We are switching up our style for this Altitude release and sincerely hope you enjoy reading! 🙌 - Ryan and the Cirrus team
I was in middle school when Napster first hit.
I still remember the first time I used it - on a clunky desktop in the corner of my friend’s basement, loading a Linkin Park track that took 11 minutes to download, even though it was mislabeled and probably ripped from a radio station.
We didn’t care.
Everyone I knew was using it. Trading MP3s, burning CDs, making mixtapes for people they liked (or thought they might like) just to have an excuse to talk.
It was this shared feeling of being in on something - something a little subversive, a little thrilling, and undeniably ours.
And then it went away. It lost its allure and years later, of course, YouTube, Pandora, and Spotify came along.
Fast-forward twenty-five years. Infinite Reality just paid $207 million to acquire that nostalgic platform.
Most people didn’t even know Napster was still around.
So what did they buy, exactly, and why?
Napster’s been through hell. Sued by the music industry, stripped down and sold for parts, merged, rebranded, forgotten. It’s had more corporate lives than most SaaS companies get homepage redesigns. But somehow, the name still means something.
It still has 1.4 million paying subscribers. It still has major label licensing deals. It still owns that primal, teenage-era nostalgia - free music, shared rebellion, and the first time tech made us feel something personal.
That kind of emotional residue is rare. Especially in a world where most digital brands vanish without a ripple.
That’s what Infinite Reality really bought:
Cultural memory. The right to try again.
They’re a 3D immersive tech company. Think Roblox for adults, but with a Hollywood budget and ambitions to build the interactive layer of the internet - events, concerts, fandom, shopping, all inside shared digital space.
So of course they want Napster.
Napster CEO Jonathan Vlassopulos left Roblox to resurrect a brand he once tried to license 25 years ago.
He’s probably thinking: “Took me two decades, but I finally got the keys.”
He’s got a second shot now - to build what he couldn’t back then. And this time, the world might be ready for it.
Now the question is whether they’ll actually build something for artists and fans…
Or if it all gets lost in the Metaverse mess of virtual merch and corporate buzzwords.
This acquisition is not about tech. It’s about time. It’s about how long a story can live in people’s heads and what it’s worth to bring it back.
That brings me to 23andMe... a product that, ironically, knew more about our DNA than we ever did… and still couldn’t make it.
Napster was nostalgia-primed for a comeback. 23andMe couldn’t even hold onto its relevance.
At its peak, 23andMe felt like the future. Personalized genomics, direct-to-consumer health insights, a product so novel it barely fit into an existing category.
For a few years, it was the darling of DTC biotech. It SPAC’d at a $6 billion valuation, had a partnership with GSK, claimed one of the largest genetic datasets in the world.
And this week, it filed for bankruptcy.
Nobody flinched. No public mourning. No "remember when" threads. Just a headline. A shrug. And silence.
I used 23andMe once. Took the test, got the report, learned I had slightly elevated odds of being lactose intolerant and a genetic predisposition to receding hairline.
That was about it. I showed it to my parents, we laughed about it at dinner, and I never logged in again.
There was no ritual. No hook. No reason to come back.
It was an insight, not an identity. And that’s the core difference.
Napster created a moment people wanted to live inside. 23andMe created a dashboard people visited once.
We talk about product-market fit like it’s the holy grail.
But emotional-market fit - this deeper resonance where a product becomes part of your story, your nostalgia, your worldview - is something else entirely.
It’s not really a growth hack or even something you split-test. It either happens or it doesn’t. And when it does, the tail is long.
People still tattoo the Napster logo on their arms. Nobody’s out here repping their 23andMe haplogroup on a hoodie.
And the implications of that are bigger than just brand affinity. They’re existential. In this era of constant launches and infinite churn, most products are lucky to be remembered.
The half-life of software is brutal.
You build, you raise, you push into the feed… and if it doesn’t stick, it vanishes.
But the ones that do stick have this uncanny way of returning.
Years later. In a new form. Maybe with a new team. Sometimes with a new mission.
But always with that core ember of emotion still glowing.
That’s what Infinite Reality is betting on - that even after all the lawsuits, rebrands, acquisitions, and pivots, Napster still means something.
Not to everyone. But to enough people that it's worth reviving.
That’s how brand equity really works. Not in your logo or your color palette, but in the way your name lives on in people’s heads after the tech is gone.
Napster and 23andMe are good case studies, but there are startups solving harder problems, in bigger markets, with more funding... and they’ll be forgotten too.
Because they never mattered emotionally. They never left a trace.
The question worth asking is not just:
Will anyone pay for this??
It’s:
Would they come begging for it if you suddenly disappeared?
