From the Archives: Rise and Fall of Boosted Board
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Welcome back to another special episode all the way from podcast. We're a host and our test. I am, and i'm David. A little bit different this week, a little bit at a schedule. Well, IT is actually are a Normal schedule.

but it's a different type of episode. yeah. So we've never done a rerun on this podcast before, and this is kind of a rerun if you're watching our faces right now. We've never spoken like this directly to you before.

We have never recorded this part of the episode, but the rest of the episode is an episode we recorded IT before is the rerun in an episode did April twenty twenty one called booted to busted, the rising fall of boosted boards. Very good episode. IT was audio only because we recorded IT before we started doing a video podcast.

And because of that, a lot of you probably haven't heard that before. So we are hoping that you enjoy IT. And if you have heard that before, it's a fun little iran. Nice to take a look at IT. Almost four years later.

our audience is pride, like four to five times bigger than when the originally got put. It's thanksgiving. We didn't really have time to do a whole new episode. So this is kind of we we think a lot of .

people should listen this and they pray, haven't been. We're on videos, so I hope up a new audience who hasn't heard the ebisu yet will enjoy IT enjoy the holiday as well. Take IT away past itselfe.

Welcome to the way from podcast where your hosts on markets and I and you, at least we're Normally your hosts.

我明白了。 My fire. No.

I OK. So we actually doing .

a story time for this one, and we're going to a bit more often because there's a lot of this to be to think about, do you actually know what happened to be support? That's the question for you, the list or do you actually know yeah.

one of the stories that I think a lot of people know the lose details of, including me. I mean, I watched a lot of videos of losing boards in them, but if I try to remember and explain what actually happened, you know, I know they had a massive rise to success. They were everywhere for a while, and then they just kind of disappeared.

It's kind of died, of course, those gotta way more to IT. So M, K, B, H, D. Team researcher David and way from producer adam went down that rabbit hole, talk to some people and found out what actually happened to boosted. So they going to tell us what they found. David, adam, take IT away.

What's of you? I'm David. Well, and this is way for today.

Is abode boosted to busted to rising fall, a boosted boards? How can we skated a little too close to the sun, burned up and finished? Let's get IT our guys.

So you might remember randomly, ly, on the internet, on twitter, on boost website, boosted just very suddenly, shot doors, right? IT was very sudden. Everyone was like, that's strange because they seems to be this giant.

Monotheists were probably the most popular electric scape or brand. And of course, we've got the global pandemic c and everything, but that had like just started and that seemed like most companies are at least trying to know get through the pandemic. And IT IT was very, very early on.

That was kind of an excuse that a lot of people were using for them shutting down. But I just seemed so ridiculously sudden and they didn't really give a lot of explanation for IT. I wanted to dig a little bit deeper to try to figure out what exactly was going on here. Do you guys have any like specific memories of voted you you want to share before we get started?

I member benchmark, I might all them point basically the tesla of electric vehicles like motor, like little personal electric vehicles because everything is compared to them. Anytime a new electrics scape came out, I was should you get the boosted or not booted out exactly. And they sort of got so dominant in that face that I I guess they sort start to branch out. They did scooter, and they start doing our stuff. But I there were the default for as long as I can member.

right? Anyway, like I said before, that this giant on lift, they're like you said, like almost the tesla of electroscope boards, shut down really suddenly. So I figured, let to start from the very beginning of the company.

So about ten years ago, a decay ago, you can believe you, the store. I was always a fan of vehicles and transportation. I thought about doing a lot of transportation engineering type of work and college and grab school mechanical engineer as stanford.

And he's working on projects in a lab as mechanical engineers do. But of course, being in coalition, he didn't have a ton of expendable income. So had stay in the cheaper graduate parking and another front of ours, john, you know he had a similar problem but actually getting around stamford campus.

So we had to park pretty far away to get the cheat grade student parking passes. Um in his research we were moving around between buildings a lot and so getting you know half a mile to one building coming back could easily turn into a know twenty thirty minute round trip when I could have been a few minutes just to check on something that we build. IT.

It's a problem for most of reasons when I just takes a long time. Do IT like if you're in the zone in your project, and then you just get the fiction. I crap, I have to chock, the meter sucks every couple hours they to do that.

And one of his lab mates was also having to do that. And they just got started getting really frustrated for IT. So sanjay, I was like really into kind of like different types of vehicles.

He had a motorcycle, but he didn't really feel like that made sense to bring his motorcycle just to go like a mile, like it's this weird zone where it's too long to walk if you need to just go somewhere really quickly, but it's too short for something like an actual vehicle, like a motorcycle because you have a story outside. He's going up to figure where to park the motorcycle. It's it's just not efficient.

And what people say, just use your bike. But you know at stanford in particular, any college like your bikes get stored like all the time. My friends are stanford used to tell me like they couldn't, you couldn't never buy campus.

If you bought a new bike, you would paint IT to look as shooting as possible, so that people still, which is so sad. But yeah, so they start frustrated. He's got this friend, Matthew trend, and they kind of get into this conversation.

They're having the same issue. They have this problem where walking can takes so long and cars, crace, such a hassle. And I lived the same with cisco, and he'd been thinking about this a ton too. So I don't know if you guys knew this, but syrtis cos actually only seven by seven square miles. So yeah, it's this weird thing where it's very tiny for like a city, but it's like definitely too far to just like if you want to get from one to the other. So it's the same kind of issue where it's like a few miles and only then did we kind of discover that there was a much bigger uh, problem here called last male transportation that we wanted to try to address last small vehicles.

the term the generally last mile yeah where you you go you know one hundred, two hundred miles in a car and then you get dropped off a mile from your destination. You need to get to that place, whether it's with a portable thing or a bike or some p board or something. That's a personal last mile vehicle.

Guess i've never heard of that. really. No.

IT actually came from like logistics and shipping because if you think about a amazon, they have all these big trucks that are just holding tons of stuff, but they drop them off at these distribution centers. And then really, the distance between a distribution center and people's homes should only be a couple of miles, but that is the most complicated part of the logistics. It's just getting at that last smile efficiently, right?

Because you have to use a bunch of different vehicles to get them there. There hadn't really been the last mile vehicles for personal use were some startups like the one wheel. And then there was this point in cemetery co.

And other places in the world where, like scooters, you've probably these scooters and bikes that are parked places and you can park them. You go like a mile, you're park again. That was a really thing at the time.

So the problem hadn't really been solved. So sanjay did what any good engineer does, and he decided to solve the problem himself. Kind of as a side project. They are still doing their graduate school stuff, but their mechanical engineers. So they might as well try to figure out how to do with themselves and and maybe IT can turn IT to something bigger because, of course, in silicon valley, any idea you have is a potential company.

I was just can say this is like the perfect set up where, like you're right, he's got a problem. Yeah he's needs an engineering solution. He happens to an engineer at stanford. There is a very specific need and a very specific group of people who all have the same problem. If you could solve IT for everyone just needs to run down garage and that's .

an exact and this is the story of icon and yeah and just people who have like all these resources and they find holes in people's lives and they try to solve them for them or you know find told that don't exist and say that you need to solve them, even know they no problems. So they go to the toy store and they actually bought some hardware to make model airplanes in santa.

I actually did a ted talk later on where he talks about how they made the first prototype. And it's kind of while, but the best part about these components is that we bought them at a toy store. These are from remote control airplanes.

And the performance of these things has gotten so good that if you think about vehicles a little bit differently, you can really change things. They strapped them to esk board, kind of like proof of concepts. They got a motor and they got a remote.

And all these little things obviously sounds a little bit dangerous. But what good project doesn't start a little bit dangerous? You got to test the limits of, like what you can do before you real IT back in and figure out what the actual use case would be.

So the sky board makes a lot of sense because it's small. They can fit in their car and they can drive the campus. They can drive to that cheaper graduate parking and then just drive the escape board the rest of the way, the last mile.

It's kind of like the ultimate solution. On top of that, it's cool. It's fun, right? Like skateboards have this really deep seated community that has not really changed since the nineties like at all.

Like if you look at skater kids now, they wear the same clothes, they listen to the same music, they make the same videos. Like it's this cool, deeply rooted community. If you build a product around that is kind of like an extension of that community, you don't have to find a community.

It's kind of already built them. Yeah right. So this point they didn't really know that they were just kind of focused on like what makes the most sense.

And then they kind of started lightly pitching to some started accelerators as you do when you live in silicon rally, just like, hey, we have this product, you should give us money. So that's what happened in the end of getting into y combination and started x, which is a really big deal. Yeah, I don't think they are expecting to get into any these programs, but the people at these companies actually saw potential what they were doing.

