The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
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Five Guys funded early expansion using gross revenue share agreements
“We'd say, give us 5000 dollars, we'll give you a certain percentage of the Gross. Not, never the profit, because there was always too many ways to get cheap people that way. So I said, we'll give you a certain percentage of the gross. We'll give you the money …”
Bushnell promised Sears 75,000 units despite 25,000 capacity
“And so, not wanting to be soul sourced, I said, we can do about 75,000.”
Steve Jobs offered Bushnell a third of Apple for $50,000
“And so he got the apple going and he came to me and says, I want to start this company and I'm going to be leaving. Do you want to be my first investor? And I'll give you a third of the company for 50,000 dollars.”
Patagonia will never sell out or become a publicly traded company
“We're not gonna sell out. We're not gonna go public, and so it's good business.”
Erickson backed out of selling Clif Bar minutes before signing
“So halfway around the block, I decided not to sell the company, and then I felt completely free.”
Vaccarella gave a 25% stake in Bogg Bag for a $120,000 investment
“And we signed the paperwork, and I gave them 25% of the business.”
Vaccarella kept Bogg Bag at 90% wholesale during the COVID-19 pandemic
“We kind of took the opposite, and we went wholesale heavy, so I was about 90% wholesale over COVID.”
Vaccarella sold a 40% stake in Bogg Bag to preserve founder control
“Yeah, 40% stake, so I maintained control, which was, you know, the issue with the other deal, and, you know, we started the ball rolling”
Goodwin: Olipop Gross Revenue Tops $500M, Targeting $1 Billion
“My target right now in my head is, okay, I need to get to a billion dollars gross revenue. We're well over a half billion and we're chugging towards that line.”
Dawes: My career goal is making organic foods taste like conventional snacks
“I have built my entire career out of making organic and natural products, healthy organic natural products, taste like conventional ones.”
Dawes: Late July Buyback Clause Was Bypassed by Snyder's Merger
“We did have a clause in our agreement that allowed us to buy it back in the event that Snyder's sold. But apparently they didn't sell. They merged.”
Modi: Bobbie targets 10% market share rather than monopoly scale
“And hopefully one day we're not as big as the Similacs and Infamils of the world, because I don't think anyone should be, but that ideally we're serving a good 10% of the market.”
MadeGood Manufactures Products In-House Rather Than Using Co-Packers
“We have to make it. We're not co-packing it. That's the thing that makes it difficult. Like, every time we have an idea, we have to build the capability from ground up.”
Richardson: Early OtterBox refused to spend capital on unmeasurable advertising
“My philosophy early on was, I'm not going to spend money on advertising unless I can measure it. Because if you can't measure it, you have no clue where that money's going.”
Harary: I Have Taken Five Lunches in 30 Years
“In, in like, 30 years, I've taken like five lunches. I eat them at my desk, I do everything in the office, but then when I leave the office, I know it's my time at the end of the day. And the other thing that I do is, is I don't talk about work to my friends o…”
Shamah: e.l.f. Cosmetics targeted 35-cent COGS and 59-cent wholesale price
“So it's about, it was about half of that, because our target goods cost was about 35 cents. I think back to the simplicity angle, everything we sold it for 59 cents, so they could retail it for a dollar.”
e.l.f. co-founder Scott Borba developed products while employed by competitors
“Scott was, in, in full disclosure, still working for other cosmetic companies, but working for us on the nights and weekends. He was doing the product development. So, yes, we did use my father's apparel office.”
Buying an existing business is easier than starting from scratch, says Shamah
“I wouldn't start a business at this point in my career. I think buying a business is a much easier entry”
Starr: STARR Restaurants requires landlords to co-fund new locations
“By the way, when we open new restaurants, I'm not financing them myself anymore. We go in, landlord wants us to open, they have to put up a good significant part of the money now.”
Tosi: Milk Bar's brand presence is intentionally larger than its revenue
“We've intentionally built our brand in a way that's much bigger and broader than what, you know, the top line revenue of our P&L is. Because that's the challenge. It's the challenge for our sales channels to try and catch the size and reach of the brand.”
LaFleur: M.M. LaFleur nearly failed after lender collapse and SVB crisis
“In 2023, we had Silicon Valley Bank, which we banked with. That was the scariest 72 hours. But then in 2024, my lender went under, and we had, like, an urgent capital call, essentially, and that actually was probably the closest I've ever come to losing my bus…”
Huang: NVIDIA spent half its remaining cash on a surplus hardware emulator
“And I took half of our company's money, so we were already running on fumes, and so I cut that life short even further, took that money, bought this machine that nobody else wanted to buy, brought it to the company, I said, here we are.”
Jensen Huang describes himself as a 'battlefield CEO' energized by crisis
“The way I'm built is you put me in crisis. Alright, the perfect day is we are in trouble. And you just create the worst possible condition and Jensen, you need, we need you to come and help us think through this. That's my perfect. That's my vibe. Battlefield.…”
Gabbert: Room & Board does not demand supplier exclusivity
“We, you know, we haven't, but we know that some of those people have gone to some of our manufacturers, like our steel manufacturer is a good example.”
Gabbert: Room & Board committed early to operating with zero bank debt
“Early on, we just said no bank debt. We're going to operate with no debt. And we did for years and years and years.”
