Waveform: The MKBHD Podcast - From the Archives: Rise and Fall of Boosted Board

Episode Date: November 29, 2024

This week, we're pulling one of our favorite episodes from the archive due to everyone being out for Thanksgiving here in the states. If you've been listening to Waveform for a while, but for all of the newer listeners (of which there are many) this one is for you. It's a deep dive episode where David spoke with multiple people trying to get to the bottom of what happened with the company Boosted Board. Enjoy the long holiday weekend everyone! Links: Music by KamrenB: https://spoti.fi/2WRJOFh Other music by 20SYL: https://spoti.fi/3di7n2F Kara Swisher podcast ep: https://spoti.fi/3x1VmXc Sanjay Dastoor: https://twitter.com/sanjaydastoor Casey Neistat: http://twitter.com/casey Sean O'Kane: http://twitter.com/sokane1 Boosted USA: BoostedUSA.com Shop the merch: https://shop.mkbhd.com Socials: Waveform: https://twitter.com/WVFRM Waveform: https://www.threads.net/@waveformpodcast Marques: https://www.threads.net/@mkbhd Andrew: https://www.threads.net/@andrew_manganelli David Imel: https://www.threads.net/@davidimel Adam: https://www.threads.net/@parmesanpapi17 Ellis: https://twitter.com/EllisRovin TikTok:  https://www.tiktok.com/@waveformpodcast Join the Discord: https://discord.gg/mkbhd Music by 20syl: https://bit.ly/2S53xlC Waveform is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Support for this show comes from Misfits Market. Misfits Market is an online grocery store that makes shopping for more sustainable, high-quality groceries easier and more affordable. It's like a farmer's market delivered to your door, with fresh organic produce, pantry staples, quality meats, wild-caught seafood, plant-based proteins, and so much more. Misfits Market is free to join, and right now you can get $15 off each of your first two orders. Just visit MisfitsMarket.com and use the code SHOPMISFITS to save money on your grocery bill. Support for this show is brought to you by Nissan Kicks. It's never too late to try new things, and it's never too late to reinvent yourself. The all-new Reimagined Nissan Kicks is the city-sized crossover vehicle that's been completely revamped for urban adventure. From the design and styling to the performance, all the way to features like the Bose Personal Plus sound system,

you can get closer to everything you love about city life in the all-new Reimagined Nissan Kicks. Learn more at www.nissanusa.com slash 2025-Kicks. Available feature. Bose is a registered trademark of the Bose Corporation. What is going on, people of the internet? Welcome back to another special episode of the Waveform Podcast. We're your hosts. I'm Marques. I'm Andrew. And I'm David. A little bit different this week. A little bit out of out of schedule well it is actually our 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 before but the rest of the episode is an episode that we recorded before it is a rerun of an episode we did in April 2021 called Boosted to Busted, The Rise and 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 it before.

So we are hoping that you enjoy it. And if you have heard it before, it's a fun little rerun. Nice to take a look at it almost four years later. Our audience is probably like four to five times bigger than when this originally got posted 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 to this and they probably haven't seen it if you're new audio or video listening yeah i feel like this is one of our pillar episodes it's crazy that it happened before we were on video so i hope that the new audience who hasn't heard this episode yet will enjoy it. Enjoy the holiday as well. Take it away, past selves.

Welcome to the Waveform Podcast. We're your hosts. I'm Marques. And I'm Andrew. At least, we're normally your hosts. What do you mean by that? Am I fired? No. Oh, I know, I know, I know. Okay. So we're actually doing a story time for this one, and we're going to be doing it a bit more often because there's a lot of stories out there that deserve to be told. Think about this. Do you actually know what happened to Boosted Board? That's the question for you,

the listener. Do you actually know? Yeah, this is one of those stories that I think a lot of people know the loose details of, including me. I mean, I watched a lot of videos with Boosted 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. Just kind of died. Of course, there's gotta be way more to it.

So MKBHD team researcher, David and waveform producer, Adam went down that rabbit hole, talked to some people and found out what actually happened to Boosted. So they're gonna tell us what they found. David, Adam, take it away. What's up, y'all? I'm David Amell, and this is Waveform. Today's episode, Boosted to Busted, the rise and fall of Boosted boards. How can we be skated a little too close

to the sun, burned up, and vanished? Let's get it. All right, guys. So you might remember randomly on the internet, on Twitter, on Boosted's website, Boosted just very suddenly shut their doors, right? It was very sudden. Everyone was like, that's strange because they seemed to be this giant monolithic company. They were probably the most popular electric skateboard brand. And of course, we've got the global pandemic and everything, but that had just started. And it seemed like most companies were at least trying to get through the pandemic. And it was very, very early on. That was kind of an excuse that a lot of people were using for them shutting down, but it just seems 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 boosted that you you want to share before we get started? I just remember they were they were the benchmark. I might have called them at one point, basically the Tesla of electric vehicles, like motor like little personal electric vehicles, because everything gets compared to them. Exactly. Any time a new electric skateboard came out, it was, should you get this over the Boosted or not? Right.

Or like Boosted Killer. Exactly. And they sort of got so dominant in that space that I guess they sort of started to branch out, and they did the scooter, and they started doing other stuff. But they were the default for as long as I can remember them. Right. So anyway, like I said before, they giant monolith there, like you said,

like almost the Tesla of electric skateboards, shut down really suddenly. So I figured let's just start from the very beginning of the company. So about 10 years ago, a decade ago, if you can believe that, there's this guy. So my name is Sanjay Dastur. I was one of the co-founders of Boosted. Sanjay Dastur.

I was always a fan of vehicles and transportation. I thought about doing a lot of transportation engineering type of work in college and grad school. Mechanical engineer at Stanford. He's working on projects in a lab, as mechanical engineers do. But of course, being a college student, he didn't have a ton of expendable income. So he had to stay in the cheaper graduate parking. And another friend of ours, John, he had to stay in the cheaper graduate parking.

And another friend of ours, John, he had this similar problem, but actually getting around Stanford's campus. So we had to park pretty far away to get the cheap grad student parking passes. In his research, we were moving around between buildings a lot. And so getting half a mile away to one building and coming back could easily turn into a 20, 30-minute round trip when it could have been a few minutes just to check on something that we were building it's a problem for multiple reasons one it just takes a lot of time to it like if you're in the zone in your project and then you just get a notification oh crap i have to check the meter that sucks every couple hours they had 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 was like really into kind of like different types of vehicles. He had a motorcycle, but he didn't really feel like it made sense to bring his motorcycle just to go like a mile.

Like it's 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 to store that outside. He's going to have to figure out where to park the motorcycle. It's just not efficient. And a lot of people say, just use your bike. But, you know, at Stanford in particular, any college, like, your bikes get stolen, like, all the time. My friends at Stanford used to tell me, like, you couldn't have a bike on campus. And if you bought a new bike, you would paint it to look as shitty as possible so that people wouldn't steal it.

Oh, no. Which is so sad. But, yeah, so they started getting frustrated. He's got this friend, Matthew Tran, and they kind of get into this conversation. They're having the same issue. They have this problem where walking can take so long and cars create such a hassle. And Matt lived in San Francisco, and he'd been thinking about this a ton too so I don't know if you guys know this but San Francisco is actually only 7 by 7 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 end 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 problem here called last mile transportation that we wanted to, you know, try to address in our own way. Do you guys know what last mile vehicles are? The, you know, the term, the term last mile vehicle. Yeah, where you go, you know, 100, 200 miles in a car, and then you get dropped off a mile from your destination, and you need to get to that place, whether it's with a portable thing or a bike or a skateboard or something. Right.

That's the type of personal last mile vehicle, I guess. I've never heard of that term before. No, never. It actually came from logistics and shipping, because if you think about Amazon, they have all these big trucks that are just hauling 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 mile efficiently, right? Because you have to use a bunch of different vehicles to get them there.

