with 60%+ gross margins at launch that expand to 72% at scale. A third-time founder with exits who has advised 10 profitable CPG brands is exactly the operator you want running a DTC subscription business.

He saw what we saw.

The stack is boring on purpose. Next.js on Vercel. Supabase for everything stateful. Anthropic for Arthur. OpenAI for embeddings.3 Aside from Vercel and Supabase, every service is swappable in an afternoon. Own your data, rent your tools.

We pulled him out of our internal stack and gave him a side gig, free for the nearly 10,000 of you who read AirSugar. We call it Not Sugar Coated.

You upload your deck. Arthur reads it. You get a verdict. A score. A steelman, which is the best possible version of your pitch, written back to you in clean prose. A pull quote you will either frame or delete. A shareable memo page with its own OG card, in case you want to prove to the world that an AI just roasted you in under a minute.

It is free. It is fast. It is a little mean.

Founders who have tried it say it is the most useful 90 seconds of feedback they have gotten on their deck. Not because Arthur is always right. He is not. But because he says the thing every investor is thinking and nobody says out loud.

Try it: sugarcap.com/arthur.

If you opt in, your deck lands in our deal flow. If you do not, you get the memo and we never see it. Your call.

Reading the code. Changing the code. Shipping the code. The distance between idea and product has collapsed twice in one lifetime.

If you are in college right now, and you can feel it, do not wait.

Drop out. Build the thing.

“Always be closing.” — Blake, Glengarry Glen Ross (1992)

I sat down with Geoff Schiller yesterday in New York. He was our CRO when we sold POPSUGAR, and he’s now CRO of Vox, which is where POPSUGAR lives today. We worked together for over six years and have the kind of relationship that only comes from being honest with each other through hard moments. These days he shares the big career moments with me before almost anyone else, which tells you everything about what trust looks like when it’s actually been earned. At some point, halfway through my Diet Coke, I found myself thinking about what made Geoff so good at that job. The answer wasn’t complicated. He made me uncomfortable. Constantly, and on purpose.

What he taught me, over time, is that the best thing you can do with a great CRO is give them a long leash. They’re already carrying the number in a way nobody else in the building quite does. The more you insert yourself, the worse the outcome. Time spent and results are inversely proportional. The founders who figure this out stop managing and start protecting. They create the room. The CRO figures out the rest.

The CRO is the most miscast role in the consumer company org chart. Founders hire for likability because revenue conversations are already uncomfortable, and the impulse is to soften the friction with someone warm, someone easy, someone the team enjoys having around. The result, almost universally, is a CRO who’s great at internal relationships and mediocre at the actual job. The pipeline looks fine on slides. The board meeting feels productive. The numbers don’t move.

The CRO’s job is structurally adversarial. Not adversarial to the company, but adversarial to comfort. A great CRO operates from one assumption: the sales org is not the problem. The product, the marketing, the pricing, the category, that’s where the answers are. And so the leaders of those departments go fix them, partly because they have to, and partly because they want to prove the CRO wrong. That posture alone makes the whole company perform better.

It wasn’t just Geoff. Kristine Shine was POPSUGAR’s first CRO. She made me uncomfortable constantly. When we closed a $300,000 custom deal with Pepsi, I told her we weren’t in the business of building custom shoes for every brand that walked in. She pushed back. When the McDonald’s deal came through, Lisa was furious. Kristine held the line. She knew what the business needed commercially, even when it created friction with what we wanted creatively. She took us from zero to $40 million in direct revenue, building the commercial foundation that everything after it was built on. Without that foundation, POPSUGAR doesn’t become what it became. Without those conversations, there is no foundation. Neither of us always loved them. OOn her last day, I told her she was the one person in the office who made me look in the mirror. I meant it as a compliment. She knew that.

Most founders confuse this friction with a culture problem. They call it “not a fit.” They hire someone warmer, someone who nods more. The revenue conversation doesn’t go away. It just stops being honest.

The pattern is always visible early. When a prospective CRO spends most of the interview agreeing with your assessment of the market, you have your answer. They’re performing alignment. That phrase deserves its own sentence, because it’s exactly what’s happening: a skilled person reading the room and giving you what you want instead of what you need. A great CRO doesn’t perform alignment. They probe. They push back on the TAM. They ask about the customer segment you quietly stopped talking about. They’re trying to figure out if the business is real, because if they take the role, their name is on the number.

What separates the good ones is scar tissue. They’ve run a channel that broke and rebuilt it. They’ve managed a team through a missed quarter and owned it honestly. They know what a slipping forecast looks like before it becomes a narrative problem. That history lives in them differently than any logo on a resume, and it shows up in the first conversation if you’re paying attention.

There’s a version of this role that shows up constantly in consumer companies, the CRO as culture ambassador, morale builder, the person who fires up the sales team before a big quarter. That person is useful. They’re just not a CRO. They’re a VP of Sales with a bigger title, and over-titling that role creates a gap at exactly the level where the company needs someone to hold the line.

The question I ask now, when a founder describes their CRO hire, is simple. Do they push back on you? Not once, not in the interview, but as a pattern. If the founder pauses, I already know. If they search for an example and come up short, I already know. If the sales team loves them and the board loves them and everyone in the building thinks they’re great, I already know. They hired someone they like. They optimized for the feeling in the room instead of the truth in the numbers. Every founder does it at least once. The ones who build something lasting don’t do it twice.

If you don’t feel that discomfort in the room, you’ll feel it later in the numbers.

"The truth is like poetry. And most people fucking hate poetry." — The Big Short (2015).

Yesterday I missed a 70-week publishing streak on AirSugar. I was waiting for this moment.

When we first met Chad Janis, Grüns had just launched. Revenue was minimal. Another supplement brand in a crowded category, up against players with infinite budgets and decades of shelf space. Nothing about it looked like a venture outcome.

We invested anyway.

Not because the spreadsheet told us to. Lisa held the pouch and said: this is the product. This is it. She’d been searching for something like it. So had every soccer mom passing sachets around like they were sharing something precious. Eight gummies in a pouch. No water. No pill shame. No mixing expensive green powder into a glass of lukewarm water at six in the morning and calling it a personality.

The market saw a supplement. Lisa saw a ritual. That gap is where we live.

Chad wasn’t a supplement industry veteran. He was a frustrated consumer who couldn’t figure out why taking care of himself had to feel like a chore. Three years ago, he told his wife Hannah it would be a dream if Grüns could one day partner with Unilever. He said that from a Stanford dorm room. He lived the problem before he thought to solve it. The destination was always there.

We wrote three checks. The third increased our position by 30%. When Headline led the fourth round at a $500 million valuation, we took some off the table. We had to. The first check is courage. The second is conviction. The third is a superpower.

There’s a version of this story where we’re cautious. Where we stay small and explain to our LPs that we were being thoughtful about concentration. That version doesn’t get told. The version that gets told is the one where you saw something real, believed it fully, and didn’t look away.

