Waveform: The MKBHD Podcast - The Rise and Fall of Boosted Boards

Episode Date: April 16, 2021

Boosted Boards was one of the fastest growing companies of the mid 2010's, but in March 2020, they shut their doors for good. Why? What happened? In this week's episode, we dive deep into the rise and fall of possibly the most famous electric skateboard brand of all time. Don’t forget to subscribe to the podcast for free wherever you're listening, or by using this link: http://bit.ly/WaveformMKBHD If you like the show, telling a friend about it would be amazing! You can text, email, or Tweet this link to a friend: http://bit.ly/WaveformMKBHD Links: https://twitter.com/wvfrm https://twitter.com/mkbhd https://twitter.com/andymanganelli http://twitter.com/durvidimel https://twitter.com/AdamLukas17 https://www.instagram.com/wvfrmpodcast/ shop.mkbhd.comMusic 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 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Uber Reserve. See Uber app for details. 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 got to 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 going to 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. 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 seemed so ridiculously sudden, and they didn't really give a lot of explanation for it. I wanted to dig a little bit deeper to try to figure out what exactly was going on here. Do you guys have any specific memories of Boosted that you want to share before we get started? I just remember they were the benchmark. I might have called them at one point basically the Tesla of electric vehicles, like little personal electric vehicles,

because everything gets compared to them. Anytime 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're this giant monolith. They're like you said, like almost the Tesla of electric skateboards. They shut down really suddenly.

So I figured let's just start from the very beginning of the company so about ten 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, you know, 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 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 ah 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 it's just not just not efficient 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 they couldn't you couldn't have a bike on campus If you bought a new bike, you would paint it to look as shitty as possible so that people wouldn't steal Which is so sad, but yeah, so they start 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 seven by seven square miles. So small. 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 try to address in our own way. Do you guys know what last mile vehicles are? The, you know, the term generally 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 some 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 like 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? Yeah. 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 holes that don't exist and say that you need to solve them even though

they're not problems. Yep. 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? 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?

Skateboards have this really deep-seated community that has not really changed since the 90s at all. If you look at skater kids now, they wear the same clothes, they listen to the same music, they make the same videos. 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 at this point, they didn't really know that. They were just kind of focused on 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 yeah 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 $100,000 and they were selling the boards for about $1,200. So, you know, they just had to sell a decent amount, but not a ton. They ended up making $467,000. So they like almost quintupled their goal. And it was way more than they were expecting. They got 1,110 backers. So this kind of accelerated the idea that this could be a way bigger thing than they thought. I mean, they got over 1,000 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. Yeah, it was pretty major. Wait, do you guys remember the Kickstarter? That's Adam, our producer. I don't remember the Kickstarter. Yes. Yeah. 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 didn't, 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 like very early

in Kickstarter. And I don't know if you guys remember, but like a popular YouTube format at the time was like top Kickstarters of the week. Yeah. You 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 one of these new Shark 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 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 we're still in that phase with Tesla right now. 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 on,

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 that 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, like, amazing bamboo board. They had the best motors, something that people cite all the time is, like, how good their brake systems were. The acceleration curve is, like, really smooth, and it's got a good controller. motors something that people cite all the time is like how good their brake systems were the acceleration curve is like really smooth and it's got a good controller and they've got those like bright wheels that like everyone knows right it's recognizable which is something which is very rare

for like a version one of a gen one product that hadn't existed on the market before it's the thing apple does that everyone strives to do apple has 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'd think, oh, they're differentiating themselves from the scooters. MARK MANDELMANN, By being a skateboarder. MARK MANDELMANN, By being a skater-oriented thing. Where, oh, a smaller group of people will probably like this more than scooters, but they by being a skater oriented thing where oh a smaller group of people will

probably like this more than scooters but they'll love the thing but that's 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. And 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. Obviously, I know it's super fun because 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 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. Oh, wow. Because people would get off the train, and they lived 14 blocks north of the train station. And instead of walking through Hoboken, they would boost it, and I would pass people on one-wheels and boosteds and scooters all the time for a couple years.

