Does CPG Need A Deuxmoi?
the 30u30 Forbes to jail pipeline strikes again
“Thank you for being authentic and calling it out as it is :)”—Arianna, a paid reader.
Founder of Simulate (Nuggs) was arrested on assault and strangulation charges.
Do you still get Simulate in your grocery store? Post acquisition, the brand seemed to have fallen off, their website is non-existent and I’ve tried to source them at different grocers to no avail, pretty sure their brand is no more, even though they did raise upwards of $50 million for their alt-chicken brand. Their founder Ben Pasternak had been notorious for his serial entrepreneurship starting from a young age, he’s also the grandson of a real estate mogul in Australia who has an estimated networth of upwards of $700 million.
After Simulate, he moved on to crypto and founded Believe, a Solana-based platform that lets users buy and trade tokens associated with creators and influencers, he is also facing a civil class-action lawsuit where investors of Believe’s native token are accusing him of orchestrating a rug pull.
Most recently he has been arrested on charges of assault and strangulation.
Over the years a lot of you have compared Snaxshot to Deuxmoi, something I feel honored by to be honest, but the fact that CPG space, in particular food and beverage, actually necessitates constant calling out is concerning. I think about the Better Brand situation, a founder that raised at an insane valuation for a company that succumbed to bad leadership, to this date the company has been sued multiple times, mostly by lendors some who have even accused them of outright fraud.
Ben Pasternak raised over $50M for a company that was shilled as food tech but it was inherently just plant based nuggets and microwavable alt-chicken breast? The fact that we don’t address these companies post-mortem and all that lives on is the puff pieces at Forbes or Bloomberg, misleading a new wave of CPG founders into promises that aren’t necessarily the reality in this industry. The fact that he’s also facing a civil lawsuit around his crypto company, where they are calling him out for fraud, is an example of what happens when we don’t process and digest these founder stories as they are, instead of the hype headlines they usually get, it allows for them to keep perpetuating a narrative of success, but also it makes me question how much of these founders ability to raise and get these headlines comes down to proximitiy to privilege in lieu of due diligence.
The allegations against him are serious, and I think it’s important for it to be noted, unlike the other publications that are linking him just to his famous ex-girlfriend, or to his alleged crypto scam, that he was also operating in CPG and was seemingly able to get away with burning through so much venture money for a brand that ultimately went down with a whimper.
Going to allow for you to share thoughts and wanted to keep this short considering it is a Friday, but this also is something I’ve brought up time and time again on how venture has corrupted CPG, creating these new crop of founders that may have ulterior motives on building companies that are not really creating value in the ecosystem at the end of the day.
You are the Deuxmoi of CPG! Your examples are good ones on how bad people get into every industry and cause scandal. VC didn’t make them do it, it was just the vehicle. I agree w @sumeet on diligence. There’s not enough of it.
I think it's less about how VC corrupted CPG. It's more about how flawed and hole-filles the diligence on these founders has been (and, well, who is doing this diligence). Yeesh.