🍔MrBeast Legal Spat Over Sizzle and Slander

🔦 Spotlight

YouTube star Jimmy Donaldson, a.k.a. MrBeast, is embroiled in a legal battle with the company behind his virtual burger restaurant, MrBeast Burger. 🍔⚖️📜

After MrBeast's lawsuit against Virtual Dining Concepts (VDC), which managed the burger's fulfillment and delivery, VDC has countersued for $100 million in damages. VDC claims MrBeast failed to fulfill contractual obligations, such as promoting the burger brand, making false and damaging statements, and causing financial harm.

MrBeast initially sued VDC, citing concerns about food quality and damage to his brand's reputation. MrBeast Burger operates through a network of "ghost kitchens," offering food through delivery apps cooked in existing restaurant facilities. It rapidly expanded to 1,700 locations since 2020, attracting attention and crowds.

VDC's lawsuit reveals that MrBeast attempted unsuccessful contract renegotiations in November 2022, February 2023, and June 2023. The legal cook-off centers on alleged breaches and disparaging remarks from MrBeast about the burger brand. Despite the legal battle, MrBeast remains influential online, having ventured into various projects beyond the burger business, including a line of snacks named Feastables.

Want to invest in real estate but don’t have the time or money to buy and manage a whole property?

Investors are flocking to Arrived, a Jeff Bezos-backed real estate investing platform that even Zillow Co-founder Spencer Rascoff loves using. It's a beautiful app and web platform that already has over 353,000 people who have invested over $100M in real estate properties. We don't blame them - Arrived takes the guesswork out. You just:

• Browse expert curated vacation rentals and long-term rentals (only <0.2% of properties pass their expert diligence process before being offered to you)
• With just a few clicks, select the properties you like and invest anywhere from $100 to $50,000+ per property
• Sit back while Arrived takes care of the management and operations for you. Simple.

Real estate has outperformed the S&P 500 over the past 20 years as an asset class - but it's not easy to get into. Arrived's seamless platform fixes this. So what's stopping you from becoming a real estate mogul?

🤝 Venture Deals

LA Startups

• Virtualitics, a data analytics and 3D visualization platform, raised a $37M Series C led by Smith Point Capital - learn more
• Luxury Presence, a provider of growth marketing solutions for real estate pros, raised $19.2M in a Series B1 led by Bessemer Venture Partners - learn more
• Nature Coatings, a biochemicals startup, raised a $2.5M Seed round co-led by Regeneration.vc and The 22 Fund - learn more

LA Funds

• Mantis Venture Capital joined a $17M Series A for Haus, a startup that helps companies measure the ROI on their marketing efforts - learn more

LA Exits

• Check back next week!

⚒️ Open Roles

Are you a tech firm, startup, or VC with open roles? Reach out to be featured on next week’s Newsletter!

📅 LA Tech Calendar

Friday, August 11th

• Cypher VR Los Angeles - Virtual reality escape room experiences!

Monday, August 14th

• Generative AI and AI Alignment with Amino Capital🗽 - Hear from Generative AI experts about how generative AI can be used in the entertainment industry!

Tuesday, August 15th

• Techstars: How to Make Your Application Stand Out🗽 - Prepare an eye-catching application with insider tips!

Wednesday, August 16th

• Ask Me Anything with Leading Innovation Law Firm: Wilson Sonsini🗽 - explore impact investing through disease foundations and innovative approaches to addressing rare disease challenges!
• KPMG Private Enterprise Tech Innovator in the U.S. Finals 2023🗽 - exclusive opportunity for you to hear the finalists’ pitches and get a first look at their ambitious plans for transforming the technology landscape!

Thursday, August 17th

• LA Tech Networking Happy Hour🗽 - Bringing LA tech world into one place to broaden our networks and get away from our laptops!
• LA Startup and Tech Mixer - Kick off August the right way with networking and drinks!
• GENERATIVE LA—LIGHTSPEED X SCOPELY X ACTIVISION (August 30th)🗽 - Bringing together local founders, engineers, designers and product leaders building the future of AI!

Other events to add to the calendar

🗽 - Free

Have an awesome event coming up? Reach out to be featured on next week’s Newsletter!

