Housekeeping first, because this is a new fixture around here: the Verdict Database is where every verdict I publish goes on the record — graded, dated, and revisited on tape when the facts change. When I'm wrong, you'll read it from me first. Entry #1 was the wearables compilation from the first Worth It or Theater? thread. This is entry #2, and it exists because of a sentence I wrote in public.

Here’s the sentence. In last week’s David teardown I said Prima was “good, but — irony noted — greasy in its original form,” and that since they’d reformulated — 21 grams of protein, reportedly less grease — it was “back on my retest list, which is exactly how this should work.” That last clause is a trap, and I set it for myself on purpose. Once you put “retest pending” in print, you either retest or you’re theater.

So I retested. Same conditions as the original test — multiple bars, one after a run, one mid-afternoon, the two slots where a bar actually earns a spot in my bag. The reformulated bar, salted caramel, four bucks at Pop Up Grocer. My money, like always.

Credit where it’s due, and loudly: it’s genuinely better. 21 grams of protein now. Less greasy — not gone, but noticeably. More moist. Somebody at Prima did real work on that reformulation, and if it were the only bar on the shelf I’d be happy about it.

But the verdict holds. The Jacob bar is still the one in my bag — better taste, better consistency, the protein I actually want. Here’s what decided it: even improved, Prima lost the head-to-head on the things I actually eat a bar for. Better isn’t best.

And that’s the whole system here. A verdict you won’t re-test isn’t a verdict — it’s a vibe with good typography. Prima improved; I went back; the ranking didn’t move. Next time it might. When it does, you’ll read it from me first.

That’s the verdict, free, no wall in front of it. Below the wall: the database entry itself — original vs. reformulation vs. the incumbent, scored line by line — the exact, falsifiable bar Prima has to clear to flip this, and the standing method so you can run the same test on whatever’s in your own gym bag.

PAID (below the paywall) — Wellness …

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Quick Answer: a no is data, not a verdict. Your job is to extract the real reason — which is rarely the stated one — and leave the door open, because the best 'yeses' in your career will start as nos.

First, the principle. The stated reason for a pass is almost never the real one. “Too early” often means “I don’t believe you can build it.” “Not our thesis” often means “I couldn’t get excited enough to fight for it on Monday -- or I don’t know enough about it.” That’s not dishonesty — it’s kindness plus efficiency. Nobody owes you a performance review. So arguing with the stated reason is arguing with a placeholder, and founders who argue in the room accomplish exactly one thing: they confirm the pass.

What works instead is one question, asked without defensiveness: “What would have to be true for this to be a yes?” Some people will dodge it. But the ones who answer hand you something priceless — the actual bar. And either way, how you take the no is itself the data they keep. Investors track founders for years. Customers churn and come back. The person who takes a no gracefully and then quietly goes and removes the reason for it is running one of the highest-return plays in business.

Now the story…

When I was raising our seed round at the fitness company I was building, we had an ask for $1M at a $4M pre-money — a valuation I based on the prior year’s $450K in revenue and my projection of $900K for the current year. A number of our clients wanted in — people who actually took classes at the studio and believed in the workout, the results, and our culture -- which is the best kind of early investor. Toward the end of the round, when we were almost fully committed, one of our clients was interested and brought her husband to the meeting — though it was clearly her capital. We had the typical discussions: the company, the growth trajectory, the strategy, and how I arrived at the valuation. After a week or two of back-and-forth, she passed. Maybe the next round, she said. I said okay — thanked her, meant it — and closed the round without her.

Ten months later I kicked off round two: this time $1.5M at a $20M valuation. I sent her a note - we’re raising again, we’ve presented to our current investors, and 85% of them committed to more than their pro rata. We met. And she said: “I’m interested in writing a six-figure check — can I come in at the earlier round’s valuation?”

I said no. Not to be cute - I explained we already had commitments in hand at the new valuation, and there was no way I could, or frankly would, reprice underneath the people who had already said yes. Three or four days later, she called back: “Okay.” And wrote a significant six-figure check, in at the newer valuation.

Here’s why I tell it. Her no didn’t end anything. It located the gap between what I was claiming — $900K on the way, trust me — and what I could prove, which at that point was $450K and a spreadsheet. That gap was findable before the meeting, if I’d been willing to look. That’s what a no is for. It’s the cheapest audit you’ll ever get, delivered by someone with no incentive to flatter you. Ten months of removing the reason turned her pass into a meeting she asked for.

But notice there are two nos in that story, and the second one was mine. Taking hers gracefully — no arguing in the room, no wounded follow-up email — is what kept the door open for the note ten months later. Holding mine is what made her yes worth having. Could she have walked? Sure. But if I’d repriced the round to get her check, every investor who had already committed would have learned that my numbers are opening bids. She wasn’t really asking for a discount - she was asking whether I believed my own valuation. The no was the answer. And to her credit, she took it the way I’d taken hers: a few days, no drama, back with a check. That’s the whole game — the relationship survives the no because neither side makes the other one pay for it.

So if you take one thing: never argue in the room. Say thank you like you mean it, ask the one question, write down what they actually said (not what you wish they’d said), and put a date on your calendar to come back when the reason no longer exists. A no now is almost never a no forever — unless you make the taking of it memorable in the wrong direction.

That’s the argument — take it; it’s yours. What sits below the line is the version you’d actually run: The Monday Worksheet — the one question and the follow-ups that make it answerable, the decoder for what stated reasons usually mean, the 24-hour debrief, the comeback note with a date on it, and the flipside: how to give a no that makes your yes worth more. Built to be used the day the next pass lands. If Open Tabs has earned it, this is what the member side is for…

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One reader you’d actually vouch for beats ten you wouldn’t. That’s the whole program. — RK

Quick Answer: the resume tells you what someone was allowed to do at their last job — not what they’ll do at yours. Hire for behavior under ambiguity, and read the resume last.

First, the principle. At a big company, the machine does half the work. The calendar fills itself, the process exists, the decisions arrive pre-narrowed. So when you hire the impressive logo, you’re often hiring the machine’s output, not the person’s. Then they land at your company — no machine, no process, nobody defining the job — and they wait for inputs that never come. That’s not a character flaw. It’s a category error: you hired a resume built by an environment you don’t have.

What you’re actually hiring for at a startup is what someone does when nobody has defined the job. You won’t find that on the resume, but you can find it in the room. Give them a real problem you have right now — not a brainteaser, an actual open question from your week — and watch what they do with it. Do they ask the questions that narrow it, or perform confidence at it? Do they say “here’s what I’d do Monday” or “here’s how I’d think about frameworks”? Do they separate what they did from what their team did — honestly, unprompted? The interview isn’t a test of the answer. It’s a preview of the Tuesday afternoon eight weeks from now when something breaks and you’re not in the building.

Now the story…

Whether at the strategy consulting firm I co-founded or the fitness company I helped build, there have been a couple of times when the person sitting in front of me gave me a gut feeling that hiring them would be a phenomenally good decision. Seven or eight years after inception, my strategy consulting firm [Acquis] was in high-growth mode, and we were hiring constantly. I helped shape the vision for what became our iterative, custom recruiting process, whose principles we often applied during on-campus recruiting as well. One of the schools where we were holding an information session was not considered a top-20 school in the US. However, one of my colleagues was an alum, so we had scheduled a recruiting slot. A senior undergraduate student approached me after the session, and we had a very interesting conversation. We subsequently invited him to our NY offices for interviews and ultimately made him an offer. He mentioned that he already had an offer from IBM, and the security of that much larger, more established company was hard to pass up as a new graduate, so he ended up working there. We stayed in touch over the coming months and ultimately, through numerous discussions, made him another offer, which he accepted and left IBM for Acquis - where he still works today! It wasn’t his résumé or the school he attended, but rather the insights he expressed through his questions — none of which were typical — that showed how interested he was not only in participating but also in contributing to our firm’s growth.