I'm just imagining all those cobblestone roads and having to skip those. That's a great point. Hoboken does not have the quality of roads, but there are plenty of back roads, and if you find a good road, you can know, and you kind of memorize the potholes after a while. I'm much more willing to skip or go an extra block if I'm on an electric skateboard where I'm not putting in more effort.

Right, exactly. So if you live on, you know, the train station is on first and you live on 14th and you go to school on 7th, like 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. 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 and 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. 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 mess around with other customer relations people. And they didn't really have to deal with the engineers. But they said 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 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, like, they were just enthusiasts for skating. So whether or not you were in the Venn diagram of like, I just want my booster to be fixed, or I'm a skater, and I just like want to know more about the product, like they were your guys. Yeah, Mike told me a story about this kid. There was, there was so many awesome, you know, so many awesome things that that happened there area that happened there. I used to sit right

in amongst all of those guys. And if any former Boosted customers are listening, they will know the names, Angelo and Hank and Kerry and Stefan. Hank was the most patient of them all. And he had, 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 in, we'd switch it over to Hank and say, okay, there you go, Hank. Did they just call to 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 joe 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 just it just

cool it just became like this 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 aspect 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 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. So they just skated around San Francisco. I did a couple of these and we're just moving in packs of like a hundred 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 like group skates in New York and it looked really fun. Yeah. This is 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 companies do.

Yeah, one is like 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 driving dynamics or sportiness or how different parts that you could buy could affect your ride, 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 advocate for the product and hang out with people who are like-minded.

That is 100% a thing that happens in the Tesla community all the time. There's forums. There's group drives. There's meet-ups. 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'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. 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. They host these meetups, but the Boosted team members are getting phone numbers from people. So the reason I actually know Stefan is because I met him at a meetup. And I got a notification on my phone that he joined Telegram 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 okay 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 you know that's mike again jumped on a 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 sets a tone. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's not exactly the best thing to happen to your skateboard.

Not at all. 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 customer-to-business relationship that customers are going to like. But the way that they handled this is Sanjay, who is the founder of like customer to business relationship that customers are going to like. But the way that they handled this is Sanjay, who, you know, is the founder of the company,

physically just like flew out to the person's house to go check it out. And I was on a Reddit forum a couple of days ago from when the company closed. And this person shared 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 act around like elon musk like he was sort of this elon musk of boosted yeah uh where they just like really looked up to him as like this leader which is very interesting um but yeah that just shows like 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's 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. You know what's great about ambition? You can't see it. Some things look ambitious, but looks can be deceiving.

For example, a runner could be training for a marathon, or they could be late for the bus. You never know. Ambition is on the inside. So that thing you love, keep doing it. Drive your ambition. Mitsubishi Motors. This holiday season, the Center for Addiction and Mental Health is counting on your support. CAMH is on a mission to make better mental health care for all a reality. And they've made incredible strides forward, breaking down stigma, improving access to care, what was the big break moment for Boosted's brand?

No idea. Absolutely. Does it rhyme with Lacey Bryce, that? 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 going to screw this timeline up, but you can probably find it on YouTube if you wanted to, 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 Hi Casey. Casey. 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.

Yeah. No, he 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 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 like really good, high quality electric bikes. Like my wife had a car in the city, so we actually had a car. Uber, taxis, bus, 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, 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 like the most convenient way to get around the city. In New York City, it's such transportation is such a specific narrow thing where it's like this Venn diagram of like practicality, speed and convenience, safety and security. So an electric bike is 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 jump off on like 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 it was 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, 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 probably more safe. And you can walk it up to your apartment and not get it stolen. It is like the perfect thing.