🌍 Around The Internet

The top 3 funding rounds for LA startups in July are…🥁🥁🥁

1. Impulse Space - $45M Series A
2. Karat - $40M Series B
3. Gardens - $31.3M Series A

📙 What We’re Reading

• Listen to TenOneTen’s LA Venture Podcast on Katelyn Foley - the President of UP.Labs -
• Meet the 2023 finalists for KPMG’s top Tech Innovators in the U.S. -

🙋♀️ Key Hires

• AdvisorCheck appoints Adriel Tam as CEO -

Love our newsletter? Share it through your social channels!

Christian Hetrick is dot.LA's Entertainment Tech Reporter. He was formerly a business reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer and reported on New Jersey politics for the Observer and the Press of Atlantic City.

PledgeLA's Venture Data Report Shows Progress but not Perfection for LA VCs

Aug 18 2023

🔦 Spotlight

The 2023 PledgeLA Venture Data Report serves up a tech-infused reality check with a small side of optimism, like when you failed an exam but took consolation in the fact that you didn’t fail quite as hard as everyone else in the class. 🤓📊📈

Image source: Getty Images

PledgeLA is a coalition of tech companies and venture capital firms working to increase diversity, equity, and community engagement by holding the region accountable with quantifiable progress tracking. Their report followed the investments of 75 LA-based venture funds in 2022, including regional powerhouses like Upfront Ventures, M13, and Fifth Wall.

Some key takeaways: in the report, 50% of all companies receiving funding from a PledgeLA-tracked venture fund were led by an all-white founding team, while companies with all Black or Latinx founders received only 9% of funding rounds, and all-female founding teams received a paltry 11% of funding rounds. Not super representative of the diversity in Los Angeles.

That said, in comparison to the national averages, LA wasn’t so bad. We saw a higher representation of all-female, Black, and Latinx founding teams relative to the US at large. Nationwide, teams led by Black and Latinx founders accounted for <3% of venture deal count according to data from Crunchbase and Techcrunch. And across the US, all-female founding teams accounted for 6.8% of venture rounds in 2022 according to Pitchbook.

So where do we land?

On the negative side, there is still a long way to go to achieving representative venture funding in the LA ecosystem, but we can see that Los Angeles' VC firms have harnessed their unique energy to begin to address these disparities. Firms with diversity-focused theses and those helmed by underrepresented minority leaders are playing the role of superheroes, making investments in Latinx, female, and Black founders at a pace that rivals a speedy express delivery. This offers a promising vision for the future, echoing a sentiment that the city's innovation ecosystem is actively redefining the rules of the game on a national scale.

To better grades ahead. 💯

Want to invest in real estate but don’t have the time or money to buy and manage a whole property?

Investors are flocking to Arrived, a Jeff Bezos-backed real estate investing platform that even Zillow Co-founder Spencer Rascoff loves using. It's a beautiful app and web platform that already has over 353,000 people who have invested over $100M in real estate properties. We don't blame them - Arrived takes the guesswork out. You just:

• Browse expert curated vacation rentals and long-term rentals (only <0.2% of properties pass their expert diligence process before being offered to you)
• With just a few clicks, select the properties you like and invest anywhere from $100 to $50,000+ per property
• Sit back while Arrived takes care of the management and operations for you. Simple.

Real estate has outperformed the S&P 500 over the past 20 years as an asset class - but it's not easy to get into. Arrived's seamless platform fixes this. So what's stopping you from becoming a real estate mogul?

🤝 Venture Deals

LA Startups

• Caelux, a solar coatings startup, raised a $12M Series A led by Temasek and joined by Reliance New Energy and Khosla Ventures - learn more
• Sapphire Technologies, a maker of turboexpanders, raised a $10M Series B led by Energy Capital Ventures and joined by Marathon Petroleum, Chevron Technology Ventures and Equinor Ventures - learn more
• D'Amelio Brands, a company founded by TikTok stars Charli and Dixie D'Amelio and their parents, raised a $5M funding round from Fifth Growth Fund - learn more
• ShipCalm, a startup that provides small e-commerce businesses with logistics and fulfillment support, raised a $2M funding round led by Montage Capital - learn more
• Robomart, a maker of electric self-driving stores, raised a $2M Seed Round led by W Ventures, Wasabi Ventures, SOSV, HAX and Hustle Fund - learn more

