The Year of the Builder

The tourists have left. The operators remain. 2026 belongs to the ones who stayed.

“Deserve’s got nothing to do with it.” — William Munny, Unforgiven (1992)

Re-entry is hard.

The holidays end. The inbox fills. The weight of everything you said you’d do lands on your chest before coffee. January doesn’t ask if you’re ready.

But if you’ve been watching closely, something shifted while we were away.

The founders walking into our offices aren’t pitching moonshots anymore. They’re building companies. Real ones. With margins. With customers who pay full price. With unit economics that don’t require a footnote.

2025 delivered nine billion dollars in consumer M&A. PepsiCo paid two billion for Poppi. e.l.f. wrote a billion-dollar check for Rhode. Church & Dwight acquired Hero. The strategics came off the sidelines and started buying what worked.

Here’s what no one’s saying: those exits didn’t happen because the market got hot. They happened because those founders spent years doing the unsexy work. Getting product on shelves. Earning repeat customers. Building brands the acquirers couldn’t manufacture internally, no matter how many consultants they hired.

The exits rewarded patience. That’s the setup for 2026.

The growth-at-all-costs crowd moved on to AI or crypto or whatever’s generating the most impressions this week. What remains is a smaller, sharper cohort of founders who understand that building a consumer company is a craft, not a sprint.

I’ve been doing this long enough to recognize the pattern. The best vintages in venture come after the hype fades. When capital is patient instead of performative. When founders are focused instead of fragmented. When the noise dies down and all that’s left is the work.

We’re in one of those windows now.

At Sugar Capital, we’ve refined a simple thesis: the pipes are full, own the water. The infrastructure layer, the Shopifys and Stripes and Klaviyos, has been built. The tools are commoditized. What matters now is what flows through them.

This is where taste becomes alpha. Not taste as aesthetic preference. Taste as pattern recognition. Taste as seeing what’s coming before it arrives in a trend report. Taste as knowing which founder has it and which one is performing.

The founders who will win this year share a few characteristics.

They’re not chasing categories, they’re creating them. Grüns didn’t pitch itself as another supplement brand. It understood that wellness had become aspirational, that the ritual mattered as much as the outcome, and built accordingly.

They know distribution is the brand. The most beautiful product means nothing if no one can find it. The founders obsessing over shelf placement and retailer relationships, the mechanics of getting product into hands, those are the ones building durable businesses. Everything else is a science project.

They’re playing a longer game than you. Forty million Americans will be on GLP-1 medications by decade’s end. That’s not a trend. That’s a structural shift in how people eat, shop, and live. The founders who see this aren’t launching quick-hit products. They’re building companies designed to serve this customer for twenty years.

They know when to shut up. The performance of entrepreneurship, the podcasts and panels and Twitter threads, correlates inversely with actual progress. The best founders I know are in the factory, on calls with retailers, reviewing customer feedback at midnight. Build first. Talk later. Or never.

Here’s what I’m telling every founder who asks about 2026.

The market is better than it looks. Capital exists for companies that deserve it. The strategics are hungry and their innovation pipelines are empty. The path to liquidity is clearer than it’s been in years.

But the bar is higher. You need revenue. You need margins. You need a story grounded in evidence, not ambition.

Focus is your weapon. Founders who try to be everything to everyone will lose to founders who own one thing completely. Pick your customer. Know them better than they know themselves. Build for them obsessively.

I keep thinking about what separates companies that endure from the ones that fade. It’s not the idea. Ideas are cheap. It’s not the market. Markets shift.

It’s the founder’s relationship with reality. The ability to hold two truths at once: absolute belief in where you’re going and total honesty about where you are.

The infrastructure exists. The capital exists. The appetite exists. The fog has lifted. The tourists have gone home.

Now build.

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