Mickael Costache

Co-founder @Elgrocer (acquired by @eAndUAE)

[Drew Fallon @drewfallon12]

Mark Cuban's shark tank portfolio is saved!

With the rumored acquisition of BeatBox by AB InBev yesterday, 2025 has produced the two biggest shark tank exits ever, both in beverage

On Season 6 episode 6, aired 2014, Mark Cuban invested $1M into BeatBox founders at a $3M valuation.

If the $700m exit holds true, Mark’s investment will have 230x’d (sans dilution). Beatbox raised a follow on round of $15m from Concentric Equity Partners in 2022.

On Season 10 episode 8, aired 2018, Rohan Oza invested $400k into poppi at a $1.6M valuation. Poppi was acquired for $2B by pepsico earlier this year (1,250x). Oza's VC fund, CAVU Consumer Partners, would go on to lead subsequent financings for poppi.

Bombas and Scrub Daddy, Inc. Daddy are two other high flying shark tank alums who have not been acquired, but with sales having scaled to $500M for Bombas and $220M in 2023 for Scrub Daddy since the show

Mark Cuban was on record last year as having not made any profit on his shark tank investments after putting $20m to work. However Beatbox, assuming modest dilution, and DUDE Wipes who received investment from TSG Consumer Partners in May of this year with sales having scaled to ~$200m, I assume at this point Mark has passed back into the green thanks to ye olde power law

$1m at $3m valuation in Beatbox -> $230m on $20m total invested in Shark Tank companies, even if the rest went totally to zero (which it hasnt), is actually on an IRR basis probably better than 95% of consumer VCs lol.

Cheers to beatbox for saving Mark's Shark Tank portfolio!

[GREG ISENBERG @gregisenberg]

Email from Fiverr CEO to his team about AI ($1b company):

[Mickael Costache @MickaelCostache]

@tomerhen Advocates. Thanks!

[Mickael Costache @MickaelCostache]

This is actually a great summary! Thanks @morganb

[Mickael Costache @MickaelCostache]

@MarketingMax Would love more info. Thanks!

[Mickael Costache @MickaelCostache]

@aleckrem Yes please

[Mickael Costache @MickaelCostache]

@itsedaxe Outreach

[Mickael Costache @MickaelCostache]

@ankurnagpal Thank you!

[Mickael Costache @MickaelCostache]

@joejarred1 Store

[Mickael Costache @MickaelCostache]

@ArijanJanes Prompt. Thanks!

[Mickael Costache @MickaelCostache]

@jspujji OS

[Mickael Costache @MickaelCostache]

@oshalchemy CRO

[Mickael Costache @MickaelCostache]

Love that!

[George Mack @george__mack]

The most under discussed immigration policy:

A lesson from Lee Kuan Yew

[Mickael Costache @MickaelCostache]

@RMHildebrandt Send. Thanks!

[Alex Johnson @AlexH_Johnson]

7 months after raising a $6M seed round, AI startup Hyperplane was acquired by Nubank for an undisclosed sum.

Nubank is usually 12 steps ahead of everyone, so it's worth trying to understand exactly what they do and why it's valuable to Nubank.

Here's what you need to know 👇

- Hyperplane builds foundation models, similar to those built by OpenAI and Anthropic. The difference is that Hyperplane’s models are built on the much smaller first-party datasets of individual banks, rather than datasets scraped from the entire internet.

- The reason for this approach is that Hyperplane isn’t interested in generative AI for its content generation capabilities (which require massive multimodal datasets). It’s interested in generative AI for its ability to efficiently find predictive patterns within unstructured datasets.

- The genius of Hyperplane confining themselves to the unstructured datasets of individual banks is that it sidesteps almost all of the big regulatory and risk management concerns with generative AI in financial services. You’re only using your own data for training, so no need to defend to regulators why you’re using data from random subreddits to power your wealth advisor chatbot. And the outputs of Hyperplane’s foundation models are predictive insights and attributes, which can be used to build standard ML models and decisioning rulesets. This completely eliminates the risk of hallucination and makes model governance and explainability much easier.

To be honest, I’m a bit surprised that Hyperplane agreed to the acquisition. The terms of the deal were not disclosed, so it’s hard to judge from the outside.

What I can say is that every big bank in the world is going to want a Hyperplane at some point.

Nubank just got theirs and made it harder for their competitors to follow suit.

Smart.

[Craig Clemens @craigclemens]

I’m 45.

You’ve never heard of me.

But every day you see my ads online, and I can guarantee you or someone you know has bought something from me.

My # 1 secret for ads that bring in billions:

[Mickael Costache @MickaelCostache]

@ankurnagpal 👋🏻 thank you!

[Mickael Costache @MickaelCostache]

@SeanODowd15 OpenPhone 👌🏻 scaled a pretty big operation using them.

[Mickael Costache @MickaelCostache]

Great episode 👌🏻

[Ankur Nagpal @ankurnagpal]

Had a blast chopping it up on @myfirstmilpod

We chatted about:

- How business owners pay less in taxes
- Teaching @thesamparr how to use credit card points
- The most generous tax break in 🇺🇸
- Why you shouldn't move to Miami
- @ShaanVP opting out of mail
- The Indian diet

[Shaun Maguire @shaunmmaguire]

I was listening to the All In Pod this morning and @DavidSacks briefly mentioned the impacts to the German economy due to their dependence on natural gas from Russia

I've been obsessed with the chemicals industry since I was a kid and the story here is crazier than you'd think