They gave them money. And once you get to one of these, IT becomes your full time thing, right? So you just have to like drop everything that you're doing and try to make company out of this.

They take what they made IT, why combinator, and they decided to make a kick starter campaign. And at the time of this was really early kick start at only. Around for a couple years.

So IT wasn't this company, were like founders would create things that they never shipped or IT was scams or know that or big companies like that rt sold phones are whatever, just using IT as a jump starter for a thing. Yeah, yeah. I give us funding.

Even know you're going to buy this product anyway and we're going to make this product anyway. But at this point, I kind of blew up that I don't think they're really expecting you to blow up on cake started like IT did. They were looking for one hundred thousand dollars, and they were selling the boards for about twelve hundred dollars.

So you know, they just had to sell a decent alba E A time. They ended up making four hundred sixty seven thousand dollars. So they like almost queen apple.

Their goal and IT was way more than they were expecting. They ve got one thousand, one hundred and ten backers. So this kind of accelerated the idea that this could be a way bigger thing than they thought. I mean, they got over a thousand people that were willing to not only that wanted to write the thing, but we're to throw down over a grand yeah, on this random idea site on seen yes.

yeah, he was IT was premature.

Do you guys .

remember the kick starter that adam.

our producer? I don't remember .

the kick starter.

No, I only remember finding boosted as a full large company. So I didn't I actually don't think I knew that they were ever a kick starter project. And there are so many cake starters, I go the exact opposite direction. So that's impressive that they got that much.

This was a weird period of time. I was a very early and kick starter and I don't, if you just remember, but like a popular youtube form at the time, was like top c starters of week.

Now the tube, oh, what .

is? Yeah, but. And will this actually go to market?

Yeah exactly. But anyway, they got so many orders and they wanted to hire a bunch their friends IT was one the reasons we first took invest money from the outside um and didn't just kind of boots drap IT off of kick starter because we could afford to hire some part smart st friends to come join us and who otherwise you know could get really well paying jobs that pretty and the other tech company in the area. So that was like the birth of the company as we know.

I love shark tank, one of my favorite T. V shows. I feel like I learned so much from that. We interviewed Kevin, eli already.

And every time I see like one of these new shark tank type, like new company ideas, I immediately think like, if they showed up on short tank, how would I go? And when I hear this story, I think, like this would have gone really well. They go, how much money they gimme, and they go, we haven't made any products, but we sold five million dollars of them.

And Kevin would go, wow, that's a lot of money, right? Tell me customers must go. It's a very specific, very dedicated kish of people that needs an issue solved and they're in a wealthy california suburb.

And it's it's a very, very strong like potential customer base. And I go, okay, it's good idea. You have anything propriety? And they go, yeah, we've just made this skate board with batteries and motor's on IT.

We can patent all the stuff. I think this will gone really well on shark tank. That's my reaction to their birth, and i'm kind of hindsight twenty, twenty, but i'm not shocked they had a pretty great start.

It's similar how tusa started that, right? Like they're one of the first big major E V companies is like you have the upper hand when you are the first. A lot of people are just going to as long as you make IT and become that stable, then people have to compare to you for a while. I think I think we're still in that face with tela right now. Like everyone's comparing the tesla, whether it's a reasonable comparison that I still think even with boost board dead, I probably would still consider every single electrics keyboard from now I would compared, right?

How boosted was there was popular? I think that's interesting thing is it's not even just their technology, but it's also the quality, which is something that I don't think tesla I had at the beginning, right? Like obviously, they're still having issues, but there getting a lot Better but boosted like from the beginning, they had this like amazing bamboo board.

They had the best motors. Something that people sight all the time is like how could their brake systems were? The acceleration curve is like really smooth and it's got a good controller and they've got to was like bright wheels that like everyone knows right that's recognizable, which is is very rare for like a version one of a gene product that hadn't existed on the market before. The thing .

apple does that everyone strives to do, apple has branding. You can tell what an apple phone is, what an apple watches with almost anything apple is from looking at IT. And they hit that .

ality everything you would .

ever want and starting a point.

Yeah, would you be interested currently in electric port like pretend you'd never wrote on one before and you'd never seen that today yeah today if you saw .

the kick starter? Yeah, it's really interesting. Today in twenty twenty one, we've seen the explosive riise and follow electric cutters.

Now even four, we just saw them just like a pear everywhere. And so electric cuts are the same solution to the same problem. It's like this last mile vehicle. It's sort of somewhat personal and they kind of got commodities for companies. We just have them over the streets, need see on the sidewalk and send to say, but like if I yeah so I think if I saw a company like boosted have that same initial response starting today, I think oh, they're differentiating themselves from the skies by by being a skater or and thing oh, a small group of people will probably like this more than scooters, but theyll love the thing. But that that because i've already seen what happened to the scooters, yes, and I feel like before the scars, this would appear to have a much wider total demographic.

I mean, as someone who skated when they were Young like, I think I think that would be super interesting. And I think the Price point would be my biggest worry. I just because that is an expensive product is not cheap, like you said this, this is more of you're paying for solution.

So if you don't have this last mile problem, like to is try not something you would want and as to me IT would be really interesting I think an election escape or would sound super fund um office I know its super fund because we ve wrote them since. But going back to before then, I think I would have been super interested and never would have put down. But at the same time, if you have a kick start worth thousand, people are backing IT at that Price point. Might to say there are obviously people willing to pay those Prices.

I have one other a bit server. Girl reminds me a lot of hosting. I want to school for four years and hope you can live there for all four years. Uh, it's a one mile square city, and during the height of boosted, they were everywhere because people would get off, people would get off the train, and they lived fourteen blocks north the train station. And instead of walking through hommock, and they would boosted, and I would pass people on one wheel and boosted and scooters all the time for a couple years.

And vegetable, all those couple stone roads and those have a great point .

hob and does not have the quality of roads, but there are plenty like back roads. And if you a good roads, memories much more .

willing to skip, go on extra block electric .

are around exactly. So if you live on the transitions on first and you live on fourteen th and you go to school on seventh like that, that whole commute became seconds instead of minutes because you have that sort of IT .

was really popular for, well, right act to keep the music right. So they start hiring people really fast. You know they start with like friends.

They have all these talented people that are in their programming, stanford and mechanical engineering all that, but they're pretty quickly expanding to try to hire more talent throughout silicon valley. You got ta grow fast rate if you get seed funding, what those investors want to growth as fast as physically possible in a valley. Pretty easy to develop like a bit of a toxic work environment at these places.

I mean, it's pretty fun at first. You know you have like catered lunches. You ve got rub activities, my sister's company and common value day of, like surfing and like all this stuff that they just do together.

It's like, it's fun. But can I can vary quickly develop into this weird kind of toxic relationship? So I wanted to know what I was actually like to work there. So I gone to contact with a couple former employees.

My name is mike. Mike.

yes, i'm the phone right here. I was in customer support at boosted the fun.

And mike had almost nothing negative to say about the company, and they had their own little laugh.

There was a pretty massive warehouse and there .

was little upstairs loft where they got to like mess around with other customer relations people and just like they didn't really have to deal with the engineers and but they said he was just IT .

was fun customer support loved IT having this little laugh to ourselves where we could sort of cook, you know, customer stock, as we recalled. We loved IT up there. We loved having that freedom to sort of say, whatever the how you want and have that like privacy sort run our department.

However, we felt that guys knew or passion about skating. So mike grew up in australia in like deep skate culture.

So I and I have been a keen surface skate board of her, my, my entire life and and not my my ty night son as well.

When we talk to him on the phone, you could tell that he was like a skater of himself. I saw an electric .

skateboard ripping down the strait where we lived in mountain view. And I was like, wow, uh, what is that thing? IT looks really amazing with a generation one, but I still don't know who was writing in to this day. And I went high when I said to my life, I just saw this thing, uh, ripping the strait. I want one of layers that looks just sick.

And the fun wasn't exactly enough skateboard either.

So I had been in skate boarding for most of my life when I was eighteen. I skate boarded across america.

Yeah, is awesome. Um but these guys are hard course. When you call to talk to a customer service representative, you talk to someone who won new where they were talking about, they were really into the product and then two, like they were just enthusiast for skating so whether or not you were in the one diagram of like I just want my boosted to be fixed or i'm a skater and I just like wants to know more about the product like they were your guys yeah, mike told me a story about this kid.

Uh, there there is so many awesome, you know, so many awesome things that that happened the area, you know, I used to sit ride in amongst all of these guys. And if any, any former boosted customers are are listening you that will know the names, you know, Angelo, and hang and and Carry an, you would have hank with the patient, a patient of them all.

