From the Archives: Rise and Fall of Boosted Board

27:25And I was on a Reddit forum a couple of days ago from when the company closed. And this person shared the person whose board was smoking, like shared a memory. He's like, I've still got like a signed like napkin with your signature on it for when you come came to help me out, which is like kind of how people act around like Elon Musk. Like he was sort of this Elon Musk of boosted. Yeah. 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 going to 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 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 doesn't mean they're really big it could just be the communities you hang out around are similar to you so you see things but at this point even though Boosted is not like maybe a major brand that everyone's like that's a Boosted board people can still recognize them because they've got these like popular they've got these orange wheels and they've got these decks.

28:43And like when people are writing a Boosted board, almost everyone knows what it is. After the break, Boosted hits its stride. Stick with us. We'll be right back.

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30:51So if you guys were to guess, what was the big break moment for Boosted's brand? No idea. Absolutely. Does it rhyme with Lacey Bryce that? as someone who's seen a lot of products arrive in the public eye thanks to an obsession by a public figure particularly YouTubers with a strong following I'm very confident that Casey Neistat has something to do with Boosted 100 % the reason I know about Boosted Board I decided to talk to all these people that I had chatted with about what the inflection point was where Boosted went from nobody knowing it to everybody knowing it Casey Neistat. Casey Neistat drove a lot of sales.

31:36My name is Casey Neistat and I'm a I guess I'm a YouTuber. So naturally we had to get in touch with Casey. So Casey Neistat had started this daily vlog project around New York City. Nothing specific. He was just doing fun stuff around New York and kind of showing what it was like to live here. I started my daily vlog in I'm going to screw this timeline up but you can probably find it on YouTube if you wanted to correct. I I started my daily vlog March 25th, I think 2015. I checked. He's right. Like, if you just, he was one of the first vloggers, at least the first vloggers to like do it in this type.

32:09And so like everyone started to know who he was. Even in those early vlogs, he would leave his apartment and people would go, Hi, KZ. KZ. What's up guys? Just, it was crazy around New York in particular. It's hard to overstate how much of an impact his vlogs had on YouTube. Like the, like lots of parts of YouTube. You mentioned vlogs, but it's like the daily aspect, the drone cinematography aspect the like community building location specific aspect of his videos like so much of it was the perfect storm and so I can't imagine being Casey walking outside and like zipping around the city on a boosted board how many people would be like that's the guy from the videos because it's such a recognizable repeatable image so I imagine that was 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.

33:01Just like so many different things. You know, I only now in retrospect, you know, like I stopped my daily vlog two years ago or whatever, and only now do I realize like what it means to effectively have a daily show that was going out to a million plus people seven days a week when the central character was not even me. The central character was New York City. Which was, I think, a really interesting way to put it. And he's kind of just like this narrator showing what the city could be and the people and the situations in his films, really the meat of the vlogs. And he's trying all these different transportation mediums, right?

33:33He'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 wrote everywhere. I remember that. Put those L brackets on the side so he could hop up on the curb. I think that was the first ever Casey vlog I ever watched and then watched every single day.

34:10In his vlog where he opens the boosted board, it's like a Q &A. He's like, I used to use this janky hoverboard thing, but now I have this. And he's just 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.

34:50So an electric bike's amazing in New York City until you have to go into an office building. And then no matter how many locks you put on that bike, it's going to be stolen when you come out. And then on top of the fact I always have 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.

35:24I could carry it on a subway. So it was that boosted board became my key to New York City, even though I had lived there for 15 years at the time. I mean, New York City, if you think about it, it wasn't originally built for cars, right? It's this old city that really was like a walking city. and then they kind of just stuffed streets and cars into it. And that's the reason like the streets are so narrow and like it's just very hard. You have to navigate around everything and it's hard to get around people. It's not that big. So that is kind of the perfect use case for a last mile vehicle, right?

35:57It's like, it's hard to use other mediums. So you might as well use this like I'm walking, but very fast. And less effort. One of Casey's most viral videos ever is all about bike lanes and how there are constantly obstructions. And that's pre-vlogged. Yeah. There's always stuff parked in the bike lanes. And if you want to zip around New York City in any sort of versatile way, you've got to be in the streets, in the bike lanes, on the sidewalk. This needed a solution. Yeah. Yeah. And the Boosted Board could go 24 miles per hour. Yep. You could be in the street. Exactly. So you could ride in the streets and you're probably going to be faster than most cars, right?

36:30At this point, you're basically a motorcycle that's weaving between cars, but slimmer and, you know, probably more safe. And you can walk it up to your apartment. Exactly. It is like the perfect thing. Like bikes don't really work in this case. Scooters are annoying. This is basically his solution. So Boosted gets a ton of attention and traction just from his vlogs. And they didn't expect this to happen at all. I don't think they even expected him to open it up. I think that one of the challenges for the marketing team was sort of matching the sales that he was bringing in. That's Stefan again for those wondering.

37:02But 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. Yeah. I mean, you guys did the studio tour, right? You guys did the studio tour. So like, how was that? That's the thing about Casey is he's a guy who just wants the thing to work. So if he has a camera and a lens, he's not gonna 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.

