Today, I get to announce that Baton has raised a $10M Series A. 🎉 We’ve been heads down building the world’s best marketplace for SMB acquisitions for the last four years, and today is a testament to the progress we’ve made.

OH HI

Here’s why Greg is wrong, from someone who bought, grew, and sold one of these: Nobody running of these is dumb, and the fact that they've survived is testament to the fact that they're smart. To me, baked into this strategy is a sense of paternalism. Look at these dumb boomers. I can come in with absolutely zero industry experience and a Claude Code subscription and change this industry!! The most pervasive dynamic within Main Street businesses is resource scarcity. Not enough time or money to do any of the million things that you plan to. Awesome, so you want to do some big Claude Code thing? Cool, you're going to need to find time to do that between figuring out how to repair the trucks, fix your broken Google My Business listing, and not take a salary that month because of the reinvestment you're making with the hope that it will pay off. Getting a CRM implemented correctly is hard enough!! You need managers who enforce the process, employees who change their habits, and someone accountable when things break. Now try rebuilding delivery around AI WHILE KEEPING THE BUSINESS ALIVE AND SERVICING DEBT. You come in full of piss and vinegar and on day four your operations manager quits because she liked doing things the old way, and suddenly you’re covering her job instead of building agents. Greg acknowledges key-person risk, but it deserves far more weight in his economics. The people, process, and change management required to make even basic technology productive can consume years. Innovation has to improve the performance of the whole business. Justin Roff-Marsh and I have discussed the sequence: identify the constraint, get more productive use from its existing capacity, then add capacity where necessary to increase throughput. Said another way ---If an accounting firm’s bottleneck is senior review, generating drafts ten times faster may just create a bigger queue. You have to show how AI frees the reviewer, change the workflow so that capacity gets used, and then upgrade whatever limits further growth. Technological innovation must drive global maxima, not local maxima. Even real savings elsewhere need to be converted into lower expenses (which is only weak replacement) or redeployed against the constraint. A list of automated tasks tells me very little about how much more profitable work the firm can complete. Now put a large, expensive acquisition loan underneath that transition. In the SBA buying range, debt payments compete with the money you need for implementation, training, replacement hires, and additional capacity. Saving people time doesn’t automatically remove their salaries. Your plan is to do what? Have Betty train you in the first three weeks to replace her, and then you're gonna fire her. Let me know how that goes for you with a big ass loan due every month. More than likely you're going to end up keeping Betty and adding a bunch of AI expenses, which are going to reduce all of your fancy pre-acquisition projections. You can spend months paying for the existing payroll, new software, and human review before realizing any savings.... If at all. And cutting a support role can make your scarce, expensive specialists less productive if they inherit its work. Ultimately a playbook like the below is achievable but requires an enormous amount of experience, judgment, skill, etc. And the idea that a corporate refugee is going to parachute in out of their W2 with a couple agents and transform a business model fundamentally feels like something that someone who's never tried to do it before in a real business would say. I'm happy to have this debate with anybody who'd like to have it. I've both owned these businesses and built agents in an enormous number of these categories referenced.

The SBA technical Update is out. (link to document in comments) Viso recommended a few updates, and 2 very important recommendations made it into the final document! 1. QofE prepared for buyers is OK 2. Working capital true-ups are not rebates, and are explicitly allowed (this one is almost word-for-word from our letter).

Clearly need more people to not be in Private Equity and out building and growing existing small businesses! bloomberg.com/news/features/…

can confirm...

LFG!!!

Manufacturing is the most contested category on Baton right now. Over the last six months, the average manufacturing listing received about three times the buyer interest of a typical listing. But that interest is concentrated: manufacturing businesses that received offers saw more than 10 times the engagement of those that did not. Here's what our 2026 industry data shows: 👉 Interest clusters at $500K–$1M (36% of buyer activity) and again above $5M (32%). There is considerably less activity in between. Owner-operators and strategic buyers are active in the category, but they are often looking for different types of businesses. 👉 About one-third of buyer activity is on listings priced above 5x cash flow, nearly matching the 3–4x range. The median manufacturing listing attracting buyer interest is priced at $1.5M at a 3.4x multiple, with $420K in SDE. 👉 Nearly half of buyer questions are about financial performance, followed by customer quality, growth, and assets and equipment. Want to see how manufacturing compares with other industries? Read the full 2026 report covering buyer activity across 10 industries: baton.com/small-business-acq…

Super excited to share @WillowVoiceAI! They've saved me so much time.

I finally shipped the last production-ish thing into our internal harness so once it's running solidly for a week, I can kill my OpenClaw (and use Anchor our internal harness and Grok Bot for everything it used to do...) RIP!

Locked shelves. Closed stores. Higher prices. Failed leadership.  As Attorney General, I’ll crack down on organized retail theft to make New York safer and more affordable.

One quote that stuck with me from this year's SEETA conference, was from Linh Tran, who said that "kids spell love T-I-M-E." With two of my kids off to college a month ago, that hit home. I was also impressed/surprised how many of the SMB owners on panels decided to buy a business to have more flexibility on their schedule, primarily for their family (spend more time with their kids, etc.)

NEW: We visited PS 307, the failing public school that Nikole Hannah-Jones sent her daughter to. The teachers make an average of over $100,000 a year. The school spends $52,000 per student each year. The student/teacher ratio is 9 to 1. We went to another school just down the street that spends less than half of what PS 307 does—yet the academic outcomes are significantly better. Underfunding and racism aren't causing schools to fail. @DanielDiMartino explains what is:

The crew @baton_market led by @joglekar and @dylangans have been talking about "the Zenestimate for SMBs" for years - this brings that vision further into reality. Check it out. Pass that Baton!

This is something that Dylan and I have been working on for a long time and excited that we launched, we are gonna keep improving this product, and it helps small business owners. LFG!

We've been testing ChatGPT Ads for the last ~60 days and have to say - not impressed. We might not be the right fit for the product of course, but it's been pretty disappointing given the amount we're spending on the pilot.

Excited to share more next week!

Something BIG is launching on Baton with 1M+ small businesses and coverage in a Tier A publication next Tuesday We've been working on this in a way since we started Baton, excited to show it to the world If anyone is curious, feel free to like this message or reply and I'll DM you a link to the article when it goes live

An owner on working with one of our advisors and the rest of the @baton_market team. Love that they saw how amazing Tanner is, the rest of the team supporting, that they had the room to ask questions, the room to pull back when needed. Exciting to get these inbound testimonials even after hundreds of closes!

Walking around the house this weekend, talking to my Chief of Home @bot and having it search for a replacement gasket for a kitchen sprayer, order some HEPA filters on Amazon was pretty DOPE. Feel like it is slowly helping me just be more handy / productive around the house and not have to run to my computer every time I need to do something at home (order something, etc.)

To me the Bot Store (aka a way to share and load other Grok Bots) makes it infinitely more useful now and in the long term than Instinct for me.