PAGE 48 · July 10, 2026
I was looking for a video my mom had sent me last year when I stumbled on the Kickstarter video I made back in 2016. It’s funny what happens when you look back. I totally forgot about this moment in my life, where I sold my ADBE stock to put $150K into building a connected hardware device I had absolutely no right to build. Idiot. That stock would be worth like $3M today. Instead, I have a paperweight in my office alongside the rest of ideas that either failed or never got started.
But as I watched the video, a slow grin started to pull at my cheeks. A smile even, as I watched and rewatched, not remembering the shoot, but the moment that inspired me to take that first leap of faith. A young man, no kids, building a media company that was just getting off the ground, now side hustling a hardware product because of some dream to stave off the water crisis in this country (you know, the one you probably don’t know about).
At the time, I went down a rabbit hole of how much water we use in our mundane tasks. Ask a person how much water you use in the shower, and you’ll get answers ranging from a single gallon to a 1000 liters (stupid metric system). Do you even know? Well, I’ll obviously tell you. Your shower head is rated at 2.5GPM (that means Gallons Per Minute). Every minute in the shower, 2.5 gallons of water goes down the drain. Drinkable water. The kind kids in Africa walk 5 miles to carry on their heads. In the U.S., we’re blessed with this luxury, and some of us take 2 a day (no shaming here).
So young me thought, could I engineer a device that could go on the universal pipe that comes out your wall, attach to the 300 million+ shower heads, and reduce the water volume while increasing the pressure, so a 10minute average shower would save 10 gallons, per person, per shower, per day, for every person in this country (and then the world). That’s a lot of buckets.
And I’ll bet you can’t guess where the idea hit me (literally)… that’s right, in the shower. My naked ass was scrubbing away thinking, “what if we all took shorter showers”, as I probably marinated on the idea for a solid 20minutes. Then I thought, screw water conservation, I wish I could just record my voice right now because like most of us, I either go through my most important todo’s of the day, or have the absolute best ideas that I forget by the time I get to conditioning.
But the idea of recording your ideas in the shower (as great as it is) was a hard engineering feat 10 years ago. Hardware + software, electricity + water. Not a lot of the ingredients you want on your first time founder baking sheet. So I stuck to the water conservation angle, and after trials and tribulations, and a hundred prototypes, we built something truly remarkable; that worked.
Unfortunately, I don’t know if it would’ve succeeded or failed. When I made the launch video, MALKA was flying, and I had to make a choice. Try to figure out this hardware thing while I was taking pitch meetings with Marriott and Grohe, or go all in on building content at the speed of culture. I think I chose right. I wasn’t ready to build SWON. A full decade later, almost to the day, with what I know now, I can proudly say that with 20/20 hindsight.
In the next few weeks, I’m gonna launch something that I am proud of. And the serendipity of me finding this video, reliving this 0 to 1 entrepreneurial journey again 10 years later, well…. I think it was to remind me just how far I’ve come, and how so much has changed… and honestly, and how so much of me has not.
O, if you were wondering if you’d get a chance to watch the video, how could I resist. For your viewing pleasure here.
The past is not a predictor of the future, but a compass to guide you. Keep it on your journeys. And remember, life is a lesson learned, some times you must do and fail, before you can do and succeed.
WHAT WE’LL HIT ON THIS WEEK
MUST KNOW
Tiger Woods skipped the endorsement check in 2015 and took a stake instead. This week it sold for $530 million dollars.
ON OUR RADAR
Three founders to watch: a two-ingredient tequila soda winning Caesars, biotech hair at $31 dollars a bundle, and a kids-snack brand that sold out in two hours.
THE Operator
Michael Strahan spent 20 years on camera for other people's networks. This week he launched his own.
THE OWNERSHIP LEAGUE
Three dads turned $750 dollars and 100 hats into a $35 million dollar brand. Then Gary Vee called, asking to buy in.
The Golf Tech Tiger Woods Believed In Before the Boom Just Sold for Half a Billion Dollars
Must know · 5 min read
Tiger Woods bought a slice of a golf simulator company called Full Swing back in 2015. On July 6, Versant agreed to buy the whole thing for 530 million dollars.
Woods never fronted the brand for an appearance fee. He took a position, an estimated 1 to 2 percent of the company, and then spent a decade making that position more valuable. He put Full Swing at the center of TGL, the primetime indoor league he built with Rory McIlroy through TMRW Sports. He kept it the official licensed simulator of the PGA Tour. Every round played on that software was a round played on something he owned.
The buyer is a serious one. Versant is the Comcast spinoff that owns Golf Channel and CNBC, a company with a market cap around 5.37 billion dollars, and Full Swing is its third acquisition this year. The seller, George Pyne's Bruin Capital, paid 160 million for the company in 2021. Roughly 3x in about five years, all cash, with the deal expected to close in the back half of 2026.
