ISSUE 001 · SEPTEMBER 4, 2026

Welcome to Blackdoor. I’ve wanted a place to put down some of the things I’m learning, the philosophies I’ve picked up along the way, and whatever else is bouncing around in my head. I don’t totally know what shape it takes from here, and that’s kind of the point. We’ll see where it goes.

If I’m going to start documenting my thoughts in this newsletter, this story is probably a good place to start. Not because it’s the most dramatic story I have, but because it explains a lot about how I think about business today.

In 2018, MVMT sold to Movado for $100 million. They were in our space, selling similar products, and at the time they were doing about double our revenue.

It wasn’t our company, obviously, but that transaction changed the trajectory of my first business, Vincero, more than almost anything we did ourselves.

The funny part is Vincero was already working really well. We had built a profitable eight-figure business and were taking quarterly distributions. The future felt pretty damn good.

Then a competitor sold for nine figures and all of a sudden what Vincero could become looked completely different. That moment changed the game we were playing.

Before that, we were pretty obsessive about where we spent money. We cared about where every marketing dollar went. Influencer partnerships had to make sense. Return mattered. Profit mattered. And when the business made money, we took some of that money out.

Looking back, that sounds incredibly obvious. A business should eventually pay the people who own it.

After the MVMT deal, we willingly changed that arrangement. Instead of taking distributions, we started leaving more and more cash in Vincero so we could push harder on growth.

I think about that differently now. Every dollar we could have distributed but chose not to was basically us loaning our company money. We were taking cash we had already earned and handing it back in exchange for an IOU from the future.

Maybe that IOU comes back worth way more because you build a much bigger company and somebody buys it. There are plenty of times where making that trade is exactly the right decision.

But you should understand that you’re making that trade. I don’t think we really understood it that way, definitely not at the time. We just started pushing.

What had been a pretty disciplined approach to growth turned into a hunt for more eyeballs anywhere we could find them. New channels, more distribution, more people. Eventually we opened retail stores in New York and California, despite having no experience operating retail stores.

There were bankers reaching out saying there were buyers for businesses like ours if we could get to certain numbers. Advisors saw the opportunity. Our growth team saw places to spend more money. Internally, we saw what had just happened with MVMT and thought it would almost be silly not to go for it.

We weren’t literally running around saying, “We need a $100 million exit.” It was more subtle than that. Once we knew an outcome like that was possible, it started influencing almost every decision we made.

And that’s the part I don’t want to rewrite with hindsight and pretend we were complete idiots. There was a real opportunity there. Maybe we should have pushed harder than we had been pushing. We just went too far.

At one point we brought in a consultant to help us understand the quality of our revenue across different channels. When he dug into Amazon, the takeaway was pretty simple: we were pushing the channel hard with ads, but it wasn’t profitable. We were basically buying sales.

The revenue growth was there, but there wasn’t any meaningful profit. We had spent money to make the top-line number bigger, which feels a lot like progress when growth is the main thing you’re chasing.

We were stuck. We had too many obligations, too many people depending on the business, and not nearly enough margin for error if sales kept slowing. Things got really tough, really fast.

Our 13-week cash-flow forecast basically turned into a weekly board game for keeping a sinking ship afloat. What can we move around? Who needs to get paid now? Who can we call and work something out with? What can we cut? How do we stay out of bankruptcy for another week?

That went on for roughly a year and a half, and fixing it meant undoing a lot of what we had spent years building. We ended up cutting ties with roughly 60% of the employees and agency partners supporting the company. Some of those employees had been with us almost from the beginning. We closed the stores. We had commitments all over the business that couldn’t just disappear overnight. Some took more than a year to fully unwind.

For me, the hardest part was feeling like we were constantly going backwards. Momentum is the best drug in business, and losing it is brutal. It’s really easy to delay the obvious decision when making it means the company gets smaller. Shrinking feels like admitting you screwed something up.

For close to two years we basically had to swallow our pride and keep making decisions that reduced the size of the business. Not because we had come up with some brilliant new strategy, but because that was what we needed to do to stave off bankruptcy.

Going through all of that also forced me to confront something I hadn’t really thought about before: everybody else had gotten paid along the way.

Our employees got paid. Our agencies got paid. The landlords got paid. The factories got paid. Meta got paid. The credit card companies got paid.

We were the owners, and we were the ones who had spent years saying, “We’ll get ours later.”

That’s the trade I’m much more skeptical of today.

I’m not saying you shouldn’t take the swing. If you consciously decide, “I’m going all in on this thing for five or seven years. I may take almost nothing out, and if it goes to zero I understand exactly what I signed up for,” more power to you. I fucking love that for you.

The problem is how easy it is to accidentally end up there. A competitor sells, your buddy raises money, a banker tells you what the company could be worth if you just get to another revenue number, and somebody you follow posts that they doubled again. Before long, a business that felt pretty damn successful a year ago starts feeling like it isn’t enough.

Social media only makes that worse. There is always somebody on your feed making your current level of success look small.

The good news is we made it through. Today Vincero is back to multiple eight figures in annual sales, multiple seven figures in profit, and I’d argue the company is healthier than it has ever been.

We still care a lot about growth. We’ve just gotten much stricter about making sure growth doesn’t eat the economics underneath the business.

We’ve redesigned Vincero to require less of our own cash and distribute profits regularly, and we’re much more deliberate about what actually deserves reinvestment.

The goal isn’t to grow as fast as humanly possible anymore. It’s to keep growing, produce real profit and spit off cash along the way.

That experience has also affected the kinds of businesses we’re building now. When we look at other opportunities, I care a lot more about capital requirements, how quickly the owners can get paid, how much fixed cost the model needs and whether the business creates optionality or takes it away.

That’s probably one of the themes you’ll hear me come back to a lot in Blackdoor.

A few questions I wish I had asked more often back then:

There’s nothing wrong with taking the big swing.

Just make sure it’s actually your swing.

The experiences that make all the hours worth it.

Take the Belmond train to Machu Picchu

This has been on my list for a long time; I got it booked for next spring. Take the Belmond Hiram Bingham train through the Andes, stay right outside the gates of Machu Picchu, and do the whole thing with a level of old-school luxury and class that just looks badass.

THINGS WORTH YOUR ATTENTION.

Roman Khan crushing it on Open Residency

This is a long one, but if you own an e-commerce business, there’s a lot in here. Roman goes really deep on everything from supply chain and payment terms to actually getting cash out of a business instead of constantly feeding it. Obviously pretty timely given what I just wrote above. I had a bunch of notes by the end of it. Listen to it here.

Eric Weinstein on All-In

This one was all over the place in a good way. American science, physics, peer review, China, AI, UAPs, why breakthrough thinking seems harder to come by. I definitely didn’t agree with or understand every part of it, but that’s kind of why I liked it. It kept opening up new rabbit holes. Listen to it here.

Dan Koe on the “digital renaissance”

Dan had a great post this week about the three paths people seem to be taking with AI: reject it, outsource everything to it, or use it as leverage while still developing real skills yourself. The last one is where I land. I want AI doing a shitload of work for me. I just don’t want it doing the thinking for me. Read the article.

Alright, that’s enough for this week.

Tim