From the Archives: Rise and Fall of Boosted Board

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

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Andrew Manganelli?

  This episode is brought to you by On Investing, an original podcast from Charles Schwab. Each week, host Lizanne Saunders, Schwab's Chief Investment Strategist, and Colin Martin, Head of Fixed Income Research and Strategy for the Schwab Center for Financial Research, bring your fresh insights on what's happening in the markets and why, and what the implications might be for your portfolio. Join Colin and Lizanne as they explore questions like, how do you evaluate corporate bonds that look interesting? And what sectors are on the move right now? Download the latest episodes and subscribe at schwab.com/oninvesting or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 0:33Speaker 01

  I'm a voice agent powered by Deepgram. I don't just understand words, I understand context. Like when you're at trivia night and say, "I'm on fire," it means you got the last three questions right. But when you're camping and say, "I'm on fire," it means a spark just landed on your highly flammable synthetic rain pants. Deepgram understands words in context across STT, TTS, and voice agents. That means better conversations at production scale. Learn more at deepgram.com/contextiseverything.

• 1:03David Imel?

  What is going on, people of the internet? Welcome back to another special episode of the Waveform Podcast. We're your hosts, I'm Marquez.

• 1:09Andrew Manganelli?

  I'm Andrew.

• 1:10David Imel?

  And I'm David. A little bit different this week, a little bit out of schedule. Well, it is actually our normal schedule, but it's a different type of episode. Yeah, so we've never done a rerun on this podcast before, and this is kind of a rerun. If you're watching our faces right now, we've never spoken like this directly to you before. We have never recorded this part of the episode before. But the rest of the episode is an episode that we recorded before. It is a rerun of an episode we did in April 2021 called, "Boosted to Busted: The Rise and Fall of Boosted Boards." Very good episode. It was audio only because we recorded it before we started doing a video podcast. And because of that, a lot of you probably haven't heard it before. So we are hoping that you enjoy it. And if you have heard it before, it's a fun little rerun. Nice to take a look at it almost four years later.

• 1:52Andrew Manganelli?

  Our audience is probably like four to five times bigger than when this originally got posted. It's Thanksgiving, we didn't really have time to do a whole new episode. So this is kind of, we think a lot of people should listen to this, and they probably haven't seen it if you're new audio or video listener.

• 2:06David Imel?

  Yeah, I feel like this is one of our pillar episodes. It's crazy that it happened before we were on video. So I hope that the new audience who hasn't heard this episode yet will enjoy it. Enjoy the holiday as well. Take it away, past selves.

• 2:35David Imel?

  Welcome to the Waveform Podcast. We're your hosts. I'm Marquez.

• 2:38Andrew Manganelli?

  And I'm Andrew.

• 2:39David Imel?

  At least, we're normally your hosts.

• 2:41Andrew Manganelli?

  What do you mean by that? Am I fired?

• 2:44David Imel?

  No.

• 2:46Andrew Manganelli?

  I know, I know, I know. Okay. So, we're actually doing a story time for this one, and we're gonna 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?

• 3:01David Imel?

  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 gonna tell us what they found. David, Adam, take it away.

• 3:35David Imel?

  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 companies skated a little too close to the sun, burned up, and vanished. Let's get it.

• 3:50David Imel?

  All right, guys. So, you might remember randomly on the internet, on Twitter, on Boosted's website, Boosted just very suddenly shut their doors, right? It was very sudden. Everyone was like, "That's strange," because they seemed to be this giant, monolithic company. They were probably the most popular electric skateboard brand. And of course, we've got the global pandemic and everything, but that had, like, just started. And it seemed like most companies were at least trying to, you know, get through the pandemic. And it was, 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.

• 4:36David Imel?

  Do you guys? Does anyone like specific memories of Boosted that you you want to share before we get started?

• 4:41Speaker 03

  I just remember they were they were the benchmark. I might have called them at one point basically the Tesla of electric vehicles, like motor, like little personal electric vehicles, because everything gets compared to them.

• 4:52David Imel?

  Exactly.

• 4:53Speaker 03

  Anytime a new electric skateboard came out, it was, should you get this over the Boosted or not?

• 4:57David Imel?

  Right.

• 4:57Andrew Manganelli?

  Or like Boosted Killer, like.

• 5:00Speaker 03

  Exactly. And they sort of got so dominant in that space that I I guess they sort of started to branch out and they did the scooter and they started doing other stuff. But I they were the default for as long as I can remember them.

• 5:10David Imel?

  Right. So anyway, like I said before, they're this giant monolith there, 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 10 years ago, a decade ago, if you can believe that, there's this guy.

• 5:27Speaker 04

  So my name is Sanjay Dastoor. I was one of the co-founders of Boosted.

• 5:30David Imel?

  Sanjay Dastoor.

• 5:32Speaker 04

  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.

• 5:39David Imel?

  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.

• 5:52Speaker 04

  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, you know, half a mile away to one building and coming back could easily turn into a, you know, 20, 30 minute round trip when it could have been a few minutes just to check on something that we were building.

• 6:14David Imel?

  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 gonna have to figure out where to park the motorcycle.

• 6:58David Imel?

  It's just, it's just not efficient. And a lot of people say, just use your bike. But, you know, at Stanford in particular, or 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 it.

• 7:16Speaker 03

  Oh, no.

• 7:17David Imel?

  Which is so sad, but yeah, so they, they started getting frustrated. He's got this friend, Matthew Tran, and they kind of get into this conversation. They're having the same issue. They have this problem where walking can take so long and cars create such a hassle. And Matt lived in San Francisco and he'd been thinking about this a ton too. So I don't know if you guys know this, but San Francisco is actually only seven by seven square miles.

• 7:39Speaker 03

  They're small.

• 7:40David Imel?

  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.

• 7:53Speaker 04

  And only then did we kind of discover that there was a much bigger problem here called last mile transportation that we wanted to, you know, try to address in our own way.

• 8:01David Imel?

  Do you guys know what last mile vehicles are? The, you know.

• 8:04Speaker 03

  The term generally?

• 8:05David Imel?

  The term last mile vehicles.

• 8:06Speaker 03

  Yeah, where you, you go, you know, a hundred, 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.

• 8:19David Imel?

  Right.

• 8:20Speaker 03

  That's the type of personal last mile vehicle, I guess.

• 8:21Andrew Manganelli?

  I've never heard of that term before.

• 8:23David Imel?

  Really?

• 8:23Andrew Manganelli?

  No, never.

• 8:24David Imel?

  It, 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 it 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 one wheel. 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.

• 9:09David Imel?

  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.

• 9:33Speaker 03

  I was just gonna say, this is like the perfect setup. We're like, alright, 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.

• 9:47Andrew Manganelli?

  And he just needs a rundown garage and that's a billion dollar company.

• 9:51David Imel?

  And this is the story of Silicon Valley, right? Just people who have like all these resources and they find holes in people's lives and they try to solve them for them. Or, you know, find tools that don't exist and say that you need to solve them even though they're not problems. So they go to the toy store and they actually bought some hardware to make model airplanes. And Sanjay actually did a TED Talk later on where he talks about how they made the first prototype. And it's kind of wild.

• 10:17Speaker 05

  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.

• 10:29David Imel?

  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 gotta test the limits of like what you can do before you reel it back in and figure out what the actual use. So the skateboard makes a lot of sense because it's small, it can fit in their car. You know, they can drive to campus, they can drive to that cheaper graduate parking and then just ride the skateboard the rest of the way, the last mile. It's kind of like the ultimate solution. On top of that, it's cool, it's fun, right? Like skateboards have this really deep seated community that has not really changed since the 90s like at all.

• 11:13David Imel?

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

• 11:29Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 11:29David Imel?

  Right? So this point, they didn't really know that. They were just kind of focused on like what makes the most sense. And then they kind of started lightly pitching to some startup accelerators as you do when you live in Silicon Valley. You're just like, hey, we have this product, you should give us money. So that's what happened and they ended up getting into Y Combinator and StartX, which is a really big deal.

• 11:53Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 11:53David Imel?

  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, you're, 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.

• 12:29Speaker 03

  Using it as a jump starter for a single thing.

• 12:31David Imel?

  Yeah. Yeah, like give us funding even though you're going to buy this product anyway and we're going to make this product anyway. But at this point, it kind of blew up. I don't think they were really expecting it to blow up on Kickstarter like it did. They were looking for a hundred thousand dollars and they were selling the boards for about $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 a thousand people that were willing to not only that wanted to ride the thing, but were willing to throw down over a grand.