There hadn't really been last mile vehicles for personal use. There were some startups like the Onewheel. And then there was this point in San Francisco and other places in the world where like scooters, you've probably seen these scooters and bikes that are parked places and you can park them. You go like a mile, you park them again. That wasn't really a 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. You know, they're still doing their graduate school stuff. But they're mechanical engineers. So they might as well try to figure out how to do it themselves. And maybe it could turn into something bigger. Because of course, in Silicon Valley,

any idea you have is like a potential company. I was just going to say, this is like the perfect setup. We're like, all right, he's got a problem. He needs an engineering solution. He happens to be an engineer at Stanford. There is a very specific need and a very specific group of people

who all have the same problem. And if you could solve it, you'd solve it for everyone. And he just needs a rundown garage and that's a billion dollar company. And this is the story of Silicon Valley, right? 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 tools that don't exist and say that you need to solve them even though they're not problems. So they go to the toy store

and they actually bought some hardware to make model airplanes. And Sanjay actually did a TED Talk later on where he talks about how they made the first prototype. And it's kind of wild. 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 a skateboard, kind of just as like a proof of concept. You know, they got a motor and they got a remote

and all these little things. Obviously, it sounds a little bit dangerous. But what good project doesn't start a little bit dangerous? Of course. You know, you got to test the limits of like what you can do before you reel it back in

and figure out what the actual use case would be. So the skateboard makes a lot of sense because it's small. It can fit in their car. You know, they can drive to campus. They can drive to that cheaper graduate parking and then just ride the skateboard 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 90s 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 and if you build a product around that that's kind of like an extension of that community you don't have to find a community it's kind of already built in 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 startup accelerators, as you do when you live in Silicon

Valley. You're just like, hey, we have this product. You should give us money. So that's what happened. And they ended up getting into Y Combinator and StartX, which is a really big deal. Yeah. I don't think they were expecting to get into any of these programs, but the people at these companies actually saw potential in what they were doing. They gave them money. And once you get into 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 a company out

of this. They take what they made at Y Combinator and they decided to make a Kickstarter campaign. And at the time, you know, this was really early Kickstarter. It had only been around for a couple of years. So it wasn't this company where like founders would create things that they never shipped or it was scams or, you know, that kind of stuff or big companies like that already sold phones or whatever. Just using it as a jump starter for a single thing.

Yeah. Yeah. Like give us funding even though you're going to buy this product anyway and we're going to make this product anyway. that already sold phones or whatever just using it as a jump starter for a single thing yeah yeah like give us funding even though you're gonna buy this product anyway and we're gonna make this product anyway but at this point it kind of blew up i don't think they were really expecting it to blow up on kickstarter like it did they were looking for a hundred thousand dollars and they were selling the boards for about twelve hundred dollars so you know they just had to sell a decent amount but not a ton they ended up making four hundred sixty seven thousand dollars so they like almost quintupled their goal and it was way more than they were expecting they 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 ride the thing but were willing to throw down over a grand on this random idea. Sight unseen. Yes. It was pretty major. Wait, do you guys remember the Kickstarter? That's Adam, our producer.

I don't remember the Kickstarter. No. I only remember finding Boosted as a full-fledged company. So I actually don't think I knew that they were ever a Kickstarter project. And there's so many Kickstarters that go the exact opposite direction. So that's impressive that they got that much.

This was a weird period of time. It was very early in Kickstarter. And I don't know if you guys remember, but a popular YouTube format at the time was like top Kickstarters of the week. Yeah. They don't do that anymore. Now the YouTube videos are,

what is the dumbest thing on Kickstarter I can find? And will this actually go to market? Yeah, exactly. But anyway, they got so many orders and they wanted to hire a bunch of their friends. It was one of the reasons we first took investor money from the outside and didn't just kind of bootstrap it off of Kickstarter because we could afford to hire some of our smartest friends to come join us. Who otherwise, you know, could get really well paying jobs at pretty much any other tech company in the Bay Area. So that was like the birth of the company as we know it. I love Shark Tank. It's one of my favorite TV shows. I feel like I've learned so much from it.

We interviewed Kevin O'Leary 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 Shark Tank, how would it go? And when I hear this story, I think like this would have gone really well. They'd go, how much money did you make?

And they'd go, we haven't made any products, but we've sold half a million dollars of them. And Kevin would go, whoa, that's a lot of money. All right. Tell me about your customers. And they'll go, it's a very specific, very dedicated niche of people that needs an issue solved. And they're in a wealthy California suburb. It's a very, very strong, like potential customer base. And they go, okay, this is a good idea. Do you have anything proprietary? And they'd go, yeah, we've just made this skateboard with batteries and motors on it.

We can patent all this stuff. I think this would have gone really well on Shark Tank. So that's my reaction to their birth. And I'm kind of hindsight 2020, but I'm not shocked. They had a pretty great start. It's similar to how Tesla started though, right? Like they're one of the first big major EV companies. Like you have the upper hand when you were the first, a lot of people are just going to, as long as you make it and become that staple,

then people have to compare to you for a while. I think, I think we're still in that phase with Tesla right now. Like everyone's comparing to Tesla, whether it's a reasonable comparison or not. I still think even with boosted Board dead, I probably would still consider every single electric skateboard from now. I would compare it to how Boosted was when it was popular. I think that's the interesting thing is it's not even just their technology, but it's also the quality, which is something I don't think Tesla had at the beginning. Right. Like, obviously, they're still having issues, but they're getting a lot better. But Boosted, like from the beginning, they had this amazing bamboo board. They had the best motors, something that people cite all the time

is how good their brake systems were. The acceleration curve is really smooth, and it's got a good controller, and they've got those bright wheels that everyone knows. It's recognizable, which is very rare for a version one of a Gen 1 product that hadn't existed on the market before. It's the thing Apple does that everyone strives to do. Apple has branding. You can tell what an Apple phone is, what an Apple watch is, what almost anything Apple is from just looking at it.

And they hit that. It's quality. It's recognizable. Everything you would ever want in starting a company. Yeah. Would you be interested currently in electric board? Like, pretend you'd never

rode on one before and you'd never seen it. Today. Yeah, today. If you saw the Kickstarter. Yeah. It's really interesting. Today,

in 2021, we've seen the explosive rise and fall of electric scooters. Not even fall. We just saw them just appear

everywhere. And so, electric scooters 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 commoditized where companies would just have them all over the streets and you'd see them on the sidewalk in San Jose. 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 scooters. By being a skater.

By being a skater-oriented thing. Oh, a smaller group of people will probably like this more than scooters, but they'll love the thing. But that's because I've already seen what happened to the scooters. Yeah. And I feel like before the scooters, 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 it would be super interesting. And I think the price point would be my biggest worry.

Just because that is an expensive product. $1,200 is not cheap. Like you said, this is, this is more of you're paying for a solution. So if you don't have this last mile problem, like $1,200 is probably not something you would want. And as to me, it would be really interesting. I think an electric skateboard would sound super fun. Um, obviously I know it's super fun cause we've rode them since, but going back to before then, I think I would have been super interested and never would have put $1,200 down. But, but at the same time, if you have a Kickstarter where 1,000 people are backing it at that price point,

who am I to say? There are obviously people willing to pay those prices. I have one other tidbit. Yeah. San Francisco reminds me a lot of Hoboken. I went to school for four years in Hoboken, lived there for all four years. It's a one-mile square city.

And during the height of Boosted, they were everywhere. Because people would get off the, people would get off the train and they lived 14 blocks North of the train station. And instead of walking through Hoboken, they would boosted and I would pass people on one wheels and boosted and scooters all the time for a couple of years. And that's like imagining all those cobblestone roads.

That's a great point. Hoboken does not have the quality of roads, but there are plenty of like back roads. And if you find a good road, you can know, and you kind of memorize the potholes after a while. So much more willing to skip or go an extra block. If I'm on an electric skateboard where I'm not putting in more, right. Exactly. So if you live on, you know, the train stations on first and you live on 14th

and you go to school on seventh like that that whole commute became seconds instead of minutes because you have that sort of speed so it was really popular for a while all right act two cue the music all 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 program at stanford and mechanical engineering all that kind of stuff. But they're pretty quickly expanding to try to hire more talent throughout Silicon Valley. You got to grow fast, right? If you get seed funding, what those investors want are just, it's just growth as fast as physically possible. But in Silicon Valley, it's 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 group activities mean, it's pretty fun at first, you know, you have like catered lunches, you've got group activities. My sister's company in Silicon Valley, they have like surfing and like all this stuff that they just do together. It's like, it's fun, but it can it can very quickly develop into this weird kind of toxic relationship. So I wanted to know what it was actually like to work there. So I got in contact with a couple former employees. My name is Mike McKee. Yeah, I'm Stefan Reinhardt. I was in customer support at Boosted. Stefan and Mike had almost nothing negative to say about the company. And they had their own little loft.

It was a pretty massive warehouse. And there was a little upstairs loft. Where they got to like, you know, mess around with other customer relations people and just like they didn't really have to deal with like the engineers and but they said it was just it was fun customer support loved it having this little loft to ourselves where we could sort of be kooky or you know customer stoke as we were called we we loved it up there we loved having that freedom to sort of say whatever the hell you want and have that like privacy to sort of run our department however we felt fit. And they hired guys that they knew were passionate about skating. So Mike grew up in Australia in like deep skate culture.

