True story:
I have two very close younger friends who are practically my little brothers. They come from an established family in Hollywood, and have a very famous actor-dad. The younger brother is about 20 now, and is friends with half of the teen “influencers” on Instagram/YouTube; the older brother is about 22, and hangs with a group of LA kids who are obsessed with the movie American Psycho and dress/look the part — ironic given that their lives are a 2010s version of that book’s author’s other classic, Less Than Zero.
About two years ago, I’m at a club in Hollywood when these two hand me a thick pile of paper, which looks like a legal document. I’m really confused — is someone getting sued? Is this a screenplay? Am I being asked to sign an NDA?
The older brother, in his American Psycho-inspired suit, takes a puff of his vape and then whispers in my ear, “this is the funding prospectus for Juul. Our friends have been invited to invest.”
I looked at the thing. It was crazy. The valuation was well over $1 billion. The growth rate was off the charts. And, looking around at that club in Hollywood, filled with kids vaping in the outdoor area, I realized the numbers made sense. But the fact that a 19 year old Hollywood kid was handing me the funding documents for this company and telling me that his friends had been invited to invest told me that there was something very, very wrong about how Juul got into the hands of all of these young people — it clearly wasn’t an accident.
