“Good morning, and in case I don’t see ya, good afternoon, good evening, and good night.” — Truman Burbank, The Truman Show (1998)

Gracie passed away last week. She was 21.

On Monday, Lisa and I went to her service at Congregation Emanu-El.

Our girls went to different schools. But Katie grew up with the twins at Hebrew school. They went to each other’s b’nai mitzvah. In February, Lisa and I helped Amy fix a wardrobe malfunction at Lauren and Andrew’s 50th in Mexico. A few weeks ago, we saw the family at a Sukkot party. Nothing on anyone’s mind.

You don’t have to be close to show up. You just show up. And everyone did.

The sanctuary looked like the High Holidays. Every pew full, front to back.

For close to twenty minutes, nobody spoke. Just soft piano. Two empty chairs on the bimah. Hundreds of people, waiting. I have never felt a room hold that much love for one family.

Then the family came down the right side and took the front row.

Rabbi Ryan Bauer walked out with Cantor Arik Luck. The rabbi was on a cane. I learned later he had knee surgery the Wednesday before. Two hours after it, he was on the phone with the family.

They opened with an old prayer. Guardian of Israel, watch over Israel’s remnant. And of those among Israel who say Shema Yisrael, let none be lost.

He didn’t sugarcoat anything. “This is a nightmare,” he said. “We’re not supposed to be here.” Then he told us our job. Not to explain. To bring love. To bring memory. To sit in silence.

So we remembered. Here is what stayed with me.

I remember Cami, her best friend, describing a middle schooler belting Hamilton under the big tree at lunch. An upperclassman rolling to class on hot pink Heelys. Homemade signs at Cami’s college soccer games in Boston. “Canadians are nice. Stereotypes are harmful. And so is Cami.” The whole room laughed. She spoke for every friend who couldn’t be there, and she made us laugh the way Gracie would have.

I remember Nate saying he was born a few minutes before his sister, and it was the only race he ever won. She taught him to write. He says she is the reason he is at Williams. Once, at a scrimmage at Harvard where no fans were allowed, he looked over at the entrance and there she was, head to toe in Williams gear.

She just found a way in.

I remember him saying that grief is a list of small things that will never happen again. And his promise at the end. He will always be looking for her in the stands. He is 21.

I remember Lucy and the jar of ticks Gracie kept in their bathroom for a year. The free “I donated blood” shirt Gracie gave her for her birthday.

Neither of them ever had.

Marty said Lucy was the one who called the temple when the news came. Up there, she was every bit that strong.

I remember Amy describing a girl who folded her clothes like origami to fit a closet built for baby clothes, and never complained. Who carried a hammock everywhere, just in case. Who, at 10, wanted a gerbil so badly she hid little pink gerbil drawings all over the house. In the fridge. On the steering wheel. On Amy’s toothbrush.

They never got the gerbil.

Amy told us she hoped we would laugh. We did. Only a mother could pull that off on that day.

At a 10th grade volleyball game, Gracie found a pair of sneakers in the lost and found. The weekend before she died, in Boston, she was still wearing them.

I remember Marty telling us she lost the student government election three years in a row. Senior year she ran again and introduced herself by her losses.

She won.

She also once hit a boulder in a Tahoe parking lot. She claimed the boulder moved.

And then, more quietly, he told us he was hurt, but not broken. You could see both.

They remembered the details. She learned every waiter’s name. She baked maple bacon cupcakes for a construction worker because he mentioned he liked them. She noticed whoever was standing on the outside of a conversation and pulled them in.

Rabbi Bauer said Lucy had told him Gracie had too much grace. Maybe that is what made her Gracie.

Then the line I keep coming back to. “We do not know why Gracie died. But we know how she lived.”

And I remember Amy’s one request, at the end of her eulogy. She called it “Pull a Gracie.” Do something new. Try something different. Dance like no one’s watching. Make someone laugh. And when you do, think of her and say to yourself, “I just pulled a Gracie.”

Somewhere in that service I made a decision. Buffalo wings and a cold beer that night. I hadn’t had them in years. I love them.

I have three daughters. You sit in that sanctuary and you can’t help it. What if it were us?

When it ended, Lisa and I went home and called Katie. She is studying in Italy. She had seen the emails. Hearing her voice from the other side of the world was the only thing I wanted.

We asked her what she remembered about Gracie.

She didn’t hesitate. During the first COVID summer, she and Juju spent a day at the Ann Curtis Swim Club in Marin with Gracie and her little sister Lucy. That night they got invited to family movie night at Gracie’s.

The movie was The Truman Show.

There is a Truman Show poster above her bed in San Francisco. Until that call, I never knew where it came from.

The rest of the day was ordinary. It was exactly what we needed.

Lisa and I had lunch across the street with Lauren. We didn’t solve anything. We just talked.

Then Lisa drove Elle to her cross country meet, and Juju and I met them there. I have watched a lot of those races.

I watched this one differently.

That night, Andrew came over for the second half of Monday Night Football. Commanders at the Niners. Lisa, Andrew, and me. Wings. Beer.

It wasn’t much. That was the point.

I pulled a Gracie.

Here is what I am carrying out of that room.