So I have been a keen surfer, skateboarder for my entire life and my teenage son as well. When we talked to him on the phone, you could tell that he was like a skater himself. I saw an electric skateboard ripping down the street where we lived in Mountain View. And I was like, wow, what is that thing? It looks really amazing. It was a generation one, but I still don't know who was riding it to this day. And I went home and I said to my wife, I just saw this thing ripping down the street.

I want one of those. That looks just sick. And Stefan wasn't exactly a novice skateboarder either. So I had been in skateboarding for most of my life. When I was 18, I skateboarded across America. Yeah, it was awesome. But these guys are hardcore. So when you call to talk to a customer service representative,

you talk to someone who, one, knew what they were talking about because they were really into the product. And then two, they were just enthusiasts for skating. So whether or not you were in the Venn diagram of like, I just want my boosted to be fixed, or I'm a skater and I just want to know more about the product, they were your guys yeah Mike told me a story about this kid uh there was there was so many awesome you know so many awesome things that that happened there area you know I used to sit right in amongst all of those guys and if any any former boosted customers are

listening you know they will know the names, you know, Angelo and Hank and Kerry and Stefan. You would have, Hank was the most patient of them all and he had a, you know, I think he was about a 12 or 14-year-old boy, Joey Verone, call in every week and talk to Hank for about an hour about how he was saving for a Boosted boy. And when Joey would call call him we'd switch

it over to hank say okay there you go did they just call the chat to each other or he did he actually need help yeah no he just called a chat yeah yeah if you if you're listening joey and you will be he's a legend shout out i'm sure hank would love to say hello and then they would just call in just to talk about skating like have you seen this video like on YouTube about the skating? Like, it's just cool. It just became like this lovely community. That sounds fun. And then if you're really busy one day and you know he's going to call in, that sounds like a nightmare.

So the community aspects of the company grew really freaking fast and it kind of became like a hallmark part of boosted right like not only did you already have the hardcore people who just love skating and so you already grabbed that audience but like they their community was nuts they started holding uh group rides which i went to a couple in san francisco and they're so fun and 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 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 an excuse to hang out with like-minded people. And it just becomes this really fun event. You know, so they just skated around San Francisco.

Like I did a couple of these. And we're just moving in packs of like 100 up the streets of SF. We look scary sharks at this point. I mean, it's like motorcycles do that all the time. Right, exactly. Sam Sheffer's done a couple of videos on group skates in New York. And it looked really fun. Yeah, so funny.

So many parallels to Tesla that I see. So many. Drop them. I mean, yeah, every car meet. Like a lot of car meet. Yeah. One is like you, when you work for Tesla in certain departments, you are a car enthusiast, not necessarily a Tesla or an electric enthusiast. So when people discuss like driving dynamics or sportiness or like how different parts that you could buy could affect your ride, like they can

talk to you about that when you're a customer. And the other thing is you mentioned group rides and people who will like advocate for the product and hang out with people who are like-minded, like that is a hundred percent of thing that happens in the Tesla community all the time. There's forums, there's group drives, there's meetups, there's all kinds of stuff like that. And I feel like that's just what happens when you love a product enough. Right. 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 other Tesla owners. Right, yeah. And I think that's just like a hallmark of these tight-knit communities. Like there's already like, you don't have to organize meetups in skate culture because you already are meeting at the skate park. Yeah.

Right? And you're not necessarily skating the whole time, but when you have this weird niche that you're really interested in, you post on forums like crazy. You're just obsessed with the product and you just want to hang out with like-minded people but boosted in particular they're directly communicating with their customers it's almost like they're all friends you know like they host these meetups but like the boosted team members are like getting phone numbers from people so like the reason i actually uh know

stefan is because i met him at a meetup and I got a notification on my phone that he joined Telegram like the week that we started this episode. And so I just messaged him. I was like, do you want to be on the podcast? He's like, sure. So it worked out right. That's the kind of thing like you meet friends at these places. OK. And so there's this famous story about where this customer's board started smoking. That was the most awesome thing that Sanjay did. It was legendary. That's Mike again. Jumped on a plane and flew out to New York to solve a battery issue that was there. There was

two battery faults that sort of triggered a recall. That was my first day in the office. Wow. Oh, man. That triggered a recall. That was my first day in the office. Wow. Oh, man. That sets a tone. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's not exactly the best thing to happen to your skateboard. I mean, we've seen similar cases with Samsung phones will start smoking,

and then the way that they handle that is kind of shaky. They have a weird PR response, or 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 going to like. But the way that they handled this is Sanjay, who is the founder of the company, physically just like flew out to the person's house to go check it out. And I was on a Reddit forum a couple of days ago from when the company closed and this person Share it the person whose board was smoking like shared a memory

He's like I've still got like a signed like napkin with your signature on it for when you come came to help me out which is like Kind of how people actor around like Elon Musk like he was sort of this Elon Musk of boosted Yeah, where they just just really looked up to him as this leader, which is very interesting. But yeah, that just shows the company's always got your back

with this product, which I think made people more comfortable about buying the product. They knew they were going to get really good customer service. They knew that they were never going to buy something and then just not have a warranty,

never be able to talk to these people. They were fixing every possible problem that customers had. So they started out right. So they've got this excitement. The community is growing. But they're still kind of small. And even if you think something is big in real life because you see a lot of them, it doesn't mean they're really big. It could just be the communities you hang out around are similar to you. So you see things. But at this point, even though Boosted is not like maybe a

major brand that everyone's like, that's a Boosted board. People can still recognize them because they've got these like popular they've got these orange wheels and they've got these decks. And like when people are riding a Boosted board, almost everyone knows what it is. After the break, Boosted hits its stride. Stick with us. We'll be right back. This episode is brought to you by HelloFresh. Be honest.

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selling today that's shopify.com slash waveform. So if you guys were to guess, what was the big break moment for Boosted's brand? No idea. Absolutely. Does it rhyme with Lacey Bryce? As someone who's seen a lot of products arrive in the public eye thanks to an obsession by a public figure, particularly YouTubers with a strong following. I'm very confident that Casey Neistat has something to do with Boosted. 100% the reason I know about Boosted Board. I decided to talk to all these people that I had chatted with about what the inflection

point was where Boosted went from nobody knowing it to everybody knowing it. Casey Neistat. Casey Neistat drove a lot of sales. My name's Casey Neistat and I guess I'm a YouTuber. So naturally, we had to get in touch with Casey. So Casey Neistat had started this daily vlog project around New York City. Nothing specific. He was just doing fun stuff around New York and kind of showing what it was like to live here.

I started my daily vlog in, I'm gonna screw this timeline up, but you can probably find it on YouTube if you wanted to correct. I started my daily vlog March 25th, I think, 2015. I checked, he's right. Like, if you just, he was one of the first vloggers, at least the first vloggers to like do it in this type.

And so like everyone started to know who he was even in those early vlogs he would leave his apartment and what's up guys just it was crazy around New York in particular it's hard to overstate how much of an impact his vlogs had on YouTube like the like lots of parts of YouTube you mentioned vlogs but it's like the daily aspect the drone cinematography aspect the like community building location specific aspect of his videos. Like so much of it was the perfect storm. And so I can't imagine being Casey walking outside and like zipping around the city on a boosted board. How many people would be like, that's the guy from the videos.

Right. Such a recognizable, repeatable image. So I imagine that was that. Yeah, no, I mean, he was a part in everything, like even the cinematic unboxings of products, you know. He kind of like forefronted that in his vlogs too, just like so many different things. You know, I only now in retrospect,

you know, like I stopped my daily vlog two years ago or whatever and only now do I realize like what it means to effectively have a daily show that was going out to a million plus people seven days a week when the central character was not even me. The central character was New York City. Which was, I think, a really interesting way to put it. And he's kind of just like this narrator showing what the city could be. And the people and the situations in his films, really the meat of the vlogs.

And he's trying all these different transportation mediums, right? He's got a car. Him and Candice have a car. He's got a bike. He tries an electric bike. But there's nothing that can compete with a boosted board. There's nothing. And I've ridden every device from a Segway to an electric bike

to really good, high-quality electric bikes. My wife had a car in the city so we actually had a car uber taxis bus subway nothing works as well as a boosted board he had that hoverboard for a while that was a thing he rode everywhere i remember that yeah put those l brackets on the side so he could like hop up on the curb i think that was 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&A. He's like, I used to use this like janky hoverboard thing, but now I have this. And he's just like super excited about it.