LA Funds

• 75 & Sunny Labs launched heyLibby, an AI assistant for SMBs -

⚒️ Open Roles

Operations Associate @ NEXT Careers

LA-based NEXT Careers is hiring an Operations Associate. This role involves both operations and community-facing support for Fellows in the NEXT program, who are mid-career and exec-level startup job-seekers. Hybrid 3 days per week in Culver City or Playa Vista. You'll get to meet and help support hundreds of the most talented people on the market right now. Reach out if you’re interested, and we’ll connect you to the team, or apply directly here.

Are you a tech firm, startup, or VC with open roles? Reach out to be featured on next week’s Newsletter!

📅 LA Tech Calendar

Friday, August 18th

• Founders Live LA🗽 - This in-person event is your opportunity to network with like-minded entrepreneurs, investors, and industry experts!

Monday, August 21st

• Tech Networking - Studio City!🗽 - Bringing the thriving tech community of Los Angeles together once again, in the Valley!

Tuesday, August 22nd

• Develop a Successful Blockchain Tech Startup Business Today! - Blockchain Startup Hackathon and Workshops

Wednesday, August 23rd

• Los Angeles Film & NFT Web3 Meetup🗽 - NFT's in Film/Media, and Music will shape all areas/facets of our daily lives!

Thursday, August 24th

• Armenians in Tech + Entertainment Happy Hour🗽 - Join Armenians working in tech and entertainment for an after-work happy hour!
• GENERATIVE LA—LIGHTSPEED X SCOPELY X ACTIVISION (August 30th)🗽 - Bringing together local founders, engineers, designers and product leaders building the future of AI!

Other events to add to the calendar

🗽 - Free

🌍 Around The Internet

We are exiting the growth-focused subsidized streaming service chapter and entering the profitable streaming service phase with prices increasing on average by nearly 25% over the next year (yikes!) to offset losses and achieve profitability. 💸🎥 📺

This trend includes companies like Disney, Netflix and others as they test customer loyalty and the tolerance for higher costs. To counter churn, ad-supported options and bundling are being offered, with the industry navigating a delicate balance between retaining subscribers and increasing revenues.

Source: WSJ

📙 What We’re Reading

Our friends at CuratedLA just did a profile on dot.LA CEO Wil Chockley! Learn about Wil’s passion for dinosaurs, his take on LA tech and more here.

The the CuratedLA platform contains a daily feed of news, eats, events, happenings, discussions, and LA need-to-knows without showcasing political opinions or morbid headlines; to have fun with wit and positivity while creating an LA vibe.

CuratedLA is sent every morning, M - F, at 6:00am. It is completely free to subscribe, submit content, and to catch the discussion of local waves on the CuratedLA Surfboard.

We’re also reading…

• Pacaso’s Spencer Rascoff on the Revitalized Experience Economy and More Pandemic Shifts -
• Video game voice actors have a keen interest in the (potential) AI protection outcomes resulting from the SAG-AFTRA strike -
• NASA’s Psyche mission is schedule to take off in early October -
• Future Fisker owners will be able to utilize Tesla’s 12,000 supercharger stations starting in 2025 -

Love our newsletter? Share it through your social channels!

Christian Hetrick is dot.LA's Entertainment Tech Reporter. He was formerly a business reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer and reported on New Jersey politics for the Observer and the Press of Atlantic City.

🏢 Crexi: The Commercial Real Estate Emporium

Aug 15 2023

This week’s dot.LA Deep Dive delves into the stodgy but rapidly changing world of commercial real estate. Marina Del Rey-based Crexi is the new kid on the block, looking to transform the way buyers, brokers, and sellers do business.

Crexi, a commercial real estate (CRE) upstart, emerged on the scene in 2015, reshaping the CRE world with its blend of property marketplace, data platform, and virtual auction. Its mission? To build the simplest and most efficient one-stop-shop for CRE professionals. Crexi is the cupid of the real estate realm, connecting sellers of properties with buyers, and matchmaking the most efficient and effective transactions possible.

