You Can Literally Just Buy A $40 Pot

No, it won’t have the same initial Instagrammable veneer as the $155 pot. But who cares?

I just read a very good story (one of my professors in J-school would have called it “dishy,” which is a bit literal here) by Anna Silman in Insider about the direct-to-consumer cookware startup Great Jones and the complete employee mutiny it faced amid constant clashing between its founders. It contains many revealing anecdotes (dog office politics, an investor list that reads like a who’s who of accruing millennial wealth from other millennials with new money, girlboss-on-girlboss crime, “a tug-of-war in which the two women took turns entering the company’s HR system to change their salaries,” etc.) and you should really read the whole thing in full (it is paywalled) but this is one of my favorite bits:

For some staffers, a Domino magazine article in 2019 was a tipping point. In the spread, which featured a large photo of Tishgart in a silk robe dress, their boss described her tips for entertaining at home and shared her favorite roast-chicken recipe with readers — a recipe an employee had sent her earlier in the day. The employee said, “I wasn’t going to ask for credit for a chicken recipe, but, like, I don’t think she’s ever roasted a chicken before.”

The whole thing made me think about DTC startups all over again. Last year I wrote a long reported piece examining venture capital funding and how it was core to the boom — and the inevitable bust —…