Right. And pretty much from the moment he opens that up on camera, shit just goes nuts for this company. At this point, it became a total necessity for his vlogs. He started using it in every single vlog because he said it was the most convenient way to get around the city. In New York City, transportation is such a specific, narrow thing where it's like this Venn diagram of practicality, speed and convenience,

safety and security. So an electric bike's amazing in New York City until you have to go into an office building. And then no matter how many locks you put on that bike, it's going to be stolen when you come out. And then on top of the fact I've always had a camera in my hand, so having two hands on the handlebars didn't work. Enter this skateboard that has brakes

where I could just mob around that city and I had brakes and acceleration in one hand and my camera in the other. I wasn't attached to this thing, so if I were to fall, I could just mob around that city and I had brakes and acceleration in one hand and my camera in the other. I wasn't attached to this thing, so if I were to fall, I could jump off on a bicycle. And then as far as security, I could just pick it up and walk into any business in the city and no questions asked.

I could carry it on a subway. So that Boosted Board became my key to New York City, even though I had lived there for 15 years at the time. I mean, New York City, if you think about it, 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 stuffed streets and cars into it. And that's the reason like the streets are so narrow. And like, it's just very hard.

You have to navigate around everything and it's hard to get around people it's not that big so that is kind of the perfect use case for a last mile vehicle right it's like yeah it's hard to use other mediums so you might as well use this like i'm walking but very fast and less effort one of casey's most viral videos ever is all about bike lanes and how there are constantly obstructions. That was pre-vlog. Yeah, there's always stuff parked in the bike lanes. And if you want to zip around New York City in any sort of versatile way, you've got to be in the streets,

in the bike lanes, on the sidewalk. This needed a solution. Yeah, yeah. And the boost board could go at 24 miles per hour. Yep, you could be in the street. Exactly. So you could ride in the streets and you're probably going to be faster than most cars, right?

At this point, you're basically a motorcycle that's 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 don't really work in this case scooters are annoying this is basically his solution so boosted gets a ton of attention and traction just from his vlogs and they didn't expect this to happen at all. I don't think they even expected him to open it up. I think that one of the challenges for the marketing team was sort of matching the sales that he was bringing in.

That's Stefan again, for those wondering. But it became so essential he buys multiple boards for when some of them start breaking, or if one's dead and he forgets to charge it, he wants to have one just ready to go. He is the let's go type of guy. No obstructions, nothing slowing me down. I mean, you guys did the studio tour, right?

You guys did the studio tour. So how was that? That's the thing about Casey, is he's the guy who just wants the thing to work. So if he has a camera and a lens, he's not going to baby that thing. He's going to use it absolutely every way he can, sticking on a curb, sticking on a fire hydrant, whatever it needs to do to get the shot. And so you saw in the videos, the way he treated those

boards is like, throw it on the ground, jump on and go like, he's not going to baby that thing. Yeah. And the thing you notice, even if I was never going to get one of my videos, I would always notice those boards are getting manhandled and they were just working all the time. So I was never shocked when he bought one, he broke one. I'd never go, oh man, I can't believe that boosted board broke. I would go, wow, I can't believe it lasted that long. And he goes on to the next one

and he gets another boosted board. I'm like, this guy could get any other board he wants. So it must be pretty good. He had four or 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 you said, one runs out of battery of battery you forgot to charge you just grabbed a different one right one breaks he just grabs another one he always had them for everything and the funny thing is like like i said earlier this is like one of the first electric skateboards

in the category but yet it became it was already one of the like best ones. Not only was it one of the fastest, it had the best deck, had the best wheels, and it just became kind of the electric skateboard that you'd get. Most people attribute the acceleration curve and the brakes in particular as being the most important thing on those boards. Casey said like the brakes in New York City,

like you need to be able to go 20 miles per hour and when you brake, not just get thrown off. If you can't accelerate your way out of trouble, you're going head to head with a taxi cab, the taxi is slowing down. If you don't have the power to pull in front of that taxi driver, you're in a very compromised position. So acceleration was vital. And then the other thing was braking. The braking was so robust on a boosted board that at full speed, if you were to hit that brake 100% and really not know how to brace yourself, you'd get thrown off the board.

There's an argument that says the braking was too powerful on those devices, but once you learned how to navigate that, that became instrumental to its yielding a kind of confidence in its users that said, you know what? I can use this to get around. This isn't just a fun thing to ride around in a parking lot when no one's here. And a lot of other electric skateboards, the brake system was just like, eh. But this one had a belt on the motor, so that was actually the thing that would make the acceleration curve the best and also the brakes the best.

But, of course, that would also brake. So it was kind of a trade-off, but it was worth it. So Boosted's basically having trouble keeping up with demand, which Mike says... No, I think that's an awesome problem to have. It's another Shark Tank thing. Like, so why do you need the money? Well, we can't make enough. Yeah. Perfect. Yeah, perfect answer. Just need to scale up. Yeah. So Mike told me the story that every single time Casey would

release a vlog... So Casey would release a vlog. So Casey would post a video. They'd be in their little like customer service loft. Basically yell out down the stairs, get ready to ship, fellas. They'd like call down to the rest of the team and they'd be like, all right, boys, let's get ready. That is so funny. You could see the direct correlation between, you know, he's ripping through New York and a whole bunch of boards flying out the door. It was insane.

I'll just drop this in here. I hate the word influencer, but there is no more perfect storm for a bunch of new people finding a product than someone that they love and follow every day becoming obsessed with it. When I think of a Casey Neistat vlog from back in those days, 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 GorillaPod or some sort of tripod.

And I think of a Boosted Board. Right. And that was perfect. GorillaPods even. Yeah, drones. Yeah, a drone's a good one. But GorillaPods even weren't a popular thing. They blew up because of him too. For sure. Yeah yeah because vlogging blew up because of him it's just insane they

couldn't pay for a better ad than that yeah they could not pay for a better yeah no and i asked him i was like did you did you ever set up any sort of like sponsorship thing he's like no he yeah that's true if there was an affiliate program with boosted casey would be like the order of magnitude highest by a lot. Wow. Like you've, you've inadvertently sold a bunch of Tesla's. Oh yeah. But they, you know, they added a referral program, but there's lots of other products that I know have seen an impact from videos that I don't get a cut of, but I'm just curious, like, wow. Yeah, no, if they had a referral program and Casey would be like hundreds of thousands probably. Okay. So obviously things

are going pretty well. I mean, they released the V2, the Stealth, the Mini. Like they started expanding their product line because that's what you do. They took seed money from investors. They needed to grow. They needed to expand. And you even did a video with Casey on the Mini. Yep.

What was that like? Oh, it was fun. I mean, I was never a skater. So this was me coming at the tech angle from something I'm unfamiliar with, as I do often. Like, I love my handhelds and my iPads and TVs and stuff, but, like, I was never a car guy until the electric cars. And I was never a, you know, skater until the electric skateboards, and I just was trying something new because it was high tech. And I learned a lot about it from Casey, and I really liked it, and it was clearly a very good product.

So I think that was a win for them too yeah yeah what was like did you feel like he was just like so much more experienced 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 to get comfortable carving a little bit and like how you steer and maneuver the thing yeah and the benefit of the mini was obviously that it was smaller but it was also more nimble that i had like that back stand so you could get around tighter corners and stuff so i was just happy that there was like a lighter weight version i could hold with my arm extended and not drag on the ground but he was so obsessed over like the dynamics of like this smaller non-long board where now you got like your feet closer together and you can carve a little tighter and your

turning radius is better because you can lift the front wheels off the ground all that stuff yeah i wouldn't have appreciated that if he didn't tell me so that was all in one place which is really good i remember at the event that i met stefan at the the group ride it was right after the mini and the stealth had launched and the thing that blew my mind was that he was doing like ollies and kick flips oh yeah the mini stupid it's how hard that is on something that heavy. But either way, the fact that you could was just crazy. You probably shouldn't because there's a battery in it, but it was still crazy.

So things seem good, but as you remember, the company doesn't exist anymore. So back to our original question, what exactly happened here? Things seem to be going super well. How did a company that seems so huge and was growing so fast crash just as quickly, right? To really figure this out, I needed to contact someone who has been covering this since the very beginning. I'm Sean O'Kane. I'm a senior reporter at The Verge. And what is your

main beat over there? I cover transportation, everything that moves pretty much. EV startups, Tesla, he's covered all that stuff. And he's covered Boosted literally since they were first founded. So he knows a thing or two 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 right back out the door.

And all that money was being sort of rein right 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 to grow the company as fast as possible. And overall, if you take seed investor money, you have to start seeing a return as quickly as possible. Right. And this is even harder with hardware. It's one thing to write, you know, really amazing code and execute it and see, you know, 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 around.