And he had a, you know, I think is about twelve, a fourteen year old boy, joy, iran, calling every way bad. But he was saving for joyful ood calling rates swetchine. I would have said, I like.

did they just call the chat to each other? Or he, did he actually need .

to help just call the chat? Yeah, yeah. If you're listening, join you will be he's legend SHE had out hanker, would love to say. And then they were just .

call in just to talk about skating. Like, have you seen this video, like on youtube about the skating? IT just cool IT just became like this, this love, lovely community that sounds fun.

And then if you are a really busy one day, and you know, you onna call in, that sounds like a nightmare.

So the community aspects of the company grew really freaking fast. And I kind of became like a hallmark part of boosted, right? Like not only did you already have the heart core people who just love skating and see you are ready grabs that audience, but like they their community was not. They started holding a group rides, which I went two couple in seven S O. And there so fun.

It's weird because it's it's one of those things that is really just enabled by the internet and like by the future where you no matter what your niche is, if you get together with people who are really into the same thing as you IT becomes, like not even about the thing that you're getting together about, it's just excuse to hang out with like minded people. And IT just becomes this really fun of them, know, so they just scared around in mercy co, like I did a couple of these days. And we're just moving in packs of like a hundred of the streets of us, really scary sharks at this point.

I mean, I can do all right. exactly. I remember sam chaffers done a couple of videos, unlike group gates in new york.

and what really fun. yes. So so many parallel test so that I see so many.

One is like, yeah, one is like you one.

you worked for tesla certain department. You are a car enthusiast, not necessarily a test like electronic usia. So when people discuss like driving dynamics or sporting ists or like how different parts that you could buy could affect your ride, like they can talk to you about that when you are customer.

Any other thing, as you mentioned, group rides and people who are like advocate for the product and hang out with people who are like minded like that is a hundred percent of thing that happens. The test community all the time. There's forums, there's group drives, there's meet ups, there's all kinds of stuff like that.

And I feel like that's just what happens when you love a bada. Enough, right? So have you ever done one before? I ve never done one. I've never. I'm not social enough to want to go out of my way, but I make videos about the products just like lots of test others.

And yeah and I I think that's just like a hallmark of these tightness c communities like there's already like you don't have to organize metus in scape culture because you already are meeting at the skatepark. Yeah right.

And you're not necessarily getting the whole time, but when you have this weird niche that you're really interested in, you post on forms like crazy are just successes with the product and you just want to hang out with like minded people, boosted in particular, they're directly communicating with their customers. It's almost like they are all friends, you know like they host these meet ups, but like the boosted team members are like getting phone numbers from people. So like the reason actually, uh knows define is because I met him at media and I got a notification on my phone that he joined telegram like the week that we started this this episode.

And so just messing is like do you want to be on the podcast? He's like, sure. So IT works out, right?

That's the kind of thing like you meet friends at these places. okay. And so there's a famous story about where this customers board started smoking.

That was the most awesome thing that santa I there was .

legendary unit that's .

mike again jumped on a plan and flow out to new york to solve a you know a battery issue that was there there was two battery fault. That's A A trigger of a recall. That was my first day in the office.

Wow, man.

that's such a little. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's not exactly .

the best thing to happen to your skyward. And we ve seen like similar cases with like samsung phones will start smoking and the way that they handle that is kind of shaky. They have your P R response or like they say that they're using IT wrong or something like that. It's not exactly the kind of like customer to business relationship that customers are gna like, but the way that they handle this is sanjay, who you know is the founder of the company physically, just like flew out to the person's house to go check that out.

And I was on a redit forum a couple days ago from when the company closed and this person share the person whose board was smoking like shared the memory, like i've still got like a signed like napkin with your signature on IT when you come came to help me out. Which just like kind of how people acted around, like elon musk, like he was sort of this elon musk of asted yeah ah where they just like really looked up to him as like this leader, which is very interesting but yeah that just show is like the companies always got your back with this product. But I think many people more comfortable about buying the product.

They knew they we're gonna get like really good customer service. They knew that they were never going to you know buy something and then just like not have a warranty, never be able to talk to these people are they're fixing every possible problem that customers had. So they started out, right? So you ve got this excitement.

The communities growing, but they're still kind of small. And even if you think something is a big in real life because you see a lot of them, doesn't mean they're really big. IT could just be the communities you hanging out around or or similar to you.

So you you see things. But at this point, even though boost is not like maybe a major brand that everyone like, that's a boosted board. People can still recognize them because they would ve got these like popular theyve got these orange wheels, we've got these decks.

And like when people are writing a boost to board, almost everyone knows what IT is. After the break, booted hits its thread. Stick with us. I'll be your back.

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So if you guys were to guess what was the big break moment for boost its brand?

No, no idea. Absolutely is wrong with laz as as as someone who's .

seen a lot of products arrive in the public eye thanks to an obsession by a public figure, uh, particularly youtube s with a strong following. Uh, i'm very confident that case.

and I said, is something to do. One.

I decided to talk to all these people that I had about what the inflection point was, where boosted went from nobody knowing ing .

IT to everybody knowing IT.

My is casey nice that I guess some youtube.

So naturally we had to in touch with casey, the casey nice that had started this daily vlog project around new york sitting, I think specific, he was just doing fund stuff around new york and kinds showing.

When I was like to live here. I started my daily blog in screw this time line up. We can probably find IT on youtube, if you want to. I started my daily vlog, march twenty, I think two thousand fifteen.

I he's right, like if he just he was one of the first bloggers, at least the first blogger to like, do IT of this in this type and so like everyone started to know who you was even in those early blogs, he would leave his apartment and guys just IT was crazy on new york and particularly.

it's hard to overstate how much of an impact his vlog had on youtube. Like the like lots of parts of youtube you mentioned vlog, but it's like the daily aspect, the drone ca photography aspect, the like community building location specific aspect of this videos, like so much of IT was the perfect storm. Uh and so I can't imagine being casey walking outside and like sipping around the city board. How many people would be like that? The guy from the videos because it's such a recognizable, repeatable image so I I imagine you .

know he I mean, he was apart in everything like even the cinematic on boxing of products now kind of like forefront of dead in his blogs too, just like so many different things.

You know, I I only now in that respect, like I stopped my daily blog two years ago, whatever. Only now do I realize, like what IT means, emptively, have a day we show that was more up to a million plus people, or seven days a week, when the central character was not even me. The central character was new ork city.

which was, I think, a really interesting way to put IT. And he's kind of just like this naratu, showing what the city could be and the people in the situations, in his films, really the of the blogs. And he's trying all these different transportation mediums, right?

He's got a car. him. Can I have a car? He's got a bike. He tries electric bike.

But there's nothing that can compete with a boosted board. There's nothing. And i've writing every device from a segway electric bike to, like, really good, high quality electric bike. Like my wife had a car in the cities. We actually had a car uver, taxi, bus, subway, nothing works as well as a boost .

board for a the first ever casey vlog .

I ever watched and then watched every single day in his vlog where .

he opens the boosted board. It's like A Q N A. He's like, I used to use this like jacky hover board thing, but now I have this and he's just like, super excited about IT, right? And pretty much from the moment he opens up up on camera should just goes nuts for this company at this point. IT became a totally active for his blog he started using in every single vlog because he said he was like the most convenient .

way to get on the city. The new york city. Such transportation is such a specific narrow thing where it's like this diagram of like practically speed and convenience, safety and security. So, uh, an electric bike, amazing.

In new york city, until you have to go to an office building and then number how many locks you put on that bike, it's going to be stolen when you come out. And then I told the fact we have a camera, my hands and two hands on the hand bars were, enter this support that has breaks where I could just move around that city. I had breaks and acceleration in one hand in my Cameron, the other.

I wasn't attached these things of how the fall I could jump off, unlike a bicycle. And then as far as security, I could just take IT up and walking to any business in the city and no questions asked. He Carried on a subway. So IT was that boosted board became my key to new york city, even though I had lived there for for fifteen years at the time. I mean.

new york city, if you think about IT, wasn't originally built for cars, right? It's this old city that really was like a walking city. And then they kind of just stuff t streets and cars into IT.

And that's the reason like the streets are so narrow and like it's just very hard you've to navigate around everything and it's hard to get around people. It's not that big. So that is kind of a perfect use case for a last mile vehicle, right? It's like, yeah, it's hard to use other mediums, see mine as well. Use this like i'm walking, but very fast and less often.

One of cases, most viral videos ever is all about by lanes and how there are constantly obstruction. Yes, there is always stuff parked in the back lanes. And if you want to zip around new york city in any sort of visual way, you've got to be in the streets, in the bike lanes, on the sidewalk. This needed a solution.