• 13:12Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 13:12David Imel?

  On this random idea.

• 13:14Speaker 03

  Sight unseen.

• 13:15David Imel?

  Yes. Yeah, it was, it was pretty major.

• 13:17Speaker 03

  Wait, do you guys remember?

• 13:18David Imel?

  Remember the Kickstarter? That's Adam, our producer.

• 13:21Andrew Manganelli?

  I don't remember the Kickstarter.

• 13:23Speaker 03

  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 are so many Kickstarter's that go the exact opposite direction. So that's impressive that they got that much.

• 13:37David Imel?

  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 Kickstarter's of the week.

• 13:45Speaker 03

  Hmm, yeah.

• 13:47David Imel?

  Yep, don't do that anymore.

• 13:48Andrew Manganelli?

  Now the YouTube videos are what is the dumbest thing on Kickstarter I can find and will this actually go to market?

• 13:54David Imel?

  Yeah, exactly. But anyway, they got so many orders and they wanted to hire a bunch of their friends.

• 13:59Speaker 04

  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.

• 14:13David Imel?

  So that was like the birth of the company as we know it.

• 14:28Speaker 03

  I love Shark Tank. It's one of my favorite TV shows. I feel like I've learned so much from it. We interviewed Kevin O'Leary already. And every time I see like one of these new Shark Tank type, like new company ideas, I immediately think like, if they showed up on Shark Tank, how would it go? And when I hear this story, I think like, this would have gone really well. They'd go, how much money did you make? And they'd go, we haven't made any products, but we've sold half a million dollars of them. And Kevin would go, whoa, that's a lot of money. All right, tell me about your customers. And they'll go, it's a very specific, very dedicated niche of people that needs an issue solved. And they're in a wealthy California suburb. And it's, it's a very, very strong, like, potential customer base. And they go, okay, this is a good idea. Uh, do you have anything proprietary?

• 15:13Speaker 03

  And they'd go, yeah, we've just made this skateboard with batteries and motors on it. We can patent all this stuff. I think this would have gone really well on Shark Tank. So that's my reaction to their birth. And I'm kind of hindsight 2020, but I'm not shocked they had a pretty great.

• 15:28David Imel?

  Start.

• 15:29Andrew Manganelli?

  It's similar to how Tesla started though, right? Like they're one of the first big major EV companies. Like you have the upper hand when you were the first. A lot of people are just going to, as long as you make it and become that staple, then people have to compare to you for a while. I think, I think we're still in that phase with Tesla right now. Like everyone's comparing to Tesla, whether it's a reasonable comparison or not. I still think even with Boosted board dead, I probably would still consider every single electric skateboard from now. I would compare it to how Boosted was when it was popular.

• 16:00David Imel?

  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, uh, 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 some, which is very rare for like a version one of a gen one product that hadn't existed on the market before.

• 16:36Andrew Manganelli?

  It's the thing Apple does that everyone strives to do. Apple has branding. You can tell what an Apple phone is, what an Apple watch is, what almost anything Apple is from just looking at it and they hit that.

• 16:46David Imel?

  It's quality.

• 16:47Andrew Manganelli?

  Everything you would ever want in starting a company.

• 16:49David Imel?

  Yeah. Would you be interested like currently in electric board? Like pretend you'd never rode on one before and you'd never seen it.

• 16:56Speaker 03

  Today.

• 16:57David Imel?

  Yeah, today. If you saw the Kickstarter.

• 16:59Speaker 03

  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 like appear everywhere. And so electric scooters are the same solution to the same problem. It's like this last mile vehicle. It's sort of somewhat personal and they kind of got commoditized where companies would just have them all over the streets. And you'd see them on the sidewalk in San Jose, but like if I, yeah. So I think if I saw a company like Boosted have that same initial response, starting today, I think, oh, they're differentiating themselves from the scooters.

• 17:36David Imel?

  By being a.

• 17:36Speaker 03

  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.

• 17:47David Imel?

  Yeah.

• 17:47Speaker 03

  And I feel like before the scooters, this would appear to have a much wider total demographic.

• 17:54Andrew Manganelli?

  I mean, as someone who's skated when they were young, like I think. I think it would be super interesting and I think the price point would be my biggest worry just because that is an expensive product. $1,200 is not cheap. Like you said, this is, this is more of you're paying for a solution. So if you don't have this last mile problem, like $1,200 is probably not something you would want. And as, to me, it would be really interesting. I think an electric skateboard would sound super fun. 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, but at the same time, if you have a Kickstarter where a thousand people are backing it at that price point, who am I to say? There are obviously people willing to pay those prices.

• 18:39Speaker 03

  I have one other tidbit.

• 18:40Andrew Manganelli?

  Yeah.

• 18:41Speaker 03

  San Francisco reminds me a lot of Hoboken. I went to school for four years in Hoboken, lived there for all four years. It's a one-mile-square city. And during the height of boosted, they were everywhere. Because people would get off the, people would get off the train and they lived 14 blocks north of the train station. And instead of walking through Hoboken, they would boosted. And I would pass people on one-wheels and boosted and scooters all the time for a couple of years.

• 19:05Andrew Manganelli?

  I'm just imagining all those cobblestone roads and having to skip those.

• 19:10Speaker 03

  That's a great point. Hoboken does not have the quality of roads, but there are plenty of like backroads. And if you find a good road, you can know, and you kind of memorize the potholes after a while.

• 19:18Andrew Manganelli?

  Yeah, I'm much more, 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.

• 19:24Speaker 03

  Right, exactly. So if you live on, you know, the train station's on First and you live on 14th and you go to school on 7th like that, that whole commute became seconds instead of minutes because you have that sort of speed. So it was really popular for a while.

• 19:38David Imel?

  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, you gotta 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 top. 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. Uh, 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.

• 20:21David Imel?

  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 of former employees.

• 20:31Speaker 06

  My name is Mike McKee.

• 20:33Speaker 07

  Yeah, um, I'm Stefan Reinhardt. I was in customer support at Boosted.

• 20:38David Imel?

  Stefan and Mike had almost nothing negative to say about the company and they had their own little loft.

• 20:45Speaker 07

  It was a pretty massive warehouse and there was a little upstairs loft.

• 20:48David Imel?

  Where they got to like, you know, mess around with other customer relations people and just like, they didn't really have to deal with like the engineers and, but they said it was just, it was fun.

• 20:58Speaker 07

  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.

• 21:15David Imel?

  And they hired guys that they knew were passionate about skating. So Mike grew up in Australia in like deep skate culture.

• 21:22Speaker 06

  So I am a, have been a keen surfer skateboarder for, you know, my, my entire life and, and my, my teenage son as well.

• 21:33David Imel?

  When we talked to him on the phone, you, you could tell that he was like a skater himself.

• 21:37Speaker 06

  I saw an electric skateboard ripping down the street where we lived in Mountain View and I was like, wow. Uh, what is that thing? It looks really amazing. It was a generation one, but I still don't know who was riding it. Uh, to this day and I went home and I said to my wife, I just saw this thing, uh, ripping down the street. I want one of those. That looks just sick.

• 22:00David Imel?

  And Stefan wasn't exactly a novice skateboarder either.

• 22:03Speaker 07

  So I had been in skateboarding for most of my life. When I was 18, I skateboarded across America.

• 22:09David Imel?

  Yeah, it was awesome. But these guys are hardcore. So when you called to talk to a customer service representative, you talked 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 Boosted to be fixed, or I'm a skater and I just like want to know more about the product, like, they were your guys.

• 22:33Andrew Manganelli?

  Yeah.

• 22:34David Imel?

  Mike told me a story about this kid.

• 22:37Speaker 06

  There was, there was so many awesome, you know, so many awesome things that, that happened there. Area, you know, I used to sit right in amongst all of those guys. And if any, any former Boosted customers are, are listening, you know, they will know the names, you know, Angelo and Hank and Carrie and Stefan. You would have, Hank was the most patient, patient of them all. And he had a, you know, I think he was about a 12 or 14 year old boy, Joey Verone called in every week. About an hour about how he was saving for a Boosted boy. And Joey would call in, we'd, we'd switch it over to Hank, say, okay, there you go.

• 23:17David Imel?

  Did they just call the chat to each other? Or did he actually need help?

• 23:20Speaker 06

  Yeah, no, he just called a chat. Yeah, yeah.

• 23:24Speaker 06

  If you're listening, Joey, and you will be, he's a legend. Shout out. I'm sure Hank would, would love to say hello.