And like Silicon Valley, most of the companies are software companies. You don't have a lot of overhead. It's pretty easy to, you know, make software and make it better. Try to reach more customers. You're really, your only overhead is like maybe your office and you've got your employees. That's kind of it. But even, even companies like Amazon had trouble doing this, right? Like they're not selling a, they weren't selling a product at first. They were just a logistics company, but they lost money for so long that investors almost pulled out multiple, multiple

times and Bezos 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 Silicon Valley that get seed investor funding because it's just hard to grow that. It's a lot harder to grow that. And specifically, Boosted's margins were like incredibly low, especially at the beginning, right? Because they were already selling this product for like 1200 bucks, but that was like, they weren't making a lot of money on it. If anything, they were like barely scraping by

from the beginning. So it was 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 than it costs to sell. And they have the problem of their product is so good,

people are probably not replacing them that often, right? Like they have to keep finding more audience. So Boosted raised more money to reinvest into the product because they needed to start seeing, you know, they had to make it better. They had to hire more engineers. They had to keep getting the catered lunches, you know, to like actually get people

to come work at their company. So they ended up, once everything was said and done, raising about $75 million after all of the investment rounds. So they've got all this money. It's just that Sanjay and the others that founded the company weren't exactly used to growing companies, right? They're engineers. In 2017, you stepped down as the

company CEO. And we're curious as to why you did that. Yeah, 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, you know, both as a founding team and with the board with the major investors, like, okay, let's go find somebody who has done this kind of work before, but at a much bigger scale, because neither of us, John or I, who had been there at that time, Matt had left at that point. But John and I had never run a business before, especially one that was growing as fast as that. So Sanjay decided to step down as CEO and move to the board. So he just became on the board of directors,

kind of like helping oversee the company growth. Anyway, they bring in this hotshot. He came from the same program as Sanjay at Stanford, pretty much the exact same track, but he went the business route instead of the engineering route. Yeah, I feel like I just saw an interview about this where I think it was probably Elon, but talking about like growing a company kind of has to come from inside the company. And when you take someone

from some high end program, some hotshot maybe, and he just parachutes 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, knows how it would best continue to improve. But, you know, Sean told me that like, it wasn't necessarily the worst thing, you know, when the new CEO came in, Jeff Rusico, that idea that started with Sanjay of like, you know, we are sort of goal at some point is to help solve this sort of last mile transportation problem

really got accelerated that sort of aspiration became like the sort of like marching cry for Rusico when he took over because that was the way that they could really grow the business. That's ultimately always the problem is that the investors just want to see a return as fast as possible. Now, obviously you've got this company that's got a super laid back culture because they hired a bunch of skaters. Right? Skaters, business, they don't match very well, right? And everyone was just really chill. They had come from the Santa Cruz area or the San Francisco

area and they were just like it doesn't match when you bring a business guy in that wants to grow something. So there's already a little bit of tension. Jeff wants to figure out how to scale the company and one of the solutions he has is to expand their like proprietary motor system into other form factors. There was a point in time over the last couple years where it seemed like a lot of options were on the table for them, where whether that was going to be the scooter that they eventually

made in the rev or something simpler and more designed for sort of micro mobility or just more generally affordable and lighter. There was also some bikes in the work that were more either standard bikes, they also had a sort of seated scooter kind of thing like super 73. So I, you know, they definitely were evaluating a lot of different options. Usually, you start with your core products, and then you realize like, okay, if we want to sell more stuff, we want to expand our company, we have to hit these audiences that are not being served right now. So the two main product categories that they were kind of toying with was an electric bike and an electric scooter.

They ultimately landed 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 skateboard had brought. Like an electric skateboard you could just bring inside with you and they sort of wanted to maintain that. Also, the whole like electric scooter craze was the thing in Silicon Valley at that point in like 2017, 2018, which personally I think is a terrible idea. I don't think that you should just like, if something is oversaturated, you should just like inject yourself into the market at the same time. Clubhouse.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. That kind of thing. I mean, you had Lime and you had Bird and you had all these companies that were like jump bikes. You had all these companies that are just like showing up in the city out of nowhere. I remember seeing these scooters like in the middle of the road because people just pick them up and throw them in the middle of the road. And there was Instagram accounts that would pop up like Bird Graveyard

with just people destroying birds like as like a fun thing. I don't know. People hated them in San Francisco. But anyways, they ended up landing on the personal scooter. 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 that 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 grew up in San Francisco, that's a very hilly city and they wanted something that you could like fly up the streets with, right? At the time, Xiaomi kind of owned the market of personal electric scooters. They still kind of do.

They've done a really good job scaling that. I think they offer like a Mi Scooter Pro now that is supposed to be able to climb the streets of San Francisco. But at the time, I remember I took the Caltrain to San Francisco from San Jose like every day. And the amount of people that would get off the Caltrain with the Xiaomi scooters was like, I don't think anyone in the U.S. really knew that Xiaomi was a brand, but they would still buy their scooters off of Amazon. It was crazy.

And those worked for flat areas, but they couldn't really do inclines. So Boosted saw this opportunity of what if we put our motors and engineering tech into this really powerful scooter and make it be able to like fly up and down the streets of San Francisco and ultimately obviously the company was really divided about this choice I wasn't super hyped on the scooter to be honest as a direction you know for the business actually you, I stuck my hand in the air at some of those product meetings and said, hey, do you know what a bike is to go

if we're going to do another product? That would be rad. But like any good team, there was differing opinions. Before we went down that road, everyone had a different opinion on it. when uh when that final decision was made everyone got behind it you know as as best they could usually that's the kiss of death yeah usually when a startup has a series of founders that are like 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 too. There's plenty of examples of that. Yeah, Casey actually said the same thing. Yeah, when Sanjay left,

whenever a founder leaves their startup, that vision that they brought to it goes away with them. And I think about when Steve Jobs left Apple. They brought in great leadership. They had 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 acumen 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 you develop a mission statement, second you write it on the wall.

And then that becomes religion. Everything you do has to be to promote that mission statement. And when I look at Boosted Board under Sanjay's guidance, I see that. I see that. And when I look at it in the time after he left, I saw something about, you know, 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 raised money at? And that's never a great recipe for success. around Silicon Valley. And if you go on Reddit,

there's like all these posts on the boosted subreddit of like bring back Sanjay, hashtag bring back Sanjay. Like, you know, people started like thinking ahead, like did he get outed? Like it 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 it just felt weird to have Sanjay leave the company when he built this thing I kind of wonder if that guy that was calling every week was still calling every week so like what's going on guys what's good with the skateboards yeah just like when's the next product coming out are you still making a skateboard

so there was also this worry that the company had like leveraged a little too much on the scooter I don't know if you guys remember but the boost Boosted Rev, which was the name of the scooter, was not cheap. It was like $2,000, right? And like you could say the skateboard was expensive at $1,200, but then you bring in $2,000. It's a scooter, so it's not as cool. It's really big. It's heavy.

It's like 40 pounds. And it was also entering in a market that already had competitors i feel like when boosted showed up with an electric longboard i don't really know if anyone knew how much that should cost all they knew is it solved an issue and there wasn't really any other version so they got to boost it 1200 bucks okay when the scooter came around i remember immediately when i'm doing my research i'm like all right i got to compare it to these six or seven other scooters that are out there. And I'm like, wow, this is a very different approach.

It's much heavier and much bigger and bulkier. And maybe that's a different demographic or maybe that's just a different way of doing the same thing, solving the same problem. So, yeah, they definitely got that comparison happening from every angle. And again, like the Xiaomi's had already flooded the market. They were only like 400 bucks. Like it was a big difference. Like you're paying a lot more for this thing just because it could go faster and it could like go up the hills without as much of an issue. I think their kind of like idea was that people feel more comfortable on the scooters than they do on skateboards because you

use two feet on it. You have two handlebars, all of that kind of stuff. But it just wasn't the same as riding a skateboard. It's a totally different experience. After the break, an attempted pivot? Take it with us. Support for the show today comes from NetSuite. Anxious about where the economy is headed? You're not alone. If you ask nine experts,

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Whether you're helping that special person take their content up a notch or adding that extra quality to your own shoots, Canon's got you covered. Shop the level up sales event today at canon.ca. Do you guys remember your first time seeing the Rev? What were your impressions? Do you guys remember your first time seeing the Rev? Like, what were your impressions? I remember we got it out the box and just starting, I think we just like zipped it around the studio on the carpet for a little bit.