Yeah, yeah. And the best word could go twenty four miles hour in the street. exactly. See you.

You could write in the streets and you're probably going to be faster than cars, right? At this point. You're basically a motorcycle is weaving between cars, but slimmer and you know probably more .

safe and you can walk IT up to your apartment.

exactly. IT is like the perfect thing, like bikes aren't work in this case, cuts are knowing this is basically his solution. So booter gets a ton of attention, interaction just from his blog, and they didn't expect this to happen at all. I don't think .

they would expect to him to open IT, one of the of matching the sales that he was bringing .

in that stuff on again for those wondering. But he became so essential he he buys multiple boards for when some of them start breaking or like if one's dead and forget to charge IT, he wants to have one just ready to go like he is the let's go type of guy you know no obstructions.

nothing slowing me down yeah um I mean, you guys did the study. So how was that? That's that's the thing about casey is he is a guy who just wants the thing to work so he is a camera and a lens.

He's not a baby thing. He's going to use IT absolutely everywhere he can, sticking on A A curb, sticking on a fire and whatever needs to to get the shot. And so you saw the videos where he treated those boards is like thrown on the ground, jump on and go.

He's not a baby. That thing. yeah. And the thing you notice, even if I was never gonna get one of my videos, I would always notice those boards are getting manhandled and they were just working time.

So I was never shocked when he bought, when he broke one. I never go on, man. I can't believe a bootlegs all broke.

I would go, wow. I can't believe at last. And he goes on the next one and he gets another boost board. And I, like this guy, could get any other boy he wants. So what to be pretty good yet.

Four, five of them on the wall when we went there and they were just, they were absolutely destroyed. All of them were always there charging. And yeah, like he said, one runs out about you. You got the change, grab the different one, breaks, grabs another one. He always had them for everything.

And the fine thing is like, like I said earlier, this is like one of the first selector skateboards in the category. But yet IT became IT was already one of the like best one. Not only was that one of the fastest I had, the best deck had the best wheels, and IT just became kind of the electric skybox that you'd get. Uh, most people attribute the acceleration curve and the breaks in particular as the most important thing on these boards, casey said. Like the breaks in york city, like you need to be able to go twenty miles power, and when you break, not just get thrown out.

if you can accelerate your way out of trouble, you're going head head with a taxi cab, the taxi slowing down. If you don't have the power to pool in front of the taxi driver, you're in a very compromised position. So acceleration was vital. And then the other thing was breaking.

The breaking was so row bus on a boosted board that like a full speed, if you were to hit that break a hundred percent and really not know how to brace yourself, you get thrown off the board like there's an argument that says the brain was too powerful on those devices. But once you learn how to navigate that, that became instrumental to its um it's yelling a kind of confidence and its user that said, you know what this I can use this to get around. This isn't just a fun thing to right around the parking lot when no one's here.

right? Like and a lot of other elements. C escape boards, the brake system, which is like, but this one had a built on the motor.

So that was actually the thing that would make the acceleration curve the best and also the breaks the best. But of course, that actually that would also break so kind of a trade off. But IT was worth IT substance basically having trouble keeping up with demand uh, which mike says.

no, I think that's an some problem to it's .

another shark tech thing like, so why do you need the money? Well, we can make enough.

yeah. perfect. yeah. So yeah, just need to scale up. Yeah, so mike told me the story that every single time casey would release of log.

so casey would post the video.

they d like customer basically down the days.

get ready to ship peels.

You'd like call down to the rest of the team and y'd be like, are I boys? Let's get ready.

That is so funny.

You could say the direct car relation between unit is ripped through new york and the whole bunch .

of birds .

found out i'll just drop. I hate the word influenced, but there is no more perfect like storm for like a bunch of new people finding a product than someone that they love and follow every day, becoming a assessed when I think of a case. Nice that vlog from back in those.

I think of probably about four things. I think of casey, I think of new york city. I think of the camera he's holding on either a gorilla pod or some sort of tripod.

And I think of a boost about, right yeah was perfect gilla pods, even. Yeah, drones. Yeah, john is a good one.

But like gorilla pods, even. Yeah, good. They couldn't pay for a Better ad.

Yeah, they couldn't pay for a Better. Yeah, no. And I asked him, I was like.

did you did you ever set up any sort of that case? You would be like the order of magnet, the highest bio? yes. wow.

Like you've you've inadvertantly sold the bunch of teslas. Ah they added program.

But this lot of other products that I have seen an impact from videos that I don't get a cut of, i'm just ious.

Yeah, they had a full program and casey would be like hundreds of thousands probably. Okay, so obvious ly, things are going pretty well. I mean, they released the v two, the stealth, the mini like they started expanding the product line because that's what you do.

They took seed money from investors. They needed to grow and need to do expand. And you even did a video with casey on the mini, um what was that like?

Oh, fun. I mean, I was never scared. So this was me coming at the tech angle from something I am from with, as I do often.

Like, I love my handheld and my ipad TV and stuff, but like, I was never a car guy until the electric cars, and I was never a know skater until the electric skate boards. And I just was trying something new because I was high tech and I learned a lot about from casey, and I really liked IT. IT was clearly a very good product.

So I think that was a one for them too. Yeah, yeah, that was like, did you feel like he was just like, so much more experience at the product that you had to like?

I mean, there's definitely a learning curve with skating in general about like getting your baLance and starting get comfortable carving a little bit like how you steer and maneuver thing. And the benefit of the mini was obviously that IT was smaller, but IT was also more nimble that I had like that extend so you can get around tighter corners and stuff.

So I was just happy that there was like a lighter weight version I could hold with my army extended and not drag on the ground. But he was so obsessed over like the dynamics of like the smaller non lon board or now you got like you're feeds closer together and you can carve a little tighter and your turning radius is Better because you can lift the front wheel off the ground, all that stuff. Yeah, I would never appreciate you that if he didn't tell me. And that was all in one place, which is, yes.

I remember at the event that I must to fn at the group ride, IT was right after the mini and the self have launched. And the thing that blue my mind was that he was doing like always in kick flips yeah .

for mini how hard that is on something .

yeah but I was but either way, like the fact that you could yeah like you ably shouldn't because they are battering IT but IT IT was so crazy um so things seem good. But as you remember, the company doesn't exist anymore. So back to the original question.

What exactly happened here? right? Things seem to be going super well.

How did the comity that seems so huge and was going so fast crash just as quickly? right? To really figured out, I need to contact someone who has been covering this since the very beginning.

OK, i'm a singer reporter at the verge.

And what is your main beat over there?

And I cover transportation, everything that moves pretty much E.

V. Start tesla. He's covered all that stuff and he's covered boosted literally since they were first founded.

So he knows the thing you're too about this company. So things seem to be going great on the outside. They're going great with customer relations and the culture. But obviously.

startups aren't easy. Whatever money was coming in was going back out the door and all that money was being sort of reinvested and spent as they got IT in right.

Like IT seems like everything can go great, but you need to make the product Better. You need to invest any earnings you get back into the company. You've got got to grow the company as fast as possible. And overall, if you take seed investor money, you have to start seeing your return as quickly as possible, right? And this is even harder with hardware.

It's one thing to write really amazing code in executed and see you see your work pay off. It's another thing to like work on a product like this and then be able to like write IT.

And like silicon valley, most of the campus are software companies. You don't have a lot of overhead. It's pretty easy to make software, make a Better try to reach more customers.

You really your only overhead is like maybe your office and you've got got your employees, that's kind of IT. But even, even companies like amazon had trouble doing this rate like they're not selling. They weren't selling a product at first.

They were just the logistics company. But they lost money for so long that invest almost pulled out multiple, multiple times in bazas had to be like, don't worry, we're going to be profitable eventually. We're going to be profitable eventually.

There's not a lot of hardware companies in so icon valley that gets the investor funding because it's just hard to grow. That is a lot to grow. That and specifically boosted margins were like incredibly low, especially at the beginning, right, because they were already selling this product for lag twelve hundred books.

But that was like they weren't making a lot of money on, if anything, they were like barely scraping by from the beginning. Ah so it's going to take them a lot longer to become profitable. They had to get to a point in the product where IT cost a lot less to make the product, then IT cost a cell.

And they have the problem of the products is so good, people are probably not replacing them that off and they have to keep finding more audience um so boosted, raised more money into investments the product because they needed to start seeing that to make IT Better. They had to hire more engineers, the head to keep getting the cattle lunches. You know it's to like actually get people to to come work at their company.