Rabbi Bauer said this would be the easiest week of the next year for the family. Everyone shows up for shiva. Then it gets quiet. We move on. They don’t. So keep checking in. Every few weeks. Every few months. For a whole year. In his words, make them get sick of you.

Nate asked us to call the people we love. Not tomorrow. Not when things slow down. Today. Show up to the game nobody else is going to. Say yes to the movie. Stay for dinner.

And once in a while, pull a Gracie.

I keep thinking about that poster.

You never know which ordinary night a kid will remember forever.

Marty said that when his mind starts to wander, he stops it with one sentence. He puts a period at the end and holds it there.

Gracie was awesome. Period.

Good morning, Gracie. And in case we don’t see ya, good afternoon, good evening, and good night.

May her memory be a blessing.

Shared with the blessing of Marty, Amy, Nate, and Lucy.

"You can actually see old lobster couples, walking around their tank, you know, holding claws." — Phoebe Buffay, Friends (1996)

Right now, as I write this, Lisa is crossing the street outside my window. Blue denim dress. The bag of the day. Sunglasses on, coffee in hand, on the phone, the sun catching her as she heads to lunch with her friends. Tomorrow she turns 50.

I’ve been watching her cross streets for 32 years.1 I still stop what I’m doing.

September 1994. A house on Washington Circle in DC that I shared with three fraternity brothers. Emily Krasney, a high school friend, stopped by with her new roommate from George Washington. Lisa was 17, a few days into college. She picked up the controller for FIFA Soccer 94 and took me apart. A month later she was at The Exchange on F Street in a ridiculous costume her friends had made her wear to announce her birthday. The bartender asked if I wanted the usual.2 I reached into my pockets and found nothing. The cutest girl in the room was standing next to me and I couldn’t afford a drink.

“Just two waters, please.”

She took one anyway. I walked her home and kissed her goodnight on the steps of Thurston Hall. The next afternoon we met at Kramerbooks & Afterwords3 on Dupont Circle. It was her 18th birthday.

A few months earlier, as a senior at Bullis, she’d won the Manuel José Baca, Jr. Joy of Living Award. I found out years later.4

I think about how thin the thread was. If Emily had been assigned a different roommate. If I’d stayed home that Friday. If she’d left ten minutes earlier. Everything I love hangs on a night I almost missed.

I believe in making your own luck. I didn’t make this one. I didn’t earn Lisa. I got her, and I’ve spent 32 years trying to deserve it.

She bet on me before there was any reason to. I dropped out of college to start Neptune the same spring we got serious. She didn’t flinch. Her parents did, which was fair. In 1998, over lunch at Caliente Cab in New York, Arthur Cinader Jr., my boss at the time5 and now one of my closest friends, told me to stop waiting and marry her. I couldn’t afford the ring, so Alan helped me set up a payment plan.6 At her graduation dinner, Alan gave a toast, handed me the room, and I got down on one knee.

Rabbi Bruce Lustig stood with us under the chuppah at Washington Hebrew Congregation on September 25, 1999, and told us about beshert. Meant to be. I don’t remember his exact words. I remember he said it like a fact, and I remember believing him.

Then came the dot-com crash. 2008. COVID. Every time the world broke, I looked across the room and she was still there.

I’m writing this on October 7th. Thirty-two years ago tonight, I walked her home to the steps of Thurston Hall. Three years ago, the same date became a day our people will mourn forever. I wrote about what it taught me in We Dance Again. Now the worst day and the night everything began share the same square on the calendar. Tonight I’ll hold both.

She was the soul of POPSUGAR from its first post, leading hundreds of editors in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco and around the world, knowing the bag before it was the bag. She is raising Katie, Juliet, and Elle without missing a meet or a game, then up at 7 a.m. on applications and housing forms before the rest of us are awake. She jokes that she’s a single parent. It’s a joke. Mostly. I know exactly how much she carries, and I know I don’t thank her enough while she’s carrying it.

She taught me no grudges. When we fight, one of us asks whether the fridge is making a funny noise, and it’s over. She taught me family first, the way Alan and Inez taught her, the way Alan’s mother did, gathering everyone in Boca Raton every December until she was 100. She taught me that an optimist needs someone nearby who checks the math.7 She says anyone standing next to me turns a little pessimistic just to keep the room level.

Then there are the dogs. Jack arrived for my 25th birthday. Lucy I brought home one day just after the dot-com crash, without telling Lisa. Lucy stayed. When Jack died, we got JJ, short for Jack Jr. Lulu was our COVID puppy. Four dogs across 27 years, and every one of them figured out within a day who runs the house. They follow her from room to room, and every night they follow her to bed. Ever since, there has been a dog between us. Romance finds a way.

Our life is blue. The house, the cars, the company colors, the closets. Even now, out the window, the dress is blue.

Thank you for taking the water. Thank you for not flinching. Thank you for Katie, Juliet, and Elle. Thank you for never missing a game, and for every 7 a.m. at the kitchen table. Thank you for the fridge.

Thank you for being my wife, my best friend, my co-founder, my co-pilot, my ride or die. The planner. The editor-in-chief. The venture capitalist across the table. Khaleesi, mother of three dragons.

The first call. The last word.

She’s been there for all of it, starting with a broke kid who ordered two waters.

Tomorrow at five o’clock, it will be 32 years since we walked into Kramerbooks on her 18th birthday.