This is the actual 4th image on Google when you search “Commercial Real Estate”

Credit: Investopedia

Crexi’s origin story takes us to the early life of its creator, Mike DeGiorgio. Mike was a tumbleweed as a kid, growing up all over the country, which fostered an adaptability that later became a hallmark of his entrepreneurial ethos. Armed with a business degree from Northern Illinois University, Mike embarked on his professional journey at Irvine-based Auction.com, a tech enabled marketplace for bank-owned and foreclosed residential real estate properties. At Auction.com, he witnessed the elaborate waltz of property transactions, and, while there, he was struck by the fact that – while residential real estate was quickly jumping into the digital age, commercial real estate seemed stuck in a bygone era. The itch for innovation gnawed at him, and the concept of Crexi began to take shape.

His idea was a digital emporium in the truest sense of the word: a one-stop destination where CRE professionals could convene, conduct business, and make deals with just a click.

In 2015, Crexi emerged, a result of Michael's determination and a trio of co-founders who shared his vision. The path to success, however, wasn't a cakewalk. With a seed funding of $4.3 million from investors like Lerer Hippeau Ventures and Freestyle Capital, Crexi embarked on a journey to transform the commercial real estate landscape. Over the next five years, Crexi slowly but surely gained adoption across the CRE world, but in 2020, Covid struck and threw the CRE world into a state of disarray from which it has not yet returned. Like much of the financial world, CRE had a rough 2020 but roared back in late 2021 to a total of $1.43 Trillion (with a T!) in transaction volume. Higher rates have since put a damper on things, and transaction volumes have plummeted in late 2022 and early 2023 by 60-75% over the prior year.

Credit: Motley Fool + CBRE

Luckily, Crexi was perfectly positioned to function in an uncertain market and grew through all of the ups and downs. Crexi’s value proposition has actually increased in the current market craziness. With asset values changing rapidly as the value of office space, distribution centers, and malls crash and rebound, Crexi’s data platform gives CRE pros a way to keep up. Additionally, in the event a deal goes sour, Crexi’s auction platform gives financial institutions an ability to offload properties quickly, easily, and to the highest bidder.

Fast forward to the present, and Crexi has emerged as one of the most resilient proptech companies in a brutal year for the space. It leads nearly three million buyers, brokers, and tenants through the intricate maze of CRE transactions, unlocking access to a whopping $5 trillion of property value. Crexi has facilitated transactions worth over $440 billion and continues to grow even during a challenging time for real estate.

So where does Crexi go from here? It just keeps on growing. Mike envisions a commercial real estate ecosystem built around Crexi, where properties are marketed, analyzed, and traded with unprecedented ease. It aspires to be the central hub of its industry, making commercial real estate accessible and efficient for all participants.

Over the last eight years, Crexi has grown from an idea to an integral part of the commercial real estate world. It’s successfully surfed the ups and downs of Covid, work from home, higher rates, and the return to office. Next up, we expect to see more big things from Crexi.

Christian Hetrick is dot.LA's Entertainment Tech Reporter. He was formerly a business reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer and reported on New Jersey politics for the Observer and the Press of Atlantic City.

⛈ Sensible: The White Knight of Weather

Aug 09 2023

Picture this: you’ve saved up for months for your dream beach vacation. You’ve cut out restaurant dinners, morning coffees, and those concert tickets you really wanted. You bought your flights and made your hotel reservation. You finally step off the plane in your tropical paradise, only to see that the weather forecast has changed while you were in flight. It’s now supposed to rain for the next 3 days straight…

Source: Peter Cade, The Times of London

Every year, this happens to thousands if not millions of travelers, and, until recently, there was nothing you could do except grit your teeth and “enjoy” sitting in your hotel room reading your mystery novel while your hard earned money evaporates.

Nick Cavanaugh has made it his life’s mission to change that. His company, Sensible, offers the world’s first “Weather Guarantee.” Unfortunately, Sensible can’t literally guarantee the weather will be perfect for your next vacation, but they can insure your trip, such that you get paid a refund if the weather ruins your getaway. Very soon, if it rains on your beach vacation, you can breathe easy because the money you worked so hard to save will go right back into your bank account, and you get a free or discounted vacation to boot.