The flip side of this is another candidate that we made an offer to who ultimately didn’t accept, but for all the wrong reasons. Our financial offer exceeded his expectations, and everyone who had met him wanted him to join; however, his experience warranted a certain title, with the understanding that a year later we could assess the possibility of a promotion. Neither my cofounder nor I communicated that elevated title; rather, it was what he expected in the offer when he received it. Through discussions, I found that he simply could not let go of the title in his mind, which was ultimately unimportant to the role we wanted him to play in our company’s growth, so we rescinded the offer. We stood by our principles, and that made all the difference.

Here’s why I tell it. Every founder I’ve taught knows the pull of the impressive resume — it feels like de-risking, and it demos well to your investors. But the resume is a record of context, and you are not offering that context. You’re offering ambiguity, ownership, and a job that changes every quarter. Hire the person who has already done the job nobody gave them — at any scale, in any industry. That’s the trait that transfers.

So if you take one thing: read the resume last. Write down the three behaviors your next six months actually require, build the interview to surface them, and only then look at where the person has worked. The logo is the least interesting thing on the page.

Promise check. Everything I’ve published stays free — I don’t retro-gate, ever. Going forward the line is the one I drew when the doors closed: the question and my honest answer stay free. The full working — the spreadsheet, the build, the version applied to your race or your block — is member work. If you can read the whole argument without paying, I’ve kept my word.

That’s the argument — take it and hire better; it’s yours.
What sits below the line is the version you’d actually run: The Monday Worksheet — the three-behaviors exercise, the live-problem interview with the exact scoring table, the read-the-resume-last checklist, and the red flags that tell you you’re interviewing the machine instead of the person. It’s built to be used before your next interview goes on the calendar. If Open Tabs has earned it, this is what the member side is for.

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The sensor is elite. What I do with it is a push notification. Without someone paid to read the number and act on it, that’s all elite data is — a number.

Sit in that gap for a second, because it’s stranger than it looks. The obvious explanation is that my watch is a toy and the pro’s instrument is the real thing. It isn’t. Same class of sensor, same validated numbers. So if the data doesn’t change my morning, the failure is not the data. It’s somewhere else — and it’s a stranger place than most people think to look.

First, what’s actually on my wrist. An Apple Watch Ultra. Not a Whoop — Whoop can’t tell me the time, let alone play my music. Not a Garmin — Garmin is a running company that happens to make watches. Not an Oura — Oura is a sleep ring with opinions. Part of my reasoning is boring: Apple makes the hardware better every year, which means the data gets better every year, and I never have to think about it. But the real reason is that I don’t run with my phone. Ten dollars a month for cellular, AirPods in, Strava starts from my wrist, one of my BPM-engineered playlists starts with it — that’s the entire kit. If my family needs me mid-run, the call lands on the watch. And afterward everything syncs to Strava, where I can pull the run apart myself — or hand the data to a coach who reads this stuff for a living.

Hold on to that last person. That last person is the entire essay.

Now, the part I won’t argue. The sensors won. Flatly, cleanly won. Whoop’s heart rate and HRV are validated at around 99% against a medical ECG — a real number, not marketing. (It’s also the only place I’ll let “99%” stand. It does not mean your sleep stages are 99% of anything, or your recovery score, or your calories. Heart rate and HRV. Full stop.) The hardware got cheap and good — something like 611 million wearables shipped last year. And here’s the tell that keeps me honest: I keep strapping in. So do millions of people. Anyone calling this whole category a scam has never worn one through an actual training block. I already handed Whoop an F in these pages, and I stand by it — but that fight was about the money. This one isn’t. Put the money down and follow me.

The trickle went the wrong way. In 2019, everyone told the same story: trickle-down. The pros had lab-grade gear, and one day a cheaper version would reach the rest of us. Wait your turn, consumer — the tech is coming down the mountain.

Instead, the consumer gear went up the mountain. Whoop didn’t just reach the pros — it became Scuderia Ferrari’s official wearable. And read the fine print on that deal, because it’s better than the headline: Hamilton and Leclerc wear the strap to sleep, to train, to travel — everywhere except the car, because the FIA bans wearables in the cockpit. So Ferrari isn’t buying race telemetry. It’s buying the other 20 hours. Oura’s ring went on US Soccer. And the company that makes my watch is now the official performance technology partner of a major marathon. The gap between what an elite athlete wears and what a guy training for his first NYC Marathon wears didn’t shrink. It closed.

Meanwhile, the elite gear of 2019 left sport entirely. I watched this one up close. Fatigue Science’s ReadiBand was a genuine athlete kit — at one point, four of the five most recent world-championship-winning teams in American sports were testing it. I tested one myself and sat with their management team, and here’s what I actually learned: the teams were never really testing the strap. They were testing the data — what it meant, and who should act on it. Fatigue Science’s original business model wasn’t even sport. It was factories. Workers wore the sensor, the readings flowed wirelessly to tablets, and a manager could see — on rest scores — which workers could safely tolerate an overtime shift. The wearer was never the customer. The reader was.

Today the ReadiBand watches mine-truck drivers, trucking fleets, and the military. Zephyr’s chest strap got swallowed into Medtronic and faded from sport. Motiv’s smart ring became a fingerprint login. The elite hardware didn’t trickle down to you. It changed careers — and notice that in every new job, it reports to a manager.

So follow the logic. If the hardware came all the way down the mountain — came down so completely it climbed back up the other side, onto Ferrari’s drivers and the London Marathon — then the thing that never trickled down was never the hardware. It was the staff.

That’s the whole trick. A pro straps on the same class of sensor I do, and then a human being whose actual job is to read and analyze that data decides what the athlete does tomorrow. Green light but the trend looks ugly? Move the interval. Cut the volume. Push the hard session a day. The number is an input to a person who is paid to act on it.

Mine gets a color and a notification — me, alone in the kitchen at 6:30 with one shoe on, nobody in the room whose job is to read the number and tell me to do something different.

You bought the sensor. You never bought the staff — the person paid to read your number and actually change what you do tomorrow. That was always the whole difference between actionable data and a nicer notification.

And the real thing exists — you just can’t buy it at retail. I’ve worn the elite sensors. What I’d actually love to try is the elite staff. The Red Bull Athlete Performance Center — Salzburg and Santa Monica, in-house sports science for roughly 600 athletes — is the setup I mean: not better data, but people and systems that know what to do with the data when the work gets hard. Michelle Khare, a YouTube creator who had run exactly two long-distance races in her life, trained at the Santa Monica APC starting in April 2025 alongside pro ultrarunner David Kilgore, a two-time Great World Race winner — and went on to finish all seven races at the November 2025 Great World Race. Seven marathons, seven continents, seven days. Imagine what they could do for me with only one marathon!

And there’s a rhyme worth noting: her access to the APC was itself part of a sponsored-content relationship. Even the one civilian who got the staff didn’t buy it.

So the industry sells the staff back to you as software. It knows exactly what’s missing. Its answer is the AI coach — rebuild the missing human interpreter in code, rent it back monthly. Which is the quiet truth of the entire sector: every company selling you “insights” is selling back the labor it removed.

Here’s why I’m not buying it, and the evidence is theirs, not mine. Apple — Apple, with all the money and talent on earth — wound down its flagship AI health coach this February after concluding it trailed the specialists. Garmin shipped its version and got roasted by its own community for “summarizing data that’s already readily available.” And then the number that ends the argument: the Les Mills 2026 Global Fitness Report found only about one person in ten prefers AI workout guidance to a human coach. Nine in ten want the person. Gen Z — raised entirely inside these apps, supposedly born trusting the algorithm — resists it hardest of all. Hand people the staff-as-software, and they hand it right back.