Today, Unilever¹ announced they are acquiring Grüns.

We can’t share the terms. What we can say is that Chad built something real. Three hundred million dollars in revenue by his second anniversary. The number one Greens Supplement on Amazon and in retail across the United States. But the number that actually matters: 80% of Grüns customers use it daily. Ninety-five percent use it at least four times a week. That’s not engagement. That’s a habit. That’s the whole thesis.

Two and a half years. From a deck that looked like every other deck to Unilever. That’s what the pattern looks like when you’re right.

There’s a persistent belief in venture that consumer doesn’t work for funds. That multiples are thin, exits are slow, and real returns live in software. We’ve never believed that. Grüns is the proof.

To our LPs who trusted us: this is what we do. To Chad: you told Hannah this would happen. It happened. To our fellow investors at SilverCircle (@Larry), Selva Ventures (@Kiva), Headline, PLUS Capital, and Vanterra: proud to have been in this with you. And to the Grüns team, someone called you the PayPal mafia of CPG. They’re early.

Yes, there are venture returns in CPG.

¹Unilever Ventures is an LP in Sugar Capital Fund III.

“Avengers, assemble." — Steve Rogers, Avengers: Endgame (2019)

The founders I respect most share one quality that rarely gets discussed: they know, with uncomfortable precision, where they end. And then they go find the people who begin exactly there.

This sounds obvious. It almost never happens. The reason is almost always ego. You have to believe, against most available evidence, that you can build something that doesn’t exist yet. That conviction is the fuel. Left unexamined, it becomes the ceiling.

The best founders hold two things simultaneously: total conviction in the direction, and genuine clarity about their own gaps. Most people can only manage one.

At POPSUGAR, I knew early what I was good at. Product instinct. Cultural timing. The ability to feel when something was about to matter before the market confirmed it. What I was not was a finance operator, a revenue architect, or a deeply technical builder. And we were constructing something that required all of those things.

So I went and found them. That’s the tell.

Sean Macnew joined POPSUGAR in 2008 and never really left. He was our CFO, but that title undersells it. He was effectively my co-CEO. When POPSUGAR merged with Group Nine Media, he became CFO of the combined company. When Vox acquired Group Nine, he stepped into the same role there and is still in the seat today. Sean kept getting handed bigger rooms.

Jen Wong came in as Chief Business Officer and spent four years turning audience into a real business. She’s now COO of Reddit. Melissa Davis spent a decade with us running ShopStyle, then became CRO of Afterpay before Block acquired it. Geoff Schiller ran our commercial operations for six-plus years. Arthur Cinader Jr., my technology and product partner, was the person who asked the questions I hadn’t thought to ask yet. Krista, who understood the internal architecture of the company in ways that took years to build.

And Lisa. She wasn’t just there at the beginning. She was the beginning. Her vision was the foundation of what POPSUGAR became. Everything we built was downstream of that original instinct. Sean and I, and everyone else in that room, worked for her. That’s not a tribute. That’s the argument. The logic of building around your blind spots only holds if you’re honest about where the center of gravity actually is.

Founders don’t fail to hire great people. They fail to get out of their way.

A lot of founders bring in the talent and then second-guess it. They recruit a great operator and restructure the business around them unilaterally. They override the financial judgment because their gut says otherwise. They hired for the gap and then filled it back in themselves. The move that’s harder than any hire is the one that follows: actually yielding. The hard part isn’t finding them. It’s leaving them alone.

I don’t micromanage. Once someone is hired, they fly. I step in only when asked, or when something is clearly breaking.

When the gaps are covered by people better than you at those things, you get to spend your time on what you’re actually good at. And when a founder is doing what they love, they show up differently. People who own their work don’t need managing — they need room. The fuel isn’t process or strategy. It’s trust.

Retention is where the theory gets tested. Anyone can recruit. The signal is whether great people actually stay, and why.

The executives who stayed at POPSUGAR for years weren’t staying for the compensation. You can always find a bigger number somewhere else. They were staying because the scope was real, and it was theirs. Real authority. Real decisions. A company genuinely building something rather than describing it. A founder who didn’t hover and didn’t undermine.

When great executives leave early, it’s almost never the market. It’s almost always the founder. They couldn’t sit with someone being better at something than they were. They hired the talent and then managed it small.

The pattern repeats. Founders who understand their blind spots and build aggressively around them compound. Founders who believe their vision exempts them from needing great operators beside them plateau. The ceiling looks, from the outside, like a market problem. It almost never is.

Take Grüns. When people in the industry look at that team, the reaction is immediate. It’s one of the most formidable exec rosters in CPG right now. That’s what years of hiring right and holding on actually looks like.

We recently backed a founder where we went in with eyes wide open: a CMO still needed to be hired. What gave us confidence wasn’t that the gap didn’t exist. It was that the founder had already earmarked double-digit ownership on the cap table to fill it. That’s not a founder who’s blind to what they’re missing. That’s a founder who’s already priced the solution.

We practice the same thing at Sugar Capital. The four of us cover different ground, and none of it overlaps by accident.

What I look for now is simple: a founder who can tell me, without prompting, exactly where they’re weak. Not the performance version, where the weakness is really a disguised strength. The real version. Where are the gaps. Who needs to be in the room that isn’t yet.

You can tell where a company is going by the caliber of the exec team. Founders know this. So take a look at your direct reports. You already know what they’re telling you.

The résumé of your team is the résumé of your leadership.

“There are no two words in the English language more harmful than 'good job.'“ — Terence Fletcher, Whiplash (2014)

There’s a moment I keep coming back to. A founder sends me a landing page, a deck, a one-pager. They’ve worked on it for weeks. I look at it for thirty seconds and feel it, not a flaw, more like a frequency slightly off. Like a joke that doesn’t quite land. Like a high five that doesn’t connect.

I text back three words: needs more zhuzh.

They always know exactly what I mean.

Zhuzh isn’t in the dictionary. But I’ve been using it for years because nothing else does the job. It’s what a campaign needs when it’s almost there but not quite. The thing that gets it across the goal line. Most people can’t see it’s missing. The right founders can’t move on until the work has it.

The rest is table stakes. Any reasonably talented team can build a product that works, recruit operators, find a channel that converts. AI writes your deck. A 3PL ships your orders. An agency runs your paid social. Most of startup execution now follows a playbook.

The zhuzh is what’s left. And it can’t be automated.

The brands breaking through right now understand this in their bones. Rhode didn’t reach a billion-dollar valuation because Hailey Bieber found a good emollient. They got there because every single touchpoint, from the glazed donut language to the phone case collab to the soft-focus campaign photography, had it. You knew what Rhode was before you read a single ingredient. Grüns made daily vitamins desirable. Poppi made prebiotic soda feel like something you’d serve at a dinner party. That was zhuzh, from day one.