37:36and 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 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 you just grabbed a different one right one breaks he just grabs another one he always had them for everything and the funny thing is like like i said earlier this is like one of the first electric skateboards in the category but yet it became it was already one of the like best ones not only was it one of the fastest, it had the best deck, had the best wheels, and it just became kind of the electric skateboard that you'd get.

38:39Most people attribute the acceleration curve and the brakes in particular as being the most important thing on those boards. Casey said like the brakes in New York City, like you need to be able to go 20 miles per hour and when you brake, not just get thrown off. If you can't accelerate your way out of trouble, you're going head to head with a taxi cab, the taxi's slowing down. If you don't have the power to pull in front of that taxi driver, you're in a very compromised position so acceleration was vital and then the other thing was braking 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 um it's yielding a kind of confidence in its users that said, you know what, this I can use this to get around.

39:32This isn't just a fun thing to ride around in a parking lot when no one's here, right? Like, and a lot of other electric skateboards, the brake system was just like, 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, which Mike says no I think that's an awesome problem to have it's another Shark Tank thing like so why do you need the money?

40:02well we can't make enough perfect perfect answer just need to scale up so Mike told me the story that every single time Casey would release a vlog so Casey would post a video they'd be in their little like customer service loft basically yell out down the stairs get ready to ship they'd like call down to the rest of the team and they'd be like alright boys let's get ready that is so funny you could see the direct correlation between you know he's ripping through new york and a whole bunch of boards flying out the door it was it was insane i'll just drop this and 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 right 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 gorilla pod or some sort of tripod and i think of a boosted board right yeah and that was perfect gorilla pods even yeah drones yeah a drone is a good one but like gorilla pods even yeah gorilla popular thing they blew up because of him too for sure yeah because vlogging blew up because of him it's just insane they couldn't pay for a better ad than that yeah they could not pay for a better yeah no and i asked him i was like did you did you ever set up any sort of sponsorship thing?

41:23He's like, no. Yeah, that's true. If there was an affiliate program with Boosted, Casey would be the order of magnitude highest by a lot. You've inadvertently sold a bunch of Teslas. Oh, yeah, but they added a referral program. But there's lots of other products that I know have seen an impact from videos that I don't get a cut of. But I'm just curious. Wow. If they had a referral program, Casey would be hundreds of thousands, probably. So obviously things are going pretty well. I mean, they released the V2, the Stealth, the Mini. They started expanding their product line because that's what you do.

41:56They took seed money from investors. They needed to grow. They needed to expand. And you even did a video with Casey on the Mini. Yep. What was that like? Oh, it was fun. I mean, I was never a skater. So this was me coming at the tech angle from something I'm unfamiliar with, as I do often. Like, I love my handhelds and my iPads and TVs and stuff. But, like, I was never a car guy until the electric cars. and I was never a 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.

42:28So I think that was a win for them too. Yeah, yeah. What was like, did you feel like he was just like so much more experienced at the product that you had to like? I mean, there's definitely a learning curve with skating in general about like getting your balance and starting to get comfortable carving a little bit and like how you steer and maneuver the thing. Yeah. And the benefit of the Mini was obviously that it was smaller, but it was also more nimble that I had like that back stand so you could get around tighter corners and stuff. So I was just happy that there was like a lighter weight version I could hold with my arm extended and not drag on the ground.

42:59But he was so obsessed over like the dynamics of like this smaller non-long board where now you got like your feet closer together and you can carve a little tighter and your turning radius is better because you can lift the front wheels off the ground, all that stuff. Yeah. I wouldn't have appreciated that if he didn't tell me. so that was all in one place which is really good. I remember at the event that I met Stefan at, the group ride, it was right after the Mini and the Stealth had launched and the thing that blew my mind was that he was doing like ollies and kickflips on the Mini. Stupid.

43:29It's how hard that is on something that heavy. But either way, the fact that you could was just crazy. You probably shouldn't because there's a battery in it but it was still crazy. So things seem good but as you remember the company doesn't exist anymore so back to our original question yeah 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 has been covering this since the very beginning i'm sean okay and i'm a senior reporter at the verge and uh what is your main beat over there uh i cover transportation Everything that moves pretty much EV startups Tesla He's covered all that stuff and he's covered boosted literally since they were first founded So he knows a thing or two about this company.

44:20So things seem to be going great on the outside They're going great with customer relations and the culture, but obviously startups aren't easy Whatever money was coming in was going right back out the door and all that money was being sort of reinvested and spent as they got it in Right. Like it seems like everything can go great, but you need to make the product better. You need to invest any earnings. You get back into the company. You've got to grow the company as fast as possible. And overall, if you take seed investor money, you have to start seeing a return as quickly as possible. Right.

44:52And this is even harder with hardware. 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. 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, make it better, try to reach more customers. Your only overhead is maybe your office and you've got your employees. That's kind of it. But even companies like Amazon had trouble doing this, right? They weren't selling a product at first. They were just a logistics company, but they lost money for so long that investors almost pulled out multiple, multiple times and Bezos had to be like, don't worry, we're going to be profitable eventually.

