Allbirds recently sold for $39 million. At its peak it was worth $4 billion. Dan Frommer wrote a sharp piece in @newconsumer on what that says about this early DTC era. Many of the brands of this era raised "tremendous" and "unnecessary, and for some, ultimately harmful" amounts of capital. "This is where the 'DTC era' looks the most foolish in retrospect." This lines up with comments I've seen Michael Preysman and @mrethansong make recently about Everlane’s sale to Shein. Preysman is launching a new brand and in that initial message he says that this time "no venture capital, no private equity." “Venture capital was never suited for apparel or fashion brands" was Ethan Song’s observation in a LinkedIn post. We seem to be at a turning point in how high-craft consumer brands build their businesses and grow. As someone who has built a platform for companies to raise capital from their fans, this shift has caught my attention. @Dealmakertech has seen real success with consumer brands raising community capital and bringing their fans onto the cap table. @fromedome, I would love to talk through this and record it. Just a casual conversation. I think a lot of founders would find it useful.

Chamath picked Revolut as the company he’s not in that he wishes he was. @chamath, revolut was OG retail-backed! European retail got in a decade ago. Today: $75B valuation. Which company should be raising from their retail consumers today? Let’s bring them to every American.

I’m at the All In Liquidity Summit. The panel on retail access to private markets felt like an inflection point. @altcap: "It is destabilizing when you are creating trillions of dollars in private value and 80% of America thinks it's a scam where they are left out and left behind." Great panel @Jason, @chamath, @altcap, and Kelly Rodriguez @theallinpod

Green Coffee Company, the exclusive US and Canada partner for Juan Valdez retail coffee and the largest and only vertically integrated producer of Colombian coffee, just announced a $5m retail capital raise. After the raise closed, they sent every new shareholder a thank-you discount code. The shareholders used it. Thousands of orders followed. That is the flywheel I keep talking about. When a customer becomes a shareholder, they buy more, refer more, and show up. Retail capital is leverage. Congrats to Cole Shephard and the GCC team. dealmaker.tech/content-green…

Two weeks ago, I spent time in Medellín where we now have a team of 30+ building @Dealmakertech. A few things I keep coming back to: • In-person beats async. Decisions we made face to face in days would have taken weeks over Slack. Relationships aren't separate from innovation, they're part of it. • The best work happens at the intersection. We ran a hackathon with engineers and marketers in the same room. The output was things neither team could have built alone, and ideas neither could have arrived at separately. • Building in Colombia is one of the best decisions we've made. The talent depth and commitment to what we’re building at DealMaker to empower founders to raise from their community is real. This is what blue ocean building looks like: sitting next to the people doing the work, in the city where they're doing it. Medellín is an important and growing hub for DealMaker. 🇨🇴

I was just on @MTSlive, the new @a16z backed and hosted live streaming tech show, built around @eriktorenberg's bet that the "main characters of the moment" show up there first. From the movement to buy @SpiritAirlines, to @SpaceX offering 30% allocation to retail in its upcoming IPO, to @RobinhoodApp's publicly-traded venture fund investing in private companies, the world is tilting towards retail. I'm saying this trend is going to continue to accelerate, but I'm not the only one. @profgalloway predicted on his podcast that someone would pull off a Spirit Airlines style deal with retail investors in the next 12 to 36 months. @vladtenev was interviewed recently by Stripe's co-founder and said the end goal of what they're building is capital formation for businesses at the earliest stages. We've been working for years to tear down the walls that separate retail investors from investing in private companies. There's much more to unlock with the market's momentum behind us. Thanks to @JackFarley96 and @maxwiethe for the conversation. 🫡