I’ve been on the receiving end of this pitch. A founder once asked me to come aboard as an advisor to an AI-workout-music startup. His best line was genuinely good: “Spotify doesn’t know if you’re lifting or running. Human curation drifts. AI doesn’t.” I passed — and not because the line is wrong. Because it aims at the wrong target. A system that never drifts is a metronome, and nobody ever ran the best mile of their life to a metronome. AI can hold a tempo. It cannot hear effort — it cannot know what one specific song does to one specific body at the moment the legs start voting to quit. It’s why the playlists I build for paid subscribers run in exactly the opposite direction: human-curated, effort-mapped, taste over computation. Same reason a coach beats a readiness score. The machine reads the output. A person reads you.

Back to the kitchen at 6:30. My watch gives me elite numbers. Strava gives me an elite debrief. And the tie-breaking layer — the person who looks at the trend, then looks at me, and changes what tomorrow is — doesn’t come in the box. On the mornings the data says one thing and my legs say another, here’s who breaks the tie in that kitchen: nobody. What actually gets me out the door is older than any readiness score: focusing on how good it’s going to feel when I’m done. (That, and not wanting to hear the tone my coach takes about a skipped workout.) So I run the workout I planned the night before — not because the number told me to, but because it gave me no reason to change it. One of the most elite instruments in fitness, right there on my wrist, and it changed nothing.

The underline. The device stopped being the elite part — the day they put the same class of sensor on you and on a Formula 1 driver. That’s not a knock. The instruments are genuinely good, and mine isn’t going anywhere — it’s how I run phone-free and how my family finds me on a Saturday long run. Just be clear-eyed about the receipt. You bought the sensor. You did not buy the staff.

And the staff was always the expensive part. The most valuable thing in this whole setup is also the oldest thing in it: a person who looks at your number, then looks up at you, and tells you to take the day off.

Open Tab → I dove deeper: the full operator's read on the 2026 wearables sector — who actually owns the interpretation layer, and why the new sub-$100 screen-less trackers make the problem worse for the platforms — is coming for paid subscribers.

This is my experience as an athlete, operator, and investor — not medical advice, not a lab's verdict. I wear the thing. I just know what it is.

Worth It or Theater? — a new Friday ritual, starting today.

Now it’s your turn — this becomes a weekly ritual today. Name ONE thing you bought for performance or recovery, give it a verdict — WORTH IT or THEATER — and the single result (or absence of one) that convinced you. Not the brand’s claim. Your result. I’ll grade the room’s picks in the comments all day, and the best verdict gets quoted in next Friday’s post — first name only, with your permission.

P.S. — Members are expanding THE LIST. Name one restaurant you’d defend and the one line that makes it undeniable — reply to this email or drop it on yesterday’s Note. Every worthy pick gets compiled and credited on the page around Aug 19.

I will be covering a wide range of topics from an operator’s viewpoint with this series so if you’d like to be the first to know, consider subscribing!

If there are topics you are interested in, please comment or post to the chat.

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But the shiny label stopped me: 28 grams of protein, 150 calories, zero sugar. I’ve spent more of my life evaluating businesses than reading nutrition panels — sixteen years building a consulting firm, then sitting on the investor side of the table — and when a number looks that good, my instinct isn’t “is it healthy.” It’s “show me the machine behind it.”

Let me say the fair part first, loudly, because the internet won’t: the number is real. 28 grams of complete protein for 150 calories is the best macro line in America, and it isn’t close. David publishes third-party protein testing — Light Labs, December 2025 — 65 of 65 tests passed. The blend (milk protein isolate, whey, egg white, collagen) hits a complete amino profile. If your only constraint is protein-per-calorie, David wins on the spreadsheet, full stop.

Hold onto that concession. It’s the last thing in this story that survives contact with the evidence.

Here’s the mechanism. David gets to 150 calories by swapping most of the fat for EPG — esterified propoxylated glycerol — a modified plant fat that’s about 90% non-digestible. It’s a GRAS ingredient; the FDA reviewed the safety dossiers and issued “no questions” letters. And because most of it passes through you unabsorbed, it goes on the label at roughly 0.7 calories per gram instead of fat’s usual 9. It’s legal. It’s clever. (That greasy texture I noticed on day one? That’s the fat that isn’t supposed to count.)

Then David did the truly smart thing: they bought Epogee, the company that makes EPG. As business, acquiring your one irreplaceable supplier is textbook — and that’s precisely the problem. They didn’t vertically integrate the nutrition. They vertically integrated the illusion. The moat isn’t a better bar; it’s exclusive ownership of the accounting method that makes the label possible. (Three small brands that built products on EPG are now suing over that supply cutoff — an antitrust fight still in court as I write this.)

Now the machine. Peter Rahal founded David after selling his first company, RXBAR, to Kellogg’s for around $600 million. (Hold that thought — RXBAR comes back at the end, and it’s the best part.) David raised roughly $85 million, and the company says it was on pace to surpass $100 million in revenue in year one; Rahal is targeting $300 million for 2026. Their numbers, not audited ones — but even directionally, that’s one of the fastest food launches ever.

How? Not ads. The documented playbook: 20,000 free samples seeded to influencers before launch, a 40,000-person waitlist, and — the clever part — megaphones that own a piece. Andrew Huberman isn’t a hired spokesman; he’s an investor and a pitchman, same mouth, both jobs. Peter Attia — roughly two million Instagram followers — invested in the seed round and was Chief Science Officer until he stepped down in February 2026. Attia stepped down after his name appeared roughly 1,700 times — including email exchanges he himself called ‘indefensible’ — in the DOJ’s January 2026 Epstein files release. He has not been accused of any wrongdoing.

Think about that structure for a second. When a podcast host takes cash to read an ad, disclosure rules kick in — you know it’s payola. When the same host owns equity and just... enthuses about a product he happens to hold a stake in? The disclosure gets a lot fuzzier, and the enthusiasm reads as science. I paid for my greasy bar. The loudest voices telling me it was the future of protein own a piece of the company. That’s not a scandal — it’s just worth knowing whose mouth the megaphone is attached to.

The lawsuit — here’s the honest version. In January 2026, a federal suit alleged that independent testing found 263–275 calories and 11 to 13.5 grams of fat per bar, versus the 150 calories and 2 grams on the label. David disputed the methodology: the plaintiffs’ numbers came from bomb calorimetry, which burns the bar and measures total energy — while EPG’s whole premise is that your body doesn’t absorb most of that energy. Rahal called the suit “frivolous.” On March 30, 2026, the plaintiffs voluntarily dismissed it — without prejudice, meaning they can refile. No ruling, no explanation. So the fair line is not “David got caught.” It’s: someone alleged the calorie math only works inside David’s own accounting frame, David said they measured wrong, and the question left the courtroom before anyone answered it.

Your gut gets a vote too. The sweetener stack is four deep: allulose, about 8 grams of maltitol, sucralose, and acesulfame-K. Allulose is generally well tolerated — it gets a bad rap it doesn’t deserve. Maltitol is the classic gut-bomb, and the effects are dose-dependent: one bar, most people are fine; two or three, the odds turn against you. EPG itself was tolerated at around 10 grams a day in studies, with GI issues showing up at 25-plus — so the multi-bar-a-day crowd is running an experiment the label doesn’t mention. None of this will wreck you. At one bar it probably won’t. But “engineered to be eaten in volume, uncomfortable in volume” is a strange spec sheet for a health product.