45:35We're going to be profitable eventually. There's not a lot of hardware companies in Silicon Valley that get seed investor funding because it's just hard to grow that. It's a lot harder to grow that. And specifically, Boosted's margins were like incredibly low, especially at the beginning, right? Because they were already selling this product for like 1200 bucks, but that was like, they weren't making a lot of money on it. If anything, they were like barely scraping by from the beginning. So it was going to take them a lot longer to become profitable. They had to get to a point in the product where it cost a lot less to make the product than it cost to sell.

46:08And they have the problem of their product is so good, people are probably not replacing them that often, right? Like they have to keep finding more audience. So Boosted raised more money to reinvest into the product because they needed to start seeing, you know, they had to make it better. They had to hire more engineers. They had to keep getting the catered lunches, you know, to like actually get people to come work at their company. So they ended up, once everything was said and done, raising about$75 million after all of the investment rounds. So they've got all this money. It's just that Sanjay and the others that founded the company weren't exactly used to growing companies, right?

46:48They're engineers. In 2017, you stepped down as the company CEO and were curious as to why you did that. Yeah. So we had a bit of a disagreement internally at the time about which direction to go in as a company. And I won't get into too much detail about that. But basically, we decided, both as a founding team and with the board with the major investors, 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.

47:26So 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, pretty much the exact same track, but he went the business route instead of the engineering route. Yeah, I feel like I just saw an interview about this where I think it was probably Elon, but talking about like growing a company kind of has to come from inside the company. And when you take someone from some high end program, some hotshot maybe, and he just parachutes in from the top, he doesn't necessarily he or she doesn't understand why the company grows or how it specifically works and should grow.

48:13and 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 yeah knows how it would best continue to improve but you know Sean told me that like it wasn't necessarily the worst thing you know when the new CEO came in uh Jeff Rusica 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 Rusico when he took over because that was the way that they could really grow the business.

48:56That's ultimately always the problem is that the investors just want to see a return as fast as possible. Now, obviously you've got this company that's got a super laid back culture because they hired a bunch of skaters, right? Yeah. skaters, business, they don't match very well, right? I see, I see. And everyone was just really chill. They had come from the Santa Cruz area or the San Francisco area, and they were just like, it doesn't match when you bring a business guy in that wants to grow something. So there's already a little bit of tension. Jeff wants to figure out how to scale a company, and one of the solutions he has is to expand their proprietary motor system into other form factors.

49:37There was a point in time over the last couple years where it seemed like a lot of options were on the table for them, whether that was going to be the scooter that they eventually made in the Rev or something simpler and more designed for sort of micromobility 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, you know, they definitely were evaluating a lot of different options. Usually you start with your core products and then you realize like, okay, if we want to sell more stuff, if we want to expand our company, we have to hit these audiences that are not being served right now.

50:13So the two main product categories that they were kind of toying with was an electric bike and an electric scooter. They ultimately landed on the scooter because a bike is great and people love biking, but they still wanted to kind of fit that portability aspect that the electric skateboard had brought. Like an electric skateboard you could just bring inside with you and they sort of wanted to maintain that. also the whole like electric scooter craze was the thing in silicon valley at that point in like 2017 2018 which personally i think is a terrible idea i don't think that you should just like if something is oversaturated you should just like inject yourself into the market at the same time clubhouse yeah yeah exactly that 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 in the city out of nowhere i remember seeing these scooters like in the middle of the road because people just pick them up and throw them in the middle of the road and there was instagram accounts that would pop up like bird graveyard it's just people destroying birds like as like a fun thing i don't know people hated them in san francisco but yeah anyways they ended up landing on the personal scooter and most of the scooter startups were convenience-based last mile stuff, right?

51:35So you'd rent from a charger outside some business, you'd ride it to a different place that you were going, you'd park it, and then you'd walk the rest of the way to where you're going. But Boosted wanted to offer something that you could actually own as opposed to something that you just rent because they wanted to kind of stick to their company ethos of really powerful, really fast. And you can't really do that when you want something to be like just a little last mile thing. And also, because they grew up in San Francisco, that's a very hilly city, and they wanted something that you could like fly up the streets with, right?

52:12At the time, Xiaomi kind of owned the market of personal electric scooters. They still kind of do. They've done a really good job scaling that. I think they offer like a Mi Scooter Pro now that is supposed to be able to climb the streets of San Francisco. But at the time, I remember I took the Caltrain to San Francisco from San Jose like every day and the amount of people that would get off the Caltrain with the Xiaomi scooters was like I don't think anyone in the 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 i wasn't super hyped on the scooter to be honest um as a as a direction you know for the business um actually you know i stuck my hand in the air uh at some of those product meetings and said hey you know what a bike is to go uh if we're going to do another product um that would be that would be rad um but you know like any any good team um there was differing opinions you know before we went down that road everyone had a different uh opinion on it but when uh when that final decision was made everyone got behind it you know as as best they could usually that's the kiss of death yeah usually when a startup has a series of founders that are like pretty close to its core and its mission and its purpose and then that company starts to expand and branch out and move on to other things and a founder leaves, usually that's a pretty big pivoting point for that company where other people start to get the picture like, oh, it's not going to be like it was before.