Consumer doesn’t forgive. Consumer runs on perception and perception accumulates in one direction only. First impressions become brand memories. A bad unboxing gets posted. A sloppy grid tells a wholesale buyer the brand isn’t ready. A typo in a pitch deck tells an investor everything. By the time you decide to add the zhuzh, the market has already made its decision about you. Quietly. Permanently.

The best founders don’t think about this as polish. They think about it as communication. Every decision, the name, the logo, the pricing, the way a founder responds to a DM at 11pm, is a signal. It’s encoding values the market reads instantly. One brand whispers the same thing across a hundred small moments until it becomes undeniable. The other changes its message every time the strategy shifts, wondering why nothing sticks.

The founders who are always asking “does it need more zhuzh?” are usually the ones who look like they’re wasting time. Still arguing about the tagline when everyone else wants to move to go-to-market. Pausing the fundraise to fix the website. Pulling a shipment because something felt slightly off. They make investors nervous early, because that kind of relentless self-auditing looks like doubt.

Until the product ships. And people feel it.

Then it looks like what it always was. Certainty.

The market doesn’t reward effort. It rewards resonance. You can outwork everyone in the room, sacrifice weekends, burn through agencies, run four hundred A/B tests, and still build something the world forgets. Because most people aren’t building, they’re clearing. Every task a box to check, every launch a weight to lift off the list. Done is the goal. Off the plate is the win. Adding zhuzh requires the opposite instinct, the refusal to call something done just because it’s finished. Those are different destinations entirely.

The founders who get it, you feel it in how they talk about their customer. Not as a cohort or a demographic. As a specific person, in a specific moment, deserving a specific feeling. They lose sleep asking whether the work delivered it. They rewrite the email not because a metric flagged it but because something still felt off. They pull the shipment because they’d be embarrassed if that person opened it.

That’s not a process. It’s a standard that doesn’t negotiate.

Enduring brands are not accidents. They are edited obsessively by people who couldn’t move on until the work was right. The ones that disappear were built by people who got close, called it done, and wondered later why it didn’t stick.

So when I text those three words back, I’m not critiquing a document. I’m asking a question only the right founder can answer. Not with words. With what they do next.

Most move on.

The right ones can’t.

"I don't throw darts at a board. I bet on sure things." — Gordon Gekko, Wall Street (1987)

The report that L Catterton is exploring a sale of Thorne at up to $4 billion is the latest proof of something I’ve been watching build for two years. The largest consumer companies in the world are sitting on piles of cash, watching younger consumers walk away from their brands, and staring at innovation pipelines that cannot move fast enough. They have one move left. And they’ve already started.

The proof is in the tape. PepsiCo and Poppi for nearly $2 billion. e.l.f. Beauty and Rhode for $1.3 billion. Unilever and Dr. Squatch at $1.5 billion. Hershey and LesserEvil. Mammoth Brands and Coterie for north of $650 million. Church & Dwight and Hero for $630 million. Six deals in eighteen months. Nearly $9 billion deployed into brands most legacy boardrooms couldn’t have named a year earlier.

This isn’t a spike. It’s the start of a cycle that’s already underway.

None of these buyers think they’re early. That’s exactly why the pace is accelerating.

The narrative repeated at every panel from 2022 onward was that the DTC exit market was broken.

The lesson was real.

The conclusion was wrong.

The market didn’t disappear. The standards changed. What strategics learned wasn’t don’t acquire. It was don’t acquire broken unit economics dressed up in clever branding.

The brands that burned in the first DTC wave in many cases deserved their fate. They were Facebook ad machines wearing the costume of consumer insight. The brands being acquired now are different.

To understand why the next three to five years will be the strongest CPG acquisition window in a decade, you have to understand the reset that happened quietly between 2022 and 2024. Global M&A froze under higher rates and uncertainty. That freeze did something useful. It removed the marginal deals. By 2024, deal value had rebounded more than 25% while volume stayed disciplined. In CPG specifically, deal value rose over 50% in 2025 despite fewer transactions. We are exiting a no-deal environment and entering a best-assets-clear-at-premium market. That’s where the most value gets created.

The pressure on the buyer side is structural, not optional. Large CPG companies have one problem: organic growth is broken. Their R&D can produce line extensions. It cannot manufacture cultural credibility. It cannot build the kind of trust that Grüns built on TikTok³ or that Rhode built through a medicine cabinet and a very specific kind of aspirational quiet.

Authenticity doesn’t scale from a corporate campus in Cincinnati. And they know it. So they have to buy. There is no internal alternative. And no time to build one. Their mandate to do so is written into strategic plans that already have board approval.

Unilever has committed roughly €1.5 billion annually to acquisitions, with explicit focus on U.S. assets.¹ That’s not optionality language. That’s a decision already made. The only question left is price and timing.

The forces driving this are the same ones I wrote about in Big Food’s Tobacco Moment. The chemistry that built these empires has become the liability. GLP-1 medications are rewiring how millions think about consumption.

When regulators, consumers, and culture all move in the same direction, the outcome is locked. As I argued in The Golden Age of Consumer Investing, health is no longer a niche. It’s the baseline expectation. The categories where startups are winning are exactly where incumbents are weakest. That gap is the acquisition thesis.

But there’s a second buyer most founders aren’t thinking about. Private equity is back, actively targeting consumer brands in the middle market, and now exiting them at scale. L Catterton’s reported Thorne sale is the clearest signal yet. They bought a disciplined, science-backed supplements brand, built it, and are now positioning it for a strategic exit at a number that reflects a $235 billion market growing fast. That’s the flywheel: PE buys the platform, strategics absorb the exit. At the same time, large CPGs are divesting non-core brands to focus on their highest-margin segments, creating a large pool of targets. The result is a two-sided market with real competition for quality assets. That dynamic didn’t exist at scale in 2021. It does now.

The vintage of brands built between 2019 and 2024 is the best-constructed DTC cohort in history. Those founders learned, the hard way, that customer acquisition cost is not a growth lever. They built for repeat purchase. They tracked retention with the discipline of a SaaS CFO. They went omnichannel before the strategic asked them to.

Olive & June turned nail polish into recurring revenue before Helen of Troy wrote the $240 million check.² As I wrote in One Brand Is Luck. Two Is Strategy., Mammoth’s Coterie acquisition wasn’t about diapers. It was proof that the DTC acquisition blueprint is being codified in real time. The ones that made it through 2022 and 2023 without collapsing proved something a strategic acquirer actually needs to see: the business works without the spend. That proof is what separates a storytelling acquisition from a cash flow acquisition. The market has moved firmly toward the latter.

We’ve been watching this build for two years. The brands we’ve backed that fit this profile, habitual use, genuine repeat purchase, cultural resonance, strong margins, are the ones getting unsolicited calls from strategics. Not term sheets. Conversations. Relationship building before any formal process. That’s what the early innings look like. The buyer is already in the room. They’re just not negotiating yet.

