Joined July 2007
- Tweets 19,253
- Following 1,259
- Followers 28,986
- Likes 16,950
1,240 Photos and videos
Pinned Tweet
25 Apr 2025
Here's my big personal news:
Natural Dog Company has been acquired by FoodScience, a Morgan Stanley Capital Partners portfolio company!
After 13 years, the journey that started with me quitting my job to go all-in on Elements Brands has officially come to an end.
What started as one guy in a rented office turned into $200M of sales and something much bigger.
We bought (and exited) 8 brands, from skincare to laundry detergent to pet wellness.
We pioneered the "ecommerce aggregator" model long before that was even a thing.
We built an incredible team with deep expertise across ecommerce, Amazon, retail, operations, and finance, all of whom are staying on to work on Natural Dog and FoodScience's other amazing brands.
And I'm not going anywhere.
I'm staying on as VP of Corporate Development for the combined platform, where I’ll be leading M&A - finding and acquiring the best pet brands in the world.
If you know me, you know I love this stuff. I can't wait to keep doing it with the firepower of FoodScience and Morgan Stanley behind me.
Huge thanks to everyone I've learned from here on Twitter/X, and especially the EcommerceFuel crew. Y'all have been my sounding board, my therapy sessions, and my second brain for the last decade. I've learned more from you than any MBA could've taught me. Thanks for being generous with your knowledge and support.
If you're running a pet brand and thinking about an exit - or know someone who is - DM me. We’re buying. I'd love to help you write your next chapter.
Press release is in the next tweet!
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Bill D'Alessandro retweeted
This business buries fiber inside railroad easements.
25-year niche. 4x earnings.
So good we found a potential buyer DURING the episode. (And the listing's gone.)
@girdley, @BillDA, and @endresenheather dig in.
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Bill D'Alessandro retweeted
Jun 4
Charlotte is the most underrated city in the country and it’s not even close
• Affordable
• Nice people
• Great weather
• High paying jobs
• Cool neighborhoods
• Short drive to the beach or mountains
Underrated city rankings:
1. Charlotte
2. Tampa
3. Pittsburgh
4. Cincinnati
5. Kansas City
6. Columbus
7. Richmond
8. Greenville
9. Indianapolis
10. Milwaukee
Criteria:
• Good jobs
• Attractive people
• Affordable enough
• Can still get a reservation without knowing the owner
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Bill D'Alessandro retweeted
A 30-year-old porta potty business in Madison, WI with 48% margins and zero marketing spend.
But is this "recession-proof" business really worth $1.6M?
@girdley, @BillDA, and @endresenheather dig into the poop economics.
Listen now ⬇️
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Jun 4
I listened to this and now you absolutely HAVE TO also
Im almost embarrassed to say how many times I listened to this. It actually gave me goosebumps. 😂
👉𝐋𝐨𝐫𝐝 𝐨𝐟 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐑𝐢𝐧𝐠𝐬 𝐃𝐢𝐬𝐜𝐨: 𝐎𝐧𝐞 𝐅𝐮𝐧𝐤 𝐭𝐨 𝐑𝐮𝐥𝐞 𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐦 𝐀𝐥𝐥
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Jun 4
This doesn't have nearly as many likes as it deserves
Guys - it's the entire LOTR story with original lyrics, a great beat, and hilarious AI visuals
It's worth 7 minutes
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Jun 3
Class action lawyers are about to have a field day
1/New York just became the first US state to require advertisers to disclose AI-generated people in ads.
It takes effect June 9, 2026. If you run paid media, you have days, not months.
Here's what it actually means for your brand or agency. 🧵
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Jun 3
Chris is so right - there's no excuse for being intentionally financially illiterate as a business owner
Accounting is the language of business - you need to understand it
If you don't, I can teach you :)
Jun 3
I did myself dirty as a young entrepreneur.
Looking back, here’s my biggest regret:
I pretended I wasn't smart enough to understand how a profit and loss works. Or how a balance sheet works. Or how debt and cash flow actually works. I said it wasn’t for me, and hired an expert to take care of it instead.
But I found out that’s the one thing in business you should never outsource.
Years ago, I brought in a CFO from one of the big four accounting firms. He spoke the language of finance perfectly, and was actually a friend from college. He’s a great human being who didn't mean to cause any harm.
But instead of having hard conversations, telling me "Chris, we have to stop X, Y, and Z right now and fire everybody," we just kept borrowing debt hoping things would turn around.