54:03I might want to leave too. There's plenty of examples of that. Yeah. Casey actually said the same thing. Yeah. When Sanjay left, whenever a founder leaves their startup, that vision that they brought to it goes away with them. And I think about 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.

54:45and in my business experience it's always like first you develop a mission statement second you write it on the wall and then that becomes religion like everything you do has to be to promote that mission statement and when I look at boosted board under Sanjay's guidance I see that I see that and when I look at it um in the time after he left I saw something about you know that romance faded and in its place came like how do we expand this company how do we scale this company how do we meet these insane valuations that we raised money at and that's never a great recipe for for success and that's a big reason why a lot of the employees started leaving they started finding a lot of different jobs around silicon valley and if you go on reddit there's like all these posts on the boosted subreddit of like bring back sanjay hashtag bring back sanjay like you know people people started like thinking ahead like did he get outed like it just started But because the community was so powerful, right?

55:42Like they were so invested in what was happening at the company. It wasn't really like a corporation. It was like it was like their friends. So it just felt weird to have Sanjay like leave the company when he built this thing. I kind of wonder if that guy that was calling every week was still calling every week. Just like so like what's going on guys? What's good with the skateboards? Yeah. Just like when's the next product coming out? Are you still making a skateboard? Yeah. Man. So there was also this worry that the company had 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.

56:15It was like$2 ,000, right? And you could say the skateboard was expensive at$1 ,200, but then you bring in$2 ,000. It's a scooter, so it's not as cool. It's really big. It's heavy. It's like 40 pounds. And it was also entering in a market that already had competitors. I feel like when Boosted showed up with an electric longboard, I don't really know if anyone knew how much that should cost. All they knew is it solved an issue and there wasn't really any other version, so they got to Boosted. $1 ,200, okay. When the scooter came around, I remember immediately when I'm doing my research, I'm like, all right, I got to compare it to these six or seven other scooters that are out there.

56:52And I'm like, wow, this is a very different approach. It's much heavier and much bigger and bulkier, and maybe that's a different demographic or maybe that's just a different way of doing the same thing, solving the same problem so yeah they definitely got that comparison happening yeah angle and again like the xiaomis had already flooded the market they were only like 400 bucks like it was a big difference like yeah 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.

57:30But it just, it just wasn't the same as riding a skateboard. It's a totally different experience. After the break, an attempted pivot? Stick with us.

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58:53You fix the problem. So why wait to hire the people your company desperately needs? Use Indeed's sponsored jobs to hire top talent fast. And even better, you only pay for results. There's no need to wait. Speed up your hiring with a$75 sponsored job credit at indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Do you guys remember your first time seeing the Rev? 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.

59:32We need to go outside. And it was immediately very fun and very fast it again felt similar to like the boosted whereas like this felt like it was more a method of transportation less a toy less just like something you would grab as a hobby it's like well 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 two grand for something like that.

1:00:06It's such a specific demographic because you need to be living in a place that's hilly specifically. I did the briefing for the Boosted Rev in San Francisco and they specifically brought me, like Jeff, he brought me to one of the biggest hills in San Francisco because he was like right up that hill. That was like the briefing right? Nice. Yeah. I also remember we got one and then it was recalled and then we got another one to test and then they took that one back too. Right. Yeah, they never told us. I mean, I guess just it was a review unit, but they let us keep all the past boosted boards. Right, all the boosted boards are still around the studio.

1:00:49I just remember they said, hey, there's a problem with one of them. We're gonna 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. 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 top half would fold.

1:01:19Oh, I vaguely remember that. And if you were holding the board, if you were carrying the board without having folded it, sometimes it would close on its own and it broke someone's finger at The Verge. Oh, wow. And they wrote this whole article, like the boosted rev broke my finger. Not mine, my colleague Andy's. Yikes. Which is not great PR. Not at all, no. Of course not. They didn't want a bunch of reviewers with broken hands. Yeah, I'm sure the number one rule in marketing is don't hurt the reviewer when you give it to them because that's an easy headline. So like if the phone explodes or something, they should take it back.

1:01:52Probably not. Got it. Yeah, right. So I asked like everybody, I was like, why do you think the rev was the problem when the company failed? Because I was trying to figure out, why did the company just go under? And every single person was like, I don't think it was the biggest problem. But the culture around Boosted is a skater culture. And as Casey said to me. Scooters are like rollerblades. No matter how popular they get, they'll never really break through. Because there's no way to look cool on a fucking scooter. I don't care how good you are at rollerblading why did rollerblading die because you look like when I was a kid I went to Woodward Skate Camp for rollerblading I was like a really good rollerblader the whole sport died out because it doesn't matter how good you look you don't look cool on rollerblades and you don't look cool on scooter fair I think I had a line kind of like that in the review I think we specifically had shots in the review that almost just like felt lame game yeah if that makes sense yeah listen i get the scooter i get the scooter completely like it is much easier to ride a scooter than a skateboard like when we had it here i brought my wife out on the back and within one minute she was full speed on the boosted red just zipping around out here but you're also like at this point 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 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 children yeah like yeah like razor scooters exactly 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 but it just is this works great for an audio medium, by the way.

