The Map Was Always There.

One founder got millions. One built millions. Guess which one was a woman.

I was pleasantly surprised by the response to yesterday’s post, and it seemed like those who engaged might be interested in another How I Built This episode that shows a very different way to build a $100 million business.

Episode 375. Missy Park, Founder of Title Nine. Not a fashion insider when she started. But she was not building on a marketing mechanism. She was building for a community she belonged to and understood deeply, women athletes who could not find gear that fit or performed. She stayed close to them, learned from them, and let their real needs drive every decision. She invested $30,000 of her own savings into a mail order catalog. When sports bras got the strongest response, she listened. She bootstrapped through a warehouse flood, through grinding cash flow crises, through the brutal transition to e-commerce. She never took outside investment.

Title Nine became a $100 million business. Missy Park remains the sole owner.

On Episode 375 of How I Built This, Guy Raz described her growth as 'hitting singles.' In baseball, singles win games. But when explosive VC-backed growth is the benchmark, a founder who built something real, durable, and wholly her own barely registers as a success story. Title Nine is one of the most remarkable outcomes in the history of American retail.

Compare that to Episode 572. Michael Preysman, Everlane. By his own admission he knew nothing about fashion. He got his start selling iPhone cases made to order in China. Silicon Valley investors read a new marketing trick as vision and wrote checks. He made enormous, avoidable costly mistakes, went back to investors, and was funded again. And again. The company accumulated $90 million in debt and sold to Shein.

And then there is the values question. People are exhausted by brands like Everlane and Allbirds who built their identities around caring about more than the bottom line, only to become completely beholden to the investors they courted. You cannot have it both ways. The moment you take institutional money you are legally and structurally obligated to serve it. The mission does not survive that. It never does. It becomes simply a hollow marketing story.

Missy Park never had that problem because she never invited it in. She was visionary, financially disciplined, and focussed on serving the real needs of her community vs. simply collecting their email addresses.

My friend Annie Gullingsrud made a great point in the comments on my Linkedin post yesterday:

“It’s not really about institutional money. It’s about who institutional money follows. Men get funded on vision. This is an ancient story. The assumption that bold, uninformed confidence signals competence predates venture capital by millennia. We’ve just given it a new vocabulary and a cap table. Until we name that as the root cause, the post-mortems will keep focusing on growth strategy and brand dilution. And the women quietly building real businesses will keep being described as ‘not quite ready to scale.’ And the reason any of this matters is simple: it’s not working. Not for the planet, not for consumers, not for the founders being left out, and not even for the investors writing the checks.”

I’m already working on my next post about what women actually need to build the businesses the world needs. It is not a term sheet.