She decided a long time ago that I was her lobster. Phoebe swore lobsters mate for life.8

She just called. Lunch was great. She’s off with Krista and Molly to get her nails done, and she might stop back at the office.

If she does, I’ll stop what I’m doing. I always have.9

Happy birthday, baby. ILYSM 💙

Phoebe was wrong about lobsters. Rabbi Lustig was right about us.

“A man tells his stories so many times that he becomes the stories.” — Will Bloom, Big Fish (2003)

In the early fall of 2006, Michael Moritz came to see us. Lisa was at the doctor with our daughter Katie, born that June, so I was on my own. POPSUGAR had started as a hobby in 2005. Now it was a business. The iPhone was still a year away.

Mike asked for tea. Someone on our team, who had clearly never made a cup, tore the bag open, poured the leaves into a mug of warm tap water, and handed it to the most important investor in Silicon Valley.

I have never wanted a floor to open more. Mike drank it anyway, steering around the leaves and the occasional twig. I asked if I could make him another. He said no, it was fine, he had never had it this way.

Then Mike interviewed me. He didn’t start with our traffic. He started with my family, and how I grew up.

So I told him. My mother’s parents were not born here. They got out ahead of the Nazis. My grandfather had owned a chain of shoe stores. My father spent 25 years at Bell Labs / AT&T and told me, more than once, to work for myself. Sequoia became our first investor, and Mike was our partner until we sold POPSUGAR to Group Nine Media.

My radar said Mike was Jewish. Wales kept jamming the signal. Over the years I tossed him a Shana Tova in the fall and a mazel tov when there was cause. Nothing came back. I didn’t push.

Then came October 7, and a lot of us stopped blending. I wrote about it here at the time. Mike writes that it was the first time he felt bound to Israel’s fate. By then he was living with a blood cancer that runs in Ashkenazi families, and the boxes of his mother’s papers that arrived from Cardiff during the pandemic had been opened.

What came out of them is Ausländer, his memoir of the family that got out and the family that didn’t.

He can tell you the minute his mother’s Kindertransport train left Germany and the minute it reached London, on Hitler’s 50th birthday. She had just turned 15. He can tell you his father’s parents were deported from Munich and murdered.

On Tuesday night Lisa and I went to see him at the JCC in San Francisco, one stop on his book tour. He spotted us across the room, came straight over, and threw his arms around us both. Then he went on stage and told the room what he would ask his mother if she were alive today. What she wore the morning she left. The color of her suitcase. Whether both her parents came to the station. The documents kept the minutes and lost the girl.

At 12, he told the room, he drew a family tree and put a small red swastika under the name of every relative the Nazis killed. He said it felt like collecting stamps. At 13, for my bar mitzvah, I sat my mother’s parents in front of a camera and asked them to start at the beginning.

My grandmother was 13 on Kristallnacht, the same age I was holding the camera. She was from Düsseldorf, the city where Mike’s mother would board her train to London a few months later. Her father was beaten so badly he spent six months in a hospital. The family got a visa to Ecuador and left with the clothes they had on. There was no suitcase to remember. Two weeks on the Trans-Siberian Railway, then Japan, then a ship across the Pacific to Balboa, and finally the climb to Quito, more than 9,000 feet up. She spoke German and a little English. Nobody around her spoke either.

Two girls from the same city went in opposite directions. Sixty-seven years later, the son of one and the grandson of the other sat down over a mug of twigs.

My grandfather’s story starts at a fair. In 1939 he came from Yugoslavia to New York for the World’s Fair, a city of white pavilions under the slogan “The World of Tomorrow.” General Motors handed out buttons that said “I Have Seen the Future.”

Then the war started, and he could not go home. The family story is that the shoes in his stores were loaded onto trucks and sent to Germany. A man went to see the future while the past was being carted off behind him. He learned English and went to work in a textile factory. By the 1950s he had a chain of shoe stores again, on Long Island.

Last week I finished the book and wrote Mike a note. I told him I was proud he had written it, and I attached the video. He wrote back that our two families’ stories were “just two of many millions of similar tales.”

On Tuesday, after the talk, dozens of people lined up for his signature. When Lisa and I reached the front, he wrote For Lisa and Brian, Who Understand.

I finally got my Shana Tova back.

I understand the tea now. Mike’s parents never called themselves survivors. They were refugees, and refugees drink what they are handed. In 2006 I took his questions for diligence. Twenty years later, I hear something different in them. My grandfather lost one chain of shoe stores to German trucks and built another on Long Island. My father heard that story and told me to work for myself. We built a company that told millions of women what to wear. Mike heard all of it and wrote the check.

Two of many millions. Every one of them has a morning nobody asked about. My grandparents answered every question a 13-year-old put to them, and I never thought to ask what anyone was wearing. Now neither of us has anyone left to ask.

My mother has never been to Europe. Her mother left it as a girl with the clothes on her back. Her father left it for a fair, and the war kept him here.

Katie, who was three months old the day Mike drank the twigs, is spending a semester in Florence because she wanted to. She needed a visa too. Hers is for school.

For Thanksgiving my mother will cross the ocean her father crossed, in the other direction, to see her granddaughter. Both sets of our parents are coming. So are our other two girls. Nobody is fleeing. Nobody needs a ship that sails before the war does. The girls will overpack.