• 23:29David Imel?

  And then they would just call in just to talk about skating. Like, have you seen this video, like, on YouTube about this skating? Like, it just, it just cool. It just became like this, this love, lovely community.

• 23:40Andrew Manganelli?

  That sounds fun. And then if you're really busy one day and you know he's gonna call in, that sounds like a nightmare.

• 23:46David Imel?

  So the community aspects of the company grew really freaking fast. And it kind of became like a hallmark part of Boosted, right? Like, not only did you already have the hardcore people who just love skating, and so you already grabbed that audience, but like, they, their community was nuts. They started holding, uh, group rides, which I went to a couple in San Francisco, and they're so fun. And it's weird because it's, it's one of those things that is really just enabled by the internet and like by the future where, no matter what your niche is, if you get together with people who are really into the same thing as you, it becomes like not even about the thing that you're getting together about. It's just an excuse to hang out with like-minded people. And it just becomes this really fun event, you know, they, so they just skated around San Francisco.

• 24:31David Imel?

  Like 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.

• 24:38Andrew Manganelli?

  I mean, it's like motorcycles do that all the time.

• 24:40David Imel?

  Right, exactly.

• 24:40Andrew Manganelli?

  I remember Sam Sheffer's done a couple of videos on like group skates in New York and it looked really fun.

• 24:45David Imel?

  Yeah, so funny.

• 24:46Speaker 03

  So many parallels to Tesla that I see. So many.

• 24:50Andrew Manganelli?

  Drop them, drop them. Every car meet, like a lot of car companies.

• 24:53Speaker 03

  Yeah, one is like you, when you work for Tesla in certain departments, you are a car enthusiast, not necessarily a Tesla or an electric enthusiast. So when people discuss like driving dynamics or sportiness or like how different parts that you could buy could affect your ride. Like they can talk to you about that when you're a customer. And the other thing is you mentioned group rides and people who will like advocate for the product and hang out with people who are like minded. Like that is a hundred percent a thing that happens in the Tesla community all the time. There's forums, there's group drives, there's meetups, there's all kinds of stuff like that. And I feel like that's just what happens when you love a product enough.

• 25:25David Imel?

  Right.

• 25:25Andrew Manganelli?

  Have you ever done one before?

• 25:27Speaker 03

  I've never done one. I've never, I'm not social enough to want to go out of my way, but I make videos about the products, just like lots of other Tesla owners.

• 25:33David Imel?

  Right. Yeah. And I, I think that's just like a hallmark of these tight knit communities. Like there's already like, you don't have to organize meetups in skate culture because you already are meeting at the skate park.

• 25:45Andrew Manganelli?

  Yeah.

• 25:45David Imel?

  Right? And you're not necessarily skating the whole time, but when you have this weird niche that you're really interested in, you post on forums like crazy. You're just obsessed with the product and you just want to hang out with like minded people. But Boosted in particular, they're directly communicating with their customers. It's almost like they're all friends, you know, like they host these meetups, but like the Boosted team members are like getting phone numbers from people. So like, the reason I actually know Stefan is because I met him at the, at a meetup. And I got a notification on my phone that he joined Telegram like the week that we started this, uh, this episode. And so I just messaged him and 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.

• 26:27David Imel?

  Okay. And so there's this famous story about where this customer's board started smoking.

• 26:34Speaker 06

  That was the most awesome thing that Sanjay did. It was legendary, you know?

• 26:38David Imel?

  That's Mike again.

• 26:39Speaker 06

  Jumped on a plane and flew out to New York to solve a, you know, a battery issue that was there. There was two battery faults that sort of triggered a, a recall. That was my first day in the office.

• 26:52David Imel?

  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. I mean, we've seen like similar cases with like Samsung phones will start smoking. And then, you know, the way that they handle that is kind of shaky. They have a weird PR response or like they say that they're using it wrong or something like that. It's, it's not exactly the kind of like customer to business relationship that customers are gonna 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.

• 27:34David Imel?

  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. Where they just like really looked up to him as like this leader, which is very interesting. 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 gonna get like really good customer service. They knew that they were never going to, you know, buy something and then just like, not have a warranty, never be able to talk to these people. They were fixing every possible problem that customers had. So they, they started out right.

• 28:18David Imel?

  So they've got this excitement, the community is growing, but they're still kind of small. And even if you think something is big in real life, because you see a lot of them. Yeah. Doesn't mean they're really big. It could just be the communities you hang out around are similar to you. So you, 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.

• 29:00Speaker 03

  Support for the show comes from Framer. Picture this: you launch a website and your whole team's celebrating. Then the support tickets start to roll in and put a damper on the mood. That's when you could use a website platform that lets teams build, ship, and improve their sites faster than ever while getting every detail right. For that, you could use Framer. It's a complete website platform, not just a builder, so teams can launch and keep improving their sites in one place. Framer lets you prompt, inspect, edit, and publish in one place at a whole new pace. On Framer, AI agents and humans work in tandem. So agents bring speed and scale, while people bring taste, judgment, and control. And that all takes place in the same workspace where the real site is designed, managed, reviewed, and published. Framer is an enterprise-level solution that the world's leading brands like Perplexity

• 29:45Speaker 03

  and Miro rely on to build their websites. Learn how you can get more out of your site from a Framer specialist or get started building for free today at framer.com/wave for 30% off a Framer Pro annual plan. So that's framer.com/wave. Rules and restrictions may apply. Support for the show comes from Shopify. Starting a business requires you to be resourceful, and the more you flex that muscle, the more you see opportunities for growth. For example, launching a business with Black Friday approaching means that you can take advantage of the extra online traffic. Shopify is there to help you make it all happen. Shopify is the platform for a record-breaking, reliable holiday selling season for businesses at every stage. Their pre-built website themes and AI site builder make it easy to launch a beautiful, professional-looking store,

• 30:30Speaker 03

  and you don't ever need to touch a line of code to do it. They also have a mobile app that lets you run your store from anywhere. Their AI e-commerce expert sidekick can help you manage almost any business task with a single prompt, including holiday discounts. And with Shopify, you can easily sell everywhere people shop: online, in person, across social media, and even in AI chats. If you're ready to launch a business before Black Friday, go to Shopify.com/waveform to start your free trial. That's Shopify.com/waveform. So go to Shopify.com/waveform today to hear your first... Support for the show comes from Google Gemini. You know that moment when curiosity strikes? You're exploring a new city with the family, and a sculpture catches your daughter's eye. What is that?

• 31:15Speaker 03

  Who made it? With Gemini, you can snap a picture and get a fully interactive breakdown of its history, architecture...

• 31:21David Imel?

  And even hidden secrets. Gemini is built for moments like that. Whether you're learning something new, solving a problem, or looking for your next favorite thing, Google Gemini is here to help. Download Gemini, Google's AI app, or visit gemini.google.com to learn more.

• 31:42David Imel?

  So if you guys were to guess, what was the big break moment for Boosted's brand?

• 31:48Andrew Manganelli?

  No, no idea. Absolutely. Is it running with Lacey Bryce that?

• 31:54Speaker 03

  As a, 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.

• 32:09Andrew Manganelli?

  100% the reason I know about Boosted Board.

• 32:12David Imel?

  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.

• 32:23Speaker 04

  Casey Neistat.

• 32:24Speaker 07

  Casey Neistat drove a lot of sales.

• 32:27Speaker 01

  My name's Casey Neistat and I'm a, I guess I'm a YouTuber.

• 32:30David Imel?

  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.

• 32:42Speaker 01

  I started my daily vlog in, I'm gonna screw this timeline up, but you can probably find it on YouTube if you wanted to. I started my daily vlog March 25th, I think, 2015.

• 32:53David Imel?

  I checked. He's right. Like, if you just, he was one of the first bloggers, at least the first bloggers to like do it of this, in this type. And so like, everyone started to know who he was. Even in those early vlogs, he would leave his apartment and people.

• 33:05Speaker 01

  Hi, Casey. What's up, guys?

• 33:08David Imel?

  Just, it was crazy, around New York in particular.

• 33:10Speaker 03

  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.

• 33:28David Imel?

  Mm-hmm.

• 33:29Speaker 03

  And so I can't imagine being Casey.

• 33:31David Imel?

  See 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, 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, 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 up 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.

• 34:17David Imel?

  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 Candace 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, 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.

• 34:54Andrew Manganelli?

  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.

• 35:01David Imel?