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 bought he buys multiple boards for when some of them start breaking or like if one's dead and he

forgets to charge it, he wants to have one just ready to go. Like he is the let's go type of guy, you know, no obstructions, nothing slowing me down. I mean, you guys did the studio tour, right? You guys did the studio tour. How was that? That's the thing about Casey is he's a 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 he 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. 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 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 but all of them were always there charging and yeah,

like you said, one runs out of battery, you forgot to charge it, you just grabbed a different one. One breaks, he just grabs, one runs out of battery, you forget to charge, you just grab the different one. Right. One breaks, he just grabs another one. He always had them for everything.

And the funny thing is, 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's 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 like 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. In 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 post a video. They'd be in their little like customer service loft basically yell out down the stairs get ready to ship fellows it's like call down to the rest of the team and they'd be like alright boys let's get ready 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 it was. 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. 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. 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 ad. Yeah. No. And I asked him, I was like, did you ever set up any sort of like sponsorship thing? He's like, no. Yeah, that's true. If there was an affiliate program with Boosted, Casey would be like the order of magnitude highest by a lot.

Yeah. Wow. Like you've inadvertently sold a bunch of Teslas. Oh, yeah. But 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, 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. 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 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 it 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. 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 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 kickflips on the mini oh yeah stupid how hard that is

on something that heavy but I was but either way like 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 seemed 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 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. your only overhead is maybe your office and you've got your employees. That's kind of it.

But even companies like Amazon had trouble doing this, right? 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 $1,200, 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 uh 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 cost 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's 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 too much detail about that. But basically, we decided both as a founding team and with the board with the major investors, like, OK, 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 like on the board of directors, kind of like helping oversee the company growth. Anyway, they bring in in this hot shot he came from the same program as sanjay at stanford the pretty much the exact same track but he went the business route instead of the engineering route yeah i feel like i i just saw an interview about this where uh i think it was probably el, 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? Yeah. Skaters, business, they don't match very well, right? I see, I see. And everyone was just really chill. They had come from like 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 like

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, 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 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 electric scooter craze was the thing in Silicon Valley at that point, in 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, that kind of thing. Um, I mean you, you had lime and you had bird and you had all these

companies that were like jump bikes. You'd all these companies are just like showing up at the city out of nowhere. Uh, I remember seeing these scooters like in the middle of the road because people would just pick them up and throw them into the middle of the road. And there was Instagram accounts that would pop up like bird graveyard with just people destroying birds as 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 a charger outside some business. You'd ride it to a different place that you were going. You'd park it, and then you'd walk the rest of the way to where you were going.

But Boosted wanted to offer something that you could actually own as opposed to something that you just rent because they wanted to kind of 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 um they've done a really good job scaling that i think they offer like a me 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 cal train to san francisco from san jose like every day and the amount of people that would get off the cal train with the xiaomi scooters was like I don't think anyone in the US really knew that Xiaomi was a brand but they would still buy their scooters off of Amazon like it was crazy and those worked for like flat areas but they couldn't really do incline so boosted saw this opportunity of like what if we put our motors and engineering tech into this like really powerful scooter and make it be able to like fly up and down the 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, as a direction, you know, for the business. Actually,

you know, I stuck my hand in the air at some of those product meetings and said hey you know what a bike is to go uh if we're going to do another product um that would be that would be rad um but you know like any any good team uh there was differing opinions you know before we went down that road everyone had a different uh opinion on it but when uh that final decision was made, everyone got behind it as best they could. Usually that's the kiss of death. Usually when a startup has a series of founders that are 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. Right. 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 like when Steve Jobs left Apple, you know, 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. Like everything you do has to be to promote that mission statement. Second, you write it on the wall and then that becomes religion. Like 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 for success and that's a big reason why a lot of the employees started leaving They started finding a lot of different jobs around Silicon Valley And if you go on a reddit There's like all these posts on the boosted subreddit of like bring back Sanjay hashtag bring back Sanjay like 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 like 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.

Just like, 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? Yeah. Man. 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 boosted Rev, which was the name of the scooter, was not cheap. It was like $2,000. 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 Boosted.