This time I’m writing down the color of every suitcase.

“Let’s work the problem, people.” — Gene Kranz, Apollo 13 (1995)

June 25, 2018, 7:42 in the morning. A cold email from a founder I had not met, attached to a twenty-two slide executive summary. Cream and navy, lowercase brand name, a company called Parfait. A six-piece ceramic cookware set at $288, launching in seven months, $1.5 million to get there.

Slide fourteen is the product roadmap. Phase one, cookware, January 2019. Then colors, knives, cast iron. Phase five reads, in full, further expansion into stainless steel cookware, bakeware, coffee and tea, tools and gadgets, kitchen appliances, and eventually, the home.

The coffee maker went on sale this week.

Jordan tells the origin as the pan. Overheated, fumes, got sick, started the company in 2019. I believe him. The deck from a year earlier already names teflon as toxic on the problem slide. The pan did not produce the thesis. It confirmed one he had written down and sent to strangers.

A deck is worth nothing the day it lands in your inbox. It is worth something eight years later, read backwards. Seven months to launch cookware, and it launched. Ceramic instead of teflon, which became the entire brand. Phase five, eventually, the home. He named it Caraway Home1 rather than Caraway Cookware, and one of his own people wrote in the comments this week that it was never Caraway Kitchen either, from day one, for a reason.

Almost nothing in that deck got quietly renegotiated.

The coffee maker is where it turned out much harder than the slide implied. Identified in 2020. Two hundred iterations. Ten pending patents. Three years in, roughly seventy-five percent finished, the factory partner dropped the project because it had become too difficult. Three years of tooling, a supply chain that no longer existed, a machine that worked in a lab and nowhere else.

The spec is the promise you made before you knew what it would cost to keep.

What almost every company does at that moment is not called failure. It is called being practical. You allow one plastic fitting deep in the water path where no customer will ever look. You ship in year four, and the claim softens by exactly one degree, from no plastic to less plastic, and nobody notices, because nobody is checking.

Halfway down the comments, a marketing director writes that she just bought a machine claiming the least plastic and now wishes she had waited.

They started over instead, and spent two more years getting to glass reservoir, stainless water path, stainless showerhead, stainless brew basket, steel filter, glass carafe. Every surface the water touches.

I have no idea how many companies died holding a spec exactly this way. The graveyard produces no launch posts. Five years of R&D on a single appliance only looks like discipline afterward, when the business underneath survived long enough to pay for it. In 2018 I couldn’t tell how this one would end. Nobody could. The deck read the same either way.

Conviction is what founders have in a first meeting, and it is mostly momentum plus a good night’s sleep. Execution is holding a definition of done you wrote years ago while the calendar, the cash and every reasonable person in the room offer you a smaller version that would work fine.

The output of five years is a machine with one dial. The category ran toward screens and settings and eleven brew profiles nobody uses twice.

One line item did not survive. In 2018 the pitch was premium quality underpriced, $288 against incumbents at $400 and $500. The coffee maker costs $496. He stopped competing on price the moment the spec made it impossible.

The object changed. The sentence never did. Pans, then a coffee maker, then whatever is already three years into a factory somewhere.

Scroll far enough down the launch post, past the investors and the operators and the people typing rocket emojis, and you find a comment from Peter Nathan. Owner, Peter Nathan Inc. He congratulates the team, asks how everyone takes their coffee, and calls the product worthy of the brand.

Jordan replies with two words.

Thanks Dad.

“The ever impressive, the long contained, the often imitated, but never duplicated, Genie of the Lamp.” — Genie, Aladdin (1992)

A founder I like sent me a screenshot at eleven on a Tuesday night. A brand six months old. A revenue number that shouldn’t be possible yet. A retention rate that made me read it twice.

My first thought was not congratulations. My first thought was, I could build that in a weekend. Better name. More of this, less of that. Better in every way that doesn’t matter.

I have the kind of attention that sorts the world into two piles, fascinating and doesn’t exist. It makes you fast at noticing and useless at sitting with a spreadsheet that has stopped surprising you. Good at starts, bad at middles.

Envy is what happens when the middle gets boring and someone else’s start is in your feed.

It never announces itself as envy. It arrives dressed as market intelligence. Your brain does not say I want that. It says the category is validated. It says we could do it cleaner, without the legacy decisions they’re stuck with. Envy masquerades as strategy, and the disguise is good enough that your team will nod along.

“Hmm, clever. I could make it better.” That is the sound of talking yourself into it. The honest version is, I wish I’d thought of that.

For most of my career that impulse was survivable because it was slow. Wanting someone else’s idea and shipping a version of it were separated by a formulator who wouldn’t call back, a co-packer with a twelve-week minimum, a developer who stopped answering, a year of your life. Envy died of exhaustion somewhere around month three.

The friction was not an obstacle. The friction was protection.

That protection is gone. I can have the name, the logo, the site, the copy, the supplier list and the ad variants by dinner, and most of it will be good enough. So can you. So can the eleven other people who saw that screenshot. Wanting it and shipping it used to be quarters apart. It’s a weekend now.

Which means the only thing between a founder and the worst decision of their year is judgment.