And the thing would like spin the wheel so fast, it would sort of tear up the carpet. And we're like, this thing is serious. We need to go outside. And it was immediately very fun and very fast. It again felt similar to like the boosted, whereas like this felt like it was more a method of transportation, less a toy,

less just like something you would grab as a hobby. It's like, it kind of made sense that it was that expensive because it was built like a tank. It went very fast. It was super easy to pick up and I like got it. But then at the same time as someone who's just never had to deal with something like that,

like last mile transportation, I've, I couldn't see, I couldn't tell if somebody was willing to pay right two grand for something it's such a specific demographic because you need to be living in a place that's hilly specifically like uh i did the briefing for the boosted rev in san francisco and they specifically brought me like jeff he brought me to like one of the biggest hills in San Francisco because he was like right up that hill that was like the briefing right nice yeah um I also remember we got one and then it was recalled and then we got another one to test and then they took that one back too

right yeah they never told us what I, I guess just as a review unit, but they let us keep all the past Boosted Boards. Right, all the Boosted Boards are still around the studio. I just remember they said, hey, there's a problem with one of them. We're going to just take it back and replace it. And literally they showed up here at the studio. He rode a different one to the studio,

gave me that one, and I gave him the other one, and he rode that home. And I was like, all right, I guess they're just swapping it out. that one and I gave him the other one and he rode that home and I was like alright I guess they're just swapping it out maybe there's something new about the new one I don't think I ever asked or found out why so I don't know if you guys remember this but the main problem was that there was someone at the verge who was reviewing it and

there was a problem with the latch and the way that the like top half would fold and if you were holding the board if you were holding the board uh if you're carrying the board without having folded it sometimes it would like close on its own and it broke someone's finger at the verge uh and i wrote this whole article like the boosted rev broke my finger not mine my colleague andy's yikes which is not great pr not at all they didn't want a bunch of reviewers with broken hands.

Yeah, I'm sure the number one rule in marketing is don't hurt the reviewer when you give it to them because that's an easy headlock. So like if the phone explodes or something, they should take it back. Probably not a good idea. Got it. Right. So I asked like everybody. I was like, why do you think the rev was the problem when the company failed? Because I was trying to figure out

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... Scooters are like rollerblades. No matter how popular they get, they'll never really break through

because there's no way to look cool on a fucking scooter i don't care how good you are at rollerblading why did rollerblading die because you look like a you look like and i when i was a kid i like went to woodward skate camp for rollerblading i was like a really good rollerblader the whole the whole sport died out yeah because it doesn't matter how good you look you don't look cool on rollerblades yeah and you don't look cool Because it doesn't matter how good you look. You don't look cool on rollerblades. And you don't look cool on scooter.

Fair. I think I had a line kind of like that in the review. I think we specifically had shots in the review that almost just like felt lame, if that makes sense. Listen, I get the scooter. I get the scooter completely. It is much easier to ride a scooter than a skateboard. When we had it here, I brought my wife out on the back, and within one minute, she was full speed on the boosted red,

just zipping around out here. But you're also like... At this point, Marques gets up and pretends to ride a scooter, and let's be real, he looks pretty dumb. No offense to you scooter riders out there. I totally get how functional they are. Okay, let's continue. He looks pretty dumb. No offense to your scooter riders out there. I totally get how functional they are. Okay, let's continue. Yeah.

It's not like if you're skating on a longboard, you're like carving around and you look pretty sick. And when you're on a scooter, you're like, that's a scooter. What do we associate scooters with? Children in general. Yeah, like Razor scooters. Exactly. I don't know why it is so deeply ingrained in our like body language that like doing this is so much cooler than doing this but it just is this works great

for an audio medium by the way there's a there's a everyone knows what we're doing i think there's a meme i think it's a tiktok meme of like things that are humiliating for no reason and like some of them was just like, I don't know, like checking out this one weird thing at groceries or just like having to stand up in front of a group of people,

like understandably humiliating things. And then there's like riding a scooter. That's just humiliating for no reason. As someone that owns a scooter for my last mile ride

to my apartment, I'm feeling really hurt about this whole conversation as you should i think you just like you think of a scooter you think of like a guy in a business suit for some reason if you're an adult riding a scooter you feel like you're you're lame and you're like in a business suit if i'm being honest as someone who has skated and snowboarded for the majority of my life, I would feel a thousand times safer on a boosted rev in New York City than I would on a boosted board

just because of how intense the city is. I don't think Casey was too concerned about the safety. Casey was like a pro at doing it. And I don't like, I think a very big portion of that comes from him being a skater, but I think a very, an even bigger portion of that

comes from him being someone like who knows the city so well and knows how to react in those circumstances I think that's why Sam Sheffer can do it as well

I feel like I would die if I wrote a post-it board same there's a clip of at the end of Kara Swisher's interviewing Elon Musk let me see if I can

find a clip real quick make a scooter make a scooter and I'll go for it actually they are electric what am I talking about they're electric I don't know

there was like some people in the studio wanted. Make a scooter and I'll go for it. Actually, they are electric. What am I talking about? They're electric. I don't know. There was like some people in the studio wanted to make a scooter but I was like, ah, I don't know. I love the scooter. No, get on the scooter. It's like lax dignity.

No, it doesn't lax dignity. Yes, they do. They don't lax dignity. What are you talking about? Driving one of those things? Yes, I do it all the time. I look fantastic. No, you do not.

You are laboring under delusion. You lack dignity. I'm like, that clip. I was dying. Okay, by the way, the rest of that interview is great, so we'll link it in the show notes. Casey became like an icon on that boosted board

of New York City, right? Like, even in the new Tom and Jerry movie, there's that clip of Tom the cat, because it's a Tom cat. I just learned about that yesterday. I know. I know. I know. But he's riding a Boosted board throughout New York City.

And it's weird. It's like they have a bunch of product placement for Boosted in the movie. Yeah, that was. So I think they must have started the movie a long time before they went out of business. I don't know. Anyway, I don't think that Casey would have become an icon on a scooter. That's all I have to say about that. Casey was squarely in the middle of the target demographic for the board,

and he was squarely out of the target demographic for the scooter. Yeah, exactly. Because there's no way to look cool on a fucking scooter. There's Casey again. Like, he was cool. Anyway, okay. We got to get back to why the company fell okay yeah what happened so they're leveraging a lot on the scooter so uh investors are looking for a return

pretty soon because at this point it had been a while you know and they had done like all these products they did the mainline product they did the v2 the v3 the mini the stealth and now they were trying to launch the Rev. And the Rev was really supposed to be a part of that return, right? When Jeff came in, he was like, we've got to make the scooter, it's going to be the real moneymaker for us. And they had done some things to make more money, like Jeff was able to get the skateboards into more markets,

whereas before they were only really serving the US, but now they're in a bunch of different global markets, so that's good but still it wasn't great and right in the middle of all of this there is the Trump China trade war. Tariffs are high they are the upper end increasing tariffs on many imports reversal of the China tariff policy this made components being imported into the US like from China way more expensive because there was up to a 25% tariff. So it was not great. And you're either going to do one of two things.

You're going to pass those costs on to consumers and jack up the price of your components. I remember I was at Computex in Taiwan right as this was going on. There were computer companies that were like, hey, we announced this price, but it's actually going to be 25% more now, right? You can either pass on those 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 customers

and you're okay with eating those margins. But Boosted was already barely making money on their skateboards, right? They barely had any margins. At this point, they're basically paying people to buy their skateboards, right? They barely had any margins. At this point, they're basically paying people to buy their skateboards because it's costing them more to sell them than they're actually making on them,

which is terrible because now you're just hemorrhaging money in a million ways. You have employees, you have infrastructure, you have engineers. Not great, and it's not something that you could, it's not like a phone where you can sell software. You can do a plan over time, a subscription service.

No way to make more money. Keep in mind, this is all before the pandemic. So not a great situation. So it obviously starts to get around that the company is having some major issues at this point. Certain employees started interviewing at other jobs. They stopped doing catered lunches because they need to save money in some way.

And I know he'd bring up the catered lunches, but that was the thing in Silicon Valley. That's how you attract employees is by having the most employee benefits at your workplace. So whether it's a gym or lunches or any of that kind of stuff. But funny enough, the lunches are like a telltale sign that a company is having problems.

