ZYN 🧢

Interview with former $MO & $SWMA Director re: nicotine pouches in the US

@uncovered_alpha @aakashgupta Embarrassing AI slop: “That’s not a failure — it’s what happens when pilgrimage brands try to become chains.”

The PopUp Bagels bull case requires you to believe a brand literally named “PopUp” can franchise 300 locations without losing the thing that made people line up in the first place. Levain Bakery had the same cult energy, same backer (Stripes), and stopped at ~15 stores. That’s not a failure — it’s what happens when pilgrimage brands try to become chains. Crumbl solved this with a rotating weekly menu that creates perpetual content cycles at scale. PopUp has five permanent bagels. The schmears rotate, but they’re not the hero. The unit economics are genuinely elite. The question is whether demand at unit #200 looks anything like demand at unit #5.

Tiger Global just valued a bagel shop at $300 million. And the math actually makes sense if you stare at it long enough. PopUp Bagels started in 2020 out of a kitchen in Westport, Connecticut. Adam Goldberg was baking bagels for neighbors during the pandemic. Five years later, Tiger Global closed a deal in late March that values the company at 5x what it was worth five months ago. The unit economics are what caught Tiger's attention. Average transaction over $24. Five bagel varieties. Three schmears. 55 total SKUs while competitors run 200-300. Stores are 1,000-1,200 square feet. Each location hires 10-15 employees instead of the 50-60 a typical QSR needs. No ice machines. No soda fountains. No fryers. They don't sell individual bagels. You buy packs of three, six, or twelve. You grip, rip, and dip. That constraint does two things simultaneously: it raises average order value above the threshold where a small-format store prints money, and it creates a ritual that photographs well. Every customer becomes a content creator. The franchise math: $330K-$810K to open, $35K franchise fee, 6% royalty. They've signed 300 franchise units with fewer than 15 operators. That's roughly 20 stores per operator. Experienced multi-unit franchisees running large territories, not first-timers buying a single shop. About 30 locations open now, targeting 100 by end of 2027. Celebrity investors include Paul Rudd, JJ Watt, Michael Phelps, Michael Strahan. Stripes bought a majority stake in 2023 and brought in a real CEO, Tory Bartlett, in late 2024. Adam Sandler has a dedicated phone at one of the New York shops to call in orders. They literally call it "the Sandler Phone." Here's what Tiger Global sees. The same firm that backed Meta, invested in OpenAI and Waymo, has been exiting 85+ companies from its most recent fund to concentrate on fewer, higher-conviction bets. They looked at a bagel company and decided it belonged in that concentrated portfolio. The $300 million number only works if you believe 300 franchise locations actually open and hit the projected unit economics. At an estimated $6M revenue per location and 18% margins, 100 operating stores would generate roughly $108M in systemwide profit. At 300, you're approaching the kind of numbers that make $300M look cheap. The real question is whether the hype survives national scale. PopUp Bagels built its brand on scarcity, long lines, and social media energy. Every franchise system in history has faced the tension between exclusivity and expansion. Levain Bakery, funded by the same firm Stripes, is the closest comparable, and it stayed small. Tiger's betting the ritual travels. That the 1,100 square foot format, the five-SKU simplicity, and the $24 average ticket create something that works in Tampa the same way it works in Greenwich Village. If they're right, this is the most capital-efficient restaurant concept of the decade. If they're wrong, it's a $300 million lesson in the difference between a brand and a business.

@DamiDina @alokepillai @fnthawar @chamath TLDR x.com/jamgold818/sta…

@alokepillai @fnthawar @chamath ohhh!

Never understood why people bag on @chamath His funds just keep sending me 💵 Never got a cheque from any of other VC funds I'm an LP of 😭

@slatestarcodex @KTmBoyle

I cannot wait until the White House changes hands and all of you ghouls switch back from "you're a traitor unless you bootlick so hard your tongue goes numb" to "the government asking any questions about my offshore fentanyl casino is vile tyranny and I will throw myself in the San Francisco Bay in protest", like werewolves at the last ray of the setting moon.