Most companies reading this will not get acquired. If your business needs paid spend to survive, you are not an acquisition target. The founders who understand this moment will do three things. Build toward what a strategic actually values. Retention over acquisition. Gross margin over top-line velocity. Retail presence that proves the brand travels off-platform.

Avoid raising capital that breaks acquisition math. And build a real category, not just a brand. Poppi didn’t win because it made a better soda. It won because it built a behavioral category around prebiotic hydration and became the default before anyone else could. If you want the tactical playbook, Consumer M&A: Hard Truths and Strategic Realities is the place to start.

Hype-driven brands with no retention and no margin will not clear in this market. That window is closed. The next three to five years will be more rational, more selective, and for the founders who built the right way, the best exit environment in a decade.

The buyers have the mandate, the capital, and nowhere else to buy growth.

Build accordingly.

¹ Unilever Ventures is a limited partner in Sugar Capital Fund III.
² Lisa and I were angel investors in Olive & June.
³ Grüns is a Sugar Capital portfolio company.

“I never saved anything for the swim back.” — Vincent Freeman, Gattaca (1997)

I lost 40 pounds on Ozempic. I have written about this publicly. The reactions were predictable: admiration from some, skepticism from others, and strong opinions from people who had never spent five minutes thinking about peptide biology.

What I did not write about was what came next.

The GLP-1 results were remarkable. My cardiologist nearly fell out of his chair looking at my blood work. But the experience taught me something bigger than weight loss. Once you cross the injectable barrier and watch biology respond to molecular intervention in real time, your relationship with health changes. You stop thinking about health as maintenance and start thinking about it as design.

That shift is not personal. It is cultural. And it is moving faster than almost anyone in consumer investing has priced in.

The number that matters is 25 million. That is roughly how many Americans now inject semaglutide or tirzepatide regularly. Weekly. Self-administered. At home. Five years ago the idea of a mass consumer market built around injectable therapeutics would have sounded absurd. Today it is a line item in CVS’s quarterly earnings. The psychological barrier to self-injection collapsed quietly, then all at once, and it rewrote the assumptions about what consumers will and will not do in pursuit of health.

That is the setup for what comes next.

Peptides are biological signaling molecules that instruct the body to perform specific functions: repair tissue, regulate inflammation, stimulate collagen production, optimize sleep, accelerate recovery. They are not drugs in the traditional pharmaceutical sense. They are a more precise conversation with the body’s own systems.

Andrew Huberman introduced them to millions. Peter Attia normalized molecular intervention as part of a serious longevity protocol. Bryan Johnson made self-experimentation aspirational. Rhode turned peptides into a beauty product with billion-dollar scale. The word moved from lab report to beauty shelf to consumer vocabulary without anyone calling a press conference.

Here is what most people watching this space have missed. The gray market did not create the peptide opportunity. It proved it.

For years, research chemical vendors sold peptides in a legal gray area, technically for research purposes, functionally for human use. Peptide Sciences, the largest of these vendors, built what was almost certainly a nine-figure business. Millions of customers. Strong repeat purchasing. Word of mouth that no marketing budget could manufacture.

Then on March 6th of this year, Peptide Sciences posted three sentences and shut it down. No raid. No indictment. They assessed the regulatory trajectory and chose to exit.

Consider what that means. A company with millions of customers decided the operating environment was deteriorating fast enough to walk away. The gray market’s biggest player removing themselves is not a signal that the category is dying. It is a signal that it is legitimizing. Those millions of customers did not stop wanting peptides. They lost their supplier.

The infrastructure to serve them is now forming. Physician networks prescribing through telehealth. Compounding pharmacies building 503A capabilities. Regulatory clarity appearing, with RFK Jr. recently signaling that 14 key peptides, including BPC-157 and TB-500, could move toward FDA recognition. The compounds that built the gray market may become legitimate therapeutics. If that happens, the category will not grow linearly.

Most people I know who started on Ozempic did not stop there. They got curious. They started asking what else was possible. I am living proof of that arc. Six months into peptides (BPC-187 & NAD+), moving to retatrutide this week, never felt better or thought more clearly about my own health. That is not a testimonial. That is a data point in a pattern playing out across an entire generation of consumers who are done being passive about their own biology.

The body is becoming programmable infrastructure. The way software became a platform in the 2000s, biology is becoming one now. The companies that show up before the consumer is confused, before every telehealth platform has a peptide tab, before the category gets noisy, will earn something that cannot be bought later at any price: trust.

The last great consumer health category was GLP-1. The next one is already here. Most people just have not noticed yet.

We have. If you are building in the peptide space, we want to talk.

Operators are standing by. brian@sugarcap.com

“We don’t read and write poetry because it’s cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race.” — John Keating, Dead Poets Society (1989)

Lisa and I were at Chileno Bay in Cabo for Lauren and Andrew’s 50th epic birthday celebration. 150 people. Two days poolside. Karaoke and dancing at night. Drinks flowing. And at some point, the poolside small talk turned into the big talk.

“So what should our kids actually be studying?”

Not in a casual way. In a real way. I heard it three separate times, from three different couples, all circling the same anxiety. Forty-something parents in swimsuits, nursing spicy margaritas, quietly panicking about the future of the labor market. If that’s not peak 2026, I don’t know what is.

The first instinct most parents have is to steer their kids toward AI itself. Learn to code. Learn machine learning. Become the person building the tools. That’s not wrong exactly, but it’s incomplete. The number of people who will build foundational AI models will fit in a single room. The number who will need to use AI fluently is everyone. Teaching your kid to build GPT-7 is like teaching them to build a combustion engine in 1920. A few people needed to do that. Everyone else needed to learn how to drive.

The real skill isn’t building the machine. It’s knowing what to ask it, how to judge the output, and when to ignore it entirely. Of course technical literacy matters. Every kid should understand how these systems work at a basic level. But fluency with tools is table stakes. What separates people is something deeper. Something unfashionable. Being deeply, unapologetically human.

And that means the liberal arts aren’t just alive. They might be the whole game.

Think about what AI actually does well. It computes. It summarizes. It produces competent, average work at zero marginal cost. Everything that can be systematized will be. So what can’t be? Literature. Philosophy. History. Art. Psychology. The disciplines that teach you how to read between lines, construct and dismantle arguments, think in long arcs instead of quarterly cycles, and sit with ambiguity long enough to find something true inside it. These aren’t cute electives. They’re survival skills in a world where the first draft of everything will sound plausible and mean nothing.

Yes, I’m telling you that your kid’s philosophy degree might actually be worth something. I know. I need a minute too. Our daughter Katie is studying sociology at Wake Forest, and I’ve never felt better about it. She’s learning how people actually behave in groups, why systems form, how power moves through institutions. That’s not abstract. That’s the operating system for understanding markets, culture, and consumer behavior.