So they ended up, once everything was had done, raising about seventy five million dollars after all of the investment rounds. I've got all this money. It's just that sunday and the others that founded the company weren't exactly used to growing companies, right? Their engineers.

In twenty seventeen, you stepped down as the company CEO, and we're curious as to why you did that. Yeah so um so we had a bit of a disagreement internally at the time about which direction to go in as a company. And I won't get into like too much detail about that.

But basically we decided uh you know both as a founding team and and with the board, with the major investors like you, let's go find somebody um who has done this kind of work before but at a much bigger scale because neither of us, uh genti who had been there at that time, I had left at that point. But johna, I had never run a business before, especially one that was growing as fast as that. So the sunday decided to step down a CEO and move to the board.

So he just became like on the world of directors, kind of like helping oversee the company growth. Anyway, they're bring in this hot shot. He came from the same programme as sanjay at stanford, the preliminary exact same track, but he went the business around instead of the engineering out.

Yeah I feel like I I just saw an interview about this where um I think he was probably elon for talking about like grown a company kind of has to come from inside the company. And when you take someone from some high and program some hot shot maybe and he just parachute in from the top, he doesn't necessarily he or SHE doesn't understand why the company grows or how IT specifically works and should grow.

And you can take time to learn that stuff. But I feel like it's typically Better to have someone within the company, familiar with the company who has grown with the company. He knows how IT would best continue to improve.

But, you know, Shawn told me that like IT wasn't necessarily the .

worst thing. You know, when the new CEO came in. Uh, jeff re, rico, that idea that started with sunday of like we our sort of goal at some point is to help solve this sort of last mile transport oration problem really got accelerated. That sort of aspiration became like the sort of like marching cry for rucci. And he took over because that was the way that they could really grow the business.

That ultimately always the problem is that the investors just want to see a return as fast as possible. Obviously, you've got this company that's got a super laid back culture because they hire a bunch of skaters.

right? Yeah yeah. Skaters business .

don't match very well, right? I and everyone was just really chilled. The'd come from like the sankers area, the same for cisco area.

And they were just like IT doesn't match when you bring a business guy and that like wants to grow something. So there is already a little bit attention. Jef wants to figure out how to scale a camp. And the solutions he has is to expand the there like preparatory ory motor system into other form factors. There was a point in time .

over the last couple years or IT seemed like a lot of options were on the table for them, whether that was going to be the school or that they eventually made in the rev or something simpler and more design for sort of my commodity or just more generally affordable and lighter. There is also some bikes in the work that we're more either standard by. They also had a sort of seated screw or kind of thing like super seventy three. So they definitely were evaluating a lot of different options. Uh.

usually you start with your core products and then you realize like, okay, if you want to sell more stuff, we want to exit the company. We have to hit these audiences that are not being served right now. So the two main protocols, gorges that they were kind of toying with was an electric bike and electric scooter.

They ultimately land on the scooter because a bike is great and people love biking. But they still wanted to kind of fit that portability aspect that the electric skate board had brought, uh like an electric paper you could just bring inside with you and they sort of wanted to maintain that also. The whole like a electricity craze was the thing in silicon valley at that point, like twenty thousand thousand and twenty eighteen with personally.

I think is a terrible idea. I don't think that you should just like if something is over saturated, you should just like inject yourself self into the market at the same time. Yeah, yeah, exactly that kind of thing.

I mean, you had lime, you had bird, and you'd all these companies that were like jump bikes, you had all these companies are just like showing up of the city. I had nowhere. I remember seeing these scooters like in the middle, the road, because people will just pick them up and throw them in the middle the road.

And there is instagram fans that would pop up like bird grave art, or just people destroying birds like as like a fun thing. I don't know, people hate to them. Go back. yeah. Anyways, they ended up planning on the personal.

And most of the scooter startups were convenience based last mile stuff, right? So you'd rent from from a charger outside some business, you'd write IT to a different place that you're going. You'd park IT and then you'd walk the rest of the way to where you're going.

But boosted wanted to offer something that you could actually own as opposed to something that you know you just rent because they wanted to kind of like stick to their company ethos of like really powerful, really fast. And you can't really do that when you want something to be like just a little last mile thing. And also because they group in same cisco, that's a very hilly city and they wanted something that you could like fly up the the streets with right at the time, jme kind of owned the market of personal electric guitars.

They still kind of do um they done a really good jobs scaling that I think they offer like a me scooter pro now that is supposed to be able to climb streets of emphases go. But at the time I remember I took the cow in and to sanartia from cenozoic every day. And the amount people that would get off the cow train with the Jamie scooters was like, I don't think anyone the us. Really knew that Jimmy was a brand but they would still buy their scooters off of amazon like he was crazy um and those worked for like flat areas but they couldn't really do in clients. So boost saw this opportunity of like what if we put our motors and engineering tech into this like really powerful scooter and make IT be able to like fly up and down the series of same as go um and ultimately, obviously the company was really divided about this choice.

I wasn't super hoped on the square, to be honest um as as a direction know for the business. Um actually you know I stuck my hand in the air uh, at some of those product meeting since said, hey, you know what a bike is to go if we're going to do another product um that would be that would be read um but you know like any any good team um there is difference in opinions. You know before we went down that right everyone had a different uh, opinion on up but when uh when that final decision was not everyone up behind, usually that's the .

kiss of death yeah usually when a startup has a series of founders that are alike pretty close to its core and its mission and its purpose and then that company starts to expand and branch out and move on to other things and a founder leaves. Usually that's a pretty big pivoting point for that company where other people start to get the picture like, oh, it's not going to be like IT was before I might want to leave to, right? There's plenty of examples of that.

Yeah casey actually said the same thing.

Yeah when they when sunday left, whenever a founder leaves their start up, that that vision that they brought to IT goes away with them. And I I think about like when Steve jobs left apple, you know, I brought in great leadership. It's smart people there.

But there's a very specific vision that I believe sanjay had that he took with him when he left the company. So I think jeff brought tremendous business action and really intelligent, practical thinking to the company. But IT felt like the romance behind the device itself faded. And in my business experience, it's always like, first, develop mission statement. Second, you writing on the wall and that becomes religion, like everything you do has to be to promote that mission statement.

And when I look at boosted board under sanjay guide I see that I see that and when I look at IT um in the time after he left, I saw something about you know I that romance faded and in its place came like how do we expand this company? How do we scale this company? How do we meet these insane valuations that we raise money at? And that's never a great recipe for, for success. And that's a big .

reason why lot of the employees started leading. They started finding a lot of different jobs or on so on valley. And if you go on to read IT, there's like all these post on the boosted, separated of, like bring bags on j hashtag, bring bags on j like, you know, people started like thinking ahead.

Like did he get out of? Like I just started because the community was so powerful, right? Like they were so invested in what was happening at the company.

IT wasn't really like a corporation. IT was like IT was like their friends. So I just felt weird to have sunday like leave the company when he this thing.

I kind of wonder if that guy that was calling every week was still calling every week, just like, so like was gone on. yes.

yeah. Like, so there was also this worry that the company had, like leveraged a little too much on the scooter. And if you guys remember, but the booster of reb, which was the name of the skate, was not cheap.

IT was like two thousand dollars, right? And like you could say, the scape work was expensive at twelve hundred, but then you bring in two thousand and it's a scooter. So it's not as cool.

It's really big. It's heavy. It's like forty pounds like .

and I was also turning in a market that already had competitors. I feel like that boosted showed up with an electric long board. I don't really know if anyone knew how much that should cost.

All they knew that solve the issue and there wasn't really any other version. So they got the boost hundred box OK when the scooter came around. I remember immediately what i'm doing, my research, I M like, right? I got to compare IT to these six or seven other scooters that are out there.

And i'm like, why this is this is a very different approach, is much heavy and much bigger and bulker. And maybe that's a different demographic or maybe that's just a different way of doing the same thing, often the same problem. So yeah, they definitely got that .

comparison and the one x difference like, yeah, you're paying a lot more for this thing just because I could go faster and I could like go up the hills without as much of an issue. I think there kind of like idea was that people feel more comfortable on the scooters than they do on skateboards because you use to feed on IT, you have to handle bars, all of that kind of stuff. But IT IT just wasn't the same as writing a skateboard. It's totally different experience after the break and attempted pivot take with us.

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You guys remember your first time seeing the red, like, what were your impressions?

I remember we got IT of the box and just starting. I think we just exited around the studio on the carpet for a little bit. And the thing would like spin the wheel so fast, they would want to take up the carpet. And really like, this thing is series, we need to go outside. And IT was immediately very fun and very fast.

