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. 🫡

Since last week, 371,000 people have pledged $337M to buy Spirit Airlines back. There are two paths. Pacaso ran the for-profit version with Reg A+ on our platform. The Green Bay Packers ran the non-profit version. Both work. We've done it. To the Let's Buy Spirit team: we are here to help. dealmaker.tech/content/the-t…

The movement to buy Spirit Airlines has my attention. I don't know how this plays out. But customers wanting to own a piece of the businesses they care about, that's the story @Dealmakertech has been built around for years. To the campaign team: if you want to talk about what's structurally possible, we're here. Would you want to own a piece of a company that you cared about?

A few years ago, this would have been unthinkable. SpaceX is allocating 30% of its upcoming IPO to retail investors, and it's a signal the entire market should be paying attention to. I got into it with @RemyBlaireNews on Fintech.TV's Market Movers before the NYSE opening bell yesterday morning. The short version: capital raising is shifting, and the companies leading the next wave of IPOs, OpenAI included, are going to follow @elonmusk's lead. Retail is no longer an afterthought. It's becoming the strategy. Thanks to Remy, @VinceMolinari, and the Fintech.TV team for having me on. Looking forward to discussing this shift towards retail continues to gain momentum. @FINTECHTVglobal

Why did I leave a thriving securities law practice to start @Dealmakertech? Because some ideas won't let you go. I just sat down with Heather Barnhouse on her @Dentons podcast to talk about that leap, and everything that came after. We covered learning from paying customers, building resilience when things get hard, and shipping an MVP that actually mattered. One thing that stuck with me from our conversation: the best founders aren't the ones with the perfect idea. They're the ones who can't stop thinking about the problem. That obsession is what carries you through. Finding a co-founder (Mat Goldstein) who shared that same fire made the decision even easier. If you're a founder weighing your capital strategy or curious what it takes to build something from the ground up, have a listen. @DentonsCanada

This is a historic moment for retail investors: SpaceX is allocating 30% of its IPO to retail. The typical allocation is 5-10%. @elonmusk, the most successful entrepreneur on earth, just looked at his cap table and made a choice to allow retail a greater stake in his company. This isn't a gesture. It's a signal. We've been building toward this moment for years. DealMaker has processed over $2B in online capital raises. We've seen companies use retail offerings to tap into their most loyal communities. The infrastructure exists. The regulatory framework exists. And now the biggest IPO in history is validating what we've always known. Here's what happens next: other companies nearing IPO take notice. Then earlier-stage companies start asking why they don't open their cap tables to the people who actually use and believe in their product. This is a major shift. And it's not going to slow down.

I’ve been invited to the All-In Liquidity Summit in May to chat with some of the sharpest LPs, fund managers, and founders in the industry. This unique event brings together a small, curated room in Napa Valley where real conversations happen. Message me if you’re heading to the Summit!

Robinhood launched a publicly traded venture fund that lets retail investors access private companies. Portfolio includes Databricks, Revolut, Ramp, Stripe, ElevenLabs, and more. Vlad and I have discussed this and it’s clear we've been circling the same thesis for a while. He went on Bloomberg recently and explained the motivation behind this new initiative plainly: this is about getting retail access to private companies. Not after the IPO. Not after the wealth creation has already been captured. Now. This is a massive signal because of what it confirms: the wall between public and private markets is coming down. And it's not regulators forcing it. It's demand. Retail investors want in earlier. They want access to the companies reshaping industries before the markup, before the wealth creation is already captured by a handful of institutional players. The industry's response used to be: "retail doesn't belong in private markets." Now one of the largest retail brokerages in the world has built the exact infrastructure to prove otherwise — and stacked it with some of the most recognized private companies. For anyone still skeptical that retail capital is reshaping private markets: the biggest platforms in the world are now betting their roadmaps on it. That's not a trend. That's a structural shift.

This is the conversation we need to be having. @vladtenev is right: the concentration of AI wealth into dozens of shareholders while we wait for trillion-dollar IPOs is creating conditions that could undermine American innovation. We're watching extreme concentration of capital ownership play out in real-time at unprecedented speed and scale. The solution needs to go further than ever before: customers, users, and communities that fuel these companies need equity exposure too - and are good for the business! Equity crowdfunding can enable millions of Americans to own stakes in transformative companies before valuations make 100x returns mathematically impossible. The regulatory infrastructure exists. The technology exists. What's missing is the will to democratize access. If we don't fix this now, we're choosing between blunt redistribution policies or strangling the innovation that could define this century. There's a better path: broadening ownership while companies are still growing. That's what we're building toward at @Dealmakertech. That's the future worth fighting for.

I built DealMaker because I saw an opportunity to give the people who believe in you most a seat at the table. Recently I talked with @slehmann1 on STR Global Unlocked about this shift happening in how companies raise capital and why we built DealMaker to lead it. For years, I watched capital formation work the same way: gatekeepers decided who deserved funding. Communities had conviction but no seat at the table. Founders had to choose between control and capital. We built DealMaker to change that equation. When your customers become your investors, everything shifts. Loyalty compounds. Valuation strengthens. Your community doesn't just fund you, they evangelize for you. That's not just better capital. That's strategic advantage. For founders in proptech, hospitality, real estate, and beyond: the shift isn't coming. It's here. Links to the full episode in the comments.

Tuesday night’s Cocktails & Capital mixer in NYC was a great evening. The room was full of people shaping where this industry is heading, and the conversations ranged from new fundraising strategies to how founders are thinking about growth in the current market.

Revolut raised an equity crowdfunding round in 2016 at a £1M valuation. Last week they were valued at $75B. This is a huge milestone. I’ve been in equity crowdfunding for over a decade, and I’ve seen skeptics dismiss retail investors and call these rounds a sideshow.

It was AI Hackathon Day at DealMaker yesterday, one of my favourite days of the year. Hackathons bring out what makes our team special: speed, creativity, collaboration, and that spark that turns ideas into reality.