And when you're a self-funded business personally guaranteeing that debt, you're literally taking on the liability to pay your employees' bills instead of taking care of yourself first.
That led to years of depression and sadness.
Thank God we clawed our way out of it.
My biggest regret now:
If I had clearly identified this mental block earlier, I would have had the hardest conversation of my life right then, and fired everybody on the spot.
Instead, I let the bleeding continue for months and it made everything so much worse.
As a result, I've never looked at a balance sheet or a P&L the same way since.
So if you take one thing from this, let it be this:
Never delegate your finances. Your company’s growth depends on it.
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Jun 2
You really don't hear much about Bitcoin these days huh?
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May 31
Honestly this is refreshing and hopefully we can move past all this BS and on to substantive topics
May 31
Americans really, really, REALLY don't like progressive ideology.
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May 30
This is hilarious
Even the guys selling john boats on FB marketplace are using AI
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May 29
My wife currently taking a victory lap for always insisting on shopping at Food Lion
Harris Teeter stans (me) in shambles
Costco is the king of low prices
Charts of the Week: a16z.news/p/charts-of-the-we…
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May 28
This should be taught in every search / ETA program
80% of value created in most successful exits is from multiple expansion (not EBITDA growth), and most of that can be explained by sourcing a proprietary deal and then selling in a competitive auction
The final point is critical - the path to PE / strategic exit is extremely narrow below ~$25MM of enterprise value. Those buyers are where the multiple expansion comes from - you have to get there.
Which means that if you want to make money as a search fund, you *really* need to buy a business that can get to $25M of exit value - which means $2-$4M of EBITDA at a minimum (6-8X multiple).
The more you know - the data don't lie.
May 28
We acquire businesses in the same size range that most searchers are targeting so I pay attention to what's happening in that market. Came across a January 2026 Yale case study from Wasserstein and two co-authors that I hadn't seen circulate much. It's a mathematical decomposition of value creation across 59 exited ETA companies. Worth reading in full.
The headline finding is that 80% of enterprise value creation came from multiple expansion not EBITDA growth. Probably not surprising to experienced investors. But there's a finding that gets less attention: 70% of companies saw margin contraction during the hold period. The paper notes that investors consistently claimed their portfolio companies were growing margins until they actually reviewed the numbers.
The more relevant observation for smaller deals is structural. The sample is entirely traditional search funds, which exit through full investment banking processes into PE and strategic buyers. Competitive auction, offering memo, the works. The multiple expansion the paper documents is partly a function of that exit architecture. Bought proprietary but then sold through a process engineered to extract maximum valuation.
That exit path largely doesn't exist below ~$25MM in enterprise value. Smaller deals see multiple expansion too, but rarely at the magnitude the paper documents and without the same engineered process behind it. The margin compression finding is the more relevant takeaway for buyers in the lower range.
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May 28
Buried lede - Tito’s Vodka is an absolute monster
May 28
Don Julio Reposado has dethroned a fifth of Tito's as the top selling ABC product in Mecklenburg County
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May 28
Since selling my business I am now technically a W2
The ability to put in a PTO request and actually not check email the entire time is an absolutely wild thrill
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May 28
What if our best and brightest have never been truly challenged?
Athletes improve by playing against higher and higher levels of competition - the same dynamic is now appearing in mental pursuits.
Humans rise to meet the AI.
The ceiling for humans may be higher than we think!
May 28
After AlphaGo, the skill of human Go players noticeably improved. I suspect we will see a similar pattern in math.
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May 22
Wait - so are we finally allowed to admit that intelligence is a genetically heritable trait?
May 22
A friend of mine had her embryos screened by Herasight and they found one with an IQ score in the 99.99th percentile
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May 22
Very interesting paper which supports all my priors, so obviously I enjoyed it
WFH folks won the battle but lost the war - they got a few years of slacking off / increased flexibility, but gave up long-term job security
There's no free lunch in capitalism
May 21
Is GenAI causing the relative decline in early-career hiring? Our latest research finds that these effects may be conflated with another important driver: the rise of WFH arrangements (1/N)
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May 21
Wow this is one heck of a chart!
"The United States has the most progressive tax system in the world"
I would have bet you a lot of money that wasn't a true statement.
May 21
Said much of the same last week, but this is for the most part true, and most people don’t realize this (It marginally depends on what state). Definitely true in CA. Before everyone says, well it’s only income tax or the rich take a larger share, please see this graph: wid.world/document/why-is-eu…
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i aspire to be able to write like this, wow.
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