What all three agree on
Matt Richmond and Mike Canaday appeared on Shark Tank in season five asking $150,000 for 25% of Rent A Goat, a valuation of $600,000. Shark Tank Blog dates the episode to October 11, 2013 and numbers it 506; Shark Tank Recap and House Digest both describe it as season 5, episode 5. All three agree on the ask, the equity, and the outcome: every shark passed.
The stated reasons are consistent across the recaps. Mark Cuban objected that the service had no exclusivity and that competition would drive prices down. Barbara Corcoran worried the business leaned too heavily on Canaday personally. Lori Greiner thought it was too early. Robert Herjavec liked the concept but not the model. Kevin O’Leary observed he could replicate it himself.
That much is settled record. Almost everything after the episode is not.
Where they conflict
Herd size. Shark Tank Blog reports the company had expanded to more than 3,500 goats by August 2023. House Digest, writing in the same month, gives approximately 2,500 goats and 500 sheep. Those are not the same claim, and neither cites a source for the count.
Revenue. Shark Tank Blog puts annual revenue at $2 million as of 2023. Shark Tank Recap attributes $600,000 in annual goat-rental revenue to the business — but at the time of the pitch, which is a different year and a different question. Readers encountering both figures out of context reasonably conclude one of them is wrong.
Footprint. Shark Tank Recap describes service areas in Northern and Southern California, with Canaday as director of operations and Richmond as CEO. House Digest describes expansion from Northern California to statewide coverage. Shark Tank Blog describes the company as initially operating only in San Francisco.
Minimum project size. House Digest states a five-acre minimum. Our current published service note is a roughly ten-acre minimum per project — the figure on this site, which is the one we would go by.
And one number that does not survive contact with arithmetic: Shark Tank Recap states that “450 goats can clear one acre daily.” A working herd clears considerably more ground than that per animal; the figure appears garbled somewhere in the retelling. We flag it rather than repeat it.
Why this happens
Shark Tank update sites are aggregators. They work from the aired episode, from each other, and from whatever a company’s website said on the day the post was written — and then the posts stay up, unedited, for a decade while the business changes. A herd count from 2023 becomes a permanent fact. A revenue figure quoted at the pitch gets restated as current. A service minimum from an old page outlives the page.
None of this is malicious, and the recap sites have done the industry a genuine service by keeping a 2013 episode findable. But it is a good argument for going to the source. If you want to know what a grazing company runs, how much ground it covers, or what it will take on, ask the company.
The part that actually mattered
The durable outcome of that episode was never the deal. It was that several million people watched a pitch explaining that goats eat brush for money, and that municipalities and homeowners associations were already the customers. A no from five investors did not change the economics of fuel reduction; it changed how many people had heard of it.
Our other coverage of the episode — the pitch itself, why the sharks passed, what happened afterward, and how the appearance moved the whole category — goes deeper on each of those. This piece exists for a narrower reason: if you arrived here from a recap site holding a number, that number may be twelve years old.