They’d even paid their taxes. (Sam had brought in his dad to help with that.) And they resumed making millions of dollars a month in trading profits. They weren’t the same company, however. They were no longer a random assortment of effective altruists. They were a small team who had endured an alarming drama and now trusted Sam. He’d been right al

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Santos and Nathan argued about how to use the infusion of cash. Santos wanted much of it to go to marketing; Nathan thought it should go to coders to strengthen the back end. But within six months of the funding announcement, the arguing stopped — Nathan left.

By the middle of 2021, Sam saw that he could not sweet-talk regulators and at the same time have CZ as a big investor. If you wanted to be the teacher’s pet, you couldn’t sit in the back of the classroom with the badass in the leather jacket. The first thing every regulator asked for was a list of your investors, and personal details about them. “T

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Warehouse woes only compounded an already dire situation: Joymode has struggled to build its customer base post-Series A, which Fernandez believes has scared off potential investors: "It's like you can feel their allergic reaction," he says, adding that WeWork's bungled August 2019 IPO hasn't helped him make his case. But WeWork may be a symptom ra... See more