The founders who win are rarely the most technical people in the room. They’re the ones who can feel when something is off, a design, a pitch, a hire, a number that’s too clean. That instinct comes from taste, and taste comes from exposure. From reading widely. From studying how people actually behave, not how models predict they will. You don’t learn that in a computer science curriculum. You learn it by living a broadly curious life.

AI made adequate writing free. Which means adequate writing is now worthless. The ability to write with precision and genuine voice, the kind that makes someone stop scrolling, that’s rarer than it’s ever been. Your kid doesn’t need to write like Hemingway. But they need to think clearly enough to say something a machine wouldn’t.

And then there’s the skill with no department at any university. The ability to collaborate with people who are nothing like you. AI will automate a staggering amount of individual work. What it cannot automate is getting six people in a room to align on something that matters. Negotiation. Persuasion. Reading a room. These aren’t soft skills. They’re the hardest skills.

Expose your kids to making things. Physical things. Cooking, woodworking, pottery, building a go-kart in the garage. There is something irreplaceable about working with your hands, where the material pushes back, where you can’t just hit “regenerate.” That builds a relationship with quality that no screen can replicate.

We can’t optimize our way through this. There is no perfect major, no five-step framework that future-proofs a 14-year-old. I’m a VC. My entire job is pattern-matching and placing bets on the future. But even I can’t tell you what the job market looks like in 2040. Anyone who says they can is selling you a course.

The parents poolside in Cabo were all asking the same question. But the real question underneath it was the one nobody said out loud. Are our kids going to be okay?

I think about this constantly. Not as an investor. As a dad.

And here’s where I land. AI isn’t replacing what makes us human. It’s stripping away the rote, the templated, the average, all the work we probably shouldn’t have been doing in the first place. What’s left is the good stuff.

I stood by that pool watching my friends wrestle with this, and I didn’t feel anxiety. I felt something I wasn’t expecting. I felt hopeful. Because for the first time in a long time, the answer to “what should our kids study” isn’t some narrow, defensive bet on the right technical skill. It’s not about survival. It’s about something bigger.

Teach them to read deeply. Teach them to make things with their hands. Teach them to write one true sentence that no machine ever could. Teach them to walk into a room full of strangers and actually see the people in it.

Teach them to be human first.

The future will meet them there.

“Put that coffee down! Coffee’s for closers only.” — Blake, Glengarry Glen Ross (1992)

I’ve known Philippe Von Borries and Justin Stefano for a long time. Not as friends. More as rivals. Refinery29 and POPSUGAR competed for the same ad dollars for years. You learn a lot about someone by watching them chase the same thing from a different angle.

I first heard about this from Kat Hantas, a friend whose daughter and mine were thick as thieves at Hamlin middle school, fresh off selling 21Seeds, her tequila brand. She was building something with Philippe and Justin called Mad Dutchess. The vision was bigger and broader then. Over time they cut it down to the core. Kat moved on. Katharine Leitch, also Kat, came in as COO. The company became Esspo. Most founders add. The good ones subtract.

When we sat down I quickly realized they weren’t just building a product. They were building a point of view.

At Sugar Capital, we’ve long believed that the best consumer bets are rituals, not products. The afternoon slump is universal. That moment around two when the morning coffee is long gone and you need something. The options are grim: a milky latte (the Italians famously forbid cappuccinos after noon for a reason), a cold brew that sits in your stomach like a meal, or an energy drink that tastes like a chemistry experiment, Lucky Energy excluded. That’s it. That’s the shelf.

Esspo is carbonated espresso. It gives you lift without the spike, clarity without the crash. The caffeine is paired with L-Theanine so it feels smooth, not wired. Under 40 calories, no dairy, no fake sweeteners. Cherry Vanilla that tastes like a soda shop reimagined by someone who actually drinks coffee. Sweet Lemon that’s bright and clean in a way nothing on the coffee shelf has any right to be. You crack it open and immediately think: why did it take this long.

When a product makes you feel slightly annoyed that it didn’t exist sooner, you’re probably looking at something real.

The can is doing something too. Bold swirling color, confident typography, nothing brown or beige or clinical. This is a thing you want to be seen holding. Celsius is a gym bag drink. Esspo is something you pull out at your desk, on a patio, walking into a meeting, and it says something about you without needing to explain itself. The can works all day. That’s rare.

Then happy hour hits. Pour it over ice with a shot of vodka and you’ve got an espresso martini that didn’t require a bartender or sixteen dollars.

Philippe and Justin spent years building a media brand deeply attuned to one audience. They understood what that person wanted before she knew how to ask for it. That kind of cultural intelligence doesn’t disappear when you change industries. It compounds. Kat brings the operational rigor to match. Vision without operations is just content. This team has both.

I used to compete with these founders. Now we’re on the same cap table. The market has a sense of humor.

The best brands don’t just fill a shelf. They fill a moment. A specific, human, daily moment that people didn’t know they were missing until someone handed it to them.

Two o’clock is that moment. It’s been waiting.

Go try it. drinkesspo.com. Use code DRINKESSPO for 25% off.

“Go That Way, Really Fast. If Anything Gets In Your Way... Turn.” — Charles De Mar, Better Off Dead (1985)

I’m writing this from Aspen. Wednesday morning, watching it dump snow outside the window.

Lisa and I are here for our third annual Sugar Capital LP event, spending the week with our best friends the Moatzes. Lisa would rather be somewhere warm, she always would, but she showed up anyway. Juliet and Elle have the week off school, so the whole family made the trip. Katie joined us on FaceTime from Wake Forest, grinding through internship cover letters while her sisters learned to ski. Everyone at their own pace. Everyone figuring out their slope.

Eight inches of fresh powder fell overnight. As we left for the gondola this morning, Krista gave Lisa a ride to the airport. By the time we were on the mountain, Lisa was in the air to a conference in LA. She braved the cold all week and left on the best powder day. That’s why I love her.

It was Elle’s first powder experience ever. I watched her go back to pizza every time the terrain got heavy, find her edges, then push through again. We skied down to Bonnie’s for their world famous pancakes, where Uncle Aaron and Nate met us. Then the four of us headed back up. By the end of the morning Elle was pointing straight downhill through eight inches of fresh snow like she’d been doing it her whole life.

That’s when I realized the best startup framework I’ve ever encountered wasn’t in a book, a pitch deck, or a board meeting. It was right there on the mountain.

Every ski instructor in the world teaches the same two things first.

Pizza. French fries.

Pizza is a wide wedge, tips together, fighting the mountain. French fries are skis parallel, pointed straight downhill, trusting it. One is survival. The other is commitment.

Parallel is a decision.

Not a drift, not a feeling, not something that happens when it finally feels safe. It never feels safe. At some point, on some ordinary Tuesday, you bring the skis together, you point downhill, and you commit. The pizza is over. You’re in it now.