1:03:52Everyone knows what we're doing. I think there's a meme. I think it's a TikTok meme of things that are humiliating for no reason. Some of them is just like, I don't know, checking out this one weird thing at groceries or just having to stand up in front of a group of people, understandably humiliating things, and then there's riding a scooter. That's just humiliating for no reason. As someone that owns a scooter for my last mile ride to my apartment, I'm feeling really hurt about this whole conversation. As you should. I think you just like you think of a scooter, you think of like a guy in a business suit for some reason.

1:04:30If you're an adult riding a scooter, you feel like you're you're lame and you're like in a business suit. If I'm being honest, as someone who has skated and snowboarded for the majority of my life, I would feel a thousand times safer on a boosted rev in New York City than I would on a boosted board. just because of how intense the city is. I don't think Casey was too concerned about the safety. Casey was like a pro at doing it. And I think a very big portion of that comes from him being a skater. But I think an even bigger portion of that comes from him being someone who knows the city so well and knows how to react in those circumstances.

1:05:06I think that's why Sam Shepard can do it as well. I feel like I would die if I wrote a post-aborted answer. There's a clip at the end of Kara Swisher's interviewing Elon Musk. Let me see if I can find a clip real quick. Make a scooter. Make a scooter and I'll go for it. Actually, they are electric. What am I talking about? They're electric. I don't know. There was like some people in the studio wanted to make a scooter, but I was like, ah. I love the scooter. No, get on the scooter. It's like lack of dignity. No. It doesn't lack dignity. Yes, they do. They don't lack dignity. What are you talking about?

1:05:33Driving one of those things? Yes, I do it all the time. I look fantastic. No, you do not. You are underlaboring under delusion. You lack dignity. I'm like that clip. I was dying. Okay, by the way, the rest of that interview is great, so I will link it in the show notes. Casey became like an icon on that Boosted board of New York City, right? Like even in the new Tom and Jerry movie, there's that clip of Tom the cat because it's a Tomcat. I just learned about that yesterday. I know. I know. But he's writing a Boosted board throughout New York City, and it's weird. It's like they have a bunch of like product placement for Boosted in the movie.

1:06:10Yeah, that was. So I think they must have started the movie like a long time before they went out of business. I don't know. Anyway, I don't think that Casey would have become an icon on a scooter. That's all I have to say about that. Casey was squarely in the middle of the target demographic for the board, and he was squarely out of the target demographic for the scooter. Yeah, exactly. Because there's no way to look cool on a fucking scooter. There's Casey again. Like he was cool. Anyway, okay. we got you back to why the company fell okay yeah what happened so they're leveraging a lot on the scooter so uh investors are looking for a return pretty soon because at this point it had been a while you know and they had done like all these products they did the mainline product they did the v2 the v3 the mini the stealth and now they were trying to launch the rev uh and the rev was really supposed to be a part of that like return right when jeff came in he was like we We got to make the scooter.

1:07:09It's going to be the real moneymaker for us. And like 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 U.S. 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. Tariffs are high. They are the upper end. Increasing tariffs on many imports. 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 2025 up to a 25 % tariff.

1:07:44Right. So it was just it was not great. And you're either going to do one of two things. You're going to pass those costs 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?

1:08:18They barely had any margins. At this point, they're basically paying people to buy their skateboards because it's costing them more to sell them than they're actually making on them, which is terrible because now you're just hemorrhaging money in a million ways. You have employees, you have infrastructure, you have engineers. Not great. And it's not something that you could, it's not like a phone where you can sell software. You know, you can do a plan over time, a subscription service. No way to make more money. Keep in mind, this is all before the pandemic. So not a great situation. So it obviously starts to get around that the company is having some major issues at this point.

1:08:59certain 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 interesting 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 when the lunches go away oh wow yeah yeah so things aren't looking great so the boosted rev lands uh and it's kind of a mixed response i mean it's like fast and powerful and well designed but it's two thousand dollars it's very expensive uh and it's a scooter there's no way to look cool on a fucking scooter so the employees are not feeling great uh 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.

1:09:57I think a lot of people saw the writing on the wall. So, you know, you would see a lot of your co-workers updating their LinkedIn's, trying to make connections with people that were going to other companies. So I think it was pretty clear what was happening. It was just sort of unspoken. taking lunch breaks to go interview at other companies like openly it feels it feels really weird um and they just didn't know if they'd have jobs when they got back it was pretty yikes so things are getting dense and a little complicated bear with me here this is this is the real reason that boosted kind of dropped off the face of the earth okay so at this point you've got the boosted rev scooters on ships waiting to come to the u.s to be sold but the investors aren't giving Boosted any more money.