That's not an endorsement that expired. That's a stake that compounded.
Read the patience in it. A paid endorser holds the product, smiles for the campaign, and walks when the contract runs out. Woods did the opposite. He made the thing he owned more central to the sport every year he stayed in it, and he never had to run the company to do it. He just had to be early, and stay.
An appearance fee gets deposited once. A stake keeps working. A one to two percent slice sounds like a rounding error, right up until the company sells for 530 million dollars, and then it does not sound like a rounding error at all.
Woods' real edge was never only the swing. It was knowing which side of the deal to stand on. He bet on the machine his whole sport would eventually run on, then spent ten years making sure it did. The check he could have taken in 2015 would have cleared and been forgotten. The stake is the part that just paid.
On Our Radar · 1 min read
Two ingredients. Tequila and soda water. Zero sugar, and a wide-mouth lid built so you can drop your own real fruit straight into the can. While every other canned cocktail is screaming from the shelf, Adam Prange is quietly winning where people actually drink. He just locked a three-year nationwide pour deal through Caesars Entertainment's RFP program, went statewide across all 773 Jacksons Food Stores, and slid into Total Wine, all while running an open raise that lets his own drinkers own a slice. His whole bet: in an aisle addicted to more, less wins.
Moyo was 17, hunting for extensions in a corner shop in Swindon, England, when she found the gap. Ruka builds synthetic braiding hair and wigs for textured hair on a collagen-protein fiber made in Japan, not China, with a patent-filed "shape memory" version that reverts to style after a wash. The hook is the math: human braiding hair runs about $170 dollars a bundle, Ruka's is $31. The brand just raised $4.5 million dollars from Henkel Ventures and Freedom Trail Capital, and Olympic sprint medalist Dina Asher-Smith came in as an equity angel, not a face. Watch this one before it hits US shelves this year.
The earliest bet on the page. Rachel Mansfield spent years turning an audience of 1.5 million-plus into people who cook the way she cooks. Then she built the thing she kept looking for and could not find: cadootz, organic, protein-packed crackers for kids with an ingredient list a parent can actually pronounce. She and her husband Jordan Carpenter launched direct to consumer in January, and the first production run sold out in under two hours. In April, Selva Ventures, the firm behind Grüns and Mid-Day Squares, led a $3 million dollar seed. Retail is next. Grab a box before your neighbor does.
Michael Strahan Is Building a Podcast Network, Not Hosting One
Industry Moves · 1 min read
Michael Strahan could have signed on to host a show for somebody else's network. He decided to own the network instead.
THE NEWS:
On July 8, SMAC Productions, the studio he co-founded with Constance Schwartz-Morini in 2011, launched a podcast network called The Intersection with Sinclair's AMP Media. The division of labor tells you who owns what: SMAC makes every show in-house and keeps the IP, while AMP handles distribution, audience, and ad sales. Two flagship shows lead it, one where Strahan and Schwartz-Morini get executives and founders talking about how they actually built things, and one that drops Pro Football Hall of Fame Terrell Owens and writer-producer Chris Spencer into the same booth. It debuts later this year.
THE OPERATOR TAKE:
What stands out isn't that Michael Strahan launched another show. It's where he put it. Most people would have expected him to sign another hosting deal and let someone else own the audience. Instead, he's building the network and inviting Terrell Owens onto his platform. Owens isn't hiring Strahan into his world. Strahan is giving Owens a seat inside an ecosystem he controls. That's a different game. One person fills airtime. The other accumulates assets.
That's the part most brands still miss. They keep paying for talent to borrow attention, while the smartest creators are building the place where that attention lives. A host reads the ad. An owner keeps the catalog, the audience relationship, and every new show that makes the whole platform more valuable. The audience doesn't just watch one program. It stays inside the studio. Stop asking which celebrity should front your next campaign. Start asking what they would build if they owned the studio instead of renting the mic.
Three Dads, $750, and $35 Million Later, Gary Vee Wanted In.
Industry Moves · 1 min read
Grant Eastey, Bart Szaniewski, and Ejay O'Donnell started Dad Gang in a garage in 2022 with $750 dollars and 100 hats.
THE NEWS:
The numbers are impressive, but the order of operations is what matters. The brand has passed $35 million in revenue, sold more than 1 million hats, and brought on Gary Vaynerchuk as a partner and strategic advisor, not a paid face. The community came first: more than 1 million dads who connected with the brand before the retail machine followed. Then came the distribution, a Lids rollout that went from 90 stores to 200 nationwide in under a month, plus a Shopify partnership that helped scale the business beyond its original audience.
THE OPERATOR TAKE:
The hat is not the asset. The community is. Vaynerchuk did not sign an endorsement, he took a partner seat in something that already worked. Build the audience before the product. When it is real, the operators come asking to buy in.
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