$1,200? 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 it just wasn't the same as riding a skateboard. It's a totally different experience. After the break, an attempted health. BetterHelp Online Therapy connects you with a qualified therapist via phone, video, or live chat. It's convenient and affordable and can be done from the comfort of your own home. Having someone to talk to is truly a gift, especially during the holidays. Visit BetterHelp.com to learn more and save 10% off your first month. That's BetterHelp, H-E-L-P dot com. off your first month. That's BetterHelp, H- businesses are already setting their future plans with NetSuite by Oracle. This top-rated cloud ERP brings accounting, financial management, inventory, HR, and more onto one unified platform, letting you streamline operations and cut down on costs. With NetSuite's real-time insights and forecasting tools, you're not just managing your business, you're anticipating its next move. You can close the books in days, not weeks, and keep your focus forward on what's coming next. Plus, NetSuite has compiled insights about how AI and machine learning may affect your business and how to best seize this new opportunity. So you can download the CFO's Guide to AI and Machine Learning at netsuite.com slash waveform. The guide is free to you at netsuite.com slash waveform.

netsuite.com slash waveform. Do you guys remember your first time seeing the Rev? What were your impressions? slash waveform netsuite.com slash waveform 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 yeah and uh it was immediately very fun and very fast. It, again, felt similar to the boosted, where this felt like it was more a method of transportation,

less a toy, less just something you would grab as a hobby. 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 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 and then they took that one back too. Right. Yeah, they never told us. I mean, 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, gave him the other one and he rode that home and i was like all right 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'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 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. Of course not. 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 head block. So like if the phone explodes or something, they should take it back. Probably not. Got it. Right. So I asked everybody, I was like,

why do you think the rev was the problem with the company fail? 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. look you don't look cool on rollerblades yeah and you don't look cool on scooter fair um that is 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 yeah felt lame yeah if that makes sense yeah listen i get the scooter i get the scooter completely like 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, Marquez 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 be real he looks uh 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 you're a skate if you're skating on a longboard you're like carving around and you like 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 yeah like yeah like razor scootersers. Exactly. I don't know why it is so deeply ingrained in our body language

that doing this is so much cooler than doing this. But it just is. This works great for an audio medium, by the way. True. There's a... Everyone knows what we're doing. I think there's a meme. I think it's a TikTok meme of things that are humiliating for no reason.

And some of them are 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 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. 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, um, at the end of Kara Swisher's interviewing Elon Musk.

Let me, 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 to make a scooter, but I was like, ah. I love the scooter. No, get on the scooter. It's like lacks dignity. No, it doesn't lack dignity. Yes, they do.

They don't lack 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 think you do not. You are under 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.

He's riding a Boosted board throughout New York City and it's weird. They have a bunch of product placement for Boosted in the movie. 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. He was cool. Anyway, we're getting back to why the company fell. on a fucking scooter. There's Casey again. Like he was cool. Yeah, anyway.

Okay, we got to get back to why the company fell. Yeah, what happened? So they're leveraging a lot on the scooter. So 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. When Jeff came in, he was like, we've got to make this scooter. It's going to be the real moneymaker for us. And they had done some things to make more money. Jeff was able to get the skateboards into more markets,

whereas before they were only really serving the U. now they're in like 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 This made components being imported into the U.S. like from China way more expensive because there was like a 20, 25, up to a 25% tariff, right? So it was just, it was not great. And you're either going to do one of two things.

You're going to pass those costs onto consumers and jack up the price of your 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. 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 barely making money on 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, you know, you can do a plan over time, a subscription service, no way to make more money. Um, keep in mind, this is all before the pandemic. So not a great situation. Yeah. Um, so it obviously starts to get around to the companies 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 I keep bringing 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. 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 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 would see a lot of your co-workers updating their LinkedIns. 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. 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 US to be sold, but the investors aren't giving Boosted any more money.

So Boosted's 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 US. 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. This is the kind of company that you take money from not when you have like a lot of – you're not coming from a strong place. But they didn't really care because, like, again, they had like all of these scooters, like thousands of scooters on these ships.

