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A decent product gets early love. The market decides it is not just a shoe company but a movement. Bankers arrive. A narrative gets marked up faster than the business. Then reality turns up and asks the sort of rude questions that PowerPoint tends to avoid. At its peak, Allbirds
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Because they’re not doing marketing yet. They’re harvesting what was already there. They bid harder on your brand. They mop up your warmest demand. They retarget everyone who already visited. They clean up obvious waste. They take credit for people who were going to buy anyway. The charts
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Weekly “status”. Weekly “optimisation”. Weekly “roadmap”. Weekly “creative review”. Weekly “retrospective” of the week you just paid for. You end up spending more time talking about marketing than doing marketing. And the signals are always the same. The agenda is packed. The actions are vague. The deck is long. The
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That is half of private equity value creation, growth strategy, and board reporting in one line. Leads up. Traffic up. Pipeline up. “Engagement” up. Everyone claps like seals because the top of the funnel looks busy. Meanwhile conversion is awful, retention is weak, margins are leaking, the sales team is
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Most “middlemen” didn’t have a moat. They had friction, wrapped in a warm voice and a branded email signature. AI agents don’t care about your warmth. They care about outcomes, constraints, and a clean API. Travel is the canary. Hotels have spent years trying to escape OTAs because
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What happens when a lot of investors ask for liquidity from assets that are not liquid. Private credit was sold as the sensible adult in the room. Now Ares and Apollo have capped redemptions after withdrawal requests overshot their limits, Blackstone’s BCRED saw $3.7 billion of Q1 outflows,
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The old Forbes brand stood for editorial judgment. Scarcity. A bit of status. Now too much of it feels like rented credibility. That is what happens when a media company starts blurring the line between journalism, contributor content, paid memberships, sponsored storytelling, and executive vanity publishing until the average reader
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The global men’s grooming market is already roughly $65B in 2025 and still grinding upward at a steady clip. Premium prices are sticking because the customer has changed. Men now buy routines, not just products. The market has “platforms”, but not the one this thesis wants. Unilever buying Dr
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The minute a company says “we’re a family,” someone is usually about to get screwed. Because an actual family and a business are not remotely the same thing. Families do not fire Dad and call it a leadership transition. Families do not wipe out Uncle Brian on the cap
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In the pitch, it’s a spreadsheet. In reality, it’s a fog machine. They promise you’ll see exactly what’s working, what isn’t, and where to put the next dollar. Then the first time you ask why revenue didn’t move, you get the same speech. “Attribution
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Because the moment the owner tells their accountant, their mate on the golf course, or the bloke down the pub, the next call is to a banker. Then your “proprietary” deal becomes a 40-person data room, a management presentation with suspiciously perfect margins, and a deadline that turns grown
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I’d start by building something that can actually improve a business without needing a spreadsheet to do the heavy lifting. The old model worked when money was cheap and time was short. Buy it, lever it, tidy up a few costs, sell it in five years, tell everyone it