Here's my big personal news: Natural Dog Company has been acquired by FoodScience, a Morgan Stanley Capital Partners portfolio company! After 13 years, the journey that started with me quitting my job to go all-in on Elements Brands has officially come to an end. What started as one guy in a rented office turned into $200M+ of sales and something much bigger. We bought (and exited) 8 brands, from skincare to laundry detergent to pet wellness. We pioneered the "ecommerce aggregator" model long before that was even a thing. We built an incredible team with deep expertise across ecommerce, Amazon, retail, operations, and finance, all of whom are staying on to work on Natural Dog and FoodScience's other amazing brands. And I'm not going anywhere. I'm staying on as VP of Corporate Development for the combined platform, where I’ll be leading M&A - finding and acquiring the best pet brands in the world. If you know me, you know I love this stuff. I can't wait to keep doing it with the firepower of FoodScience and Morgan Stanley behind me. Huge thanks to everyone I've learned from here on Twitter/X, and especially the EcommerceFuel crew. Y'all have been my sounding board, my therapy sessions, and my second brain for the last decade. I've learned more from you than any MBA could've taught me. Thanks for being generous with your knowledge and support. If you're running a pet brand and thinking about an exit - or know someone who is - DM me. We’re buying. I'd love to help you write your next chapter. Press release is in the next tweet!

LFG!

Sometimes you see a number that's hard to process... Acquisitions Anonymous was a fun lockdown hobby for Michael, Mills, and I because we were all deeply nerd-level interested in buying businesses, and we thought there might be some other people who were too. Five years and 500+ episodes later, we just crossed 2.5 MILLION downloads 🤯 About halfway through we were joined by the incredible @EndresenHeather as co-host, who started her business Viso Capital to help buyers get the best deal on SBA loans. The four of us have done hundreds of episodes together and our guiding principle has always been that we have to be having fun. We get together twice a week and laugh, joke, tell stories, and review a business that's for sale. That format has carried us through over 500 episodes, when under 1% of podcasts even reach 100. We have been a top 20 podcast in the entrepreneurship category, signed big name sponsors (more to come here), spoken at and beocme part of the curriculum at several universities, and met hundreds of awesome searchers and entrepreneurs. I still get a kick out of knowing how many friends and strangers listen to our episodes, and we don't take any of it for granted. Here's to the next 2.5M!

Holy moly my 6 year old* is going to have a field day designing new lego models and ordering the parts * me, really me

Muse really needs a 1Password integration Proprietary credential store isn’t the answer. Let m me designate a 1password vault to share with my agent

Well, I don’t enjoy being held accountable for my own mistakes either, but that’s not how any of this works

Remembering that time @HilaryDuff plugged my brand on her insta story Perhaps the coolest I'll ever be

There are a lot of benchmarks out there, but this one is hard to argue with

The bot wars will become a major theme in society broadly *Everything* assumes a human-navigated web, and all the friction that implies If you've ever asked your bot to hammer restaurant reservations or DMV appointments until you get one, you have a small idea of what's coming

This irrigation company 6X'd monthly invoices after a 2025 recap. But the seller is already walking away before capturing the upside. Is labor constraint the real reason? Or is there more to the story? @BillDA and @endresenheather dig in. Listen now ⬇️

Everyone hates taxes. But almost as bad as paying them is finding all the documentation - I dread it every year. My Muse agent just gathered nearly all of it from a single prompt. I'm so happy I might weep 😂 What would have taken me hours, about 90% complete, gathered in a Google Drive folder to send my accountant. Here's the prompt: "I need to gather all my 2025 tax and income documentation and send it to my accountant Derek. I typically collect tax documentation in Google Drive under the Taxes folder. You can look at the 2024 folder for a list of all the documents I gathered for last year. Then compare to see what’s already in the 2025 folder. What do I still need to pull? Reference last year’s folder, last year’s tax return, and Derek’s email to me. Grab everything you can from email, login to portals if you have to, and save it in the 2025 google drive folder." Amazing!

Muse AI continues to be very good, and I think I’ve figured out why It’s OpenClaw under the hood

Ok help me out Is Jev actually as smart as a frontier LLM under the hood? Meaning - are its classification judgements as good or better than Astra/Fable, but it just can’t write?

This shipping business does big numbers, but there's a mystery: 6,500 fully paid for cassettes, sitting empty in a warehouse. Is it just the bottom of a cyclical shipping market? Is there a new competitor, or better tech out there? Or a bigger decline that doesn't come through on the listing? @girdley, @BillDA, @thegeneralmills, and @endresenheather dig in.

When making ads and landers, remember: The best place to sell a $2,000 watch is next to a $20,000 watch

You love to see it The world is healing

It’s really not a good time thanks

See if you can find North Carolina

It's pretty hilarious to watch software investors absolutely pulling their hair and rending their garmets over businesses being valued at 3X revenue What do you mean businesses need to be valued as a multiple of cash flows? Welcome back to reality

The first truly new product Apple has put out in years