  In his vlog where he opens the boosted board, it's like a Q and A. He's like, I used to use this like janky hoverboard thing, but now I have this. And he's just like super excited about it, right? And pretty much from the moment he opens that up on camera, shit just goes nuts for this company. Uh, 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's amazing in New York City until you have to go into an office building.

• 35:45David Imel?

  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 of always having 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 for 15 years at the time. I mean, New York City, if you think about it, it wasn't originally built for cars, right?

• 36:27David Imel?

  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.

• 36:53Andrew Manganelli?

  And less effort.

• 36:54Speaker 03

  One of Casey's most viral videos ever is all about bike lanes and how there are constantly obstructions.

• 37:01Andrew Manganelli?

  That was pre-vlog.

• 37:02Speaker 03

  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.

• 37:13David Imel?

  Yeah, yeah. And the boosted board could go 24 miles per hour.

• 37:16Speaker 03

  You could be in the street.

• 37:17David Imel?

  Exactly. So you could you could ride in the streets and you're probably going to be faster than most cars, right? At this point, you're basically a motorcycle that's weaving between cars, but slimmer and, you know, probably more safe.

• 37:27Andrew Manganelli?

  And you can walk it up to your apartment.

• 37:29David Imel?

  Exactly. It is like the perfect thing. Like bikes don't really work in this case. Scooters are annoying. This is basically his solution. So boosted gets a ton of attention and traction just from his vlogs and they didn't expect this to happen at all. I don't think they even expected him to open it up.

• 37:44Speaker 07

  I think that one of the challenges for the marketing team was sort of matching the sales that he was bringing in.

• 37:50David Imel?

  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.

• 38:07Speaker 03

  Yeah. I mean, you guys did.

• 38:09David Imel?

  The studio tour, right? You guys had the studio tour. How was that? That's, 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. Yeah. And the thing you notice, even if I was never going to get one of my videos, I would always notice those boards are getting manhandled and they were just working all the time. So I was never shocked when he bought, 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.

• 38:54Andrew Manganelli?

  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.

• 39:06David Imel?

  Right.

• 39:06Andrew Manganelli?

  One breaks, he just grabs another one. He always had them for everything.

• 39:10David Imel?

  And the funny thing is, like, like I said earlier, this is like one of the first electric skateboards in the category, but yet it became, it was already one of the like best ones. Not only was it one of the fastest, it had the best deck, it had the best wheels. And it just became kind of the electric skateboard that you'd get. Uh, 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.

• 39:56David Imel?

  And then the other thing was braking. Um, 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. Like, 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,

• 40:18David Imel?

  its yielding a kind of confidence in its users that said, you know what? This, I can use this to get around. This isn't just a fun thing to ride around in the parking lot when no one's here. Right? Like, and a lot of other electric skateboards, the brake system was just like eh. But this one had a belt on the motor. So that was actually the thing that would make the acceleration curve the best and also the brakes the best. But of course, that actually, that would also break. So it was kind of a trade off, but it was worth it. So Boosted is basically having trouble keeping up with demand, uh, which Mike says-

• 40:48Speaker 06

  No, I think that's, that's an awesome problem to have.

• 40:50Speaker 03

  It's another Shark Tank thing. Like, so why do you need the money? Well, we can't make enough.

• 40:54David Imel?

  Yeah.

• 40:54Speaker 03

  Perfect.

• 40:54David Imel?

  Yeah.

• 40:55Speaker 03

  Perfect answer. Yeah.

• 40:57David Imel?

  Just need to scale up. Yeah. So Mike told me the story that every single time Casey would release a vlog.

• 41:02Speaker 06

  So Casey would post a video.

• 41:05David Imel?

  They'd be in their little like customer service loft.

• 41:07Speaker 06

  Basically yell out down the stairs, get ready to ship pillows.

• 41:10David Imel?

  They'd like call down to the rest of the team and they'd be like, all right, boys, let's get ready.

• 41:16Speaker 03

  That is so funny.

• 41:17Speaker 06

  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.

• 41:23David Imel?

  It was, it was insane.

• 41:24Speaker 03

  I'll just drop this in. I, I hate the word influencer, but there is no more perfect like storm for like a bunch of new people finding a product than someone that they love and follow every day becoming obsessed with it.

• 41:39David Imel?

  Right.

• 41:40Speaker 03

  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.

• 41:53David Imel?

  Right.

• 41:54Speaker 03

  And that was perfect.

• 41:55David Imel?

  GorillaPods even, yeah, drones.

• 41:56Speaker 03

  Yeah, a drone's a good one.

• 41:57David Imel?

  But like GorillaPods even-

• 41:59Speaker 03

  Yeah, GorillaPods, yeah.

• 42:00David Imel?

  Popular thing. They blew up because of him too.

• 42:01Speaker 03

  For sure. Yeah.

• 42:03David Imel?

  Because vlogging blew up because of him. It was just insane.

• 42:05Speaker 03

  They couldn't pay for a better ad than that.

• 42:07David Imel?

  Yeah.

• 42:07Speaker 03

  They could not pay for a better ad.

• 42:08David Imel?

  Yeah. No. And, and I asked him, I was like, did you, did you ever set up any sort of like sponsorship thing? He's like, no.

• 42:15Speaker 03

  He, yeah, that's true. If there was an affiliate program with Boosted, Casey would be like the order of magnitude highest by a lot.

• 42:22David Imel?

  Yeah.

• 42:23Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 42:23David Imel?

  Like you've, you've inadvertently sold a bunch of Teslas.

• 42:26Speaker 03

  Oh yeah. But they, you know, they added a referral program, but there's lots of other products that I know have seen an impact from videos that I don't get a cut of, but I'm just curious like, wow.

• 42:34David Imel?

  Yeah, no, if they had a referral program and Casey would be like hundreds of thousands probably. Okay. So obviously things are going pretty well. I mean, they released the V2, the Stealth, the Mini, like they started expanding their product line because that's what you do. They took seed money. For investors, they needed to grow, they needed to expand. And you even did a video with Casey on the Mini.

• 42:53Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 42:54David Imel?

  What was that like?

• 42:56Speaker 03

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

• 43:20David Imel?

  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?

• 43:28Speaker 03

  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.

• 43:36David Imel?

  Yeah.

• 43:36Speaker 03

  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-longboard. 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.

• 44:01David Imel?

  Yeah.

• 44:01Speaker 03

  I wouldn't have appreciated that if he didn't tell me, so that was all in one place, which is really good.

• 44:06David Imel?

  I remember at the event that I met Stefan at, the the group ride, it was right after the Mini and the Stealth had launched. And the thing that blew my mind was that he was doing like ollies and kickflips.

• 44:18Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 44:18David Imel?

  On the Mini.

• 44:19Andrew Manganelli?

  Stupid. It's how hard that is on something that heavy.

• 44:23David Imel?

  But I was, but either way, like the fact that you could was just crazy. Like, you probably shouldn't because there's a battery in it, but it was, it was, 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, right? 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's been covering this since the very beginning.

• 44:54Andrew Manganelli?

  I'm Sean O'Kane. I'm a senior reporter at The Verge.

• 44:56David Imel?

  And what is your main beat over there?

• 44:59Andrew Manganelli?

  I cover transportation, everything that moves, pretty much.

• 45:02David Imel?

  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.

• 45:18Andrew Manganelli?

  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.

• 45:26David Imel?

  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 your return as quickly as possible, right? And this is even harder with hardware.

• 45:45Andrew Manganelli?

  It's one thing to write really amazing code and execute it and see your work pay off. It's another thing to like work on a product like this and then be able to like ride it around.

• 45:54David Imel?

  In Silicon Valley, most of the companies are software companies. You don't have a lot of overhead. It's pretty easy to make software and make it better, try to reach more customers. You're really, your only overhead is like maybe your office and you've got your employees. That's kind of it. But even, even companies like Amazon had trouble doing this, right? Like they're not selling, 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.

• 46:34David Imel?

  And specifically, Boosted's margins were incredibly low, especially at the beginning, right? Because they were already selling this product for like 1,200 bucks, but that was like, they weren't making a lot of money on it. If anything, they were like barely scraping by from the beginning. So it was going to take them a lot longer to become profitable. They had to get to a point in the product where it cost a lot less to make the product than it 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

• 47:18David Imel?