So what do I actually eat? After the David experiment I went down my own rabbit hole — labels, ingredient decks, the works — and came out holding Jacob (~20g grass-fed protein, ~220 calories, honey and dates, no seed oils, no sugar alcohols). It reads like a recipe instead of a lab order. I also tried Prima (whole-food, ancestral-leaning): good, but — irony noted — greasy in its original form. They’ve since reformulated to 21 grams of protein and, reportedly, less “grease”; it’s back on my retest list, which is exactly how this should work. GoMacro is clean too, but at 250–290 calories for 10–12 grams of protein you’re getting granola-bar macros at small-meal calories — and the taste, charitably, is something a squirrel would respect more than enjoy.

Notice the trade. Jacob and Prima cost you ~70–90 more calories and a couple more dollars to get out of the lab and into actual food. If your only constraint is calories — you’re cutting, you’re deep in a training block — David’s spreadsheet win is genuinely useful, IF it’s accurate, and “engineered” isn’t automatically “bad” (whey isolate is engineered too). The right question is what’s your actual constraint. If it’s calories, David wins on paper. If it’s your gut, or your patience for ingredient lists that need a chemistry degree, eat the food and eat the calories. These days, there’s always a Jacob Bar — Vanilla — in my bag.

And here’s the part I can’t get over. While I was comparing labels, I pulled up RXBAR — Rahal’s first company, the one Kellogg’s paid $600 million for. Read the front of the wrapper — it IS the pitch: “3 Egg Whites, 6 Almonds, 4 Cashews, 2 Dates. No B.S.” Twelve grams of protein, 210 calories. That’s it — the ingredient list famously fits on the front. No EPG, no maltitol, no sucralose, no acesulfame-K. As a food guy, here’s my verdict: RXBAR is better for you than David. Not on the spreadsheet — on the shelf, in your body, as food.

Sit with that. The man who built the honest bar built the engineered one. First he made the bar whose entire brand was printing “No B.S.” on the wrapper, and sold it for $600 million. Then he raised $85 million to build the bar that needs an accounting method, a four-sweetener stack, and a supplier acquisition just to say 150. Both are legal. Both are brilliant business. Only one of them reads like food.

And the honest one is still sitting right there on the shelf.
🏪 LINK: The shelf: every bar that survived this teardown. (affiliate link — I only list what I actually rebuy)

Open Tab → I dove deeper: I read the lawsuit filings, the ingredient decks, the GRAS letters, and the cap table so you don't have to. This is experience, POV, and what works for me as an athlete, operator, and investor — not medical advice. If you've got gut issues, your gut is the expert, not me.

I will be covering a wide range of topics from an operator’s viewpoint with this series so if you’d like to be the first to know, consider subscribing!

If there are topics you are interested in, please comment or post to the chat.

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This morning at 8am I dropped the Race Day playlist — the last build of the founding window. This post is the last thing I’ll say about that window, so let me do it the way I graded my own predictions last Friday: no theater, just the board.

Two weeks ago I switched on paid. I promised no countdown gimmicks, so here is exactly what’s on the table until midnight tonight — and what isn’t.

What stays free, forever. The essays, the verdicts, the Office Hours questions, the Go Run playlist. If you never pay for a subscription, you still get the honest version of everything I publish publicly. That doesn’t change tonight, and it never will.

What paid gets today — not someday:

• THE LIST. 287 NYC restaurants from 40 years of eating in this city — 165 of them actually rated, the misses included, plus the gone-but-great. Gated, live now.

• The Full Playlist Library. Every BPM-mapped build, including this morning’s Race Day drop.

• The Office Hours archive as it grows — the full breakdowns behind every question. (The early ones stay free; I keep my promises.)

• The quarterly live AMA, where next quarter I’ll grade YOUR predictions on the same rubric I ran on myself. I came out at a 3.29 and led with the F on purpose. Same treatment — your call on the table.

• Founding is the patron tier — same access as annual, doubled down on purpose. What the extra buys is the seat: the AMA grading table, the Charter bonus below, and my thanks on the record.

• And the one thing that actually disappears at midnight: the Charter bonus — a custom race-day playlist, BPM-mapped to your race, your distance, your goal pace— or for your non-running workout. Join founding tomorrow and the tier still exists. This doesn’t.

That’s the entire pitch. The window closes tonight for one reason: a founding cohort only means something if it’s finite. I’d rather have a small room of people who chose this on the merits than a big one recruited by a fake timer.

If the free work has been worth your time since June, this is the one day I’ll ask you directly.

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Doors close at midnight ET. Free readers: nothing changes for you tomorrow, and I’m glad you’re here either way!

Sometimes you need to find fuel in the thin air!

Run it in order, no shuffle. When the dip lands around the 20-minute mark, ease up — that’s the plan, not a stumble. Then ride the climb out: the back third stacks tempo until the finish hands you something you’ll actually feel.

Here’s the arc I built into Race Day — No Shuffle, 40:58 from first stride to cooldown:

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Quick Answer: feedback is one of the most crucial pieces of culture you have — and the leader is not exempt from it. Let me prove that with a story where I’m the idiot.

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That’s not a complaint about the food. It might be the strangest compliment this city has ever earned.

New York doesn’t really do bad restaurants anymore. Think about it - when’s the last time you ate somewhere genuinely, memorably bad? Not overpriced, not loud, not annoying to book. Bad. It almost doesn’t happen. The floor came up. Everybody’s sourcing well, everybody’s plating well, everybody’s staff was trained by somebody who trained somewhere good. You can walk into a random place in almost any neighborhood and eat a perfectly competent meal.

And that’s the trap. Competence is everywhere now. Astonishment is rare. Those two facts are the same fact.

So what happened?

Two things, and I’m only going to be flattering about one of them.

The first is me. I have better taste than I did at twenty, and better taste is expensive - it costs you your own capacity for delight. I’ve eaten the thing. I’ve eaten the thing that the thing is copying. Being harder to impress isn’t a credential, it’s a tax, and I pay it every time I sit down.

But here’s the part that isn’t about me. Social media happened to restaurants, and it moved the industry’s center of gravity from the kitchen to the marketing department. A restaurant now opens into a wave of hype that has almost nothing to do with whether the food is good. The virality is the product. And when the hype is the product, the incentive is to build a room that photographs well, a dish that photographs well, a moment that photographs well - and to let the food and the service coast on the reputation the feed already built for you.
(The Corner Store comes to mind!)

You’ve felt this. You’ve gone to the place everyone posted about, eaten a competent meal in a beautiful room, walked out thinking that was fine - and then felt vaguely stupid for having expected more.

The honest version: the hype now exceeds the restaurant almost every single time. The number that goes the other way is indeterminately small.

Torrisi. Very few restaurants in New York - or anywhere - live up to the noise around their opening. Torrisi exceeded it. The space is genuinely transforming; you walk in, and the room does something to your posture. Every single item on the menu is beautifully constructed, and then, inconveniently for the cynics, it also tastes incredible - in layers. The service is above and beyond - even where you wait with a cocktail for your table. And the part that actually matters: every single time I’ve been there, the experience is incredible. Not the first time. Every time. Consistency is the least photogenic virtue there is, which is exactly why it’s the rarest one.

Tuome. In such an out-of-the-way pocket of the city, which is already a tell - nobody accidentally goes viral in a location like that. The story behind it, the founder-chef and his parents, is genuinely wonderful, and you can feel it in the room. The first time I went, the first thing I ordered was the snow crab - noodle, squash, dashi butter. I can’t fully describe how creative and flavorful that dish was. What I can tell you is what I did about it: for the first time in my life, I ordered it again for dessert that night. I’ve been back many times since. They have a Michelin star now. I’d like to think the crab did it.