1:10:49So Boosted is just kind of like, please, we need to stay afloat. We need to be able to keep paying our employees. Those scooters are on ships. They're ready to come to the US, but they won't give them any more money. They've completely closed the pocketbooks. So they have this last ditch effort and they go to this company called Structural Capital, which is something called a venture debt fund. Yeah, it's big late stage capitalism and vibes and uh 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 uh you're not coming from a strong place but they didn't really care because like again they had like all of these scooters like thousands of scooters on these ships they were just waiting to come to the us and they were like okay it doesn't matter how much the margin of like what we're borrowing is what we need to return them we will sell these like scooters we had already taken pre-orders We'll be able to pay them back.

1:11:43We 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 OK that you're losing money for a little bit because their long term goal is to grow you. But they really need the money. So they end up taking the loan from these guys. So at this point, everyone, even the employees like Mike, who worked in customer relations, are going out to lunch with their friends in Silicon Valley trying to get acquired.

1:12:18As a matter of fact, Cody and I, who I work with, we just got together and said, you know what, let's just see what we can do here. Just through our own networks, it's just like, oh, you know, well, I met these guys and they'll, you know, say, oh, we'll go and talk to them and they might be really interested in it. So around December in 2019, Boosted lightly started talking to Lime, the scooter company. And so they were considering this deal where they would wind up with$30 million worth of stock in Lime in exchange for some employees and some IP around the scooter. It's not exactly clear if it was around the Rev or if it was the sort of more approachable, affordable scooter that they were also working on.

1:13:05okay so just a scooter tech not the scooter tech and not necessarily skateboarder or bike or anything else because lime at the time was making scooters and lime scooters are pretty weak you know their moves are weak they couldn't get up the hills that boosted was getting up so they're like okay maybe we can like hire some of your engineers and also get some of your tech and then we'll give you 30 million dollars in lime stock uh but lime wanted to know what they were in for with a failing company like boosted so they started coming into the boosted office and interviewing employees on site to kind of like see if they really want to go through with this deal that doesn't sound normal exactly that sounds kind of predatory tbh yeah okay yeah uh i think you're on to something uh so they're interviewing employees on site like not all of the employees but just the ones they're interested in which the other employees are like what is going on like imagine the f it basically feels like the fbi is like swarming your headquarters and just interviewing people and you don't know what's happening it's because lime knows they have all the leverage yeah like boosted needs a deal yeah and lime has everything that boosted needs and they can take advantage of all that leverage yeah but at the same time if you have all the leverage if you're a company that has all 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.

1:14:29Well, Lime wants some extras from Boosted, like the tech from the scooters and things like that. But as far as who needs who in this deal, Boosted needs Lime a lot more than Lime needs Boosted. And remember, Lime wasn't trying to 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 confusing. Yeah, part of this deal, they get employees, which sounds very strange, like you're selling people. Acquire. 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.

1:15:05Like Boosted's so short on money, they don't know if they're going to have a job after Christmas. So they're starting to get really desperate. So the original investors in Boosted that had given them money at the very beginning, the venture capital firms, specifically this company called Cosla Ventures. While they had gotten a good amount of starting funding from Kozla 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.

1:15:45At this point, Structural starts pretty much controlling Boosted's wallet. Like every payment that came out of Boosted, every decision was not really being made by the CEO. It was being made by this venture capital firm, which sucks. Like this sounds terrible. They couldn't make any deals or purchases or transactions without explicit approval. Pretty bad. But then out of nowhere, Yamaha shows up. and Yamaha is a little bit interested and boosted as a company. No one really knows what that would look like. Maybe they want to start selling electric skateboards under the Yamaha brand because Yamaha sells a lot of stuff.

1:16:23The more I think about it, Yamaha sounds perfect because they sell the most random assortment of things from motorcycles to keyboards, like musical instruments. physical instruments. It's just a very, I still don't know everything Yamaha sells. It's weird. They make my speakers. Yeah. It's kind of perfect because they sell motorized stuff and they sell electronic stuff. Yeah. Boosted's like the weird merger of that. So they're a little bit interested in Boosted. No one really knows what that looked 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.

1:17:02So Yamaha obviously seemed like the better option here. but Kossla, who's one of the biggest initial investors in Boosted, started to see potential once Yamaha got interested. So at this point, 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 survive as a company and stay open. So we're going to give you a little bit more money because there is this potential Yamaha deal, right? So they gave Boosted a little more money just to stay afloat and this is where things start getting really interesting 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 costla ventures so the lawsuit which was first reported by the information basically alleges this allegedly because boosted was sort of looking into both deals like it had not signed anything concrete with either Yamaha or with Lime it was it was trying for both because at any minute one of them could just fall through right as the deal with Yamaha started to fall apart and they walked away then some other people went to Lime and it was very unclear on the employee side of things like was this part of like a deal that was being struck or were people just sort of like leaving because they were being poached and that's sort of at the core of that lawsuit you know lime says there was nothing improper being done there was no uh you know the two sides lime and boosted had not agreed to like not hire if there are each other's employees while they were working out this deal whereas kozal ventures says you know lime knew it had a chance to like kill the yamaha deal by like ripping out these like core people and then out of nowhere where 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?