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

• 47:46Speaker 04

  Yeah. So, so we had a bit of a disagreement internally at the time about which direction to go in as a company. And I won't get into like too much detail about that. But basically, we decided, you know, both as a founding team and with, with the board, with the major investors, like, okay, let's go find somebody who has done this kind of work before, but at a much bigger scale. Because neither of us, John or I, who had been there at that time, Matt had left at that point. But John and I had never run a business before, especially one that was growing as fast as that.

• 48:16David Imel?

  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 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.

• 48:35Speaker 03

  Yeah, I feel like I just saw an interview about this where, I think it was probably Elon, but talking about like, growing a company kind of has to come from inside the company. And when you take someone from some high-end program, some hot shot 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.

• 49:14David Imel?

  Yeah.

• 49:14Speaker 03

  Knows how it would best continue to improve.

• 49:17David Imel?

  But you know, Sean told me that like, it wasn't necessarily the worst thing.

• 49:21Andrew Manganelli?

  You know, when the new CEO came in, Jeff Rusika, that idea that started with Sanjay of like, you know, we, our 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 Rusika when he took over. Because that was the way that they could really grow the business.

• 49:47David Imel?

  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?

• 50:01Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 50:01David Imel?

  Skaters, business, they don't, they don't match very well, right? 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.

• 50:27Andrew Manganelli?

  There was a point in time over the last couple of years where it seemed like a lot of options were on the table for them. Where whether that was going to be the scooter that they eventually made in the rev, or something simpler and more designed for sort of micro mobility, or just more generally affordable and lighter. There was also some bikes in the work that were more either standard bikes. They also had a sort of seated scooter kind of thing like Super 73. So I, you know, they definitely were evaluating a lot of different options.

• 50:54David Imel?

  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. Uh, like an electric skateboard, you could just bring inside with you and they sort of wanted to maintain that. Also, the whole like electric scooter craze was the thing in Silicon Valley. At that point, like 2017, 2018, which personally.

• 51:40David Imel?

  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.

• 51:52David Imel?

  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 of 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. It was just people destroying birds like as like a fun thing. I don't know. People hated them in San Francisco, but. Yep. Anyways, they ended up landing on the personal scooter. And most of the scooter startups were convenience based, last mile stuff, right? So you'd rent from from a charger. Outside some business, you'd ride it to a different place that you're going. You'd park it and then you'd walk the rest of the way.

• 52:33David Imel?

  To where you're going, but boosted wanted to offer something that you could actually own as opposed to something that, you know, you just rent because. They wanted to kind of like stick to their company ethos of like really powerful, really fast. And you can't really do that when you want something to be like just a little last mile thing. And also because they grew up in San Francisco, that's a very hilly city and they wanted something that you could like. Fly up the 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 a Mi scooter pro now. That is supposed to be able to climb the streets of San Francisco, but at the time.

• 53:18David Imel?

  I remember I took the Caltrain into San Francisco from San Jose like every day and the amount of people that would get off the Caltrain with the Xiaomi scooters was like. I don't think anyone in the 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 inclines. 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.

• 53:51Speaker 06

  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? If we're gonna do another product, that would be, that would be rad." But, you know, like, any, any good team, there was differing opinions, you know? Before we went down that road, everyone had a different opinion on it. But when, when that final decision was made, everyone got behind it, you know? As, as best they could.

• 54:29David Imel?

  Usually, that's the kiss of death.

• 54:30Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 54:31David Imel?

  Usually, when a startup has a series of founders that are like, pretty close to its core and its mission and its purpose, and then that company starts to expand and branch out and move on to other things, and a founder leaves, usually, that's a pretty big pivoting point for that company, where other people start to get the picture like, "Oh, it's not gonna be like it was before. I might wanna leave too."

• 54:54Speaker 03

  Right. There's plenty of examples of that.

• 54:56David Imel?

  Yeah, Casey actually said the same thing. Yeah, when they, when Sanjay left, whenever a founder leaves their startup, that, that vision that they brought to it, goes away with them. And I, I think about like, when Steve Jobs left Apple. You know, 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.

• 55:36David Imel?

  And in my business experience, it's always like, first you develop the 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.

• 56:18David Imel?

  And if you go on Reddit, there's like, all these posts on the Boosted subreddit of like, "Bring back Sanjay, hashtag bring back Sanjay." Like, you know, people started like, thinking ahead, like, did he get outed? Like, it just started, because the community was so powerful, right? Like, they were so invested in what was happening at the company. It wasn't really like a corporation, it was like, it was like their friends. So it just felt weird to have Sanjay like, leave the company when he built this thing.

• 56:45Speaker 03

  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, uh, what's good with the skateboards?"

• 56:52David Imel?

  Yeah, just like, "When's the next product coming out? Are you still making a skateboard?" Yeah.

• 56:56Speaker 03

  Man.

• 56:57David Imel?

  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, right? And like, you could say the skateboard was expensive at $1,200, but then you bring in $2,000, it's a scooter, so it's not as cool. It's really big, it's heavy, it's like 40 pounds.

• 57:19Speaker 03

  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 the Boosted. $1,200 bucks, okay. When the scooter came around, I remember immediately, when I'm doing my research, I'm like, "All right, I gotta compare it to these six or seven other scooters that are out there." And I'm like, "Wow, this is a, this is a very different approach." 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 Xiao Mi's had already flooded the market. They were only like 400 bucks.

• 58:01Speaker 03

  Like it is 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 totally different experience. After the break, an attempted pivot? Stick with us.

• 58:36Speaker 03

  Support for the show comes from Jira by Atlassian. AI is only as useful as the context it has to work from, but when that context is scattered across tools and threads and DMs, that means your team and your AI agents end up flying blind. That's the problem that Jira solves. What's the goal tied to your project? What got decided last week in Slack? Atlassian's teamwork graph pulls all the pieces together from Jira, Confluence, Slack, GitHub and more, so nothing falls through the cracks. With Jira, you can actually share that context with the AI agents you already use, like Claude, Cursor and GitHub Copilot. Assign them work directly or connect your agents through MCP. Spend less time digging through endless links and DMs, less time chasing down what got decided and by who,

• 59:21Speaker 03

  and more time actually shipping. Learn more at jira.com. That's J-I-R-A dot com. Support for the show comes from Gusto. When you started your small business, I'm sure you were dreaming of the day where you'd run your first payroll. No? Yeah, obviously not, but you have better things to be doing. Your payroll though still needs to get done. The good news is Gusto is here to help. Gusto is online payroll and benefits software built for small businesses. It's all in one, remote friendly and incredibly easy to use so you can pay, hire, onboard and support your team from anywhere. Their services include automatic payroll tax filing, simple direct Deposits, health benefits, commuter benefits, worker comp, 401k, you name it. Gusto makes it simple and has options for nearly every budget.

• 1:00:04Speaker 03

  You can save time with built-in automated tools, offer letters, onboarding docs, direct deposit, and more. And if you ever have a question, you can get direct access to certified HR experts to help support you through any tough HR situation. You can try Gusto today at gusto.com/wave and get three months free when you run your first payroll. That's three months of free payroll at gusto.com/wave. One more time, gusto.com/wave. This episode is brought to you by Indeed. You're ready to level up your business, but the pressure to find the right person to make that happen is intense. Indeed Sponsored Jobs can help carry the load. It boosts your job post to help it reach quality talent fast.

• 1:00:46David Imel?

  Cut through the chaos with Indeed Sponsored Jobs. Get a $75 sponsored job credit at indeed.com/podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring now? Then this is a job for Indeed Sponsored Jobs.

• 1:01:02David Imel?

  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 it was immediately very fun and very fast.

• 1:01:22Andrew Manganelli?

  It again felt similar to like the Boosted where it was like this felt like it was more a method of transportation, less a toy, less just like something you would grab as a hobby. It's like, it kind of made sense that it was that expensive because it was built like a tank. It went very fast. It was super easy to pick up. And I like got it, but then at the same time, as someone who's just never had to deal with something like that, like last mile transportation, I couldn't see, I couldn't tell if somebody was willing to pay

• 1:01:50David Imel?

  Right.

• 1:01:51Andrew Manganelli?

  two grand for something.

• 1:01:52David Imel?

  It's such a specific demographic because you need to be living in a place that's hilly, specifically. Yeah. Like, 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.

• 1:02:13Speaker 03

  I also remember we got one and then it was recalled.

• 1:02:20Speaker 03

  And then we got another one to test. And then they took that one back too.

• 1:02:24David Imel?

  Right.

• 1:02:25Andrew Manganelli?

  Yeah, they never told us, I mean, I guess just as a review unit. But they'd let us keep.