Fedora. This one breaks my own framework, and I'm keeping it anyway. I'd known the original - the old-school room, exactly as it had always been - and then the space went dark for four or five years, the kind of closure you quietly assume is permanent. So when it reopened with a new team and the same name, I was genuinely excited: I got to walk back into a great space I thought I'd lost, with someone special. The atmosphere, the food - every dish - the drinks, the service, the interior. And the person across the table from me. That's the whole list, and I refuse to separate the items on it, because that's the point: the whoa wasn't only in the kitchen. It was in the room - a restaurant resurrected, dark for years, suddenly lit again - and I happened to be in it with the right person, and it still delivered. New team, same name, an old space brought back to life. Names are portable. That night wasn't.

And then the deep cut: Bouley. The original - 165 Duane Street, opened in 1987, gone by the summer of ‘96 when the rent finally outran it. (He reopened two blocks away years later; it isn’t the same room (which has since also closed), and it isn’t the one I’m talking about.) Here’s what I remember most, and it isn’t a dish. You walked in the door, and the entire space smelled completely, overwhelmingly of fresh apples - because it was apples, real ones, lined up on shelves surrounding the entrance. Not a diffuser. Not a brand scent. Apples on a shelf.

Sit with that for a second, because it’s the whole argument.

That apple wall was not a photo op. It couldn’t have been - this was the late eighties; there was no feed to post it to. It was built for the nose of the person walking through the door, which is the least scalable, least measurable, least marketable place a restaurant can possibly decide to spend its money. It existed to do something to you, in a hallway, for four seconds, and then you’d never think about it again. The room has been gone for nearly thirty years now.

Except I’ve thought about it for decades.

Here’s what the four of them share. Not a cuisine, not a price point, not a neighborhood. Every one of them was built for the person in the room instead of the person scrolling past. The apples at the door. The parents in the story. The service that still shows up on the ninth visit, when nobody’s reviewing you anymore. The night that was really about why I was excited to go back and share it with who was across the table.

You cannot photograph any of that. That’s not a coincidence - it’s the mechanism. The stuff that makes you go whoa is, almost by definition, the stuff that doesn’t survive being turned into content. So an industry optimizing for content will produce less and less of it - and it will do so while getting better at everything measurable. More competent. Less astonishing. Which is exactly what I’ve been eating for ten years.

So am I jaded? Sure, partly. Guilty. But I don’t think I’ve lost the ability to be astonished. I think astonishment got un-economic.

The good news is that it’s still out there, and it’s findable, and it announces itself in a specific way: it’s the place your friend can’t explain properly. Not the one they showed you a picture of. The one where they say “you just have to go,” and then trail off - because the thing that got them wasn’t a dish. It was four seconds in a hallway that smelled like apples.

Go to that one. Bring someone.

The Long Table — food, restaurants, and the New York that survives at the table. My taste, not a star rating. This is my experience and my palate, not a critic’s star rating. Reasonable people love restaurants I found merely fine, and that’s the correct outcome.

Open Tab -> I dove deeper: the full, filterable NYC restaurant list - the comprehensive one, not the argument - is LIVE now for paid subscribers.

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The $5 lacrosse ball and the $600 massage gun do roughly the same thing to your calf. The Myofascial Massage Stick sits in the middle at $40. I own all three. I reach for the Stick.

Most “recovery tech” is a nicer-feeling delivery system for pressure you can already generate for almost free. The gun buys you convenience and a good story. Sometimes that’s worth it. Usually it isn’t. The trick isn’t spending nothing — it’s knowing exactly what you’re paying for. Convenience, status, or outcome. Three different purchases wearing the same box.

That question is the whole essay. Walk through any NFL or NBA training room and it looks like a NASA cleanroom — compression boots, massage guns, cold-and-compression rigs humming away. The implication is loud and clear: this is what separates the elite from you, and it’s purchasable. I love good gear. I’m an early adopter by temperament, and I’ve bought — and used, for years — more of this list than I should probably admit. So let me do for recovery tech what I’d do for a startup: grade it on what it actually delivers, not the highlight reel.

Quick version up top: most of this stuff works for the soft outcomes — less soreness, more range of motion, feeling recovered — and feeling recovered is worth more than the skeptics admit, because it’s what gets you out the door tomorrow. The performance promises are where the theater lives. With one rehab-shaped exception I’ll get to.

Here’s the tier list.

Buy first — the Stick and a lacrosse ball (~$45 total). You’re buying outcome, almost free. This is the part the gadget ads would rather you skip. Self-myofascial release — rolling, ball work — has a large measured effect on range of motion and meaningfully reduces soreness, with no downside to performance. And the proposed mechanism (calming pain sensitivity and muscle tone so the muscle relaxes and lengthens) is the same one the expensive percussion guns work through. That’s the whole game: a $5 ball and a $600 gun are pulling the same lever. One just has a charging cable and a marketing budget. The Stick is the version I actually use most — fast, portable, and it gets the length of a calf or quad in a way the ball can’t.
The Stick — Amazon Lacrosse ball — Amazon

Worth it if you’ll actually use it — a mid-tier massage gun (~$150–$250, not the $600 one). You’re buying convenience.Percussion guns have decent evidence for soreness and short-term flexibility — and zero for strength or power output. So buy one for what it really gives you: reach into spots a ball can’t pin, speed, and the honest pleasure of the ritual. Mine earns its shelf space. Just know you’re buying a nicer version of the ball’s job, not a different result — and don’t pay flagship price for a feeling. TheraGun — Amazon

(As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.)

Worth it if you can afford it — Normatec compression boots (~$800–$1,100). You’re buying recovery you’ll actually feel — and use. Here’s where I part ways with the internet’s favorite dunk. Yes, the famous “97% of pro teams use them” line is a brand stat — keep that in mind about what “the pros use it” really tells you. And here’s the honest read on the science: what’s well documented is increased lower-limb blood flow and a real reduction in how sore you feel. A 2024 meta-analysis found the effects on actual muscle function trivial-to-small, and the lactate findings are mixed — lactate isn’t what makes you sore anyway. That’s what the studies measure. Here’s what my legs tell me: time in the boots after a heavy day, and the next morning is different. I’m giving you both, and I’m not dressing one up as the other. Because feeling recovered isn’t nothing — it’s often the difference between doing tomorrow’s run and skipping it, and in marathon training, consistency is the entire ballgame. Pricing: Normatec 3 legs run about $799–$899; the cordless Elite about $999–$1,099. One warning — there’s no official rental program, and the lease-to-own deals floating around add up to more than retail. If you’re in, just buy it. Normatec

Best in class, priced like it — Game Ready (~$3,300–$3,700 all-in). Cold plus active compression, and the best-evidenced device on this entire list: less pain, less swelling, fewer opioids after orthopedic surgery. It is genuinely best-in-class at what it does, and it will help recovery — this is the machine PTs and pro training rooms trust for a reason. The catch is the math: roughly $2,900–$3,300 for the unit, plus $425–$600 per wrap, sold through authorized dealers — yes, to regular consumers, online. The good news: you don’t have to own it. Game Ready’s official rental channel runs through a physician’s prescription, but independent medical-equipment renters will do a two-week rental without one. If you’re coming back from surgery or a real injury, this is where I’d point you first. For a healthy runner’s routine sore quads, it’s more machine than the job needs — but the machine is real.