1:18:59So that seems extremely sketchy. And not only was he a VP of engineering, but he was also helping facilitate the interviews between the Boosted employees and Lime. So at this point, it really seemed like Lime is just like trying to steal employees, and they had no interest in actually being part of this deal at all. And so he leaves and then Kostler 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 Lyme. So now Boosted's in this terrible position where they didn't sign anything and Lyme had taken their employees without striking a deal and Yamaha pulls out.

1:19:42So Lyme 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, Kostler is alleging that Lime never even wanted to go through with the deal. They were just intentionally trying to get Yamaha, the Yamaha deal to fall through by hiring away the employees. Again, this is just alleged in the court case. But basically, at this point, Boosted's got no more money. They're dead. They own a ton of debt to all these companies, including that 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.

1:20:25All of us see that. That's all we know about all of this, right? We don't know about any of this crazy internal stuff that's happening. They owe a ton of money to Structural Capital. That company takes all of the company's IP as collateral for the loans. So like everything. Yeah. Yeah. So now that company is a real shark. Oh, yeah. That company probably signed some of the worst contracts on planet Earth. That's crazy. It's like a last ditch. Wow. Kind of situation. But now Boosted is 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.

1:21:03Those parties agreed to structural capital being able to run the foreclosure sale. and then like certain percentages were assigned to each of the parties as far as like what was happening you know what they got in return for the sale you know structural would get like 66 percent Kozla would get whatever and um you know the original investors and sort of uh boosted whoever was left over would get x percent as well so they they set up this sale that Kozla Ventures is trying to argue in the firm that like there was some trickery involved so this sale was supposed to happen on March 17th. Do you guys have any guesses on what happened on March 16th?

1:21:41Rudy Gobert touches a bunch of microphones and tests positive for COVID and the NBA shuts down? Basically. Was it the NBA one? I'm guessing that's like right around New York City lockdown. San Francisco went into lockdown. Oh, San Francisco. The day before the sale. Wow. Wow. Yeah. So March 17th was supposed to be the sale where they 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 uh structural capital that they could run the sale and then the day before san francisco goes into lockdown okay yeah so now everyone's a lot everything's in lockdown costla doesn't attend the sale in person because they're like can we even attend a sale in person like it's it's locked down like who goes to these things and then they tried to argue that uh lime and structural didn't provide like conference call details for like the phone in part of the auction it only lasted 20 minutes and they sold all the ip to lime for really cheap much less than the 30 million dollars that lime was originally going to pay them wow like really really really cheap so okay let's do a quick recap on what happened here the united states engages in a trade war with China, which made things shipping out of China have a really big tariff on them, like 25 % huge.

1:23:07And Boosted had so much inventory coming out of China, they had already paid about$5 million to the government. But they applied for an exemption to those tariffs, and they did get approved. The problem here, though, is, well, the US government isn't exactly quick to give people their money back. So Boosted is temporarily$5 million down and in some pretty hot water at this point. So in the original Boosted board blog post announcing they were pretty much shutting down, 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.

1:23:45Wow. 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. You can own the refund as part of the company, basically. A debt to the company. A debt to the company. So this is where things get really crazy. basically wait this is where things are really crazy I know so they sold the IP to Lime for super cheap and then Structural Capital ended up selling that 5 million dollar refund for 400 thousand dollars but guess who they sold it to Structural Capital to themselves 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 so then that 400 ,000 I'm guessing as they're saying is part of everybody's no they just like siphoned it off from the rest of the deal so they sold the assets of the company to start paying off all the different people that owned it right but then they so am I getting this right yeah so they sold it and that 400 ,000 would be distributed to all of the investors in whatever way that they wanted.

1:25:20But then their LLC, which is structural capital, ends up getting the$5 million. So not only do they get the$5 million, they get their portion of the$400 ,000 too. These are some sharks, man. Yeah. Wow. Yeah. How do you, in good conscience, work at a... You don't. I'm sorry. A company like that, that you're literally just swimming around looking for almost dead fish. I mean... And when you find one, you slowly kill it. Do you think sharks have... In the most methodical way. Do you think sharks give a damn about the fish they're eating? That's why the nickname... I guess, yeah, that is true. You just kind of do it to survive and then make their money.

1:25:58Wow. Yeah. So I should remind everyone this is an ongoing lawsuit. Actually, two lawsuits. There's one against Lime from Kossla and one against Structural from Kossla. But yeah, if I could sum it all up... Yeah, let's get a TLDR version of this chaos. TLDL. Can I attempt one? Yeah, go for it. All right, the rise and fall of Boosted. Yeah. So Boosted has like a perfect Shark Tank story in the beginning. They're a crowdfunded project with a core of skaters and a really obvious solution to a really clearly defined problem. They make a product, they engineer it, because they're engineers from Stanford, and they do pretty much everything they could possibly do right, minus the one debatable thing, which is taking a ton of money from investors.

1:26:47I have my own feelings about taking money from investors, but this is the way they need to build the company. They build it, they start it, they have a core product of a longboard with an electric motor and a battery, and they're killing it, and they get picked up by a handful of mildly important people like Casey Neistat who blow up the company and the product, and it becomes a household name, at least in this niche. Now, it gets to this peak and they realize that they need to continue growing to please these investors and making more money. And at that same time, a couple small dings like extra tariffs and small 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.