We’ve seen this movie before. When the dust settles, a lot of patriotic founders will point to this exact moment as the match that lit the fire in them. 🇺🇸

@58isthenew40 @let_nick_cook @deanwball

@let_nick_cook @deanwball Did you READ Kegsbreath's post? Good grief, man.

Think about the power Hegseth is asserting here. He is claiming that the DoD can force all contractors to stop doing business of any kind with arbitrary other companies. In other words, every operating system vendor, every manufacturer of hardware, every hyperscaler, every type of firm the DoD contracts with—all their services and products can be denied to any economic actor at will by the Secretary of War. This is obviously a psychotic power grab. It is almost surely illegal, but the message it sends is that the United States Government is a completely unreliable partner for any kind of business. The damage done to our business environment is profound. No amount of deregulatory vibes sent by this administration matters compared to this arson.

@tracknumber06 @HoldenPSykora @buccocapital Yes, you can certainly decide to turn down free money but that’s a skill issue

@HoldenPSykora @buccocapital Hey Holden. Did you know you can have a complete understanding of the financial system AND STILL make a decision that’s different than the one you’d make?

Death penalty

@cap_zay You haven’t covered yourself in glory either, pretty disappointing and telling reaction you had over the last few days immediately defaulting to party-line blame that does nothing but feed the echo chamber and create more division.

The folks gleefully celebrating the murder are a little too used to getting away with 0 consequences. Have a feeling many will wish they never posted it for it to be screenshotted and saved down for eternity.

This is the mistake you make when ideology trumps the judgement.

@liensofnewyork This isn’t a real image bro. You’re just as brainwashed as the ppl you’re criticizing but don’t realized it.

From what I've seen over the last two days, it's hard not to think that liberal women are far too susceptible to brainwashing. That smile, the glee at the bloodshed. This isn't politics, it's cult like psychosis from young girls.

@Geiger_Capital Who is they? The suspect is still at larger. You are part of the problem man.

Charlie Kirk’s entire thing was to speak to the other side. Resolve political disputes with free speech and open debate… They killed him.

@texaseattle Welcome to the show, Chris. You’ve showed future investors, clients, coworkers, etc. what kind of person you are and how careless you act.

BTW… as of yet, no credible news source has CONFIRMED this is in-fact Cheryl Richardson-Wagner. Lots of people claiming it is/isn’t her but offering no hard evidence, so I reserve the right to be wrong. I simply found her LinkedIn job description to be ironic (if that’s indeed her). We don’t need to be calling for her to be fired, y’all. Hopefully this lady can learn from her actions and the embarrassment it should rightfully cause her.

@Best_Thx_Krgds @bucketshopcap @taobanker Skill issue

@bucketshopcap @taobanker New Yorkers keep saying this but u just don’t realize how bad u have it. Everything is 2-3x more expensive here and u are taxed 10-15% higher than the rest of the country Standard of living is just objectively rly low here

I'm seeing a bigger trend of younger guys in the city openly admitting they want to marry rich. Was always a thing but we've def hit a new level of ppl being fine with saying they'll never make it on their own merits. Disappointing...we need to make ambition great again.

@ryxcommar @TheStalwart CRM one of the easiest businesses to understand lol

@TheStalwart I did try. I still don't know. We pay for Salesforce, I log into Salesforce, I pull all the Salesforce data, I run the Salesforce reports, and I still don't really know what Salesforce does.

“I don’t know what Salesforce even does”. Well have you tried to go out and learn or did you just think such knowledge would somehow emerge spontaneously in your brain?

@Empty_America You’re missing that at a certain point the incremental $ doesn’t improve QoL. Optimize for increased earnings so you can maximize QoL to whatever extent you want and save the incremental $ beyond that. Actually fairly simply but not easy.

I had a weird realization about saving money. Say you start saving 10K a year, you immediately reduce your quality of life by that amount. After 15 years of reduced QoL, you have 200K, which yields you 10K annually in interest. But even if you start spending your 10K in annual interest, you aren't in the "black" in QoL terms until year 30, since the first 15 years of interest just makes up for the quality of life you lost in the 15 years of saving.