IT IT again, felt similar to, like the boost wears like this, felt like a more method, transportation less, toy less, just like something you grab a bite. Like, no IT kind of made sense. Is that expensive? Because I was built like a tank. IT went very fast as supercar to pick up, and I like got IT. But then at the same time, as someone who just had never had to deal with something like that, like last smile transportation, i've I couldn't see I couldn't tell somebody was willing to pay right too .

grand for something. It's such a specific demographic because you need to be living in a place that's hilly specifically like ah I did the briefing for the boosted revenues esco and he specifically brought me like jeff. He brought me till like one of the biggest hills insurance to scope. He was like right of the hill that was like the brief in .

right yeah I also remember we got one and then IT was recalled and then we got another one to test. And then they took that when back to right?

Yeah, they never thought what I mean, I guess just was a review unit. But they let us keep the first, let us keep all the past booted boards.

All the Lucy boys start on the studio. I just remember they said, hey, there's a problem with one of them. We're going to like, just take IT back and replace IT.

And literally, they showed up here. The studio, he wrote a different one to the studio, gave me that one and I gave him the other one and he wrote that home and I would go, right? I guess they're just swapping IT out.

Maybe there's something new about the new one. I don't think ever aster found out. yeah.

I don't know if you guys remember this, but the main problem was that there was someone of the virtue is reviewing IT, and there was a problem with the latch in the way that the like top have would feel. And if you were folding the board, if you are Carrying the board without having followed IT, sometimes I would like close on its own. And IT broke someone's finger at the verge. I wrote this whole article like the boosted reve broke my finger.

not mine. My colleague, andy.

yes, which is not great.

Pr, not at first, they didn't .

want much of reviewing in marketing. Hurt, give IT because doesn't easy have .

so like phone explosion that should take IT back yeah so so I asked, like everybody.

I was like, what like why do you think you think the ref was the problem with the company fails? Because I was trying to figure, like why did the company just go under and every single person was like, I don't think IT was the biggest problem, but the culture around boosted is a skater culture. And as casey said to me.

like roller blades, how popular they get, they'll never really break through because there's no way to look cool on a fuckers. Student, I don't can help. You are roller laying down because you look like like I I was a good, I like to camp.

I like good roller later the whole, the whole sport died out. Yeah, because he doesn't have good. You look, you don't look cool on roller blade, you don't look cool on scooter .

that I think I had a line kind of like that in the review. I think we typically .

had shot in the review that almost just like, yeah felt lame yeah, if that makes sense yeah like I get the scooter. I get the scooter completely. Like IT is much easier to write a cuter espoo. When we had IT here, I brought my wife out on the back, and within one minute he was full speed on the .

boost ridge. Just at this point, mars kids up and pretends to write a scooter and let's be really he looks, he looks pretty m fence to cuter writers out there. I totally get out functional.

They are okay. Let's continue. Yeah like it's not like you're .

if you're skating on a long board, you're like carbon around and you like you look pretty sick and when you're on a scar, you like that .

scar, what do you I don't know why IT is so deeply ingrained in like body language that like doing this is so much cooler than doing this. This works great .

for an audio medium, by the way, that I think is a me I think it's a take talk like things that are humility for no reason and like someone is just like out, not like checking out. This one weird thing at groceries are just like having to stand up in front of a group of people like understandably ly humiliating things. And then there's like writing a scooter that's just humiliating for no.

as someone that owns a scooter for my last mile ride in my apartment and feeling really heard about the whole conversation as you should, I think you just like you think of the scooter. You think of like A Y A business suit for some reason, if you're an adult right of his scooter, you feel like your lame and you're like in a business.

if being honest, as someone who has to and the majority of my life, I would feel a thousand times safer on a boosted revenue new york city. Then I went on a busy board just because of how intense I don't .

think casey was too concerned about the same.

Casey was like a pro doing. And I don't like, I think, a very big portion that comes from him being a skater, but I think a very an even bigger portion that comes from him being someone like who knows the city so well and knows how to react in those. I think that's why sam shaver can do IT as well.

I feel like I would die.

I A lip at the end of care swishes interviewing .

iron mask. Let, let me see if I can find a clip, make square, make a scooter and i'll go. Was like I to make a cuter.

I love the school. Get on the school. No, he doesn't .

like that.

They do what you talking. I you like .

dignity. That clip.

I was dying.

Okay, by the way, the rest of that interviews is great. So I will all look into the shown.

Casey became like an icon on the boosted board of new york city, right? Like even in the new thoman Jerry movie, there's that clip of a tom the cat because it's a talk yeah just learned about that yesterday. I know I know, but he's writing a boosted board throughout new york city.

And it's weird. It's like they have a bunch of like product placement for boosted in the movie. So I think they must have start the movie like a long time before they want to resist.

I don't know. Anyway, I don't think that casey would have become an icon on scatter. That's i'll have to .

say casey was squarely in the middle of the target demographic for the board and he was squarely out of the target demographic for this.

Yeah exactly.

And because there's no way to look cool on a fucking scary.

there's casey again like he was cool yeah anyway yes. Okay, we get you back to where the company fell. okay. Yeah, what happened? So they're leveraging a lot on the scooter.

So investors are looking for return pretty soon because at this point, I had been a while, you know, and they had done like all these products. They did the mainline products, they did the v two, the v three, the many, the health. And now they were trying to launch the rev.

And the rev was really supposed to be a part of that like return, right? When jeff came in, he was like, we're going to make the scar. It's going to be the real money maker for us.

And like they they had done some things to make more money like jeff is able to get the skate boards into more markets for us before they were only really serving the U. S. But they are in like a bunch of different global markets.

So that's good. But still IT wasn't great. And right in the middle, all of this there is the trumpet china trade war tips are high.

They are the Operant increasing terrorists on many import reversal of the china terre policy. This made component. Being important to the U S.

Like from china way more expensive because I was like a twenty twenty five up to a twenty five percent tariff, right? So IT was just IT was not great ah and you're either going to do one of two things, you're going to pass those costs onto consumers and jack up the Price of your a components. I remember I was in I was a competed x in taiwan, retired, was going on.

There were computer companies that were like, hey, we announce this Price but is actually going to be twenty five percent more now, right? You can neither pass on this Prices to your consumers or you can eat the cost if you're a giant company and you want to maintain a good relationship with your company and are okay with eating those margins. But boosted was arty barely making money on their escape ards, right? They barely had any margins at this point.

There is Sally paying people to buy these keywords because there is costing them more to sell them than IT is they're actually making on them, which is terrible because they are just emerging money in a million ways. You have employees of infrastructure of an engineers. Not great.

And it's not something that you can it's not like a phone where you can sell software. You know you can do plan over time a subscription service. No way to make more money. Um keep mind this is all before .

the pendel c so .

not a great situation. Um so IT obviously starts to get around that. The company is having some major issues at this point. Certain employees start interviewing at other jobs. They stopped doing cater lunches because like they need to save money in some way.

And I know he's bring edicated lunches, but the thing and so on values like just that's how you attractive employees is by having like the most employee benefits like your workplace. So whether it's a jam or lunches or any of that kind of stuff. But funny enough, the lunches are like to a tee tee sign that are companies having problems.

SHE is go away. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So things .

are looking. So the booted rev lands, and it's kind of a mixed response. I mean, it's like fast and and powerful and more design, but it's two thousand dollars is very expensive and .

it's a scooter. There's to look cool, a fuck scare.

The employees are not feeling great, uh, they're about to leave for thanksgiving break. But a lot of them were like, are we going to even have jobs when we come back from thanks giving break because things are like really go in south and everyone can know.

I think a lot of people saw the writing on the wall. Um so you know you would see a lot of your co workers are updating their linked.

trying to .

make connections with people that were gone, other companies. So I think IT was pretty clear what was happening. IT was just sort of unspoken .

taking lunch breaks to go interview at other companies like openly IT feels he feels really weird and they just didn't know if they've jobs and they ve got back. IT was pretty x. So things are getting dense and a little complicated.

Very with me here. This is this is the real reason that boosted kind of drop off the face. So at this point, you've got the boosted scooters on ships wanting to come in the U.

S. To be sold. But the investors aren't boosted any more money.

So boosted just kind of like, please, we need to stay flow. We needed to be able to keep paying our employees. Those scooters are on ships.

They're ready to come to the us, but they won't give them any more money. They're completely like close the pocket books. So they have this like last age effort and they go to this company called structural capital, which is something called the venture dead fund.

Yeah it's big leagues lastaola itals invites and and so they took the money from this company and not for position of strength. This is a kind of company that you take money from, not when you have like a lot of uh h you're not coming from A A strong place. But they didn't .

really care because like again, they had like all of these scooters, like thousands of scooters on the ships. They are just a willing to come to the us. there.