Relaunched brand Counter prohibits partners from building multi-level sales teams
“We do have a community of women we call brand partners, but one key differentiation is that they cannot build teams, so they are paid all
Exclusively on, commissioned on their own sales”
Ian Murray: Vineyard Vines was funded via credit card cash advances
“So we financed the business with credit card cash advance checks that we wrote to ourselves. So while we still had our incomes, we signed up for like four or five different credit cards while we had credit.”
Eric Ryan joins Greycroft to launch $150M consumer fund
“I've moved much more into the venture investing space. And I joined Graycroft. We are launching a new one hundred fifty million dollar dedicated Consumer Fund. We just made our first two investments. So I've officially made the move from entrepreneur to invest…”
Lubetzky sold 100% of his KIND stake by December 2024
“I sold a hundred percent of my financial stake as of December, 20, 24, and the relationship is predominantly very informal. I think I consult with them three times a year.”
Colin Angle's New Stealth Startup Uses Generative AI For Consumer Robots
“It is in robotics. It's in consumer robots. It's taking advantage of this amazing new toolkit, generative AI, and using these generative tools to control robots.”
Swad sold Wingstop for $22 million, carrying a $12 million seller note
“Twenty million turned into twenty-two million. It's got, the deal got sweeter. But it would only give me ten million at closing, and that's, that was part of the reason that we bumped the price up by 10%. Then I would carry the note for 10 years on the twelve …”
Jet.com paid identical salaries to all employees at the same organizational tier
“The transparency of salaries so everybody could see what everybody else was making. The fact that everybody in the company at the same level made exactly the same amount, you know, to really prevent unconscious bias from creeping in and things like that.”
O'Hayer: Vital Farms stopped making nutritional claims on pasture eggs
“We don't make any claims in my company because every chicken on pasture can eat whatever he wants, or she wants. And so, I mean, and the yolk color can change because some chickens You know, decide to stay in all day. You know, I'm just gonna stay home and eat…”
Stafford rejected outsourcing baking to keep Bobo's homemade texture
“Most of them advised me to stop baking and Have somebody else make this, and you focus on sales and marketing. And I said, no, I want to control this, and I don't want them to look like they're guillotine cut with four square corners. They're imperfect, each b…”
Stafford: Investor conflicts centered on economic terms when raising follow-on capital
“Well, I would say mostly the economic terms of their investment. That, that has been a struggle each time we ran out of money.”
Osher: Spinbrush scrapped 400K defective units and raised $500K for redesign
“And we had 400,000 of them in our warehouse, and I had to make a decision. This is a consumable product, and this is potentially so big, and if I continue to sell this, it will die. And I went back to my partners in it, my investors, and I said, I'm gonna scra…”
Mermoud: Hoka co-founders were 'lazy' and not serious runners before founding
“It's a legend that we were serious, enthusiastic runners before hockey. We were lazy because it was so hard and one step at a time compared to anything else we would do.”
Diard: Hoka's original grand vision was merely to become a $500M company
“The vision that we had was to become a five hundred million company.”
Taylor: Bob Taylor gifted Taylor Swift her iconic koi fish acoustic guitar
“Well, what happened is we started a we started a series called the Gallery Series, and the first guitar I made, I named it Living Jewels, and I had koi fish swimming around it, and we had this relationship with Taylor, and her birthday is just before Christmas…”
Joan Barnes bought out early partner Max Shapiro for doing all the work
“And somewhere along the way, I bought my partner out. I realized I'm doing all the work.”
Gymboree ran WSJ advertorials to recruit stay-at-home moms via commuting husbands
“We also ran kind of an interesting strategy. We ran editorials... In the Wall Street Journal, so that Daddy could read them on his commute to his real job that he had to do to pay for the family, and he'd say, oh my God, this is perfect for my wife.”
Warby Parker is partnering with Google to launch AI smart glasses
“We're working with Google to launch AI glasses. They're sort of Warby Parker branded intelligent eyewear.”
La Colombe was founded to supply an expected American fine dining renaissance
“We had a deep, deep belief that there would be this restaurant renaissance in America. There was gonna be this huge inflow of French and Italian high-level cuisine, and that the coffee in America wasn't going to accommodate it. Coffee in America was just dedic…”
SkinnyDipped leadership paused salaries in 2022 to make employee payroll
“When I tell you we did not have money in twenty-twenty-two, we, I asked our entire, like, leadership team to put their salaries on hold just so that we could try to make payroll for the rest of the company.”
President Mark Mortimer made a personal investment to cover SkinnyDipped's payroll
“Mark came in with some added Capital at a time, you know, just to at least make payroll. He made a personal investment to help to support the brand.”
Breezy Griffith raised a funding round from 65 individual celebrity investors directly
“When I raised that money, That was not a, you know, that was not a syndicated fund. That was individually from each celebrity investor. 65 individual celebrity investors.”
Graves: Raising Cane's refuses to introduce spicy chicken options
“Bankers would be like, well, are you considering a spicy alternative? I'm like, no, we're not considering a spicy alternative, because our concept is quality food, quality, craveable food served with fast food, speed, and convenience.”
Todd Graves: Raising Cane's Will Remain a Generational, Company-Owned Business
“And so for me is I'm not selling the business. I love the business. I want it to be a generational business and to keep rolling. And the best way to have something I'd be proud of for me personally was to own them company restaurants.”