g'day
you probably saw the news.
last week we announced the sale of eucalyptus to hims & hers for A$1.6 billion.
i co-founded euc in 2018 and stepped back over a year ago.
i'm not going to rehash the deal. once it closes, there will be time to tell the story properly, in vivid and painful detail.
2019: at a low point, without furniture
2026: the announcement
instead i want to talk about the bit that i’m proud of:
~20% of the company was held by employees.
that's roughly $300 million. to the team.
value that didn’t exist before.
it wasn't taken from anyone. it wasn't redistributed from tax. it was created from nothing, over seven years, by a group of people who built something together.
and now a US public company will wire much of that value into australia.
several dozen team will become millionaires. the average payout across the pool is north of $400k.
some of these people joined us from hospitality. first office job. early 20s. they got equity on day one and didn't fully understand what it meant.
i’ve been receiving texts like this from our team:
others joined later, took market salary, and treated the equity as a nice-to-have. they'll still walk away with a house deposit that changes how they think about risk.
and now that $300 million is about to flow through the australian economy. into first homes, into angel investments, into VC funds, into trades and local cafes.
this is the part of startups that needs more airtime:
not the founders. not the VCs. not the headline number.
the wealth creation engine itself.
of course, the regular caveat: for every eucalyptus outcome, there are dozens of option pools that go to zero. that is part of startup life.
but when it works, nothing else comes close.
charlie