• 1:02:30Speaker 03

  I mean, the first one.

• 1:02:31Andrew Manganelli?

  Let us keep all the past boosted boards.

• 1:02:33Speaker 03

  Right, all the boosted boards are still around the studio. I just remember they, they said, hey, there's a problem with one of them. We're gonna like just take it back and replace it. And literally they showed up here at the studio. He rode a different one to the studio, gave me that one, and I gave him the other one and he rode that home. And I was like, alright, I guess they're just swapping it out. Maybe there's something new about the new one. I don't think I ever. Asked or found out why.

• 1:02:55David Imel?

  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.

• 1:03:06Andrew Manganelli?

  I vaguely remember that.

• 1:03:07David Imel?

  And if you were holding the board, uh, if you were carrying the board without having folded it, sometimes it would like close on its own. And it broke someone's finger at the verge.

• 1:03:16Speaker 03

  Oh, wow.

• 1:03:16David Imel?

  This whole article, like the boosted rev broke my finger.

• 1:03:22Andrew Manganelli?

  Not mine, my colleague Andy's.

• 1:03:24Speaker 03

  Yikes.

• 1:03:24David Imel?

  Which is not great PR.

• 1:03:25Andrew Manganelli?

  Not at all, no.

• 1:03:27David Imel?

  They didn't want much of reviewers with broken hands.

• 1:03:28Andrew Manganelli?

  Yeah, I'm sure, I'm sure the number one rule in, in marketing is don't hurt the reviewer that when you give it to them, because that's a, that's an easy headline.

• 1:03:36Speaker 03

  So like if the phone explodes or something, they should take it back.

• 1:03:38Andrew Manganelli?

  Probably not.

• 1:03:39Speaker 03

  Got it. Yeah. So, so I asked like everybody, I was like, what, like, why do you think, do you think the rev was the problem with the company fail? Cause I was trying to figure out like, why did the company just go under? And every single person was like, I don't think it was the biggest problem, but. The culture around boosted is a skater culture. And as Casey said to me.

• 1:04:00David Imel?

  Scooters are like rollerblades. No matter how popular they get, they'll never really break through. Cause 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? Cause you look like a, you look like, and I, when I was a kid, I like went to Woodward Skate.

• 1:04:17Speaker 01

  Camp for rollerblading. I was like a really good rollerblader. The whole, the whole sport died out.

• 1:04:22Andrew Manganelli?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:22Speaker 01

  Cause it doesn't matter how good you look. You don't look cool on rollerblades.

• 1:04:25Andrew Manganelli?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:25Speaker 01

  And you don't look cool on scooter.

• 1:04:29Speaker 03

  That is, I think I had a line kinda like that in the review.

• 1:04:32Andrew Manganelli?

  I think we specifically had shots in the review that almost just like.

• 1:04:36Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:04:37Andrew Manganelli?

  Felt lame.

• 1:04:39Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:04:39Andrew Manganelli?

  If that makes sense.

• 1:04:40Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:04:41Andrew Manganelli?

  Listen, I, I get the scooter. I get the scooter completely. Like it is much easier to ride a scooter than a skateboard. Like.

• 1:04:47Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:04:47Andrew Manganelli?

  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.

• 1:04:56Speaker 03

  But you're also like.

• 1:04:57David Imel?

  At this point, uh, Marquez gets up and pretends to ride a scooter and 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.

• 1:05:10Andrew Manganelli?

  Yeah. It's not like you're 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?

• 1:05:21Speaker 03

  Yeah, like, yeah, like razor scooter.

• 1:05:23Andrew Manganelli?

  Exactly.

• 1:05:24Speaker 03

  I don't, I don't know why it is so deeply ingrained in our like body language that like doing this is so much cooler than doing this.

• 1:05:32Andrew Manganelli?

  But it just is.

• 1:05:33Speaker 03

  This works great for an audio medium, by the way.

• 1:05:37Speaker 03

  There's a, there's a.

• 1:05:38Andrew Manganelli?

  Everyone knows what we're doing.

• 1:05:39Speaker 03

  I think there's a meme. I think it's a TikTok meme of like things that are humiliating for no reason. And like, some of them was just like, I don't know, like. Che- 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 very hurt about this whole conversation.

• 1:06:10Andrew Manganelli?

  As you should.

• 1:06:11Speaker 03

  I think you just like, you, you think of a scooter, you think of like a guy in a business suit for some reason. If you're an adult riding a scooter, you feel like you're, you're lame and you're like in a business suit.

• 1:06:20Andrew Manganelli?

  If I'm being honest, as someone who has skated and snow. Boarded 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.

• 1:06:34David Imel?

  I don't think Casey was too concerned about the safety.

• 1:06:36Andrew Manganelli?

  Casey was like a pro at doing it and I don't like, I think a very big portion of that comes from him being a skater, but I think a very, an even bigger portion of that comes from him being someone like who knows the city so well and knows how to react in those circumstances. I think that's why Sam Shepard can do it as well. I feel like I would die if I rode a boosted board.

• 1:06:56David Imel?

  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.

• 1:07:03Speaker 05

  Make a scooter, make a scooter and I'll go for it. Actually, they are electric. What am I talking about? They're electric.

• 1:07:07Speaker 07

  I don't know. Like, there was like, uh, some people in the studio wanted to make a scooter, but I was like, ah, it's.

• 1:07:12Speaker 05

  I love the scooter. No, get on the scooter. No, it doesn't lack dignity. They don't lack dignity. What are you talking about? I guess I do it all the time. I look fantastic.

• 1:07:21Speaker 07

  No, you do not. You are unrelated, bring on delusion.

• 1:07:25David Imel?

  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 J, uh, Tom, the cat, cause it's a tomcat. I just learned about that yesterday. I know. I know. But, uh, he's riding a boosted board throughout New York City and it's weird. It's like, they have a bunch of like product placement for boosted in the movie. So I think they must've started the movie like a long time before they went out of business. I don't know. Anyway, uh, I don't think that Casey would have become an icon on a scooter. That's all, that's all I have to say about that.

• 1:08:09Speaker 03

  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.

• 1:08:16David Imel?

  Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

• 1:08:17Speaker 01

  Cause there's no way to look cool on a fucking scooter.

• 1:08:21David Imel?

  There's Casey again. Like he was cool. Yeah. Anyway, yeah. Okay. We go back to why the company fell. Okay.

• 1:08:29Speaker 03

  Yeah. What happened?

• 1:08:30David Imel?

  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 like return, right? When Jeff came in, he was like, we got to make the scooter. It's going to be the real moneymaker for us. And like, they, they had done some things to make more money, like Jeff was able to get the skateboards into more markets. Whereas before they were only really serving the US, but now they're in 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.

• 1:09:14Speaker 05

  The tariffs are high. They are the upper end. Adding increasing tariffs on many imports.

• 1:09:19David Imel?

  A reversal of the China tariff policy. This made components being imported into the US, 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, it was not great. And you're either going to do one of two things. You're going to pass those costs on to consumers and jack up the price of your components. I remember I was in, I was at Computex in Taiwan right as this was going on. There were computer companies that were like, hey, we announced this price, but it's actually going to be 25% more now. Right? You can either pass on those prices to your consumers or you can eat the cost if you're a giant company and you want to maintain a good relationship with your customers. And you're okay with eating those margins. But Boosted was already barely making money on their skateboards, right?

• 1:10:04David Imel?

  They barely had any margins. At this point, they're basically paying people to buy their skateboards. Because they're, it's costing them more to sell them than it is, 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.

• 1:10:33David Imel?

  Keep in mind, this is all before the pandemic. So, not a great situation.

• 1:10:39Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:10:41David Imel?

  So, it obviously starts to get around that the company's having some major issues at this point. Certain employees started interviewing at other jobs. They stopped doing catered lunches because like they need to save money in some way. And I know I keep bringing up the catered lunches, but that's the thing in Silicon Valley is like, that's how you attract employees is by having like the most employee benefits like 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's having problems.

• 1:11:11Speaker 03

  When the lunches go away? Oh, wow.

• 1:11:13David Imel?

  Yeah, yeah. So things aren't looking great. So the boosted rev lands and it's kind of a mixed response. I mean, it's like fast and powerful and well-designed, but it's $2,000. It's very expensive and it's a scooter.

• 1:11:26Speaker 03

  There's no way to look cool on a fucking scooter.

• 1:11:31David Imel?