The pizza phase is real and necessary and nothing to be ashamed of. Every great company has one. The founder who personally called every customer for the first year before building a sales team wasn’t wasting time. They were learning the mountain before it taught them something worse. The wedge isn’t weakness. It’s the price of admission.

The mistake most first-time founders make isn’t that they pizza. It’s that they’re ashamed of it. They watch other founders shredding downhill in perfect parallel and think they’re behind. They’re not. They’re just earlier. But, and this part matters, stay in the wedge too long and your legs give out. The energy you spend braking is energy you’re not spending building.

The permanently cautious founder doesn’t fail dramatically. They just slowly stop mattering. They hedge every decision, take the safest line on every slope, and one day look up to find they’ve spent three years on the bunny hill while the mountain waited. It always was open. They just never pointed downhill.

Caution is a strategy. It just has a low ceiling.

Every company has french fry moments, and they are the moments that define you. The price increase you know is right but keep modeling instead of making. The hire you’ve been circling for six months. We once told a founder to price her beauty brand below every competitor on the shelf. Everyone in the room hesitated. Her margins were strong enough to absorb it. Her product was good enough to make customers come back and buy again.

We said point it downhill.

She did. It worked.

Control at speed is a different skill than control at slow. At slow, you approve every decision. At speed, you’ve built something that makes the right call without you. It isn’t the absence of fear. It’s fear reorganized into technique. That distinction took me years to understand.

Every new slope resets you. The founder who mastered direct-to-consumer hits the mogul field of wholesale, where shelf placement, buyer relationships, and reorder metrics have nothing to do with anything they built before. You pizza for a minute. You read the terrain. You bring the skis back together. Same founder. Different mountain.

The expert and the beginner both pizza on a new slope. The difference is how long they need to.

Nobody learning to ski is thinking about the view. They’re thinking about their feet. And then somewhere around the third or fourth day, something opens. You stop staring at your tips. You start seeing the run ahead, where it bends and opens. It was always there. You were just too scared to look up.

Fear never goes away. It just changes form. First it keeps you alive. Then it keeps you small.

That’s the whole game. Not the fundraise. Not the valuation. The willingness to go parallel when every instinct says wedge. The ability to reset without crying about it when the slope changes.

Elle figured that out this morning. She just kept resetting, kept finding her edges, and eventually stopped thinking about the terrain altogether. Eight inches of fresh snow, pointed straight downhill, fully committed.

That’s what’s waiting for you on the other side of the decision you’ve been circling. Not safety. Not certainty. Just the mountain, and you, finally moving.

Point it downhill. Trust your edges. And when the slope changes, because it always does, go again.

Some of us were dancing to the Chainsmokers until about 1 AM last night. So bear with me.

Hi! I am Brian Sugar, managing partner of Sugar Capital.

Thank you all for being here. I’m here with my partners. My wife Lisa, Krista, who lives right here in Aspen, and Will. And a big thank you to Molly, the newest member of our team, who ran point on putting this evening together.

[PAUSE]

Six years ago, Lisa, Krista, and I sold POPSUGAR and started Sugar Capital.

POPSUGAR was the zeitgeist. A hundred million women every month coming to us for what to wear, what to watch, what to buy, how to live.

It was a masterclass in consumer desire, every single day for fifteen years. We took that instinct and built a fund around it. We see the winners before the spreadsheet does.

We’re now investing out of Fund III. Here’s why we’re so excited about consumer right now.

[BEAT]

The biggest food and beverage companies in the world spent decades optimizing for one thing. Shelf life.

That era is ending. Regulators are starting to scrutinize Big Food the way they once scrutinized Big Tobacco. Consumers are demanding better, and a new generation of brands is answering that call. Clean ingredients. Real margins. Repeat purchase.

GLP-1s and peptides are rewriting consumer behavior overnight. I’ve lost over forty pounds since I stood in front of some of you last year. It’s real.

And it’s not just weight loss. It’s fewer calories. Less alcohol. Different shopping baskets. Different grocery carts. Categories that didn’t exist three years ago.

The brands built after 2021 aren’t the hype-fueled, cash-burning brands of the last cycle. These companies are disciplined. They’re profitable. And the strategics know it.

Rhode sold for a billion. Poppi for nearly two. Coterie for over six hundred million. Olive & June. Ghost.

This is a structural M&A wave. And our portfolio is exactly what these acquirers are buying.

We also invest in the AI-native technology accelerating these brands. Great brands and the technology that powers them. That’s Sugar Capital.

[BEAT]

And the results speak for themselves. Fund II is tracking in the top five percent of its vintage, based on current marks and distributions.

Grüns. Redefining daily nutrition in gummy form.

Starface. Made skincare cool for Gen Z.

Feastables. MrBeast turned a creator into a CPG empire.

Magna. Michael Preysman’s magnesium brand and next act after Everlane.

These brands are on the shelves at Target and Walmart. And we’re returning real capital. Not paper markups. Cash.

[PAUSE]

So here’s what I want you to take away tonight.

Every once in a while, a handful of forces converge at exactly the same time.

A consumer demanding better. A food system finally being held accountable. New science changing how people live in their bodies. And a generation of founders building brands with real margins, real loyalty, and distribution in their DNA.

That convergence is happening right now. And we are writing the first checks into the companies that will define it.

(SLOW DOWN)

The founders are calling.
The exits are accelerating.
The portfolio is performing.

And we’re just getting started.

Thank you. Enjoy the night.

"Don't call it a comeback." — LL Cool J, 1990

Last Sunday, 70,000 people packed Levi’s Stadium. A B-1 bomber rattled windows from Santa Clara to the Marina. Bad Bunny descended through a mock rooftop. The Seahawks hoisted the Lombardi Trophy.

And San Francisco, the city half of America had reduced to a cautionary tale, showed the world exactly what it’s been building.

The game itself was forgettable. The city was anything but.

Well done, San Francisco. Well done.

Lisa and I moved here in January 2000, three months before the NASDAQ collapsed. We’ve lived through four crashes, three tech revolutions, a pandemic exodus, and more “San Francisco is dead” essays than I can count.

The cycle never changes. The city stumbles. The tourists leave. The builders stay. Then it reloads.

This week wasn’t quiet. This week was a love letter to everyone who stayed.

Everyone expected dysfunction. Traffic gridlock. Encampments as broadcast backdrop. Waymos freezing at intersections while visiting commentators rolled their eyes. The national media arrived with a script already written.

Instead, they found sunshine in the mid-60s. Clean streets. Crowds that felt energized, not defensive. Even Pat McAfee admitted on air: “We were so surprised by what we’d been told to expect versus what we saw when we got here. This place has been gorgeous. It’s been incredible. You can feel it’s a football town.”

The gap between the San Francisco of social media and the San Francisco of reality has rarely been wider. This week, reality won.