@DMTCapital My hope is 75% of his followers are there to watch the train wreck as it inevitably happens again but even then, feel for 25% he’s leading off a cliff

Imagine taking life advice from a trust fund baby zoomer who capitulated at the bottom - with leverage

@sri_batchu @pitdesi This is a generous postmortem, mainly bc Keith’s Twitter persona is that of a jerk who cannot under any circumstances admit when he’s wrong. I’m sure the team at Openstore deserves grace, but Keith does not.

@pitdesi Ok this not been vetted for Keith or the Openstore team but this is my quick tl;dr on the situation. The company took a few calculated risks and certain things worked and some didn’t.

Update- they are just focusing on Jack Archer, raising at $50M (down from $1B). Sounds like they got a winner in that brand that they bought for $1M, just a very different type of business.

@bumbadum14 Tbf if there’s anyone who deserves it, it’s MHG

Men now have a hidden social credit score like they're in China. This is the most insane and neurotic thing I have ever seen.

@DylannvTheWorld @compound248

@compound248 I'm sorry but short-selling investigators is the most immoral thing in the market. You literally are betting millions of dollars on the failure of the company you're supposed to be investigating?? Wtf... How is this legal?

If someone who is a convicted CON ARTIST comes on your show and makes a bunch of claims that cause you to repeatedly say: “Wow! This is unbelievable!" ...and you don't challenge the veracity, it's worth looking in the mirror and questioning whether you are a good journalist.

@NateHindenburg @TuckerCarlson Nate, you’re the man. It’s unfortunate this criminal was pardoned but your work exposing him cannot be undone no matter how hard Trevor tries.