  See, employees are not feeling great. They're about to leave for Thanksgiving break, but a lot of them are like, are we gonna even have jobs when we come back from Thanksgiving break? Because things are like really going south and everyone kind of knows it.

• 1:11:43Speaker 07

  I think a lot of people saw the writing on the wall. So, you know, you would see a lot of your coworkers updating their LinkedIn's,

• 1:11:55Speaker 07

  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.

• 1:12:06David Imel?

  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.

• 1:12:25Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 1:12:27David Imel?

  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 like closed the pocketbooks. So they have this like last ditch effort and they go to this company called Structural Capital, which is something called a venture debt fund.

• 1:12:58Andrew Manganelli?

  Yeah, it's big late-stage capitalism vibes. And so they took some money from this company, not from a position of strength, right? This is the kind of company that you take money from, not when you have like a lot of, you're not coming from a strong place.

• 1:13:12David Imel?

  But they didn't really care because like, again, they had like all of these scooters, like thousands of scooters on these ships. They're just waiting to come to the US and they're like, okay, it doesn't matter how much the margin of like what we're borrowing is, what we need to return them. We will sell these like scooters. We'd 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 endgame here would just to get acquired by a company that maybe has some more resources and could just give you money to stay afloat and they're okay that you're losing money for a little bit because their long-term goal is to grow you. But they really need the money, so they ended up taking the loan from these guys. So at this point, everyone,

• 1:13:57David Imel?

  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.

• 1:14:04Speaker 06

  As a matter of fact, Cody, 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.

• 1:14:21David Imel?

  So around December in 2019,

• 1:14:24David Imel?

  Boosted lightly started talking to Lime, the scooter company.

• 1:14:27Andrew Manganelli?

  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.

• 1:14:51David Imel?

  Okay, so just the scooter tech, not the...

• 1:14:53Andrew Manganelli?

  The scooter tech and not necessarily skateboarder or bike or anything else.

• 1:14:57David Imel?

  Because Lime at the time was making scooters and Lime scooters are pretty weak, you know? Their moves are weak. They couldn't get up the hills that Boosted was getting up. So they're like, okay, maybe we can like hire some of your engineers and also get some of your tech and then we'll give you $30 million in Lime stock.

• 1:15:16David Imel?

  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.

• 1:15:30Speaker 03

  That doesn't sound normal.

• 1:15:32David Imel?

  Exactly.

• 1:15:34Speaker 03

  That sounds kind of predatory, TBH.

• 1:15:36David Imel?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:36Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 1:15:37David Imel?

  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.

• 1:15:54Speaker 03

  It's because Lime knows they have all the leverage.

• 1:15:56David Imel?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:57Speaker 03

  Like Boosted needs a deal.

• 1:15:58David Imel?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:59Speaker 03

  And Lime has everything that Boosted needs and they can take advantage of all that leverage.

• 1:16:04David Imel?

  Yeah. 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?

• 1:16:14Speaker 03

  Well, Lime like wants some extras from Boosted, like the tech from the scooters and things like that. But as far as like who needs who in this deal?

• 1:16:22David Imel?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:22Speaker 03

  Boosted needs Lime a lot more than Lime needs Boosted.

• 1:16:25David Imel?

  And remember Lime wasn't trying to like take, they weren't trying to buy the company. Okay, they were just trying to... They were trying to buy employees, which sounds weird. I guess that's a conf... Fusing. Yeah, part of this deal, they get employees, which sounds very strange, like you're selling people. Yeah, it's very weird. And then they also got tech for the scooter. So whatever. So Lime's obviously interested, but the company is already so short on money, like people don't like boosted so short on money. They don't know if they're gonna have a job after Christmas, so they're 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 Cosla Ventures.

• 1:17:06Andrew Manganelli?

  While they had gotten a good amount of starting funding from Cosla Ventures, which is sort of the biggest firm backing them. There wasn't this really great relationship of sort of building that. It was sort of like, here are the goals and hit them. And so when they ran into trouble, this wasn't something where they could just turn back to sort of existing investors. And, you know, get a little bit of help, which is why they wound up turning to this debt firm.

• 1:17:31David Imel?

  At this point, structural starts pretty much controlling boosted's wallet, like every payment that came out of boosted, every decision. Was not really being made by the CEO. It was being made by this venture capital firm. Which sucks. Like, this sounds terrible. They couldn't make any deals or purchases or transactions without explicit approval. Pretty bad. But then, out of nowhere, Yamaha shows up. And Yamaha is a little bit interested in boosted, like as a company. No one really knows what that would look like. Like, maybe they want to start selling electric skateboards under the Yamaha brand because Yamaha sells a lot of stuff. The more I think about it, Yamaha sounds perfect because they sell

• 1:18:14David Imel?

  the most random assortment of things from motorcycles to keyboards, like musical instruments. It's just a very, I still don't know everything.

• 1:18:26David Imel?

  They make my speakers.

• 1:18:27Andrew Manganelli?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:18:28David Imel?

  It's kind of perfect because they sell motorized stuff and they sell electronic stuff.

• 1:18:32Andrew Manganelli?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:33David Imel?

  Boosted's like the weird merger of that. Um, so they're a little bit interested in Boosted. No one really knows what that'd look like. Lime is also still kind of a startup. So like if Lime gave Boosted 30 million in stock, like Boosted doesn't actually know what that would do for them in the long term. So Yamaha honest, like obviously seemed like the better option here. But Kosta, who's one of the biggest initial investors in Boosted, started to see potential once Yamaha got interested. So at this point, they'd already, they'd totally closed off the pocketbooks. But because Yamaha was now interested, they're like, okay, we want this deal to go through, but you also have to like survive as a company and stay open. So we're going to give you a little bit more money because there is this potential Yamaha deal, right?

• 1:19:16David Imel?

  So they gave Boosted a little more money just to stay afloat. And this is where things start getting really interesting. Uh, 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 Kosta 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?

• 1:19:52Andrew Manganelli?

  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, uh, you know, the two sides, Lime and Boosted had not agreed to like not hire if they're each other's employees while they were working out this deal. Whereas Cozal Ventures says Lime knew it had a chance to like kill the Yamaha deal by like ripping out these like core people and-

• 1:20:34David Imel?

  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-

• 1:21:00Andrew Manganelli?

  Poaching.

• 1:21:01David Imel?

  -steal employees like and they had no interest in actually-

• 1:21:04Andrew Manganelli?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:04David Imel?

  -being part of this deal at all. Um, and so he leaves and then Cosla 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 like 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 Cosla is alleging that Lime never even wanted to go through with the deal. They were just intentionally trying to get Yamaha, the Yamaha deal to fall through by hiring away

• 1:21:49David Imel?

  the employees. Again, this is just alleged in the court case. Uh, 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.

• 1:22:27David Imel?

  Yeah, so now-

• 1:22:29Speaker 03

  That company is a real shark.

• 1:22:30David Imel?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:22:31Speaker 03

  That company probably signs some of the worst contracts on planet Earth.

• 1:22:35David Imel?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:35Speaker 03

  That's crazy.

• 1:22:35David Imel?

  It's like a last ditch-

• 1:22:37Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 1:22:37David Imel?

  -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.

• 1:22:49Andrew Manganelli?

  Those parties agreed to structural capital being able to run the foreclosure sale. And then, like, certain percentages were assigned to each of the parties as far as, like, what was hap- you know, what they got in return for the sale. You know, Structural would get like 66%, Cosla 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, they set up this sale, but Cosla Ventures is trying to argue in the firm that, like, there was some trickery involved.

• 1:23:19David Imel?

  So this sale is supposed to happen on March 17th. Do you guys have any guesses on what happened on March 16th?

• 1:23:27Speaker 03

  Rudy Gobert touches a bunch of microphones and tests positive for COVID and the NBA shuts down?

• 1:23:32David Imel?

  Was it?

• 1:23:33Speaker 03

  Basically.

• 1:23:34David Imel?

  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.

• 1:23:43Speaker 03

  Wow. Wow.

• 1:23:45David Imel?

  Yeah. That's rough. So March 17th was supposed to be the sale where they, where they all met up and divvied up and sold off stuff so they could, like, fairly divide the company and get the money. And they had told Structural Capital that they could run the sale. And then the day before, San Francisco goes into lockdown.

• 1:24:01Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 1:24:02David Imel?

  Yeah. So now everyone's in lock- 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, it's lockdown. Like, who goes to these things?

• 1:24:15Andrew Manganelli?

  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.

• 1:24:25David Imel?