⛈️ Pre-Sensible

The Sensible story starts in one of the most notoriously rainy places in America: Seattle. Nick Cavanaugh was an outdoorsy kid who loved to ski. Fortunately for him, the Pacific Northwest is full of beautiful ski mountains, but unfortunately for him, the temperatures at many of these mountains hover right around freezing, so rainy skiing was just a fact of life for Nick. Year after year, Nick’s ski trips got rained out, or he skied and got rained on.

Eventually Nick moved out of Seattle to attend the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, where he studied Engineering, with a minor in Environmental Science. While a student at Penn, he came back to the west coast to intern at the world-renowned UC San Diego Scripps Institution of Oceanography where he found the perfect marriage of his passions for math and the outdoors. He was hooked.

After graduation in 2010, Nick returned to the Scripps Institute and four years later completed his masters and PhD in Atmospheric Dynamics and Physics. Nick then spent another two years as a postdoctoral fellow at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory (named for Ernest Lawrence, inventor of the cyclotron and J. Robert Oppenheimer’s frenemy in the movie). After 10 years in academia with a hyper-specialized degree and set of skills, Nick had a couple options - he could remain in academia and research, he could work in catastrophe insurance, or he could explore an emerging niche segment of Wall Street, weather-focused hedge funds.

Given Nick hadn’t really made money in his adult life, the hedge fund angle seemed pretty interesting, and he moved to New York to join a fund called Cumulus. At Cumulus, he was focused on predicting weather patterns and inferring their effect on energy and commodity prices. During Nick’s time at Cumulus, the scrappy little fund was acquired by mega-fund Citadel, and Nick looked for the exits.

After leaving Citadel, Nick moved to Los Angeles to get back to the sunny weather, surfing, and outdoorsy culture of Southern California while he thought of what to do next. As he was brainstorming, his mind kept coming back to those rainy childhood ski trips. He was one of probably 25 people in the world with deep experience in both advanced weather prediction and complex financial products, so he decided that he just might be the right person to solve his childhood problem.

☀️ Sensible

To make this happen, Nick needed some initial funding. In 2021, he connected with local LA VCs Dustin Rosen from Wonder Ventures and Josh Diamond from Walkabout Ventures who came together to lead Sensible’s Seed Round and get the business off the ground.

Since then, Nick and team have been building the fastest and most accurate local weather prediction engine in the world. Today, Sensible is constantly ingesting hundreds of terabytes of weather data from NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) and the ECMWF (European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts). The craziest aspect of Sensible’s product is not that they are able to ingest the data, but rather that they are able to generate quotes based on a completely personalized, local prediction in less than half a second. Not only can they spit out an individual quote in half a second, but they can spit out more than 60,000 quotes per second across their platform.

So how do you get one of these Sensible Weather Guarantees?

Sensible’s go-to-market strategy thus far has been B2B2C, where the team partners with end merchants (e.g., ski resort Mt. Baldy) as well as infrastructure providers (e.g., ticketing provider Catalate). As a consumer, you find Sensible in the checkout flow of your booking experience, similar to how you find travel insurance in your airline ticket checkout.

For example, when I went to book through Sensible partner Aquarius Boat Rentals, I was shown this screen:

As you can see, adding Sensible’s Weather Guarantee is pretty darn simple - just click yes in the dropdown, and it’s automatically added to your purchase price. Pricing of the policy is algorithmically determined based on the likelihood of rain and a multitude of other complicated factors. Depending on the policy you pay for, you can get a full or partial refund paid out by Sensible’s reinsurance partner (importantly, not the merchant or channel partner).

According to Nick, merchants can benefit from Sensible in two ways: 1. Buyers are more likely to buy if they have peace of mind knowing they will be reimbursed for inclement weather 2. Merchants can mark up the cost of the guarantee and actually make additional revenue from selling the policies.

This all seems like the legendary Michael Scott win-win-win.

WIl Chockley is a partner at 75 & Sunny, where he evaluates potential investment opportunities across sectors and works with founders to build their strategy and execute on their vision.