The one I own and swear by — Compex (EMS), ~$150–$420 depending on model. This is the most personal verdict on the list, because I’ve owned a Compex for years. When I rehabbed from ACL-replacement surgery, it was part of how I held onto strength in a leg I wasn’t allowed to load — and that’s not just my experience talking: using electrical stimulation to preserve muscle when you physically can’t train it is among the best-supported uses in this whole category. The recovery evidence is better than you’d guess, too — EMS reliably reduces soreness and can bring strength and jump performance back faster than passive rest, roughly on par with active recovery. Think of it as active recovery you can do sitting down. I also use mine before and after tennis and after longer runs. The warm-up use is thinner in the literature — I’ll say that plainly — but it’s been part of my routine for years, and I keep coming back to it because it works for me. Pricing: the Edge 3.0 runs about $150, the Performance 3.0 about $220, the Sport Elite 3.0 about $420 list, and the wireless models $250–$400+. One skeptical aside: Compex is on “sale” nearly year-round. The discount is the real price — never pay list. Expensive next to a lacrosse ball? Sure. Worth it, in my opinion — and I’ve put years on mine to earn that opinion. Compex

Here’s the line that ties it together: across this category, you’re buying some mix of less soreness, better blood flow, and belief. All three are real. The mistake isn’t spending money — it’s paying outcome prices for status purchases. And none of it replaces the stuff that actually makes you faster in November, which is gallingly boring: the training, the sleep, the food, not ramping mileage like an idiot.

So what’s actually in my bag training for my first marathon? A lacrosse ball. The Stick — the thing I reach for most. A TheraGun that earns its keep on the spots the Stick can’t pin down. And a Compex that’s been with me since ACL rehab. And yes — the Normatec 3 Legs in this house are real: I bought them (backpack and all) for my son, a sprinter heading off to college this fall. He recovers in them; I borrow them after heavy days. Buying recovery gear for your kid and stealing sessions of it is, I suspect, the most honest product endorsement a father can give.

Buy the ball and the Stick tonight. Buy the gun if you’ll actually use it. Buy the boots if the budget genuinely won’t notice. Rent the Game Ready when you’re hurt. And whatever you just saved, spend it on a coach, or shoes that fit, or literally anything that touches the part where the race is actually won.

On the Run → This is athlete experience and POV — what works for me as an athlete, operator, and investor — not medical advice. If you’re rehabbing a real injury, the device that helps is the one your PT hands you — if something hurts, see a pro, not a Substack.

Run it in order, no shuffle, and commit to the deal: on the fast pairs you push like there’s an actual hill in front of you, and on the slow pairs you genuinely back off — that recovery is what makes the next climb possible. It closes on a hill, because of course it does. I’ve thought about this for two semesters while I was teaching at Cornell in Ithaca. Running those hills was brutal in the beginning, but this playlist style made it bearable - somewhat 😉.

Here’s the arc I built into Hills — No Shuffle, 42:57 from first stride to cooldown:

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Here’s how we got here. Last Friday I wrote about Bessemer’s Anti-Portfolio and repeated the line I’ve taught at Cornell: fake humility is abstract, real humility is specific. That’s an easy thing to admire in someone else’s firm. So I pulled two tapes of my own: The Business Side of Fitness, Episode 15, August 10, 2020, and D&D Fitness Radio, Episode 123, February 13, 2022. Me, on the record, predicting the future of an industry I’d operated in, invested in, and sweated in.

The rules: every call gets the quote, the date, what actually happened, and a letter grade. The grades average into a GPA, like it’s freshman year and I can’t drop the class.

One objection to kill before we start. By February 2022, everybody was bearish on connected fitness — the stock charts had done the arguing, and bear takes were free. Fair. So judge the tape on what wasn’t consensus: calling against the Apple-acquisition rumor the same week it spiked Peloton’s stock 25%. A constructive call — that Strava’s community would turn out to be the whole business. And a Flywheel bet made with real money a year before the crash.

3.29 — That’s the unweighted GPA. Now the work — oldest tape first.

1. Flywheel: the 35 days

The Business Side of Fitness, Ep 15 · August 10, 2020 · 18:11 (min:sec): Flywheel is “tailing down” and “likely to go out of business.”

On September 14, 2020 — exactly 35 days later — Flywheel filed for Chapter 7. Not Chapter 11, where you reorganize and fight another day. Chapter 7. Liquidation. Five weeks from my mouth to the court docket.

And here’s the part that matters more than the sound bite: this wasn’t a hot take I tried on for a podcast. In September 2019 — a full year before that episode — the growth-equity fund I was running made a seven-figure investment premised on exactly the gap Flywheel’s collapse would leave behind. The tape wasn’t a prediction. It was a thesis I already had money behind, said out loud with a date on it.

Grade: A. Vague bearishness is free. “Likely to go out of business,” on the record, costs something.

2. Peloton: the gaps

D&D Fitness Radio, Ep 123 · February 13, 2022 · 32:37: sustaining a company is daily iteration and daily listening — “that’s where Peloton missed... it gave gaps for others to rise up and eat away at that huge lead.”

Housekeeping first, because this one gets misremembered: the host called Peloton a sinking ship that day. Not me. My version was narrower and, I’d argue, more useful — they stopped iterating, and the lead leaked out through the gaps.

When we taped, Foley had resigned five days earlier, with 2,800 layoffs announced in the same breath. That news wasn’t the call. The call was that the erosion wouldn’t stop. It didn’t: two more CEOs since, and a stock that sits around $6 — roughly 96% below its peak.

Honest caveat, because a grade without a caveat is marketing: Peloton posted its first GAAP profit this spring. It isn’t dying. It’s smaller, humbler, and possibly fine. But the call was never “Peloton dies.” The call was “the lead is gone, and it left through the gaps.” That held for four straight years.

Grade: A. Leads don’t get stolen. They leak.

3. Apple: the rumor week

D&D Fitness Radio, Ep 123 · 33:43: “Apple will not acquire them.”

Context is the grade here. The very week we taped, the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times were reporting Amazon, Nike, and maybe Apple circling Peloton, and the stock spiked about 25% on the story. Saying “no deal” that week meant betting against the market’s mood at its hottest.

Nobody ever bought Peloton. Not Apple, not Amazon, not Nike — nobody, through three CEOs and the whole drawdown. And the kicker I couldn’t have scripted: Peloton’s current CEO, Peter Stern, came over from Apple Fitness+. Apple didn’t buy the company. Peloton bought the Apple guy.

Grade: A. Acquisition rumors are hope with a ticker attached. Ask who’s selling the story.

4. Mirror: the hedge

D&D Fitness Radio, Ep 123 · 35:28: Mirror won’t succeed — there’s no community behind it — and on Lululemon’s acquisition, it “has potential but we don’t know.”

Nineteen and a half months later — September 26, 2023 — Lululemon stopped selling Mirror and signed a deal to get its fitness content from, of all places, Peloton.

My instinct on Mirror was right, and I said it plainly. Then I got to Lululemon and reached for “has potential” instead of finishing the thought.

Grade: B+. A hedge is a prediction you didn’t have the stomach to finish.

5. The celebrity call: wrong name, right thesis

D&D Fitness Radio, Ep 123 · 36:44: celebrity equity can’t substitute for community — and the connected-strength machine LeBron backed wouldn’t matter.

Except: replaying the tape, I caught myself saying “Tempo.” The company LeBron actually backed, in October 2021, was Tonal - which is what I meant. Wrong name, on the record. In a series called Receipts, I eat that one in print.

So grade the thesis against the company he actually backed. Tonal cut 35% of its staff in July 2022. In April 2023 its valuation was cut by roughly two-thirds, and Forbes ran the story under a headline saying athlete investors couldn’t save it. (Footnote: Tempo, the company I actually named, fared no better — no funding round since 2021, gutted by layoffs, still alive but badly diminished. The thesis didn’t care which name I botched.)

Grade: A−. Right thesis, docked a notch for the name — precision is the whole point of a series called ‘Receipts’. Celebrity is reach. Community is retention. They are not the same product.