Like, okay, doesn't matter how much the margin of like what we're borrowing is what we need to return them. We will sell these like scooters, but are you taking priority? Will be able to pay them back. We just need the money now so we can pay our employees and not actually just go to business. You know like a sad like taking money from a venture debt fund is very much a last ditch effort.

The Better end game here would just to get acquired by a company that maybe has more resources and could just give you money to stay a flow in their OK that you're are losing money for a little bit because their long term goals to grow you. Um but they really need the money so they adopt taking the one from these guys. So this point, everyone, even the employees like mike, who worked in customer relations, are going out to lunch with their friends in silicon value, trying to get a quiet as .

a matter of fact, cardy cardy. You know, I who who I work with, we just got together and seeking, know what let's just say, what we can do here just works just like, I like guys know so going to I might be really interested yeah .

so around december in twenty and boosted lightly, started talking to line the skate company.

And so they were considering this deal where they would wind up with thirty million dollars worth of stock in line in exchange for some employees and some IP around the scooter. It's not exactly clear if IT was around the river, if I was the sort of more approaching affordable scooter that they were, were also working on.

O so just a cuter tech, not guter tech.

and not necessarily skateboard or bike or anything.

because I M at the time was making scooters. And live scooters are pretty weak. You know, their movies are weak. They couldn't get up the hills that boosted was getting up.

So they were like, okay, maybe we didn't like hire some of your engineers and also get some of your tech and we'll give you thirty million doors and livestock. But I wanted to know what they were in for with a feeling covering like boosted. So they started coming into the boosted office and interviewing employees on site to kind of like see if they really want to go through with this deal.

That doesn't sound Normal. exactly. That sounds kind of predatory.

T B H, yeah, okay. yeah. Ah I think you're on to something. Uh, so the employees on site like not all of the employees, but just the ones they're interested in, which the other employees are like what is going on like imagine the IT basically feels like the FBI is like swarming your headquarters and just interviewing people and you .

don't know what happening because lime knows they have all the average like boosted needs. A deal and line has everything that boosted needs and they can take advantage of all that leverage .

yeah but at the same time, if you have all the leverage, if you're a company that has all the leverage, is that a good sign or a bad sign? Because if you have that much leverage, what's going on in that company?

Well, I am like wants some extras from boosted like the tech from the scooters and things like that. But as far as like who needs who in this deal, yeah boosted needs them a lot more than life needs.

And remember line wasn't trying to like take they weren't trying .

to buy the company.

okay? They were trying to buy buy employees, which I got a confusing a part of this deal. They get employees, which sounds very strange, like very selling people. It's very weird. And then they also got tech for the so whatever.

So i'm obviously interested, but the companies are arty, so short on money like people don't like boosted so short money, they don't know they're onna have a job after Christmas, so they'll starting to get really desperate. So the original investors in boosted that had given the money at the very beginning. The venture capital firms are specifically this company called costal ventures.

while they i've got ten a good amount starting funding from coastal ventures, which is sort of the biggest firm backing them. There wasn't this really great relationship as sort of building that IT was sort of like here the goals and hit them. And so when they ended a trouble, this wasn't something where they could just turn back to IT, uh, sort of existing investors and you get a little bit of help is just why they want up. Turning to the debt firm at this point.

structural starts pretty much controlling boost. Its well, like every payment that came out of boost at every decision was not really being made by the CEO IT was being made by this ventures capital firm, which sucks like this sounds terrible. They could not make any ideals or purchases or transactions without explicit approval.

Pretty bad. But then I don't know where you maha shows up and is a little bit interested in boosted. Like as a company, no one really knows what that would look like. Like maybe they want to start selling electronics awards under .

the amah brand because ymar sounds perc because so the most random assurance of things from motorcycles to keyboards make my speakers yeah so it's kind of perfect because .

they .

sell motorised .

stuff and they sell electronic stuff. yeah. Boost is like the weird merger of that. So there are a little bit interest in visited. No one really knows that look like lime is also still kind of a startups.

So like if line gave booted thirty million and stock, like we said, doesn't actually know what that would do for them in the long term. So yang ha, honest, like obviously seemed like the Better option here. But cosla, who is one of the biggest initial investors and boosted, started to see potential once yahagi interested.

So at this point, they they totally closed off the pocket books. But because yahoo is not interested, they're okay. We want this deal to go through, but you also have to like survivors, the company and stay opens.

We're going to give you a little bit more money because there is this potential yeah hodel right? So they gave boosted a little more money just as taplow. And this is where things start getting really interesting. Ah the only reason we know about these details with like maha in line is because there is a loss of going on right now between lime and costly ventures. So the lawsuit, which was first reported by the information basically alleges this allegedly because boosted was sort of looking into both feels like he had not signed anything concrete with either 1 maha or with line IT was IT was trying for both because at any minute one of them could just fall through.

right as the deal with the uma, how started to fall apart. And they walked away, then some other people went to life. And IT was very unclear on the employee side of things like was this part of like a deal that was being struck? Or were people just sort of like leaving because they were being poached? And that sort of at the core of that lawsuit, your lime says there is nothing improper being done. There was no uh you know the two sides line and boosted had not agreed till I can not hire if there are each other's employees while they were working out this deal. Whereas coastal ventures says, you know, lime knew I had a chance to like kill the alma deal by like ripping out these like core people .

and then out of nowhere, this guy who is a VP of engineering, a boosted leaves boosted and takes a job at line before any sort of deal went through, right? So that seems extremely sketchy. And not only will see a VP of engineering, but he was also helping facilitate the interviews between the booster employees and line.

So this point, he really seems like line is just like trying to deal employees like and they had no interest in actually yeah being part of the deal at all. Um and so he leaves and then costlier starts getting really mad because no deal had been struck with either company. And then all of a some some more employees start living for lime now boosted in this terrible position where they didn't sign anything.

And lime had like taking their employees without striking a deal in your maha pulls out so lame, argues in the IT losses that was fair game to push the employees because they never signed any pieces legal documentation which is ridiculous um so costa is alleging that lime never even wanted to go through with the deal. They were just intentionally trying to get ymar the yamaha al to fall through by hiring away the employees again, this is just a legend in the court case. But basically this point boost has got no more money.

They are dead. They owned a ton of debt to all these companies, including that like venture firm, that is, you don't want to go to see you fast forward to march and boosted announced that they're dead on their blog. All of us see that. That's all we know about.

All of this, right? We don't know about any of this crazy internal step that's happening. They all a time of money to structural capital. That company takes all of the company's IP as collateral for the loans .

like everything.

yeah.

So now that company is a real shark. H yeah, that company probably sign s some of the worst tracts on planets.

Yes, crazy. It's like a last ditch wow kind of situation. But now boost owned by a bunch of different investors, right? And all these companies have to get together and decide how they're going to split up.

The assets of boosted those parties agreed to structural capital being able to run the for closure sale. And then like certain percentages were assigned to each of the parties as far as like what was happy, what they gotten return for the sale. You know structure will get like sixty six percent cause would get whatever and um the original investors and sort of uh a boosted whoever was left over would get x percent as well. So they they set up the sale that coastal entries is trying to argue in the firm that like there is some tRicky involved.

So the sale supposed to happen on march seventeen th. You guys have any guesses on what happened on march sixteen th? A Better touches.

a bunch of microphones and test positive for cover in the MBA shuts down. That basically.

was that the N. B. A one? I'm guessing that like a around new .

york city locked down and is go in the is day before the sale?

wow.

wow. yeah. So march seventeenth was first to be the sale where they were.

They all met up and divided up and sold off stuff so they could like fairly divide the company and get the money. And they had told, uh, structure capital that the kid run the sale. And then the day before, same as a goes in the lockdown.

So now everyone's everything's locked down. Cosplay doesn't attend the sale in person because they are like can we even tend a sale? And son like it's it's locked down like who goes to these things?

And then they try to argue that uh, lime and structural didn't provide like conference call details for like the phone in part of the auction.

IT only lasted twenty minutes and they sold all the I, P, to line for really cheap, much less than the thirty million dollars that line was originally going to feed them like really, really, really, chief. So okay, let's do a quick recap on what happened here.

The united states engages in a trade war with china, which made things shipping out of china, have a really big tariff on them, like twenty five percent huge and boosted, had so much inventory a coming out of china, they had already paid about five million dollars to the government, but they applied for an exemption to those terrace, and they did get approved. The problem here though is, well, the U. S.