In 2011 I watched Groupon become the fastest growing company anyone had seen, and it made complete sense to me. Local deals, for women, the audience we already had at POPSUGAR. I could argue it in one sentence, so I did, to anyone who would sit still.

We built it. We hired against it. We ran it for two years and quietly stopped.

We had the audience. We had the sales team. What we never had was a reason.

You can copy what someone built. You can’t copy why they built it.

The best products I know are answers to questions their founders could not stop asking. Not a market gap. A grievance.

Grüns exists because Chad was disgusted by what taking care of yourself required. Eight pills and a powder that tasted like a lawn.¹

I get the Grüns of something every week. Grüns for energy. Grüns for longevity, for sleep, for menopause, for dogs. Some of them will work, because distribution wins and price wins and timing wins. They saw a number and went looking for a grievance.

The format can be borrowed. Ultra sells a nicotine-free pouch, which is Zyn’s format exactly.² But the grievance came first. Eric wanted the ritual without the nicotine, exactly what I wanted as a daily Zyn user who hated what came with it. The pouch was just the shape the answer took. More than half his customers have never used a pouch at all.

I hear the derivative in a pitch about ninety seconds in. The founder describes the market beautifully. Growth rate, white space, competitive set. What they can’t describe is the moment. There wasn’t one.

There was a jolt, the same one I felt looking at that screenshot, and they mistook it for conviction.

And acting on that jolt gets cheaper every quarter. The clone gets faster, prettier, closer to the original than it has any right to be. None of that helps at the first hard fork, when the original stops telling you what to do and you have to know why you built it.

So I’ve stopped treating envy as a signal to act and started treating it as a signal to look. What you covet tells you what you value, which tells you where your own attention has been starving.

That screenshot wasn’t telling me to build a competitor. It was telling me I’d let something in my own work get boring, and that I’d been avoiding it.

The weekend is free. The two years after it are not. And if you’re building one right now because you saw the number, you already know it. The tools won’t stop you. Your team will nod. Your deck will look immaculate. Two years from now you’ll be explaining to your investors why the original still wins, and the honest answer will be that it was never yours to want.

The genie will build anything you ask for. He still can’t tell you what to want.

1. Grüns is a Sugar Capital portfolio company, acquired by Unilever. Unilever Ventures is a limited partner in Sugar Capital Fund III.

2. Ultra is a Sugar Capital portfolio company.

“I’m going to have to science the shit out of this.” — Mark Watney, The Martian (2015)

I am in a group chat called Poop Journal. 15 guys, all north of forty, one rule: no photos. The rule exists because it had to.

What gets posted instead is the situation. The gate at Newark. The rental car outside Fresno with 40 minutes to the next stop and a decision to make.

It is the most active thread on my phone. It beats the Zyn Life chat (for another post). It beats the family chat, which Lisa has noted.

The chat is not really about digestion. It is about how much of an adult life organizes itself around one bodily function, and how fast everything else stops mattering when it stops.

Nobody schedules a day around fiber. Everybody schedules a day around the absence of it.

Read the thread long enough and a second thing shows up. Well-informed men discovering, one at a time, that the most effective weight-loss drugs we have come with a plumbing problem.

Nobody warned them. The marketing is all before and after. None of it is about the part in between.

Gallup has current use for weight loss tripling in two years, three percent of American adults to 11 percent. Among adults 50 to 64, KFF puts it at 22 percent.

One in five adults my age.

Nothing in consumer moves that fast.

And it landed on a country already losing at fiber. The average American eats about 16 grams a day against a recommendation of 25 for women and 38 for men. Roughly five percent of us clear the bar. Then the drug arrives, intake drops, and fiber often goes with it. Fiber rides in on volume, and volume is precisely what the drug reduces.

GLP-1s also slow gastric emptying, one of the reasons people feel fuller longer. Everything downstream can slow down too.

So we have a medication that can make fiber more necessary and less likely at the same time.

Then go look at the fiber aisle.

Metamucil was introduced in 1934. Benefiber is a powder in a canister beside the laxatives, packaging that says, without saying it, this is for old people with a problem. A multibillion-dollar category with no real idea in decades.

The culture moved. Teenagers on TikTok invented fibermaxxing. Gut health became a personality. The demand curve got 20 years younger and the shelf never noticed.

This is where it breaks.

This summer, a founder walked Krista, Lisa and me through his company. No name here. The round is not closed and I would like to own more of it.

It is a shelf-stable pouch. A day of fruits and vegetables, a serious dose of prebiotic fiber, twist open and drink in under ten seconds.

No scoop. No shaker. No water. No counter space.

I had been drinking it for weeks and told him I crave it. Everyone I hand one to says a version of the same sentence:

“I did not think it could taste like this.”

Then they ask where to get it. It is on Amazon.

The thesis is not the fiber.

The thesis is the format.

Grüns moved greens into a gummy satchel, and Unilever bought it in April for $1.2 billion. Zyn took nicotine out of the cigarette and put it under the lip, which is how that other group chat got its name. Ultra, another company we back, put focus in a pouch, no nicotine and no caffeine. Magna made magnesium something you drink.

Same molecules. New delivery. New category.

A powder demands a decision, a measurement, a rinse.

A pouch demands a pocket.

Which sounds cosmetic until you look at retention, where compliance products live and die.

So we looked.