6. Strava: the marker

D&D Fitness Radio, Ep 123 · 50:44: Apple Watch with Strava showing up on the wrist — the community around it is the marker.

Three months later, Strava announced 100 million athletes. Today it’s past 180 million, was valued at $2.2 billion in May 2025, and this January it filed for an IPO. Filed — not public; I only get credit for what’s actually happened. And one detail I enjoy more than I should: Peloton’s ex-CEO now sits on Strava’s board.

Grade: A. Community wasn’t a feature. It was the business.

7. WHOOP: the F

D&D Fitness Radio, Ep 123 · 45:28: WHOOP is a consumer device, not a high-performance one. And I said it like a ceiling.

My receipts here are personal. In WHOOP’s early days, I had the opportunity to be on a call with the CEO/Founder (Will Ahmed), and he sent me a band, and I wore it for two weeks on my right wrist with an Apple Watch on my left. One boxing class: 1,500-plus calories on the WHOOP, about 700 on the Watch. There is no way I burned 1,500. I wish. And I’m a lifelong swimmer — the strap wouldn’t stay put through an easy swim workout. Case closed, I figured. This is a new Nike Fuel band.

Four years later, here’s the honest read on my own anecdote. No wrist wearable is validated on calorie burn — published error rates run from about 15% to north of 90%, and WHOOP’s own science blog hedges on it. Both devices on my wrist that day were guessing. Optical sensors underwater are a physics problem, not a WHOOP defect. And the thing WHOOP actually stakes its name on — heart rate and HRV during sleep — is validated at about 99%. The device was fine. My frame was wrong on the future.

The business read was worse. I heard “consumer-grade” and treated it as a ceiling. Consumer was the prize: a $10.1 billion Series G this March, around 2.5 million members, a billion-plus in bookings, cash-flow positive. And since January, the logo rides on Ferrari’s Formula 1 cars while the whole team wears the band.

The part I should have seen most, given call #5 above: many of WHOOP’s most visible athletes — Ronaldo, Mahomes, McIlroy, LeBron among them — are compensated partners, ambassadors, or investors, on top of league deals that put a strap on every NFL player. Equity as consumer marketing. The same celebrity playbook that couldn’t save Tonal — run on top of a product people actually keep using. Celebrity can’t replace community. Turns out it can advertise one.

Split verdict, single grade. Right about the device — it is a consumer product, and that’s still true. Wrong about the business, which is the call I actually made.

Grade: F. I graded a company by my own wrist instead of by its market.

Add it up: four A’s, an A−, a B+, and an F. That’s 23 grade points across seven calls — a 3.29. Respectable. Also permanently disfigured by the F, which is about the right amount of humility for anyone in the prediction business.

Because the calls that hit all rhyme. Peloton’s lead leaked into other people’s communities. Mirror had none. Tonal rented celebrity instead of building one. Strava was community, and community turned out to be the entire business. The miss is the same lesson inverted: I judged WHOOP through a community of one — me, my wrist, one boxing class, one swim. Meanwhile the backdrop settled the argument for everybody: a record 81 million Americans belonged to a gym in 2025, while Peloton holds 2.66 million subscribers. People wanted rooms with other people in them. That was the thesis under every call on these tapes, and it was the point all along.

So here’s what happens next. Receipts is now a recurring section of Open Tabs. Every quarter I’ll mark the board to market and re-grade as the facts move — Peloton’s profit already has my pencil hovering over that A. Grades that change aren’t a bug. They’re the entire point of grading in the public eye.

And it’s your turn. Send me the take you’d least like read back to you — reply to this email or drop it in the comments. I’ll grade a batch in a future post, and founding members get theirs graded live in the quarterly AMA.

One more date, since dates are the whole genre: the Charter Window — the first 100 founding seats — closes in seven days, on Friday, July 31. If you’re deciding whether the paid tier is worth it, this essay is the product: judgment, on the record, graded in public, F included.

Open Tab → I dove deeper: both full episodes are embedded above, timestamps and all. Check my math. Then send me yours.

I will be covering a wide range of topics from an operator’s viewpoint with this series so if you’d like to be the first to know, consider subscribing!

If there are topics you are interested in, please comment or post to the chat.

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That list became a spreadsheet, the spreadsheet became an argument with itself, and today it becomes yours.

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So training for my first marathon, I did the thing I do with every belief I’ve held too comfortably — I went and read what the evidence actually says. Short version: the stretching I do is good for me. It’s just not doing the job I thought it was.

Here’s what surprised me. The big fear — that stretching before you run “kills your power” — is mostly overblown. The largest review out there (264 studies) pegs the hit to power from static stretching at about negative 1.9 percent — which they literally classify as “trivial” — as long as you keep the holds short and inside a real warm-up. The meaningful power drop only shows up when you do long, isolated holds, which no runner needs to do before a run anyway. So the panic about stretching wrecking your run? Largely a myth.

But here’s the one that actually rearranged my thinking: stretching doesn’t really prevent injuries. Multiple systematic reviews land in the same place — routine static stretching does not meaningfully lower injury rates. What does? Strength training. A landmark meta-analysis of 25 trials and ~26,000 people found strength work cut overall injuries to about a third, and overuse injuries — the kind that ends marathon dreams — by almost half, with a clear “more is better” curve. Stretching showed no significant effect. For runners, the other big lever is just as unglamorous: don’t ramp your mileage like an idiot.

I love that, honestly. The thing I’d been treating as armor is really just maintenance — it keeps me mobile, it feels good, it gets me ready to move — and the actual injury insurance is the boring stuff I was tempted to skip.

Even the coaches at the top see it on the ground. Dan Pfaff — the track & field coach who coached Donovan Bailey—The 1996 Atlanta Olympic Gold Medalist in the 100m and guided Greg Rutherford to Olympic long-jump gold in 2012 — put it plainly in a lecture reported by Athletics Weekly: “I have guys – and if they are restricted in a few key areas then we are going to stretch before we do the workout,”adding that “our power output doesn’t go down – any of the stuff the literature says, I don’t see it.”

Derrick Adkins, Olympic Gold medalist in the 400m Hurdles (Atlanta 1996) — who I know personally and now coaches sprinters in NYC — has often told me that stretching is much more important for sprinters than marathoners, much more. “But even for sprinters, strengthening is more important for injury prevention than stretching. For sprinters, stretching is of moderate importance. For marathoners it is of minimal importance. For both, muscle-strengthening is of maximal importance; however, the strengthening programs for marathoners and sprinters should look vastly different.”

The man who’s coached Olympic medalists and the coach who’s won a gold medal agree with the meta-analysis: short, targeted, sensible — not religion.

So here’s how I actually warm up now — and you can watch me do it in the video. Nothing fancy: dynamic stuff before I run — hamstring sweeps, walking lunges, open and close gates, high knees, then an easy jog to find the rhythm. 10 to 12 minutes. The longer, sink-into-it static stretches I save for after, or for their own flexibility session, when I’m not about to ask my legs for power. (This is what works for me — not a prescription. Your hips, your history, your call.)

The mental shift is the whole point: stretch because it keeps you loose and because it feels good — not because you think it’s the thing standing between you and the sidelines. Then go lift something heavy and add your miles slowly. That’s the armor.

On the Run → Experience and POV from a first-time marathoner, not medical or physical-therapy advice. The video is my routine, not a regimen — if something hurts, see a pro, not a Substack.

The students were Larry Page and Sergey Brin. And here’s the part that gets me: I didn’t dig that quote out of some deposition. Cowan’s own firm published it. It’s on their website right now, under a heading that honors the greatest companies they ever said no to.

I’ve been teaching entrepreneurship at Cornell, and there’s one slide I never have to work for.