They were just waiting to come to the U.S. And they were 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 preorders 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, like taking money from a venture debt fund is very much a last

ditch effort. The better end game here would just to get acquired by a company that maybe has 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. 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. 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. Okay.

So just the scooter tech, not the... 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. Their moves are weak. They couldn't get up the hills that Boosted was getting up. So they were like, okay, maybe we can hire some of your engineers

and also get some of your tech, and then we'll give you $30 million in Lime stock. 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. I think you're on to something. 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 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. everything that Boosted needs and they can take advantage of all that leverage. 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 wants some extras from Boosted, like the tech from the scooters and things like that. But as far as who needs who in this deal, Boosted needs Lime a lot more than Lime needs Boosted.

And remember, Lime wasn'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. 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 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 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. 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. 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 as a company. No one really knows what that would look 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 Yamaha sells. I know, it's weird. And I could see them. They 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 if Lime gave Boosted $30 million in stock, Boosted doesn't actually know what that would do for them in the long term. So Yamaha, 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, OK, we want this deal to go through.

But you also have to 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 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 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 like a deal that was being struck or were people just sort of like 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, you know, the two sides, Lime and Boosted had not agreed to like not hire each other's employees while they were working out this deal. Whereas Kozo 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. And they had no interest in actually being part of this deal at all. And so he leaves. And then Kossula 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 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 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, right? 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 signs 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'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 certain percentages were assigned to each of the parties as far as what they got in return for the sale. Structural would get like 66%, Kozlo would get whatever. And, you know, the original investors and sort of boosted whoever was left over would get X percent as well. So they set up this sale that Kozlo Ventures is trying to argue in the firm that like 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? 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 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 Structural Capital that they

could run the sale. And then the day before San Francisco goes into lockdown. Okay. Yeah. So now everything's in lockdown. Cosla 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 phone-in 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. Wow. 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 U.S. government isn't exactly quick to give people their money back. So Boosted is temporarily five million dollars down and in some pretty hot water at this point. So in the original Boosted

Board blog post announcing they were pretty much shutting down, they 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 it's a thing, apparently it's a thing that you can own like 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. Basically. Wait, this is where things get really crazy. Basically.

Wait, this is where things get really crazy? I know. Oh my god. 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 thousand dollars but guess who they sold it to structural capital to themselves structural got the 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's... No, they just like siphoned it off from the rest of the deal. Well, yeah, but so they sold the assets of the company to start paying off all the different people that owned it, right? But then they, so am I getting this right?

Yeah, so they sold it and that $400,000 would be distributed to all of the investors in whatever way that they wanted. 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 company like that that you're literally just swimming around looking for like 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 then they make their money. Wow. Yeah. So I should remind everyone this is an ongoing lawsuit. Actually, two lawsuits. There's one against Lime from Cosla and one against Structural from Cosla.

But yeah, if I could sum it all up. Yeah, let's get a TLDR version of this chaos. TLDR. Can I attempt one? Yeah, go for it. All right, the rise and fall of Boost chaos. T-L-D-L. Can I attempt one? Yeah, go for it. All right, the rise and fall of Boosted. Yeah. So Boosted has like 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, 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 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.

Right. 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 started to spiral financially. And other companies, we'll call them

sharks, vultures, whatever you want, started 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 you know 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 couldn't like get all this talent but all the benefit that you get from that is equal or greater in negatives at the end of the day. 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 kind of famous and your name is out there

What that immediately does is it 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. And they didn't.

And they crashed just as hard as they rose. And 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? That their only problem is that they can't acquire enough customers. Booster'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 because you sell some 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 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 and 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 it's interesting to now know what actually happened because like you said it's super easy to blame the pandemic allegedly happened I mean we still know more behind the scenes than like just assuming pandemic killed them 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. 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 get in contact with him for this 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, 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 AdamLucas17. 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.