Subscribers kept reordering, month after month, and the curve flattened right where supplement curves usually collapse. Once we saw the numbers the conversation stopped being about whether and turned into how much.

Then the obvious objection.

A pouch is not a patent.

AG1 is doing roughly $600 million and just walked into Target. Bloom sold to Nutrabolt, Huel to Danone. Any of them can find the same co-packer inside two production cycles.

Format buys a lead.

It does not buy a moat.

What is harder to copy is the founder.

He built a real audience from nothing in a year, on his own face, making fiber funny.

The top of his funnel is a content pillar he calls “fart maxxing.” That is on a slide, in a real deck, in a real fundraise.

The fastest way through a category built on embarrassment is a joke. You cannot buy that with a media budget.

It is a temperament.

We wrote the check.

We have been hunting a fiber answer for two years. Everything else was a powder with a newer logo.

The largest consumer categories are not built on aspiration. They are built on discomfort people will not discuss at dinner and will absolutely discuss at two in the morning.

Deodorant. Acne. Hair loss. Sleep.

Every one of them was a whisper before it was a business.

Fiber is next, arriving alongside tens of millions of Americans on a drug that makes the problem more acute.

They will not read a label. They will not measure a scoop.

Ten seconds. One hand. No water.

That is half the bet. The other half is a founder willing to be the punchline until the category is his.

We started the chat as a joke. It is now one of the first things I check in the morning.

Have you pooped today?

Sources:

• Gallup, “In U.S., GLP-1 Usage Reaches New High”, fielded May 28 to June 5, 2026, 5,065 U.S. adults, margin of error plus or minus 1.5 points.

• KFF Health Tracking Poll, fielded October 27 to November 2, 2025. Average fiber intake from USDA NHANES, FSRG Dietary Data Brief.

• Daily recommendations from the Institute of Food Technologists.

• The share of Americans meeting the recommendation from Quagliani and Felt-Gunderson, American Journal of Lifestyle Medicine.

"He can see things before they happen." — Qui-Gon Jinn, Star Wars: The Phantom Menace

I had not been to SoulCycle in years. In July the family got me back on a bike in Washington, and now here we are on vacation in the Hamptons, riding at the Barn. Two days running. The second day I got lost, the way you always do, somewhere past the third song, when you stop counting and the room takes over.

Stacey Griffith has taught at Soul almost since the start, nearly 20 years up on the podium. She used to DJ, and it shows. She does not count reps. She reads the room, and the room follows her. Lisa told me when she booked the first ride, she is the one, and she did not disappoint.

SoulCycle turns 20 this year, which is strange to type. Lisa and I started POPSUGAR the same year, a coast away, making a similar bet, that if you built something around what people genuinely loved, they would come back, bring friends, and make it part of who they were. Lisa did not just try Soul. She was all in by the first class, and Lisa is a hard sell.

Soul’s founding was itself an act of reading a room. Ruth Zukerman, a former dancer, wanted cycling to feel like more than cardio, something immersive and a little emotional. Julie Rice and Elizabeth Cutler, who came from hospitality and talent, saw what she had. Most people would have sold a better workout. They understood they were selling belonging, not exercise. That read built an industry, from Barry’s to Solidcore to a hundred rooms that will follow, and it turned a 45 minute class into an identity.

For years the ritual was fixed. Monday at noon, Lisa’s alarm went off and everything stopped, because that was when the week’s bikes opened. The front row went in seconds, because the front row was the point. The instructor was part DJ, part coach, part preacher, and the good ones could make a room of strangers briefly believe the same thing at the same time. In the Hamptons in August at the Barn that energy was its own currency.

SoulCycle was never really about the bike. It was an early reading of a culture about to reorganize itself around the body. In 2006 it looked like a spin class. Today it looks like protein in everything, GLP-1, creatine, Grüns, Magna1, and a generation that increasingly defines itself less by what it owns and more by how it lives. SoulCycle was not the fitness trend. It was one of the first companies to understand that the product was identity. The bike was just the entry point.

Then Covid shut the studios. The rooms went dark, but the current SoulCycle had caught kept moving. The same women who once guarded a six a.m. bike now guard a reformer, a rack of dumbbells, a GLP-1 refill. It left the studio and went everywhere, into kitchens and supplement aisles and pharmacy counters, and it got bigger than a bike was ever going to be.

The job of an early consumer investor is to catch that signal while it still looks like a niche. Pattern recognition is not prophecy. It is literacy. You have read the shape before, so you recognize it earlier, with less data and less certainty.

By the time the numbers confirm what the room already feels, the price has moved and the round is gone. The first check exists before the proof exists. That is why data cannot be the reason you invest. It can validate conviction, but it rarely creates it. Founders love to believe they are building a better product. The best ones know they are riding a stronger current. Markets do not announce that they have turned. People do, with their feet, long before the numbers agree.

We read rooms for a living, a beat ahead of the market. People will call what we do luck. It is not. Taste is knowing what will matter before it does. Conviction is writing the first check when the only proof is a feeling.

The feeling today is the strongest I have had in years. A generation has decided that how you live matters more than what you own, that health is identity, that community still matters, even if it begins in a room full of strangers. SoulCycle did not create that shift. It recognized it before almost anyone else.