  It only lasted 20 minutes. And they sold all the IP to Lime for really cheap, much less than the $30 million that Lime was originally going to pay them. Like, really, really, really cheap. So, okay, let's do a quick recap on what happened here. The United States engages in a trade war with China, which made things shipping out of China have a really big tariff on them, like 25%, huge. And Boosted had so much inventory coming out of China, they had already paid about $5 million to the government. But they applied for an exemption to those tariffs, and they did get approved. The problem here, though, is, well, the US government isn't exactly quick to give people their money back.

• 1:25:09David Imel?

  So Boosted is temporarily $5 million down and in some pretty hot water at this point. So in the original Boosted Board blog post announcing they were pretty much shutting down, 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.

• 1:25:32Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 1:25:32David Imel?

  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.

• 1:25:58Speaker 03

  A debt to the company.

• 1:25:59David Imel?

  A debt to the company. So this is where things get really crazy.

• 1:26:05David Imel?

  Basically...

• 1:26:05Speaker 03

  Wait, this is where things get really crazy? Oh my god.

• 1:26:09David Imel?

  I know. Yeah, so they sold the IP to Lime for super cheap. And then Structural Capital ended up selling that $5 million refund for $400,000. But guess who they sold it to? Structural Capital.

• 1:26:26Speaker 03

  To themselves.

• 1:26:27Andrew Manganelli?

  Structural got the tariffs on the cheap 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.

• 1:26:39Speaker 05

  So then that $400,000, I'm guessing, as they're saying, is part of everybody's...

• 1:26:43Speaker 03

  No, they just, like, siphoned it off from the rest of the...

• 1:26:47Speaker 05

  Well, yeah, but so they sold the asset to the company to start paying off the, all the different...

• 1:26:52Andrew Manganelli?

  People that owned it, right? But then they, so am I getting this right?

• 1:26:57David Imel?

  Yeah, so they say so they sold it and that 400,000 would be distributed to all of the investors in a, in whatever way that they wanted.

• 1:27:06Andrew Manganelli?

  And then they're taking the five million.

• 1:27:07David Imel?

  But then their LLC, which is structural capital, ends up getting the 5 million. So not only did they get the 5 million, they get their portion of the 400,000 too.

• 1:27:15Speaker 03

  These are some sharks, man.

• 1:27:17David Imel?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:18Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 1:27:18David Imel?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:19Speaker 03

  How do you in good conscience work at a?

• 1:27:21Andrew Manganelli?

  You don't.

• 1:27:22Speaker 03

  I'm sorry, I, something like that, that you're literally just swimming around looking for like almost dead fish.

• 1:27:28Andrew Manganelli?

  I mean.

• 1:27:28Speaker 03

  And when you find one, you slowly kill it.

• 1:27:32Andrew Manganelli?

  Do you think sharks have?

• 1:27:33Speaker 03

  In the most methodical way.

• 1:27:34Andrew Manganelli?

  Do you think sharks give a damn about the?

• 1:27:36Speaker 03

  No, no, of course.

• 1:27:37Andrew Manganelli?

  That's why the nickname.

• 1:27:38Speaker 03

  It's true. I guess, yeah, that is true. You just kind of do it to survive and then they make their money. Wow.

• 1:27:44David Imel?

  Yeah. Um, so I should remind everyone, this is an ongoing lawsuit, actually two lawsuits. Uh, there's one against Lime from Cosla and one against Structural from Cosla. Uh, but yeah, if I could sum it all up.

• 1:27:57Speaker 03

  Yeah, let's get a, let's get a TLDR version of this chaos.

• 1:28:02David Imel?

  TLDL.

• 1:28:04Speaker 03

  Can I attempt one?

• 1:28:04David Imel?

  Yeah, go for it.

• 1:28:06Speaker 03

  All right, the rise and fall of Boosted.

• 1:28:07David Imel?

  Yep.

• 1:28:08Speaker 03

  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 clear, 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. This is, I have my own feelings about taking money from investors, but this is the, this is the way they need to build the company. They build it, they 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,

• 1:28:52Speaker 03

  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 of small dings like extra tariffs and small, you know, people at the company interviewing with others start to creep up as they start to shift their focus to maybe other products like a scooter. A founder leaves and slowly, yeah, this is where things start to get wild, which is the trajectory of the company is now down. Casey moved to LA.

• 1:29:36Speaker 03

  Like you don't have this anymore.

• 1:29:38David Imel?

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

• 1:29:47Speaker 03

  Yeah. So they, they have secured their stronghold on this niche and they do not have a way to continue to sell products to that niche because their products are so damn good that they need to start selling to other people. And this is where you start to lose the culture and the core and they start to branch out into other things, which is a good business move to appease the investors, but turned out to be the kiss of death as things start to spiral financially and other companies, we'll call them sharks, vultures, whatever you want, start to see what was going on and take advantage of it in their own ways until the final kiss of death came in the

• 1:30:25Speaker 03

  form of a venture capital firm that basically said, let's, let's reinvest, let's, let's completely end this company and take what we can from it. And then that was the end of Boosted.

• 1:30:39David Imel?

  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 like taking money from investors. It seems like this was their issue. Now, if you look at a company like One Wheel, they're in Santa Cruz, they're nearby San Francisco, they haven't really taken a lot of investor capital,

• 1:31:21David Imel?

  and they're still going, right? They're way smaller, obviously. They never got to the scale of Boosted, because Boosted had all this growth trajectory from not only the niche, not only the skater community, but also just all this money. And they were able to have a cool office in San Francisco and cool, cool, cool. They could 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.

• 1:31:45Speaker 03

  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 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.

• 1:32:27Speaker 03

  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.

• 1:32:54David Imel?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:54Speaker 03

  And they didn't, and they've crashed just as hard as they rose. And, you know, we can all look back and say, yeah, we told you it would have happened. We knew this was gonna 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.

• 1:33:14David Imel?

  Yeah. No, I mean, like, the companies that do maintain that trajectory. Are called unicorns for a reason, right?

• 1:33:20Andrew Manganelli?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:20David Imel?

  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 the, their only problem is that they can't acquire enough customers. Boosters, Boosted's problem was its margins were just not ever going to really be there. And then the other thing was like, again, how do you keep acquiring customers? Because you sell 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.

• 1:33:55Andrew Manganelli?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:56David Imel?

  And that's just, it's, it's sad.

• 1:33:58Andrew Manganelli?

  It's hard. I, 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.

• 1:34:32David Imel?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:32Andrew Manganelli?

  It's interesting to now know what actually happened because like you said, it's super easy to blame.

• 1:34:36David Imel?

  Allegedly.

• 1:34:37Andrew Manganelli?

  Allegedly happened. I mean, we still know more behind the scenes than like, just assuming pandemic killed them.

• 1:34:43David Imel?

  Right, right.

• 1:34:44Andrew Manganelli?

  But.

• 1:34:45David Imel?

  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 this story, but wah wah wah, they didn't reply to my request for comments. So maybe they'll hear the story and reach out for a. Follow up, I'd love to chat with you. Please email me.

• 1:35:30David Imel?

  Anyways, y'all, thanks a million percent to everyone that contributed to the story. Steven Reinhardt 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 Sandeep Desor 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.

• 1:36:12David Imel?

  Oh, and also, thanks to Casey Neistat for talking to me literally the day I messaged him to get a big chunk of the 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, tweet at us at @WVFRM on Twitter, or at myself, at Dervid Amell, at Adam, at AdamLucas17, if you've got any ideas for more stories like this that you'd like to hear.

• 1:36:36Andrew Manganelli?

  Today's episode was written and researched by David Amell and Adam Malina. It was produced by Adam Malina. We are partnered with Studio 71 and our intro/after music was created by Cameron Barlow.

• 1:36:49Speaker 01

  Sam's Club is the club for every holiday club. Guess who's joining the club this season? Walmart Plus. Yep, Sam's Club Plus membership now comes with Walmart Plus at no extra cost. Two memberships, one great price. Just $120 a year can save you time and over $700. Want to get in on the membership duo of the century? Visit sam'sclub.com. Come join us. Sam's Club.

• 1:37:20Speaker 06

  When you shop pickup at Kroger, you can expect the savings you love and fresh groceries selected just for you. Our associates are committed to getting every detail right, carefully handpicking your items, checking for quality and freshness, and packing your order with care. Because bringing you fresh, quality groceries is what we do best. And right now, enjoy $20 off your first online order of $75 or more. Restrictions apply. See site for details. Kroger. Fresh for everyone.