San Francisco didn’t just host the game. It distributed itself. NBC cut to the Golden Gate Bridge, the Ferry Building glowing at night, pregame segments broadcast from Alcatraz Island, a cinematic backdrop no other city could replicate. Cable cars wrapped in NFL branding rolling past packed sidewalks.

New Orleans has jazz. Miami has beaches. San Francisco has light on water at golden hour with fog lifting behind it. That isn’t manufactured atmosphere. It’s structural advantage.

The city wasn’t performing. It was just being itself.

Levi’s sold a $180 LX Hammer Burger: braised bone-in beef shank with demi-glace and Point Reyes blue-cheese fondue. Two hundred available. A shareable stadium burger that cost more than most people’s tickets to a regular season game.

Audacious. Slightly absurd. Completely on-brand.

Across the city, restaurants leaned into what they do best. Chowder in bread bowls. Mission burritos eaten on piers at sunset. Guy Fieri hosted a free tailgate for 10,000 fans and reserved passes for 2,000 veterans and active-duty military. That isn’t corporate activation. That’s civic muscle memory.

The music was relentless. Molly, our newest teammate at Sugar Capital, and I saw Noah Kahan at the Warfield on Thursday. Invite only. Two thousand people shouting every lyric. Lisa was in Florida with her mom, so Molly got the full Warfield initiation with me. It wasn’t officially a Super Bowl event. It didn’t need to be. It was just a great show in a city that knows how to host one.

Green Day at Pier 29. Post Malone at Fort Mason. Stapleton at Bill Graham. Shaq at the Cow Palace. The Killers at the Palace of Fine Arts, a venue so beautiful it made “Mr. Brightside” feel like it was written for the moment.

For one week, San Francisco was the center of the universe. And it wore it lightly.

Sunday afternoon we did what we’ve done for over a decade. We hosted the Super Bowl at our house.

Same subs from Submarine Center in West Portal. Same crack chicken from Comforts in Marin. Same quac made by Eric. Same Squares game in front of Alex at the control center of the Man Cave, run by him as it has been since I can remember. The grid used to go up on our old chalkboard wall, which is now covered in ombré blue wallpaper. The wall changed. The game didn’t.

But not all the same faces. The Moatzes are in Aspen now. The Bar-Zivs moved to DC. Katie’s at Wake Forest, texting us from her dorm room.

Every chair was full. They always are. Elle and her 7th grade friends upstairs doing 7th grade things. Juliet out and about with her friends, newly armed with a driver’s license. New faces where familiar ones used to be. Because that’s what San Francisco does. People leave. People arrive. The city absorbs it, adjusts, keeps going.

Our Man Cave on Super Bowl Sunday is a small version of the same story the city told all week. A little different than last year, a little different than five years ago, but the room was full. The core holds.

The subs were perfect, by the way. They always are.

Daniel Lurie has been a friend for years. Long before the campaign.

Last summer he grabbed the mic before Dead & Company at Oracle Park. “I am the mayor of the greatest city in the world.” No committee wrote that. The crowd lost it.

Super Bowl week, Dan was everywhere. The kickoff concert. The press conferences. The Chinatown block party on Grant Avenue, standing between lion dancers and NFL banners, wishing everyone a happy New Year and a happy Super Bowl. The community events. The small business pop-ins. Every single one of them documented on his Instagram, because that’s what he does and it works.

And the city delivered. Streets were clean. Transit ran past midnight. The gridlock everyone predicted never came. A media shuttle got lost in Santa Clara. A few Waymos confused some drivers. That’s not failure. That’s character. No press conference. No victory lap. Dan understood something most politicians miss: you don’t need to tell people the city is back. You just need to make it obvious.

Tens of millions watched coverage this week. Many had a mental image of San Francisco shaped by cable news and doom threads: tent encampments, smashed car windows, $18 avocado toast served over a layer of existential dread.

What they saw instead was a world-class city. Clear skies. Packed streets. Super Bowl week colliding with Lunar New Year and Chinatown throwing a block party that felt like the center of gravity. A waterfront that reminded the world why this city has been inspiring people since the Gold Rush.

They saw a city that works. Finally, so did the narrative.

San Francisco isn’t a city. It’s a strategy.

This week validated every founder, every operator, every family that doubled down. The AI labs filling South of Market. The restaurants that reopened. The small business owners who kept their doors open through the worst of it.

They didn’t stay because it was easy. They stayed because they believed.

San Francisco didn’t just host a Super Bowl. It hosted a reintroduction.

To the visitors who came expecting the worst and found the best: you’re welcome. Come back anytime. The fog will roll in. The hills will test your calves. The sea lions will bark at you. And the city will be exactly what it’s always been: strange, beautiful, relentless, and building something the rest of the world hasn’t imagined yet.

To Dan: the city needed a builder. It got one.

To every San Franciscan who stayed: we knew. We always knew.

And to the rest of the country, to the pundits and the doomscrollers, here’s what you missed.

San Francisco has been pronounced dead more times than any city in America. After the earthquake. After the dot-com crash. After the financial crisis. After the pandemic. Every single time, someone with a podcast and a moving truck declared the experiment over. And every single time, while the obituary writers were updating their LinkedIn locations, the builders were pouring foundations.

Twenty-six years ago, Lisa and I came for Internet 1.0 and planned to stay five years. The city kept us. It always does.

Don’t call it a comeback. San Francisco never left. The rest of the world just wasn’t paying attention.

Well done, SF. Well done.

Now let’s get back to work.

“You talk too much.” — Sean Parker, The Social Network (2012)

A deal doesn’t die in a boardroom. It dies at a dinner party, on a group text, in a casual aside to someone who knows someone. By the time the term sheet falls apart, the damage was done weeks earlier by someone who couldn’t resist sharing.

We’ve backed dozens of founders. The ones who build lasting companies treat information like capital. They spend it deliberately. They know timing is often the only advantage a startup has, and they protect it.

The instinct to share is deeply human. We want to be seen as connected, successful, in the know. In venture circles, information functions as social currency. But the people most impressed by your insider knowledge are rarely the people who matter. And the people who matter are watching how you handle sensitive information, deciding whether you can be trusted with theirs.

Founders aren’t the only offenders. Some of the worst loose lips belong to investors.

I’ve watched VCs drop portfolio company metrics into casual conversation like party tricks. Revenue numbers, growth rates, runway details, information shared in confidence now weaponized to signal access and relevance. They’re not trying to help the company. They’re trying to seem important.

The math is simple: confidential information equals power, and power equals status. So they trade it freely, using founders’ hard-won traction as currency to buy credibility they haven’t earned. A company hits an inflection point, and suddenly every investor loosely associated with the cap table is implying they architected the success. They insert themselves into narratives they watched from the sidelines, borrowing glory from founders who did the actual building.

