I send one action packed email a week called a 1x1x1 covering crazy cool businesses I spot, updates on what we're building and buying, and lessons from the journey of an entrepreneur.
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For those of you that are new here, every week I send what I call a 1x1x1.
One thought from my week.
One interesting find/tool from my week.
One image from my life.
Let's dive in 👇
Let me confess something up front: I’ve been deep in an egg rabbit hole.
Yes, that’s a real sentence.
I’ve spent the better part of my evening reading about a company that does one thing.
Sells eggs.
And yet trades like it’s building quantum computers in a garage staffed by Stanford dropouts.
The business? Cal-Maine Foods.
The vibe? If Warren Buffett and a carton of Egglands Best had a baby.
This thing is bananas. Or… egg-nanas? (Sorry. That was bad.)
You know how everyone on Twitter acts like the only way to get rich is SaaS, AI, or selling some crypto dog coin?
Yeah… meanwhile Cal-Maine is over here casually worth billions by doing… absolutely nothing fancy.
Their whole business model is basically:
1. Raise chickens
2. Wait
3. Eggs happen
4. Sell the eggs
5. Repeat forever
That’s it.
No subscriptions.
No LTV:CAC ratio tweets.
No AI-powered dashboards.
Just breakfast.
And yet the stock chart looks like a startup that just announced “now with AI.”
Also, these metrics are crazy...
Quick disclaimer before someone yells at me:
I am not a financial advisor. I am a guy on the internet who gets weirdly excited about egg companies. Investments are risky. Eggs are a commodity. Commodities can get wild. (Like… “avian flu turned my portfolio into an omelet” wild.)
So yeah, invest at your own risk!
Wait… why is this stock moving like this?
Cal-Maine (ticker: CALM) has been ripping like a growth company because they’re sitting on a perfect storm of:
• People eating more eggs than ever
• Higher egg prices
• Avian flu wiping out competing flocks (dark but true)
• Them being the dominant player in the entire egg universe
They’re the largest egg producer in the United States.
Roughly 1 in every 5 eggs you see in a grocery store comes from them.
It’s the closest thing America has to an egg monopoly without the government getting involved. (Though honestly, I’d pay to watch that hearing. “Senator… we just have a lot of hens.”)
Cal-Maine started in 1957.
Back when Elvis was charting and every business pitch probably ended with, “And we’ll use the profits to buy more land.”
What did their founder do?
He bought a small egg farm in Mississippi…
then another…
then another…
and basically just kept collecting them like Pokémon.
Fast-forward 60+ years and they’ve built the Amazon of Eggs:
• Massive distribution
• Vertical integration
• Brands on brands on brands
The whole thing is an operational masterpiece disguised as a carton of eggs.
They make money when egg prices go up.
They make money when egg prices go down because they’re the only ones who survive.
They make money when mid-tier producers get wiped out by avian flu.
They make money selling specialty eggs (cage-free, organic, extra-zen eggs).
They make money selling regular eggs.
They make money selling eggs to people who swear they are “cutting back on eggs.” (They are not.)
This is what happens when a simple business gets extremely, stupidly good at one thing: producing a high-volume, high-frequency consumable.
I LOVE businesses like this.
They’re:
• Simple
• Durable
• Non-sexy
• Cash-flow machines
• Built for the long term
• Anti-fragile in all the weirdest ways
We chase the shiny stuff (AI, robots, flying taxis).
But sometimes the real monsters are the companies quietly printing insane returns by selling… breakfast.
It just makes you realize:
There are billion-dollar opportunities hidden in plain sight.
Often literally sitting on grocery shelves next to the milk.
This whole adventure reminded me of one thing:
If you can dominate a boring industry, you basically become a cheat code.
Cal-Maine isn’t cool.
It isn’t sexy.
But is efficient.
And it is dominant.
That’s a combo founders dream of.
I’m not saying you should go start a chicken farm (unless??)…
But there are a million other egg-shaped industries waiting for the next Cal-Maine.
Whenever I hit one of those weird funks with my work, the “stare at the screen and question all my life choices” moments, I go back to a few reliable books.
One of them is Rick Rubin’s The Creative Act.
I’ll crack it open to a random chapter and, somehow, the right page always finds me.
I’ve re-read this same section four or five times this week, and it keeps hitting exactly where I need it.
This is the equivalent to rucking right?
