Goldman CEO says, “Slow down and enjoy the ride.”

Hell yeah brother 😎

I’m blonde today.

Yesterday, Fast Company announced that DTC cookware company Great Jones was acquired by one of its investors and suppliers, the manufacturer and distributor Meyer Corporation. It’s one of the first DTC darlings of the 2018-2020 era that has so explicitly been acquired, and the tip of the iceberg — we’re going to see a lot more of this in the next year.

I was the first hire at Great Jones and it was my first exposure to raising money, building a brand from scratch, and the role founder stories play in building a company in public. I learned this language that I was able to read when I saw a slew of other brands come into my purview like Our Place and Topicals and Starface and Vacation Sunscreen and Graza and Ghia, etc. This newsletter probably wouldn’t exist if I didn’t have that job.

The acquisition comes at a time when many consumer goods companies are struggling to raise capital and need to find other ways to stay alive. “For consumer goods startups,” co-founder Sierra Tishgart told Fast Company, “the VC landscape has changed dramatically. A lot of VCs were treating consumer businesses like tech businesses before, and fundamentally they’re different. In making a physical product, you can scale fast and you can grow, but ultimately making something consistently that is really high quality is not as scalable as a piece of tech.”

Well yes… and