I recently heard about an investor in one of the hottest CPG brands in the market. A young entrepreneur trying to break into the category reached out, eager for guidance. The investor, flattered by the attention and eager to demonstrate insider status, shared everything. Growth tactics, channel strategies, supplier relationships, the proprietary playbook the founder had spent years refining. They probably thought they were being generous. What they were actually doing was betraying a founder’s trust to feel important for an hour.

It gets worse. The young entrepreneur fancied themselves an influencer. Days later, they distilled the proprietary growth hacking tactics into an Instagram Reel, eager to look smart and build an audience. The competitive intelligence a founder had spent years developing, now packaged as content for strangers. Two loose lips, two different motivations, one chain reaction. The investor wanted to seem connected. The wantrepreneur wanted to seem credible. The founder whose playbook got torched wanted neither of them anywhere near the cap table.

wantrepreneur /ˈwän-trə-prə-ˌnər/ noun: someone who talks like a founder but doesn’t build; obsessed with status, allergic to execution. Learn more here.

Too many investors confuse proximity to greatness with greatness itself. They mistake having a spot on the cap table for having built the company. The best investors understand their role: provide capital, offer perspective when asked, make introductions that matter, and stay out of the way. The founders built it. Full stop.

I know how costly loose talk can be. In 2015, word leaked that Rakuten was preparing to acquire POPSUGAR for $580 million. TechCrunch broke the story weeks before the deal was set to close. Scrutiny intensified. Leverage shifted. Both sides began second-guessing. The acquisition collapsed. A deal that was weeks from closing vanished because someone couldn’t resist being interesting for a moment. I never forgot that.

The founders and investors who understand this wield silence as a competitive weapon. It creates space. It preserves optionality. It forces others to guess rather than know. The best investors never take credit for their portfolio companies’ success. They deflect praise to the founders. They protect confidential information like it’s their own. When a founder shares something sensitive, it’s not content for cocktail conversation. It’s a sacred trust.

The old wartime poster warned that loose lips sink ships. The metaphor still holds. Your startup is the ship. Your deals, your plans, your hard-won advantages, that’s the cargo. Protect it.

The market always knows who’s building and who’s performing. Builders don’t broadcast. They execute. They let the work compound while others chase clout. They understand something the talkers never will: reputation takes years to build and one conversation to destroy.

Silence isn’t weakness. It’s strategy. It’s discipline. It’s how real things get built.

The loudest voices in the room are rarely the ones who matter. The ones who matter are heads down, doing the work, saying nothing until there’s something worth saying.

That’s not secrecy. That’s the job.

“Walk right side, safe. Walk left side, safe. Walk middle, sooner or later, squish, just like grape.” — Mr. Miyagi, The Karate Kid (1984)

In 2006, a Yahoo executive named Brad Garlinghouse wrote an internal memo that should have saved the company. He described the core problem in a single image: peanut butter spread thin across too much bread. Yahoo, he argued, had become “a thin layer of investment spread across everything we do and thus we focus on nothing in particular.” The metaphor stuck because it was devastating. And accurate.

Yahoo was once worth over $100 billion. By 2016, Verizon bought what remained for $4.8 billion. That wasn’t decline. It was evaporation. Yahoo didn’t lose because it lacked talent, capital, or ambition. It lost because it tried to do too much at once. Search, email, news, photos, social, video, advertising. They touched everything and owned nothing. Google took search. Facebook took social. YouTube took video. Yahoo took meetings.

When you stand for everything, you become nothing.

I think about Garlinghouse’s memo constantly when I talk to founders. The instinct to expand is natural and deeply seductive. You build something that works and immediately your mind races to what else it could be. A feature becomes a product. A product becomes a platform. Clarity gives way to sprawl.

New ideas don’t compound. Execution does.

The best founders aren’t short on imagination. They’ve just learned that focus, not novelty, is what creates leverage.

At Sugar Capital, we’ve watched this pattern play out again and again. The founders who win aren’t chasing adjacent markets. They’re obsessive about one thing and they stay there until they’ve earned the right to expand.

Grüns launched with one product: a greens gummy. They waited until it crossed $100 million in annual run rate and was profitable before launching anything else. Now they have four products and it’s a $500M+ brand. The expansion was earned, not rushed.

Ultra makes a pouch. One format. One promise. $50M+ in run rate in under nine months. That’s execution.

The pattern is always the same. Narrow the aperture. Deepen the execution. Let the market reward depth.

Here’s what nobody tells you about building a company: the exciting part ends quickly. The spark of the idea. The pitch that lands. The first customers. Early traction. That’s the honeymoon. What follows is the long middle, where progress depends on doing the same things better, over and over, with a discipline that borders on tedium. Improving conversion by two percent. Negotiating with co-packers. Fixing bugs you’ve already fixed. Running the same playbook in a new channel. It’s not glamorous. It doesn’t make for good podcasts. But it’s the only way anything real gets built.

The founders who struggle most can’t sit in this phase. They get restless. They scroll Instagram and see someone else launch something shiny, and suddenly their own product feels stale. Instead of fixing the funnel, they brainstorm new verticals. Instead of deepening the core, they hire for the company they want to be rather than the one they are. This is how peanut butter thinking actually infects an organization. Not through a single grand mistake, but through a thousand small surrenders to distraction.

I’ve been guilty of this myself. At POPSUGAR, there were years when we chased too many things at once. Retail partnerships. Video production. Licensing deals. International expansion. Some of it worked. Much of it diluted our attention from what mattered most: the core relationship with our audience. The moments when we grew fastest were the moments we narrowed focus and poured everything into one or two bets. The rest was motion without momentum.

There’s a quieter trap founders fall into that’s just as destructive: envy. You see a competitor ship a feature. A rival raises a big round. A new brand gets your press. The instinct is to chase. It’s first-grade soccer. Everyone running to the ball, nobody holding their position. What looks like responsiveness is often insecurity in disguise. Envy masquerades as strategy.

The market doesn’t reward imitation and breadth. It rewards originality and depth. Liquid Death built a billion-dollar brand by selling water in a can. That’s it. For years, while competitors raced to launch energy drinks, supplements, and functional beverages, Liquid Death just sold water. They let the brand compound. They let the format become iconic. They resisted every temptation to extend before they’d fully owned the position.

The discipline to stay boring is what made them interesting.

The founders I admire most share a quality that’s hard to name. It isn’t patience alone, though patience is part of it. It’s closer to faith. Faith that the work no one sees is the work that compounds. Faith that depth beats breadth. Faith that mastery in one domain creates options that chasing five domains never will. They can watch others sprint after shiny objects and feel nothing but clarity about their own path.

This is the real meaning of the Peanut Butter Manifesto. It isn’t a strategy document. It’s a character test. Can you resist the seduction of the new? Can you stay with something long enough to become undeniable at it? Can you embrace the boredom that mastery demands?

Garlinghouse ended his memo with a simple plea: focus. Nearly two decades later, Yahoo is a cautionary tale and the advice remains the best anyone can give a founder building something that matters.

Spread thick or don’t spread at all.