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🍋 PE-Backed Tacos

🍋 PE-Backed Tacos

Plus: Nvidia is buying Hugging Face, Blackstone is rationing redemptions for the second time, and Bitcoin crossed $80,000.

Short Squeez
September 04, 2026

Together With

"I train like I've never won, and I compete like I've never lost.” — Eileen Gu

Good Morning! Nvidia finally announced it will acquire open-source AI platform Hugging Face for $12.93 billion. Smart ring maker Oura officially filed for its IPO and revealed $1.4 billion in revenue. And CVC raised $10 billion for its largest-ever secondaries fund.

General Atlantic is marketing a new evergreen fund for high-net-worth individuals ahead of its IPO. JPMorgan sees dealmaking on track for a record year in 2026. And Blackstone's private credit fund capped redemptions at 5% again even as the withdrawal requests keep coming.

Plus: Bitcoin topped $80,000 with Strategy stock jumping 18%, and how future leaders stand out before they're promoted.

Petrarch is building a new asset class around a company’s operational data. If you are in private credit or distressed assets, learn more about them here.

SQUEEZ OF THE DAY

PE-Backed Tacos

The big taco mafia is coming for your favorite taco spot.

Yesterday, Los Tacos announced it had received a strategic investment from TSG Consumer. Terms weren’t disclosed, and it’s not clear whether TSG bought a majority or minority stake. But one thing is official: New Yorkers’ favorite taco spot is now private-equity backed.

For those not in New York, Los Tacos is a Tijuana-style taco shop and, after opening at Chelsea Market in 2013, the brand went viral. Los Tacos only has 10 locations, all in Manhattan, but has built a ridiculous amount of brand equity. It’s rare to see a relatively small chain with a cult-like following, pricing power, and customer loyalty.

TSG is actually a pretty logical partner. The consumer-focused PE firm has invested in brands including Dutch Bros, CorePower Yoga, Crumbl, Yard House, Pura Vida Miami, and the retail business of Stumptown Coffee Roasters.

Its specialty is finding beloved consumer brands with room to grow and putting serious capital behind them, ideally without destroying the reason people liked them in the first place.

TSG is hoping to bring in the capital, real estate expertise, and operating infrastructure needed to take something that works in Manhattan and see whether it can work in Chicago, Miami, Los Angeles, or 20 other cities.

The founders are staying on to run the business, and TSG says the goal is “thoughtful growth” that preserves the food and taco-shop experience. Chipotle, Shake Shack and Cava are a legitimate blueprint to follow here because they all started as small restaurant concepts before becoming enormous public companies.

Takeaway: Let's hope the TSG investment committee has promised not to turn NYC's favorite tacos into Taco Bell with a 25% EBITDA margin. The 10 locations will likely be a lot more soon, but the question is whether taco No. 100 tastes like taco No. 1.

PRESENTED BY PETRARCH

Fitch Logged Its Highest Private Credit Default Reading Yet

Fitch reported in May that the US private credit default rate reached 6.0%, the highest reading since the firm began tracking the market.

Most of those defaults were deferred interest and restructured terms. These keep a struggling borrower upright without fixing what is wrong. Some of those companies will recover. The rest wind down eventually and are forced to search for a buyer.

Inventory, real estate, receivables, and intellectual property all have one. The operational records a company generated every working day for years never have, until now...

Petrarch has built the infrastructure to anonymize and assetize a company’s operational records. They buy those records, clear the rights, de-identify the material (remove logos, names, secrets) on premise, and restructure it into an asset with a defined value.

If you are in private credit or distressed assets, learn more about them here.

HEADLINES

Markets Rundown

Market Update

Stocks rose, led by consumer discretionary and financials, as the 10-year Treasury yield eased near 4.77%.
Fed Governor Chris Waller signaled support for holding rates steady, lifting the odds of a September hold to roughly 50% from 37%.
WTI crude extended its rise to near $92 amid continued Strait of Hormuz disruptions.