The founders building the next great consumer companies are reading the same room. They are hearing the next song before the rest of us do.

The room reads first. Our job is to listen.

"Live long and prosper." — Spock, Star Trek (1967)

Last week, while the timeline argued about whether the newest AI model had a mind, a federal advisory panel changed, with almost no notice, what Americans are allowed to put in their bodies. Six of the seven peptides on its docket, compounds like BPC-157 and TB-500, moved one step further through the regulatory process. It barely made a headline. We keep looking for the future in software. It has been arriving in biology all along.

A disclosure before I go further. We are investors in Feel Peptides, so weigh what follows accordingly. I would write this anyway.

Start with the word, because almost nobody can define it. A peptide is a short chain of amino acids. Think of it as a message. Insulin is one, and you already trust it with your life. Your body sends thousands more, telling tissue to repair and inflammation to settle. Many of the medicines we grew up with forced the body into compliance. This kind speaks its language back to it.

GLP-1 was the proof. Roughly one in eight American adults now takes one, a share that has doubled in eighteen months, self-injected at home, with none of the resistance the experts predicted. A whole country crossed the needle barrier without flinching. Once you watch your own biology answer a weekly signal, and I have, something shifts.

For all of medical history the job was to fix you after you broke. Peptides ask a different question altogether. Less repair shop, more software update. The idea still unsettles doctors. Consumers are already there.

The compounds crowding in behind GLP-1 carry gray-market music, BPC-157, Semax, Epitalon, MOTS-c, names you used to buy from a stranger with an anime avatar and a supplier in Shenzhen. Some target repair, others cognition or sleep or metabolism. They are early, uneven, and mostly unproven, and three curves are converging anyway. Synthesis got cheap. Manufacturing got trustworthy. GLP-1 made the needle ordinary. When those meet, a fringe becomes a market.

Here is my claim.

The other exponential is biology, and I spend most of my week around AI founders.

AI changes what we can make. Biology changes what we are.

One rewrites the tools. The other rewrites the toolmaker.

We are still asking whether AI will truly change how people work. Tens of millions of people, meanwhile, have already started reshaping their bodies around a weekly shot, no mandate, no debate. The hardest thing in technology was never the breakthrough. It is getting one ordinary person to change one daily habit. Biology did that at national scale while software was still writing think pieces about disruption.

Let me be precise, because the sharpest readers will push here. GLP-1 is proven. Most of these peptides are not, not yet. So what matters is not any single molecule. It is that people have changed. Those tens of millions have agreed to manage their own biology, and they are not going back. Every one of them is a vote that health has become something you do on purpose, not something that merely happens to you. Whether today’s compounds earn their claims is an open question. That a willing market is waiting for the ones that do is not.

I am old enough to be cynical, and I am choosing to spend that cynicism elsewhere. For most of human history your body was a fate. You were handed a metabolism, an attention span, a slow decline, and you lived inside the verdict. That is the thing quietly ending. The body is becoming something you can edit.

We spent a century building smarter tools. We are about to spend one improving the toolmaker. This time the future is not happening to us. It is happening in us.

The children being born now will find it strange that we ever simply accepted the body we were handed. Tuning it will feel as ordinary to them as straightening their teeth. They will not call it a revolution. They will call it Tuesday.

That is how the biggest shifts arrive, not as headlines but as habits nobody thinks to question.

And getting to watch one happen is a gift.

It is a good time to be alive.

If you are building in the peptide space, we want to talk. Operators are standing by. brian@sugarcap.com

“A martini. Shaken, not stirred.” — James Bond, Goldfinger (1964)

You can read a man by his martini order, which is inconvenient for my friends, because last night the five of us sat down and ordered five different drinks. Only three of them were martinis.

Our Martini Club meets Tuesdays at half past five, five o’clock when the Stompers are playing, which they were, because no one should have to choose between a cold martini and small-town baseball. Last night was the first sitting of the season. I see most of these guys in San Francisco all year, but that is not this, and we all knew it the second we sat down.

Lincoln and Donny had the corner spot we all covet, Sonoma royalty the both of them, gaveling the club to order before I could sit. It was north of 90 degrees, which settled the case for something cold. Donny’s son pitches for the Stompers, which is why we moved to five, and Donny ordered a Coors Light at the martini club with the clean conscience of a man who stopped keeping score a long time ago. The man with nothing to prove orders the plainest thing on the list and is somehow the most convincing person at the table.

Lincoln is a connector to the bone, the sort who cannot get through a drink without talking up somebody else at the table. Last night I was the project. He told Donny he had been reading AirSugar and really ought to subscribe, which is a strange thing to sit through when you write the thing. I let him, and enjoyed it more than I should admit.

Jason arrived in the Travis Scott Air Jordan 1 Lows, Shy Pink, reverse swoosh and all. Being a sneakerhead myself, I told him they were incredible. He told me his 13-year-old picked them out. The shoes cost more than the round, and the only part that mattered to Jason was that he was wearing something his son chose. He takes being a father more seriously than anything, and he is better at it than he knows.

Our last man is a wine drinker, which is a problem, because in a valley full of the best bottles on earth we meet at the one room without a list. He ordered a Chianti and made his peace with it. I told him to bring something from home next time.