I am Nate Anderson, the founder of Hindenburg Research referenced repeatedly in this bizarre and fantastical interview. During my career, I helped expose numerous financial scams, including over a dozen Ponzi schemes and numerous instances of public companies lying to and stealing from investors: hindenburgresearch.com/about-us/ I am immensely proud of that career including our work on Nikola Motors referenced in the interview. Trevor Milton is a convicted fraudster held criminally responsible for the incineration of hundreds of millions of dollars in retail investors’ hard-earned money. As should be unsurprising, Milton in this interview seems to just fabricate key events and information out of thin air – unfortunately with zero critical questioning or pushback from Tucker. For starters, contrary to Trevor Milton’s implications that his prosecution was some sort of Biden administration conspiracy, conveniently neither Milton nor Tucker share that the investigation into Milton was started and disclosed in September 2020 – under the first TRUMP administration and well before the 2020 election. There were numerous inaccuracies throughout the interview. The claim that Hindenburg paid employees for inside information is patently absurd. The key whistleblower discussed in the interview was only briefly a contractor for Milton. He was so horrified by what he viewed as Milton’s repeated false claims that he did a tremendous amount of research on his own, unraveling numerous additional suspected lies that Milton peddled to the investing public. Further, Hindenburg didn’t “coordinate” anything with media or the DoJ. Such entities ran their own investigations for their own purposes unconnected to us. There was ample evidence that Milton misstated numerous aspects of his business, as the company itself later acknowledged. It would take hours to write about all the other absurdities, half-truths, innuendos and false statements in this interview but in the interest of correcting some of the record, here’s a handful: - Milton waxes on about his pardon, but no one mentioned that Milton’s lawyer was Brad Bondi—the brother of AG Pam Bondi. Nor did anyone mention that Milton donated $900 thousand to Trump in October 2024, less than a month before the recent election—strategically timed well after his criminal conviction and immediately prior to the presidential election. Trump acknowledged he had never heard of Milton before being asked to pardon him but relied on others for the recommendation. - Milton failed to mention that immediately prior to his resignation from his company, beyond the extensive allegations of fraud, he was also publicly accused of multiple instances of sexual assault, including by his own cousin, who went on-the-record with her allegations. - I can only wonder what kind of investigation Tucker undertook of the fraud allegations against Milton before having him on. Milton literally video-taped a truck rolling down a hill implying that it was driving under its own power. He also went up on stage and said a truck that didn’t work “fully functions and works.” - Waxing poetic about hydrogen in the interview echoes Nikola’s lies to retail investors that it successfully produced hydrogen at a cost ~81% lower than anyone on earth, a feat that would have upended the entire energy industry had it been remotely true. Nikola’s head of hydrogen production, presumably in charge of this world-changing scientific breakthrough, turned out to be Milton’s own brother, who had no scientific background and previously did odd construction jobs in Hawaii. - These weren’t one-off misstatements—there were dozens of examples like these. As the DoJ said – and proved in court – Milton “made false claims regarding nearly all aspects of Nikola’s business.” The company itself admitted to many of these false statements, agreed to a $125 million fine, and won an arbitration against Milton holding him personally liable for his conduct. - Milton claimed that Hindenburg made $30m-$100m on our Nikola investment—this isn’t even close (we made a fraction of that). Trevor seems to just be making these numbers up out of thin air. Hilariously, Tucker opened by suggesting that short selling was illegal until 2007, a claim that is completely false. After confirming that he knows nothing about the subject, he went on to suggest that short selling should be criminalized outright. Short selling has existed for hundreds of years, and for good reason. Short sellers play a critical role in the functioning of healthy markets, similar to the role of investigative journalists, (which I presume Tucker considers himself akin to). Most companies are a force for good and economic growth. However, some companies lie and engage in fraud. Short sellers have exposed nearly every major corporate fraud in the past several decades because just as there is an economic incentive for identifying the good companies, there is also an economic model for identifying the scams. This is how free markets and free speech works—helping weed out the bad companies and those stealing from investors so good companies have more room to thrive. Claiming to be a free speech advocate while casually advocating for the imprisonment of anyone who dares to speak critically about public companies is a contradiction of the highest order. In short, Tucker, I highly suggest you actually vet the people you welcome onto your platform. If you find yourself staring, mouth agape at your interviewee, repeatedly saying “Wow! This is unbelievable!” it may in fact be because it’s unbelievable. You reach a lot of people and this one was an avoidable miss. Good day.

How Wall Street short sellers worked with the media and federal prosecutors to destroy Trevor Milton’s company and put him in jail for life. This is a shocking story. (0:00) Introduction (0:31) The Origins of Milton’s Hydrogen Truck Company Nikola (4:17) What Is a Hydrogen Motor? (8:34) Milton’s Attempt to Displace Oil Companies (11:12) The Problem With America’s Energy Grid (15:32) The Lie That Destroyed Milton’s Life (21:50) The Mysterious Hindenburg Investment Firm That Targeted Milton’s Company (29:16) How Much Did They Profit From Milton’s Destruction? (38:38) The CIA’s Playbook on How to Psychologically Break Someone (45:42) How Hindenburg Conspired With Corporate Media to Take Down Milton (58:35) How Lawyers Manufacture Chaos to Profit (1:03:38) The FBI Sting to Set Up Milton as Being a Russian Agent (1:10:13) Trump Pardoning Milton (1:12:04) Why Corrupt Prosecutors Drag Defendants to New York (1:26:56) How This Impacted Milton and His Family (1:32:06) Milton’s Emotional Phone Call With Trump Includes paid partnerships.

@J_Plotnik 4-week rolling

@VanyaWright @dalibali2 I worked at a bootstrapped co, owned a P&L, and did well for myself completely excluding equity. If the friend wasn't getting much VC $ then hard for me to believe these were truly moonshot bets x.com/zyncap/status/…

@zyncap @dalibali2 Doesn’t sound like he’s getting a lot of VC money.

Have this friend who was the youngest VP ever at his public co at like 24. Caught the startup bug. One failed endeavor after another. Now in mid 40s - no savings, no home, no wife and still chasing ideas. Sometimes the moonshots don’t work out.