(Exclusive.) On Tuesday, Puck employees gathered at their “South Tribeca” HQ for a company all-hands. The meeting followed a whirlwind few days for founder Jon Kelly and his peerless media company. 

“Four Septembers ago, I recall being huddled around a rustic kitchen table in a lovely parlor apartment on Bank Street, in Greenwich Village, as the final code shipped and Puck entered into the world,” Kelly told subscribers in a mailout last week, while offering them 20% off a subscription to celebrate Puck’s fourth anniversary. 

Then on Thursday, Breaker broke the news that Puck is set to acquire Air Mail, reuniting Kelly with his longtime mentor and the O.G. of media, Graydon Carter. 

Breaker has learned over the weekend that at least one of Air Mail’s luxury advertisers (and one of the biggest fashion houses in the world) voiced concern about the deal, after receiving emails from Puck’s ad sales team. (more on that below).

On Tuesday, Kelly and Puck’s CEO, Sarah Personette, were on hand to bring staffers up to speed on the deal and answer questions, including from founding partners Matt Belloni and Bill Cohan.

“The thing I think that we want to impress upon everyone is this is highly confidential,” Personette told staffers, according to an audio recording of the meeting obtained and reviewed by Breaker. 

“This is really tremendous,” Personette said about the deal, which is expected to close by the end of October. “We are taking an already super-elevated, elite, opinion-making, decision-making, cultural authority audience. And we are expanding that by leaps and bounds, which is really exciting.”

It was then left to Kelly to apologize to staffers for finding out about the news from Breaker. 

“Obviously, nobody wants anyone in the company to learn company news about what we did, so we are genuinely sorry about that,” he said.

“This process began many, many, many months ago, so sometimes you can't control, unfortunately, what happens at the one-yard line, but like Sarah was saying, we're thrilled.”

Then Kelly answered the question so many media observers have been stewing over since the news broke – why is Puck acquiring Air Mail?

“When we contemplate any market in Puck, we look for an endemic audience that absolutely needs the content. That's unfulfilled by whatever else exists, whether it's a trade press or you know declining legacy brands, and then we look at an endemic advertising business, and in Air Mail, we saw an opportunity for both,” he said.

Then it was over to questions. The first from a staffer was about how the integration between the two media companies would work. 

“At the highest level, they will eventually come together,” Personette responded. “So we will not run two separate sites as Jon mentioned, think of Puck as sort of the master brand and Air Mail at a certain point in time will come in as a franchise underneath that, similar to what I'm hearing, similar to Wallpower, similar to Lion Sheet.”

It was then left up to Belloni to ask the burning question.

“No one else wants to ask it, so I will. What's the Graydon question? What's he doing? What's he not doing? How long will he be doing it, et cetera?”

Kelly said he was glad his man in Hollywood had asked the curly question and then told staffers that Carter will be…