When the lunches go away? Oh, wow. Yeah, yeah. So things aren't looking great. So the boosted rev lands and it's kind of a mixed response. I mean, it's like fast and powerful and well-designed,

but it's $2,000. It's very expensive. And it's a scooter. There's no way to look cool on a fucking scooter. The employees are not feeling great. They're about to leave for Thanksgiving break, but a lot of them are like, are we going to even have jobs

when we come back from Thanksgiving break? Because things are like really going south and everyone kind of knows it. I think a lot of people saw the writing on the wall. So, you know, you would see a lot of people saw the writing on the wall um so you know you you would see a lot of your co-workers uh updating their linkedins um trying to make connections with people that were going to 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 it feels really weird um and they just didn't know

if they'd have jobs when they got back it was pretty yikes so things are getting dense and a little complicated bear with me here this is this is the real reason that boosted kind of dropped off the face of the earth okay so at this point you've got the boosted rev scooters on ships waiting to come to the u.s to be sold but the investors aren't giving boosted any more money so boosted just kind of like please we need to stay afloat we need to be able to keep paying our employees those scooters are on ships they're ready to come to the u.s but they won't give them any more money. They've completely closed the pocketbooks. So they have this last-ditch effort,

and they go to this company called Structural Capital, which is something called a venture debt fund. Yeah, it's big late-stage capitalism vibes. And so they took some money from this company, not from a position of strength, right? This is the kind of company that you take money from not when you have a lot of... you're not coming from a strong place but they didn't really care because like again they had like all these scooters like thousands of scooters

on these ships they're just waiting to come to the u.s and they're like okay it 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 we had already taken pre-orders. We'll be able to pay them back. We just need the money now so we can pay our employees and not actually just go out of business. But you know, like I said,

taking money from a venture debt fund is very much a last-ditch effort. The better endgame here would just to get acquired by a company that maybe has some more resources and could just give you money to stay afloat and they're okay that you're losing money for a little bit because their long term goal is to grow you.

But they really need the money. So they end up taking the loan from these guys. So at this point, everyone, even the employees like Mike, who worked in customer relations, are going out to lunch with their friends in Silicon Valley trying to get acquired. As a matter of fact, Cody and I, who I work with, we just got together and said, you know what, let's just see what we can do here. Just through our own networks. It's just like, oh, you know, well, I met these guys and they'll, you know, say, oh,

we'll go and talk to them and they might be really interested in it. Yeah. So around December in 2019, Boosted lightly started talking to Lime, the scooter company. in 2019, Boosted lightly started talking to Lime, the scooter company. And so they were considering this deal where they would wind up with $30 million worth of stock in Lime in exchange for some employees and some IP around the scooter. It's not exactly clear if it was around the rev or if it was the sort of more approachable affordable scooter that they were also working on uh okay so just the scooter tech not the scooter tech and not necessarily skateboarder or bike or anything else because lime at the time was making

scooters and lime scooters are pretty weak you know their moves are weak they couldn't get up the hills that boosted was getting up so they're like okay maybe we can like hire some of your engineers and also get some of your tech and then we'll give you 30 million dollars in limestock uh but lime wanted to know what they were in for with a failing company 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 tbh yeah okay yeah uh i think you're on to something uh so they're interviewing 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 f it basically feels like the other employees are like, what is going on? Like, imagine the F, it basically feels like the FBI is like swarming your headquarters and just interviewing people and you don't know what's happening. It's because Lime knows they have all the leverage. Yeah. Like Boosted needs a deal.

Yeah. And Lime 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 of 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, Lime 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 Lime a lot more than Lime needs Boosted. And remember, Lime wasn't trying to like take,

they weren't trying to buy the company. Okay, they were just trying to. They were trying to buy employees, which sounds weird. I guess that's confusing. Yeah, part of this deal, they get employees, which sounds very strange. Like you're selling people. Yeah, it's very weird.

And then they also got tech for the scooter. Yeah. So whatever. So Lime's obviously interested, but the company is already so short on money. Like people don't, like Boosted's so short on money, they don't know if they're going to have a job after Christmas. So they're starting to get really desperate.

So the original investors in Boosted that had given them money at the very beginning, the venture capital firms, specifically this company called Kosla Ventures. While they had gotten a good amount of starting company called Kosla Ventures. While they had gotten a good amount of starting funding from Kosla Ventures, which is sort of the biggest firm backing them, there wasn't this really great relationship of sort of building that. It was sort of like, here are the goals and hit them. And so when they ran into trouble, this wasn't

something where they could just turn back to sort of existing investors and, you know, get a little bit of help, which is why they wound up turning to this debt firm. At this point, Structural starts pretty much controlling Boosted's wallet. Like every payment that came out of Boosted, every decision was not really being made by the CEO. It was being made by this venture capital firm, which sucks. Like this sounds terrible.

They couldn't make any deals or purchases or transactions without explicit approval pretty bad but then out of nowhere yamaha shows up and yamaha is a little bit interested and boosted like as a company no one really knows what that would look like like maybe they want to start selling electric skateboards under the yamaha brand because yamaha sells a lot of stuff the more I think about it Yamaha sounds perfect because they sell the most random assortment of things from motorcycles to keyboards like yeah yeah musical instruments yeah like it's just a very I still don't know everything I know it's weird I could make my speakers. Yeah.

It's kind of perfect because they sell motorized stuff and they sell electronic stuff. Yeah. And Boosted's, like, the weird merger of that. So they're a little bit interested in Boosted. No one really knows what that would look like. Lime is also still kind of a startup. So, like, if Lime gave Boosted $30 million in stock, like, Boosted doesn't actually know what that would do for them in the long term so yamaha honest like obviously seemed like the better option here but cosla who's one of the biggest initial investors in boosted started to see potential

once yamaha got interested so at this point they'd already they'd totally closed off the pocketbooks but because yamaha was now interested they're like okay we want this deal go through, but you also have to like survive as a company and stay open. So we're going to give you a little bit more money because there is this potential Yamaha deal, right? So they gave Boosted a little more money just to stay afloat. And this is where things start getting really interesting. The only reason we know about these details with like Yamaha and Lime is because there's a lawsuit going on right now between Lime is because there's a lawsuit going

on right now between Lime and Cosla Ventures so the lawsuit which was first reported by the information basically alleges this allegedly because Boosted was sort of looking into both deals like it had not signed anything concrete with either Yamaha or with Lime. It was trying for both because at any minute, one of them could just fall through, right? As the deal with Yamaha started to fall apart and they walked away, then some other people went to Lime. And it was very unclear on the employee side of things, like, was this part of a deal that was being struck?

Or were people just sort of leaving because they were being poached and that's sort of at the core of that lawsuit you know lime says there was nothing improper being done there was no uh you know the two sides line and boosted had not agreed to like not hire if there are each other's employees while they were working out this deal whereas cozal vent Ventures says, you know, Lime knew it had a chance to like kill the Yamaha deal by like ripping out these like core people. And then out of nowhere, this guy who is a VP of engineering at Boosted leaves Boosted and takes a job at Lime before any sort of deal went through. right? So that seems extremely sketchy. And not only was he a VP of engineering,

but he was also helping facilitate the interviews between the Boosted employees and Lime. So at this point, it really seemed like Lime is just, like, trying to steal employees, like, and they had no interest in actually being part of this deal at all. And so he leaves. And then Costla starts getting really mad because no deal had been struck with either company.

And then all of a sudden, some more employees start leaving for Lime. So now Boosted's in this terrible position where they didn't sign anything. And Lime had taken their employees without striking a deal, and Yamaha pulls out. So Lime argues in the lawsuit that without striking a deal and Yamaha pulls out. So Lime argues in the lawsuit that it was fair game to poach the employees because they'd never signed any pieces of legal documentation, which is ridiculous.

So Kossla is alleging that Lime never even wanted to go through with the deal. They were just intentionally trying to get Yamaha, the Yamaha deal to fall through by hiring away the employees. Again, this is just alleged in the court case. But basically at this point, Boosted's got no more money. They're dead. They own a ton of debt to all these companies, including that like venture firm that you don't want to go to. So you fast forward to March and Boosted announces that they're dead on their blog. All of us see that. That's all we know about all of this.

We don't know about any of this crazy internal stuff that's happening. They owe a ton of money to Structural Capital. That company takes all of the company's IP as collateral for the loans. So like everything. Yeah. That company is a real shark.

Oh, yeah. That company probably signed some of the worst contracts on planet Earth. That's crazy. It's like a last ditch kind of situation. But now Boosted's kind of 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 foreclosure sale and Then like certain percentages were assigned to each of the parties as far as like what was happening You know what they got in return for the sale, you know structural would get like 66% Kozlo would get whatever and and

you know the original investors and sort of boosted whoever was left over would get X% as well. So they set up this sale, but Kozlo Ventures is trying to argue in the firm that there was some trickery involved. So this sale was supposed to happen on March 17th.

Do you guys have any guesses on what happened on March 16th? Rudy Gobert touches a bunch of microphones and tests positive for COVID and the NBA shuts down? Basically. Was it the NBA one? I'm guessing that's like right around New York City lockdown. San Francisco went into lockdown.