Then Lincoln, Jason, and I ordered martinis, no two the same. Put three martini drinkers at one bar and you get three martinis, each defended like a thesis. Mine was Hendrick’s, straight up, dry to the point of rudeness, announced as if the choice were a personality. The waitress brought back the drink I would have gotten without the speech.

A Coors Light, a Chianti, three martinis no two alike. Nobody comes to the Swiss Hotel for the drink.

I price companies for a living and cannot stop doing it to a cocktail order. Everyone argues about the gin, the way every pitch spends its first hour on the product. The gin is never the hard part. You can buy good gin, and these days you can nearly buy a good product too. What you remember is never the loud part. It is the founder, the part the deck never shows.

The vermouth is where the lying starts. People brag about leaving it out, and the drier the pour the more virtuous the man feels.

What decides a martini is temperature, and nobody boasts about it. A cold one made carelessly beats a warm one made perfectly. Temperature is timing, the truest thing I know about why one company wins and its twin dies. Cold is a window, not a technique.

But look at what actually happened. Five men, five different drinks, and not one order wrong, not one man in the wrong seat. Every founder is strange in his own direction, and somehow the best ones keep finding the same table.

The second martini is always a mistake, and I ordered one anyway, which makes me a liar about the one I promised myself. I would do it again tonight. Next week I am back on Diet Coke in the same chair, because the martinis were only ever something to do with my hands while the real thing assembled in the corner.

At six we broke apart. Lincoln and Donny left for the ballpark, the wine drinker went home, and Jason and I walked to the plaza, where the heat was finally letting go and a band played past the fountain.

Nobody asked what anyone had ordered. Donny’s boy takes the mound tonight, Jason will be wearing the latest and greatest picked by his son, next year the corner table will be a season older and so will we.

Our families were already out in the grass, the same patch we find every Tuesday all summer, and they looked up when they saw us coming, the way people do for the ones they have been waiting on.

The martini was never the point.

“I like to write like a human, steering clear of jargon and B-school speak.” — Om Malik

It was February of 2005, and Om Malik was standing in our living room with a glass of wine, watching the Oscars with everyone else. Lisa was talking. She was always talking that year, about the It bag and what to TiVo and which actress wore which dress and why it mattered. Om listened to her for a while. Then he turned to me and said that if we built a blog network like his, but pointed it at women, we could be the next Time Inc. or Condé Nast.

He did not say it like a pitch. He said it like a gift he had already wrapped.

The next morning I downloaded an early build of WordPress and started hacking a template onto a domain I had bought years before and forgotten. Lisa was buying media at Goodby Silverstein & Partners, and she had always wanted to write. So she wrote. Within a year there was a company. Katie was born two weeks early, on the first day of editor training. A couple of years later there were hundreds of people, offices in five cities, a Sequoia and NBC investment, and Michael Moritz on the board. None of it was on a plan. All of it started with a sentence Om said to us at a party.

That was the thing about him. He gave away his best ideas to other people and was glad when they built them.

We were not special in that. He was the godfather of early tech blogging, and he spent that position lifting other people up. He linked to writers nobody had heard of. He emailed strangers with feedback, and they remembered it for twenty years. He praised the good posts and called the bullshit what it was. He did not have a gram of resentment in him, which is the rarest thing in this town. The Valley talks a lot about paying it forward. Om actually did it.

I met him a couple of years earlier, when I was running marketing at a telecom company and my job was to make writers care about DSL modems. Om was writing for Business 2.0 and building GigaOm. He had just written the book exposing the telecom fraud of the dot-com years. I was selling telecom hardware. We became friends anyway.

Om came up middle class in New Delhi, a chemistry degree he never used, a writer from the start. He moved through London and New York and finally San Francisco, chasing the story. He was a few years older than me and felt older than that, in the good way, like an older brother raised in the same house, the one where you were taught that family came first and that the work had to be honest. He could be relentless when he got hold of a story, and he would not let it go until he had it right, which was not always a comfortable thing to be on the other side of. We never had to explain those things to each other.

What made the generosity possible was the eye behind it. He saw people before they saw themselves. He wrote one of the first pieces anyone wrote about Twitter, in 2006, when it still sounded like a toy. He was the first founder True Ventures ever backed, pitching GigaOm out of a Presidio office a few blocks from where our offices are now, and then he spent years on the other side of the table, putting money behind founders the way he had put belief behind us, early, before the proof. He loved the ones that were too early. He understood being too early.

In 2007 his heart nearly stopped. He was 41. Too many cigars, too many late nights, too much of the life the work demanded. He came back slower. He started taking photographs, thousands of them, fog over the city and light on water and the small ordinary things most of us walk past. The man who had spent his career helping other people see their futures taught himself, in the second half of his life, to pay closer attention to the present.

PopSugar happened because Om said it out loud. Sugar Capital came out of PopSugar. AirSugar comes out of all of it. You are reading these words on a page that runs, in a straight line, back to one sentence Om Malik said over a glass of wine all those years ago.

He watched us build the thing he handed us, and he was glad. That was the whole reward he wanted. The people who knew him best say he would tell us now to slow down, to look harder, to say the love out loud while there is time.

Om died Wednesday, in Palo Alto, at 59. Far too young, for a man who saw the rest of us before we saw ourselves.

May his memory be a blessing.

“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.