Business Blog: 🩰 Raising the barre

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👋 Good morning. Hope you had a nice weekend. If you happened to stumble on a few million, here's something to add to your shopping list. One of the first copies of the Declaration of Independence — read at town gatherings and posted in public spaces — is going up for sale at Goldin Auctions this spring. While the auction house hasn't offered a price estimate yet, a similar item sold for just shy of $5.7m at Christie's early this year. If you aren't sitting on a cash pile, declare your own independence and tell your boss you're leaving early today.

🚨 Hey look, The Hustle is hiring!

We're adding a full-time social producer to be the face and brains behind our social media presence. That could be you, assuming you'd be into a job like that. Apply here — or don't. Free will and all that.

STARTING UP

A woman using a straw to sip from a pint glass full of sparkles.

The best fiber is the fiber you can't taste

❌ The problem: Most Americans fall short on fiber intake, but adding meaningful amounts to foods and beverages can compromise taste, texture, and, importantly, digestion.

💡 The pitch: Startup one.bio is developing a new way to turn plant fibers into soluble ingredients that can be added to food products at high doses without changing the taste. Its oat fiber can go undetected while delivering 20+ grams per serving. The startup's on a mission to do more than just increase our fiber intake — it wants to rebrand it entirely, from "roughage" to a health essential.

🚀 The outlook: While one.bio is pitching itself to food and bev companies as an additive, it's also debuting its own in-house consumer brand, GoodVice, with prototypes including chocolate milkshakes and a fruit seltzer packed with 20 grams of fiber. Watch your back, protein.

NEWS FLASH

Bright idea: Redwood Materials is a Bay Area startup that recycles EV batteries and, now, is expanding to offer grid energy storage to AI data centers. The company already powers a Nevada data center using just reused batteries and the sun.
Speaking of data centers: Remember when Saudi Arabia was building Neom, a controversial $1.5T city of the future replete with a 100-mile-long skyscraper? Yeah, they're considering downsizing that ambitious project and may instead build a hub for data centers.
Feeling like an acquisition: Spring Health, a mental healthcare platform, intends to acquire Alma, an online therapy platform, to expand its offerings and access Alma's large provider network. Alma has helped providers serve 120m+ people.
Eyes on the future: Tenpoint Therapeutics' Yuvezzi eyedrops, designed to treat presbyopia (age-related eyesight loss), has received FDA approval. The company also announced $235m in funding to bring it to market.

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THE BIG IDEA

Two feet in pink ballet shoes flanked by two other pairs of pink ballet shoes.

The businesses solving for ballet's pain point

If you've ever watched a ballerina seemingly defy gravity while on the tips of their toes, you've probably thought "wow." And also, "ouch."

Both are warranted: The dance style is beautiful, but it can be painful and physically demanding, in large part thanks to pointe shoes.

What's the pointe?

With its flattened end designed to let the wearer stand on tiptoe, the pointe shoe is an ingrained part of ballet. It's also an expensive one.

And while most of us would just need one pair of dancin' shoes (or none — no one should have to witness that), ballerinas burn through their slippers at record pace.

One ballerina told The New York Times she goes through a pair of custom-made pointe shoes every one to two days while dancing in "The Nutcracker."
The New York City Ballet alone spends nearly $1m a year on ~7k pairs of pointe shoes.

But traditional dance companies like Freed of London — which has been in business since 1929 and supplies pointe shoes to the Paris Opera and New York City Ballet — have some teams producing shoes by hand, meaning ballerinas can wait 12+ months for a pair.

Barre none

While some ballet companies require their dancers to don certain shoes, and many dancers feel strongly about tradition, there's a growing industry of companies trying to make a better pointe shoe.

Gaynor Minden says its shoes last 5x longer than traditional ballet shoes, and shock-absorbent foam and a polymer toe box bring increased support.
Act'ble 3D-prints its shoe soles and allows dancers to order replacement parts rather than having to purchase an entirely new pair.

Pointe shoes were not the only slippers in need of a makeover: Men's soft ballet shoes, which have been mostly untouched since the 19th century, have long lacked the cushion afforded to athletes in other sports.

Orza, created by a ballet dancer, is fixing that with shock-absorbing sneaker tech. Its ballet shoes offer a supportive heel and layers of foam cushioning for tiny toe bones.

The shoes might be getting comfier but don't leap to any conclusions — grace is still required.

🔗

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

Your local Starbucks closed overnight… and now you're down a work spot and a latte. But it's all part of the company's $1B reset — and there's a lot more to it.

NEWSWORTHY NUMBER

Share of Gen Zers who report not knowing the basics of repairing clothes, like sewing a button or mending a tear, 2x the rate reported by older generations, according to a recent study by Levi's.

For as much as nostalgia-filled zoomers love their second-hand finds, they've lost the old-school skill to an upbringing that's coincided with the rise of fast fashion, which has made clothing cheap to produce and just as easy to throw away — in the US alone, 2.1k pounds of textiles are tossed out every second — but at huge environmental costs, per Inc.

To tackle the problem, Levi's is teaching high schoolers how to patch up their threads through a newly launched curriculum that it says can be incorporated into a variety of courses, including STEM ones.

AROUND THE WEB

📅 On this day: In 1887, Groundhog Day was first celebrated in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania. The tradition came to the US by way of German immigrants celebrating their version of Candlemas, though they switched to groundhogs from hedgehogs once in America.

🤔 Game: A game of estimations.

🌵 Wow: Nature's favorite science images from 2025.

🦉 That's cool: Stay quiet, get animal friends.

🐶 Aww: Another shelter dog adventure.

SHOWER THOUGHT

Social media would actually be really helpful during a zombie apocalypse. SOURCE

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Business Blog

Monday, February 2, 2026

🩰 Raising the barre