Economic Data

Initial jobless claims rose to 206,000, slightly above the 205,000 forecast; continuing claims edged up to 1.78 million.
Nonfarm productivity held at a 1.4% annualized rate, with unit labor costs revised down to 1.2%.
Friday's employment report is expected to show 65,000 jobs added and unemployment rising to 4.2%.

Movers & Shakers

(+) Strategy ($MSTR) +18% after Bitcoin rallied to over $80,000/coin.
(+) Robinhood ($HOOD) +17% because of Morgan Stanley’s price target hike to $150 from $124 on strong prediction-market growth.
(–) Victoria’s Secret ($VSXY) -13% after the lingerie retailer’s Q3 operating income guidance disappointed investors.

Prediction Markets

In honor of Labor Day, we celebrate the ability to trade on the August jobs report.
Trade on real-world events with Kalshi. Use code OWS to get a $10 bonus when you trade $10.

Private Dealmaking

Nvidia announced it will acquire Hugging Face, an open-source AI platform, for $12.93 billion
Wonderful, a Dutch enterprise AI deployment company, raised $550 million
Upwind, an Israeli cloud security company, raised $300 million
Medici Brands, the parent company of David Protein and HallPass, raised $250 million
Lyte, a robotics and AI startup, raised $165 million
iPronics, a provider of optical networking solutions for AI infrastructure, raised $125 million

For more PE, VC & M&A deals, subscribe to our Buysiders newsletter.

BOOK OF THE DAY

The Rush

Description:
Nathaniel Philbrick explores how the California Gold Rush transformed far more than the American West. Beginning with the discovery of gold in 1848, he follows the enormous migration of people, capital, ideas, and political power toward California and examines how the state's rapid rise helped reshape the United States at a pivotal moment. The book connects the Gold Rush to the growing sectional conflict over slavery, the Civil War, westward expansion, and America's emergence as a global economic power.

Book Length: 384 pages
Release Date: October 13, 2026

Ideal For:
Readers interested in American history, economics, entrepreneurship, geopolitics, financial history, and the forces that transformed the United States into a modern economic power.

The Gold Rush wasn't simply a search for gold, it was a rush toward an entirely new world.

DAILY VISUAL

AI Is Retraining Workers, Not Replacing Them

Source: Apollo

PRESENTED BY BUYSIDERS CLUB

The Most Curated Room in Finance

Buysiders Club is a curated, highly vetted community of Wall Street's top minds, bringing together professionals across private equity, hedge funds, venture capital, investment banking, institutional investors, and operating executives.

What members get:

Exclusive private dinners at places like John Lennon’s townhome, a SoHo art gallery, private clubs, etc.
Access to private placement deals like xAI
Partner events with brands like La Pauleé and the Enhanced Games
Introductions to the global finance community and leaders from other industries, including arts, tech, culture, and fitness

If you want to level up your social circle and access the best people in finance and beyond, apply for membership below.

Apply for membership. (VP and above only)

DAILY ACUMEN

Peter Principle

People get promoted based on how well they performed in their current role, not on how well they will perform in the next one. This works fine for exactly one promotion. Applied repeatedly across a career, it tends to end at the first level where the skills that got someone promoted stop being the skills the job actually requires.

The result is that many organizations are quietly staffed, at their upper levels, by people who were excellent at the job below the one they now hold and merely adequate at the one they are actually doing. Nobody chose this outcome. It emerged naturally from a system that only ever tests the wrong question.

The uncomfortable audit worth running on your own trajectory is whether the next promotion actually rewards the skills you already have, or asks for a different set entirely that your current success has given you no evidence you possess.

ENLIGHTENMENT

Short Squeez Picks

How to extend your phone’s battery life
11 gym do’s and don’ts from fitness experts
How wakeful rest may boost brain power
Why clarity is becoming a leader’s biggest competitive advantage
How future leaders stand out before they’re promoted

MEME-A-PALOOZA

Memes of the Day

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