Oh, San Francisco. The day before the sale. Wow. Wow. Yeah. So March 17th was supposed to be the sale where they, where they all met up and divvied up and sold off stuff so they could like fairly divide the company and get the money. And they had told a structural capital that they could run the sale. And then the day before

San Francisco goes into lockdown. Okay. Yeah. So now everyone's along, everything's in lockdown. Kostla doesn't attend the sale in person because they're like, can we even attend a sale in person? Like it's lockdown. Like who goes to these things? And then they tried to argue that Lime and Structural didn't provide like conference call details for like the phonein part of the auction. It only lasted 20 minutes and they sold all the IP to Lime for really cheap, much less than the $30 million that Lime was originally going to pay them.

Like really, really, really cheap. 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 25%, huge. And Boosted had so much inventory coming out of China, they had already paid about $5 million to the government.

But they applied for an exemption to those tariffs, and they did get approved. The problem here though is, well, the US government isn't exactly quick to give people their money back. So Boosted is temporarily $5 million down and in some pretty hot water at this point. So in the original Boosted Board blog post announcing they were pretty much shutting down, it put a lot of blame on the China tariffs, which is for sure a huge part of it. But it's not the whole story. So the federal government owed Boosted $5 million. Wow. Yeah. And they would have probably survived if the tariffs had not happened. But now, because all of these companies, these venture capital companies

owned Boosted, they also owned the refund from the government. So they've got this $5 million refund from the government that still hasn't come in yet, but apparently it's a thing that you can own. You can own the refund as part of the company, basically. A debt to the company. A debt to the company. So this is where things get really crazy. Wait, this is where things get really crazy?

Yeah, there's some weird... things get really crazy I know yeah so they sold the IP to Lime for super cheap and then Structural Capital ended up selling that $5 million refund for $400,000 but guess who they sold it to

Structural Capital to themselves Structural got the tariffs on the cheap uh through this new like llc that they set up and so they tried to make it seem like it was somebody else buying it but it was really them whoa so then that 400 000 i'm guessing is they're saying is part of everybody's no they they just like siphoned it off from the company from the rest well yeah but so they sold the assets of the company to start paying off the all the different people that owned it right but then they so am i getting this yeah so they say sold they sold it and that

400 000 would be distributed to all of the investors in a in whatever way that they wanted and then they're but then their LLC, which is structural capital, ends up getting the $5 million. So not only do they get the $5 million, they get their portion of the $400,000 too. These are some sharks, man. Yeah. Wow.

Yeah. How do you, in good conscience, work at a... You don't. I'm sorry. Something like that, that you're literally just swimming around looking for almost dead fish. And when you find one, you slowly kill it. In the most methodical way.

Do you think sharks give a damn about the fish they're eating? That's why. It's true. I guess, yeah, that is true. You just kind of do it to survive and they make their money. Wow. Yeah. So I should remind everyone everyone this is an ongoing lawsuit

actually two lawsuits uh there's one against lime from cosla and one against structural from cosla uh but yeah if i could sum it all up yeah let's get a let's get a tldr version of this chaos tldl can i attempt one yeah go for it all, the rise and fall of Boosted. Boosted has a perfect Shark Tank story in the beginning. They're a crowdfunded project with a core of skaters and a really obvious solution to a really clearly

defined problem. They make a product, they engineer it, because they're engineers from Stanford, and they do pretty much everything they could possibly do right, minus the one debatable thing, which is taking a ton of money from investors. I have my own feelings about taking money from investors, but this is the way they need to build the company. They build it. They start it. They have a core product of a longboard 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 Casey Neistat, who blow up the company and

the product. And it becomes a household name, at least in this niche. Now, it gets to this peak, and they realize that they need to continue growing to please these investors and making more money. And at that same time, a couple small dings like extra tariffs 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 scooter. A founder leaves. And slowly, yeah, this is where things start to get wild, which is the trajectory of the company is now down. Casey moved to LA. Like, you don't have this anymore. I think that's number one.

And this is actually, we talked to him about this, and he was like, I can't, I don't use this here. It's not the type of city that is made for this type of thing. Yeah. So they have secured their stronghold on this niche and they do not have a way to continue to sell products to that niche because the products are so damn 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 appease the investors, but turned out to be the kiss of death as things start

to spiral financially and other companies, we'll call them sharks, vultures, whatever you want, start to see what was going on and take advantage of it in their own ways until the final kiss of death came in the form of a venture capital firm that basically said, let's reinvest. Let's completely end 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 Silicon Valley story. You've got a bunch of smart people at a good school. They make a cool side project.

And there's just so many investors in Silicon Valley that just want to pump and dump, right? They just want like, put money in, grow it real quick, and get it out. And like, they're all looking for these unicorns that can make them a crap load of money in the shortest amount of time. But like, like you said, you said you have your own thoughts about investing and taking money from investors, it seems like this was their issue. Now if you look at a company like Onewheel, they're in Santa Cruz, they're nearby San Francisco, 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 Boosted had all this growth trajectory from not only the niche, not only the skater community, but also just all this money. And they were able to have a cool office in San Francisco and cool, cool, cool. They can 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. Fully 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 is out there, what that immediately does is it puts you on this hamster wheel of chasing that again. And it's almost impossible to ever hit that again. And then you create this triangle graph 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 parts of the country, but when you get that huge shoot up at the beginning, it almost feels inevitable that you will never maintain that trajectory. You will either flatline and die or get acquired and boosted hindsight 2020 probably should have been looking to get acquired somewhere in the middle of the boosted board exploding yeah and they didn't and they've crashed just as hard as they rose and yeah you know we can all look back and say yeah we told you it would happen we knew this was going to happen to you but we didn't

know nobody really knew and it kind of fell apart in an ugly way. But that's the way I think about it is if you can do things organically and slowly, I would take that over quickly every single time. Hindsight. Yeah. No, I mean, like the companies that do maintain that trajectory are called unicorns for a reason. Right. And like everyone's looking for the next unicorn, but it never happens because they are so rare. And the amount of companies that, the amount of startups that go out of business in Silicon Valley is so ridiculously high. And they're all software startups, right? Their only problem is that they can't acquire

enough customers. Boosted's problem was its margins were 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 someone something once and they're not going to buy anything from you anymore? No matter how devoted they are, unless their board breaks and they're out of warranty, they're probably not going to buy another board from you.

Yeah. And that's just, it's sad. I think it hurts a little more to us specifically and probably 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 through their community building like in this tech youtube world we built a relationship with them and it felt it was something we all knew it's something we all followed and you know we kind of got to live that rise with them and then watch them just fall out of the sky yeah it's interesting

to now know what actually happened because like you said it's super easy to blame allegedly allegedly happened um i mean we still know more behind the scenes than like just assuming pandemic killed them right right but i think that was what everyone kind of assumed. And it was just so weird to have them, you know, be the Tesla of, you know, electric transportation and all of a sudden just like they're gone.

But that's the short version of the story. But hey, listen, if you listen to this episode and you're thinking, well, crap, I really want a boosted board now. There is this guy named

Brian Schwartz in San Francisco who bought all of Boosted's remaining stock I really want a Boosted board now. There is this guy named Brian Schwartz in San Francisco who bought all of Boosted's 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 boostedusa.com. I did try to get in contact with him for the story, but wah, wah, wah,

they didn't reply to my request for comment. So maybe they'll hear the story and reach out for a follow-up. I'd love to chat with you. Please email me. Anyways, y'all, they didn't reply to my request for comments. So maybe they'll hear the story and reach out for a follow-up. I'd love to chat with you. Please email me. Anyways, y'all, thanks a million percent to everyone that contributed to the story. Steven Reinhart and Mike McHugh are actually now working for another electric skateboard company called Dotboards, based out of Australia.

And hopefully they're bringing a lot of what they learned at Boosted to that company. Thanks to Sanjay Dastore for talking to us. He's actually working on something new again, so stay tuned for when he announces that. Thanks to Sean O'Kane 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 boosted board stories based on this lawsuit that just came out. So follow him over at The Verge to make sure you don't miss that. That trial is actually set to take place in October, so it should be pretty spicy when it happens. Oh, and also thanks to Casey Neistat for talking to me literally the day I messaged him to

get a big chunk of this story done. I really appreciate that. Anyways, y'all, we're working on a few more of these long form style stories. So if you liked this one, tweeted us at WVFRM on Twitter, or at myself at Dervid Amel at Adam at Adam Lucas 17. If you've got any ideas for more stories like this that you'd like to hear. Today's episode was written and researched by David Amel and Adam Molina. It was produced by Adam Molina. We are partnered with Studio 71 and our intro outro music was created by Cameron Barlow.