It’s just a screenshot of a webpage. Bessemer Venture Partners — a storied, top-tier firm with roots dating back to the Carnegie Steel empire — maintains a page called the Anti-Portfolio. Not THE portfolio — The anti-portfolio. It is a list of the legendary companies they had a shot at and passed on, told in their own words, with the names of the partners who blew it.

Their framing, verbatim: being one of the nation’s oldest venture firms “has afforded our firm an unparalleled number of opportunities to completely screw up.”

Here’s the roll call, lightly abridged:

Google. The garage. That line.

Facebook. In 2004, at a corporate retreat, partner Jeremy Levine dodged a young Eduardo Saverin - and then got cornered by him in the lunch line. Levine’s counsel to the kid: “Kid, haven’t you heard of Friendster? Move on. It’s over!”

Tesla. Partner Byron Deeter met the team in 2006, test-drove the Roadster, loved it so much he put down a deposit - and passed on the company. His logic, which he also published: “It’s a win-win. I get a great car and some other VC pays for it!”

Apple. Offered pre-IPO stock at a roughly $60 million valuation. Deemed “outrageously expensive.”

PayPal. Passed on the Series A. Rookie team, regulatory nightmare. Four years later: sold to eBay for $1.5 billion.

eBay. David Cowan's reaction, preserved on the page: "Stamps? Coins? Comic books? You've GOT to be kidding." Followed by the verdict: "No-brainer pass."

Atlassian. Notes from 2006: totally self-financed, started on a credit card, founders don’t ever want to go public. When Bessemer finally got a real chance in 2010, the $400 million valuation was “a tad rich.” The shares they didn’t buy were later worth over a billion dollars. That’s not my math - that’s their page.

FedEx. They passed seven times. Seven.

And then, because apparently the self-immolation wasn’t complete, the page describes some of these as “a conscious act of generosity to another, younger venture firm” that “could really use a billion dollars in gains.” 🤣

Here’s why I keep coming back to this.

Every company on earth claims to embrace failure. It’s in the values deck, right between “integrity” and “bias for action.” Somebody’s on LinkedIn this morning posting about how their biggest setback was really their biggest teacher, and I promise you that person has not named a single specific thing they got wrong.

That’s the tell. Fake humility is abstract. Real humility is specific.

“We learn from our mistakes” costs nothing. “I said how do I get out of this house without going near your garage, and the guys in the garage were Larry and Sergey” costs something. It has a name attached. It has a room, a sentence, a person who has to walk into partner meetings for the next twenty-five years knowing it’s on the company website.

That specificity is the entire product. Bessemer didn’t write a humility statement. They showed receipts.

And I’ll say the thing the reverent posts about this page never say, because I think it’s more interesting than the reverence: this is also fantastic marketing. It’s a moat. Every founder who’s been rejected by a VC has felt small; this page is one of the only artifacts in the industry that says the smartest people in this business rejected Google, so your ‘no’ means less than you think. Bessemer has been telling that story for twenty-five years, and it’s very hard to copy - not because the idea is complicated, but because you can only laugh about missing Google if you’re winning everywhere else. Self-deprecation is a luxury good. It requires a balance sheet.

(To be fair: whether the page actually wins them deals is something Bessemer and its admirers assert, not something anyone has measured. Take the branding win as demonstrated and the deal-flow win as plausible.)

Now - go look for another one. I did.

Version One Ventures has an anti-portfolio. ISAI in Paris has one. GVA has one. A handful of angels keep personal lists. All of them small, all of them later, all of them following Bessemer.

Sequoia doesn’t have one! Andreessen doesn’t have one! Benchmark, Accel, Founders Fund, Kleiner - nothing! Not one brand-name firm has published a list of what it got catastrophically wrong. Twenty-five years, the format is free, everyone in the industry knows about it and quotes it at dinner, and nobody has copied it.

That silence is the real story. Bessemer’s page isn’t remarkable because it’s funny. It’s remarkable because everyone else read it, laughed, and went back to publishing only their winners.

I’ve been on both sides of this. I’ve pitched, and I’ve been the one saying no. When I was investing, I had a thesis, and I’d pass on anything outside it - cleanly, quickly, and sometimes, in retrospect, stupidly. Passing is the job. Most of the time you’re right, and the times you’re wrong are the times that get written about.

I’ve shown this to students in class and asked two things: first, if they were the General Partner at a VC firm, would they do this? Second, how can you apply this to your startup?

The lesson I want the students to take isn’t “VCs are dumb.” They’re not; Bessemer is a great firm, which is precisely why the page works. The lesson is that the confidence to publish your worst call is the same confidence that lets you make the next one. If you can’t say out loud what you got wrong, you’ll quietly organize your whole life around never being caught getting it wrong again - which is a spectacular way to never do anything. Even Michael Jordan - arguably the greatest basketball player ever - was famously quoted as saying, “I’ve missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. Twenty-six times, I’ve been trusted to take the game-winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.“

So here’s my ask — and I’ll go first. What’s on your anti-portfolio? Not the failure you’ve already sanded into a nice story with a lesson at the end. The one where you can still hear the exact dumb sentence you said.

Here’s mine. In the early days of Acquis, we were consulting for Concur — enterprise travel-and-expense software, long before anyone said “SaaS” out loud. We worked closely enough that co-founder and CEO Steve Singh made us an offer: instead of paying our roughly $100K invoice in cash, he’d pay it in pre-IPO equity. We took the cash. Young firm, real payroll — every responsible person might have made the same call. Concur went public in December 1998 at $12.50 a share. Sixteen years later, SAP bought the company for $129 a share in cash — about $8.3 billion, the largest pure-SaaS acquisition anyone had made to that point. That invoice would have been worth about $140K by the close of IPO day. By the time SAP wrote its check: over $1 million.

The exact sentence was some version of “we’ll take the cash.” I can still hear it.

And next Friday I'll prove I mean it — I found two tapes of myself from 2020 and 2022, and I'm grading every prediction on them. Publicly. Receipts attached.

Open Tab → I dove deeper: bvp.com/anti-portfolio.
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Quick Answer — and I’ll take the high road first: different people do it different ways. But here’s how it actually works for most professional money, and here’s how I do it.

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Here’s the honest version of why. I’ve spent 25 years building companies, a few investing, and a few more teaching founders at Cornell — and the one thing I kept wishing existed was a place that graded ideas the way I actually grade them. Not thought leadership. Just “what are you claiming, and does the evidence back it.” That’s Open Tabs.

The free stuff stays free — the essays, the teardowns, the first playlist.
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I’m not going to dress this up. It’s $200 a year. It’s for the people who want a hand in the thing while it’s still small — and who’d actually use a standing line to ask me what they’re stuck on.

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Founding details as of today. This is my experience as an athlete, operator, and investor — the AMA is conversation, not coaching or advice.

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Run it conversational, no shuffle. If you can’t sing along, you’re going too hard for what this is. Let the low BPM set a floor under your effort, soak up the recovery, and let that gentle lift at the end carry you home without ever feeling like work. This is the run that lets tomorrow’s run be good. Maybe, if you run with a smartwatch or fitness wearable, pay attention to your heart rate and focus on stability here.
[🤫Wearable Tech post coming soon!]

Here’s the arc I built into Tempo — No Shuffle, 42:12 from first stride to cooldown:

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Set it, no shuffle, and treat the beat as your metronome. If you’re matching footstrike to it, you’re locked in the zone this is built for: comfortably hard, sustainable, the pace you could hold for an hour but choose to hold for 42 minutes. No spikes, no dips — one honest gear the whole way. I use this to try to stay at an 8-min-per-mile pace.

Here’s the arc I built into Tempo — No Shuffle, 42:12 from first stride to cooldown:

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