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How Boosted went bust


apartKanye
Boosted
Kanye West
The Verge
Kickstarter
Trump administration’s
Lime
Khosla
Yamaha
YouTube
Stanford
Neistat
Dastoor
Apple
Khosla Ventures
Birdhouse
Specialized
Structural Capital
Activate Capital Partners
The Information
the Boosted VP
COVID-19
LLC


Tony Hawk
Kanye
Vinod Khosla
Kanye West —
Casey Neistat
Sanjay Dastoor
Jeff Russakow
Andy Macdonald
Donald Trump
Rev
John [Ulmen
’d
Lime
Ethan P. Schulman
Elon Musk


Japanese


Lime
Silicon Valley


Caltrain


China
YouTube
Manhattan
Lime.“We
Khosla
San Francisco
US


Thanksgiving

Positivity     43.00%   
   Negativity   57.00%
The New York Times
SOURCE: https://www.theverge.com/2021/7/19/22575594/boosted-electric-skateboard-khosla-lime-lawsuit
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Summary

Filed under:An inside look at how the beloved electric skateboard startup fell apartKanye wanted a meeting.That was basically all a small group of employees at Boosted knew in early 2019 after they heard the rapper-mogul had taken an interest in the company’s electric skateboards.A partnership, an investment, an endorsement — whatever he was considering, a meeting with Kanye West seemed absurd. Khosla Ventures’ lawyers say Lime sabotaged a potential bailout of Boosted from Yamaha in late 2019 and conspired with Boosted’s biggest debt lender to rig the sale of the startup’s remains a few months later. (Boosted eventually applied for, and was granted, exclusions from the tariffs, but refunds for them were still outstanding when the startup went under.)The pressure of maintaining this pace of growth — which was coming from Russakow but also from Khosla Ventures, the former employees say — had Boosted running ragged. Khosla Ventures and Boosted’s other backers had just put money into the company — they didn’t want to add even more. Suddenly, Russakow and his team received news that seemed like a Christmas miracle: Japanese giant Yamaha was interested in buying them.Those executives had already spent most of December hammering out a deal with Lime that would allow the scooter-sharing giant to hire away a small group of core Boosted employees and license some of the intellectual property around their new scooter in exchange for $30 million worth of stock.That deal wouldn’t save the entire company, though, and it wasn’t done. Lawyers for the venture firm have argued that Lime poached Boosted employees while negotiations with Yamaha were ongoing — including the Boosted VP who was coordinating interviews with the people Lime might hire as part of that deal. Lime “acted with malice by intending to cause injury to Boosted’s economic relationship with [Yamaha],” lawyers for Khosla Ventures argued at one point. Khosla’s team said in court that this was more evidence Lime was up to no good: it struck up negotiations with Boosted under false pretenses in order to steal employees and other nonpublic information from a startup on the rocks. Structural also had the right to liquidate those assets if Boosted violated any terms of the loan — something Khosla Ventures agreed to when that deal happened, according to court documents. “Your Honor, I — this is, I think, a truly kind of… kind of a mind-bending, in some ways, complaint, because… [Khosla Ventures’] alleges that Boosted was gonna fire these employees; that Boosted was under financial distress; that it, you know, was defaulting under the loan security agreement; that there was gonna be this massive bloodletting,” Lime’s lawyer said, according to a transcript of the hearing.

As said here by Sean O'Kane