Would they share it with their friends? Bring it up at the dinner table?
Would they talk about it ten years later in a bar or a group chat or to their kid?
That’s emotional-market fit.
If you're playing the long game, it might be the only kind that matters.
What it all means
💡 Some companies are killed by their irrelevance, not their revenue ➞ 23andMe collapsed quietly. There wasn’t a media cycle. No outrage. No sense of loss. Just another tech company fading out of relevance while everyone moved on. It had money. It had data. It had the novelty factor. But nothing about it ever really stuck. People didn’t build rituals around it. They didn’t come back. They didn’t care when it went away. That’s the part founders miss when they obsess over acquisition funnels and LTV formulas. Some products lodge themselves into culture. Others are just blips. Napster, for all its chaos, left a mark. It changed behavior. It earned stories. It meant something. And meaning can carry a product for decades. Through lawsuits. Through pivots. Through obsolescence. That’s the piece nobody’s modeling in their spreadsheets. But it might be the only thing that keeps your product alive when everything else goes quiet.
💡 You can’t iterate your way into identity ➞ Founders love to worship at the altar of MVPs, A/B tests, and feedback loops. But what if brand identity isn't so much a result of iteration but longevity and conviction? Napster stood for something from day one: freedom, rebellion, sharing. It barged in and disrupted one. Even through lawsuits, rebrands, and near-oblivion, that original signal stuck. And that’s why it was worth $207M two decades later. Most startups today are too scared to mean something. They hedge, they optimize, they tweak themselves into safe irrelevance. If you’re not willing to take a side - culturally, emotionally, narratively - you won’t survive the long arc. Especially now, when attention is fragmented and distribution is everything. You don’t need everyone to love you. You just need a concentrated group to believe you matter.
💡 There’s a growing market for ‘unfinished business.’ ➞ Jon Vlassopulos revived Napster, but he also completed a loop. He was one of the early voices pushing for a legal version of Napster 25 years ago at Bertelsmann. That never happened. Fast forward two decades, and he comes back to finish what he started. That’s not just a good founder story. It’s a smart bet. There’s a specific kind of upside that exists in brands with unresolved cultural weight. Napster still had energy trapped inside it. 23andMe didn’t. The next wave of acquisitions may be less about tech multiples or active users but instead about emotional unlocks. What has meaning, even if it isn’t currently monetizing? What still gets brought up at dinner tables, on Twitter threads, in late-night convos? That’s the future: brands that feel like unfinished chapters, waiting for the right person to write the rest.
Major news
- $1.4B of Tesla's assets missing, Cybertruck recalls pile up, and resale values crash as Musk’s antics tank the brand » More «
- Yahoo offloads TechCrunch to Regent, stripping down its media portfolio to focus on core consumer products » More «
- Energy giant Shell slashes clean energy spending in favor of juicing returns + narrowing its gap with U.S. oil rivals » More «
Founder tips
- VCs aren’t saviors. They’re accelerants. If your model’s broken, capital just helps it explode faster. Fix your margins before you fund your fantasy.
- Dilution is forever. Before you go fundraising, look to leverage what you already own. Credit lines, revenue based financing, even JV deals - anything’s better than giving away 20% to look “venture-backed” on Crunchbase.
- Leverage comes from options. Figure out how to not need the money... then decide if you still want it.
Financial markets
📊 Markets and Assets At-A-Glance
| Asset / Market |
Price |
Vibe Check / Sentiment |
| SOFR Rate |
4.40% |
↘️ |
| WSJ Prime Rate |
7.50% |
↘️ |
| S&P 500 |
5,693 |
🎢 |
| Dow Jones |
42,300 |
🎢 |
| Gold (Oz Spot) |
$3,060 |
📈 |
| BTC |
$83,942 |
📈 (but a wild day...) |
| Non-Farm Payroll +/- |
+151K |
Neutral |
| US Unemployment |
4.1% |
Neutral |
Meaningful Market Transactions
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💳 Credit Markets
Brex issues $150M debt facility to scale Flex offering
BMG Money Gets $150M Credit Facility
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Recent Cirrus Term Sheets & Transactions
Proud to share Cirrus Capital just closed a $4M delayed-draw term loan facility for a prominent recreational sports brand! 🌺🌴🌊
After 50+ failed attempts elsewhere, we unlocked the right capital partner to fuel growth, boost liquidity, and position the company to cross $100M+ in revenue.
We also secured a $600K term loan for a fast-growing beauty brand in New York—despite post-bankruptcy headwinds and limited operating history. 🧴💄💇♀️
We moved fast, structured around the new entity, and delivered capital in weeks to help fuel their next chapter.