1:27:38leaves and slowly yeah this is where things start to get wild which is the trajectory of the company is now down Casey moved to LA like you don't have this anymore and this is actually we talked to him about this and he was like I can't I don't use this here it's not the type of city that is made for this type of thing so they have secured their stronghold on this niche and And they do not have a way to continue to sell products to that niche because the products are so damn good that they need to start selling to other people. And this is where they start to lose the culture and the core. And they start to branch out into other things, which is a good business move to appease the investors.

1:28:23But turned out to be the kiss of death as things started to spiral financially. and other companies, we'll call them sharks, vultures, whatever you want, started to see what was going on and take advantage of it in their own ways until the final kiss of death came in the form of a venture capital firm that basically said, let's reinvest, let's completely end this company and take what we can from it. And then that was the end of Boosted. So I think this is a really depressingly classic Silicon Valley story. you've got a bunch of smart people at a good school they make a cool side project and there's just so many investors in silicon valley that just want to pump and dump right they just want like put money in grow it real quick and get it out and like they're all looking for these unicorns that can make them a crap load of money in the shortest amount of time but like like you said you said you have your own thoughts about investing and like taking money from investors that it seems like this was their issue now uh if you look at a company like one wheel they're in santa cruz they're nearby uh san francisco they haven't really taken a lot of investor capital and they're still going right they're way smaller obviously they never got to the scale of boosted because boosted had all this you know growth trajectory from not only the niche not only the skater community but also just all this money and they were able to have a cool office in san francisco and cool cool well, cool, they can get all this talent, but all the benefit that you get from that is equal or greater in negatives at the end of the day.

1:29:59Fully 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.

1:30:36And it really reminds me of like starting a company with a really good idea. If you get a huge influx of capital investing, which I guess happens a lot in certain parts the country but when you get that huge shoot up at the beginning it almost feels inevitable that you will never maintain that trajectory you will either flatline and die or get acquired and boosted hindsight 2020 probably should have been looking to get acquired somewhere in the middle of the boosted board exploding yeah and they didn't and they've crashed just as hard as they rose and yeah you know we can all look back and say yeah we told you it would have happened we knew this was going to happen to you, but we didn't know.

1:31:18Nobody really knew and it kind of fell apart in an ugly way. But that's the way I think about it is if you can do things organically and slowly, I would take that over quickly every single time. Hindsight. Yeah. No, I mean, like the companies that do maintain that trajectory are called unicorns for a reason, right? And like everyone's looking for the next unicorn, but it never happens because they are so rare. And the amount of companies that, the amount of startups that go out of business in Silicon Valley is so ridiculously high and they're all software startups right that 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 yeah and that's just it's it's sad it's 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.

1:32:21So when we see, you know, you hear about Silicon Valley startups dying all the time, we don't have that personal connection with it. But boosted mostly through Casey and just through their community building, like in this tech YouTube world, we built a relationship with them. And it felt it was something we all knew. It's something we all followed. and we kind of got to live that rise with them and then watch them just fall out of the sky. It's interesting to now know what actually happened because like you said, it's super easy to blame the pandemic. Allegedly happened. I mean, we still know more behind the scenes than just assuming pandemic killed them.

1:32:57Right, right. I think that was what everyone kind of assumed and it was just so weird to have them be the Tesla of electric transportation and all of a sudden just like they're gone. But that's the short version of the story. But hey, listen, if you listen to this episode and you're thinking, well, crap, I really want a Boosted board now. There is this guy named Brian Schwartz in San Francisco who bought all of Boosted's remaining stock. He bought the Boosted website and he started a new company called Boosted USA. So you can find all of the remaining stock over on BoostedUSA.com. I did try to get in contact with him for the story, but they didn't reply to my request for comments.

1:33:39So maybe they'll hear the story and reach out for a follow up. I'd love to chat with you. Please email me. Anyways, y 'all thanks a million percent to everyone that contributed to the story. Steven Reinhart and Mike Mahew are actually now working for another electric skateboard company called Dot Boards based out of Australia. And hopefully they're bringing a lot of what they learned at Boosted to that company. Thanks to Sanjay Dastore for talking to us. He's actually working on something new again. So stay tuned for when he announces that. Thanks to Sean who's been following the boosted story since the beginning and for explaining all that confusing legal stuff to us that was very helpful and he told me he's actually working on some more boosted board stories based on this lawsuit that just came out so follow him over at the verge to make sure you don't miss that that trial is actually set to take place in october so it should be pretty spicy when it happens oh and also thanks to casey neistat for talking to me literally the day i messaged him to get a big chunk of this story done i really appreciate that anyways y 'all we're working on a few more of these long form style stories.

1:34:38So if you liked this one, tweeted us at WVFRM on Twitter, or at myself at Dervid Amell at Adam at Adam Lucas 17. If you've got any ideas for more stories like this that you'd like to hear. Today's episode was written in research by David Amell and Adam Molina. It was produced by Adam Molina. We are partnered with Studio 71 and our intro outro music was created by Cameron Barlow.