Government isn't exactly quick to give people their money back. So boosted is temporarily, five million dollars down, and in some pretty hot water at this point. So in the original boost board blog post announcing they were pretty much shutting down, they put a lot of blame on the china tariff, which is for sure a huge part of IT, but it's not the whole story.

So the federal government owed boosted five million dollars. Wow, yeah. And they would have probably survived if the terrace had not happened.

But now, because all of these companies, eventual capital companies, owned boosted. They also owned the refund from the government. So they've got this five million dollar refund from the government that still hasn't come on yet.

But it's a thing apparently it's a thing that you can own like you can own the refund as part of the company, actually adapt to the company, I det to the company. So this is where things really, really crazy. Basically.

this is where things.

oh my god, I know. yes. So that is sold the IP to line for super chief.

And then shortie capital ended up selling that five million dollar refund, four, four hundred thousand dollars. But guess who? They sold IT, too, structural capital .

to themselves.

Structural got the the turfs on the cheap, uh, through this new like L L C. That they set up. And so they try to make IT seem like I was somebody else buying IT.

But that was then four hundred thousand guys there saying as part of everybody.

they just like sign IT off from the from the rest.

But so they sold the asset to the company to start paying off the all the different people that owned IT, right? But then they saw, am I getting this?

yes. So they say they sold IT, and that four hundred thousand would be distributed to all of the investors in whatever way that you want IT. But then there, L L, C, which is structural cafe ends of getting the five million. So not only did they get the five million, they get their portion of the four hundred thousand. Two.

these are sharks. Man.

yeah.

wow. yeah. How do you, in good conscience work at a site something like that, that you're literally just swimming around looking for, like, almost a dead fish? yeah. And when you find one, you slowly kill IT.

do you think IT way you do think sharks give a now because it's true, I guess yeah, that is true .

that you just do IT to survive and then make their money. Well, yeah.

So I should really around this is an ongoing actually two loss suits. Uh, there's one against line from costlier and one against structural from cosla. A 啊。 But yeah, if I could sum .

IT all up. Yeah, let's get to till D, R version of this chaos.

C, L, D, L.

can I attempt to one? Yeah, go for IT. The rise and followed. Boosted, yeah so boosted has like a perfect shark tank story in the beginning. There are a crowd funded project with a core skaters and a really obvious solution to a really clear, clearly, to find problem. They make a product.

They engineer IT because are engineering from stanford, and they do pretty much everything that could possibly do, right, minus the one debate thing, which is taking a tone of money from investors. This is, I have my own feelings about taking money from investors, but this is the, this is the way they need to build the company. They build IT, they started they have a core product of a long board with an electric motor and a battery, and they're killing IT.

And they get picked up by a handful of mildly important people like casing nice that who blow up the company and the product. And IT becomes a household name, at least in this nish. Now IT gets to this peak and they realize that they need to continue growing to place these investors in making more money.

And at that same time, a couple small things like extra tariff s and small, you know, people at the company interviewing with others start to creep up as they start to shift their focus to maybe other products like a, like a scooter founder leaves and slowly, yeah, this is one. This is where things start to get wild, which is the trajectory of the company is now down. Casey moved to L A. Like, you don't have this anymore and .

this is actually we we talked him about this and he was like, I can't I don't use this here. It's not it's not the type of city is made for this type of thing.

Yeah, so they they have secured their stronghold on this niche, and they do not have a way to continue to solve products to that niche because the products are so and good that they need to start selling to other people.

And this is where they start to lose the culture and the core, and they start to branch out into other things, which is a good business move to APP the investors, but turned out to be the kiss of death as things start to spiral financially. And other companies, we will call them sharks, vultures, whatever you want, start to see what was going on and take advantage of IT in their own ways. Until then, the final kisses of death came in the form of a venture capital firm that basically said, let's reinvest that.

Let's and this company and take what we can from IT. And then that was the end of boosted. So I think this .

is a really depressingly classic scan valory. You've got a bunch of smart people at a good school. They make a cool side project. And there's so many investors in silicon valley, they just want to pup and dump, right? They just want like put money in, grow at row quick and get IT out and like they're all looking for these unicorns that can make them a crappy of money in the shortest amount time.

But like like you said, you said you have your own thoughts about investing and like taking money from investors that IT seems like this was their issue. Now if you look at a company like one wheel, they're sankers. They're nearby seven, six o they haven't really taken a lot of investor capital and they're still going right.

They're way smaller. Obviously, they never got to the scale of boosted because booted had all this growth trajectory from not only the niche, not only the scatter community, but also just all this. And they are able to have a cool office.

And they were cisco. And cool, cool, cool. They couldn't, like get all this talent, but all the benefit that you get from that is equal or greater in negatives at the end of the day.

agree. You know what IT reminds me of? I've said this before, but I feel like the greatest thing that never happened to me was having a video go really viral on youtube.

Because while IT seems really desirable and you make a bunch of money and you immediately are like kind of famous and your name's out there, what that immediately does is IT IT puts you on the hamster wheel of chasing that again, and it's almost impossible to ever hit that again. And then you create this triangle of, like you never really try to expand and organically do new things, you're just chasing the same thing. You got that one time.

And IT really reminds me of like starting a company with a really good idea if you get a huge influx of capital investing, which I guess happens a lot in certain Price country, but when you get huge shoot up at the beginning, that almost feels inevitable that you will never maintain that trajectory, usually their flat line and die or get acquired and boosted. Hindsight, twenty twenty probably should have been looking to get acquired somewhere in the middle, the boost board exploding. Yeah, and they didn't.

And they've crash just as hard as they rose. And yeah, you know, we can all look back and say, yeah, we told you what happened. We knew this was going to happen to you, but we didn't know.

Nobody really knew. And I can fall part in ugly way. But that's what I think about IT, is if you can do things organic and slowly, I would take that over quickly every single time. Hindside.

yeah, no. I mean, like the companies that do maintain that trajectory are called the unicorn for a reason, right? And like everyone's looking for the next uniform, but that never happens because they are so rare.

And the amount of companies, that amount of startups that go out a business in silicon valley is so dick ously high. And there are all software startups, right, that the their only problem is that they can acquire of customers boobs st its problem with its margins or just not ever going to really be there. And then the other thing was like, again, how do you keep acquiring customers? Because you sell some someone something once and they're not going to buy anything from you anymore no matter how to voted.

They are unless their board breaks, there are out of warranty. Ty, they're probably not going to buy another board for you. Yeah and that's .

just it's it's sad. I think IT hurts a little more to us. Specifically empire people listening to this because of, like you said, they built this insane community who felt very close to them.

So when we see you know you hear about silicon valley startups dying all the time, we don't have that personal connection with IT, but boosted mostly through casey and just do their community building, like in this tech youtube world. We built the relationship with them. And IT felt there was something we all knew and something we all followed.

And yeah, we kind of got to live that rise with them and then watch them just fall out of the sky. And it's interesting to now know what actually happen because like you said, it's supreme allegedly happen. Um I mean, we still know more behind the scenes then .

like just assuming pana I killed them, right? I think that was everyone kind of assumed and IT was just so weird to have them you be the tesla of a literal transportation and all of a sudden just like they're gone. But that's the short version of the story.

But he listen, if you listen to the episode and you're thinking, well, crap, I really want to boosted board. Now there is this guy named bryan shorts in seven in ceco who bought all of boots, its remaining stock. He bought the boosted website and he started a new company called boosted USA.

So you can find all of the remaining stock over on boosted USA 点 com。 I did try to get in contact with him for the story, but why they didn't refer to my request for company. So maybe we'll hear the story and reach out for a follow up.

I'd love to chat with you. Pleased email me. Anyways, all thinks a million percent to everyone that contributed the story.

Stephen ryan hart and mike mike are actually now working for another electroscope ard company called dot board based out of australia. And hopefully they are bringing a lot of what they learned that boosted to that company. Thanks this country, the store for talking to us.

He's actually working on something new again to stay tuned for when he announced that thinks the shook e who's been following the boosted story since the beginning and for explaining all that confusing legal stuff to us. That was very helpful. And he told me he's actually working on some more boost of board stories based on this last suit that just came out.

So follow him over the verge to make sure you don't miss that. The trials actually said to take place in october, so IT should be pretty spicy when IT happens. Oh, and also thanks to casing nice step for talking to me literally the day I message him to get a big chunk of the story done.

I really appreciate we're working on a few more of these long form style stories. So if you likes this one, twitted us at W V F R M, on twitter, or at myself, at devitt mail, at adam, at adam luis, seventeen, if you you got any ideas. For more stories like this that you'd like to hear.

today's episode was written in research by David l. And adam melina. IT was produced by adam melina. We are part of the studios seven one and our interactive a music was created by Cameron.

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