BUSINESS IDEA | STARTUP

TikTok for Restaurant Discovery 🍛 

A souper idea

Available Domain: Cuiseens.com

1. Problem/Opportunity❓

The Problem/Opportunity: If you’re anything like me your social media feeds are littered with cooking content and food reviews. Particularly late at night when hunger levels are at all time highs…

But there’s nothing worse than seeing creators review delicious food from a restaurant that’s thousands of miles away. I want to see food videos from restaurants near me that I can actually visit. So let’s build exactly that.

Market Size: According to Datassential, there are around 480,000 independent restaurants in the USA

2. Solution ✅

The Idea: A platform for users to discover restaurants near them through influencer food reviews

How it Works:

• Users sign up to the platform which takes their basic details and their location

• When they open the app they are met with a TikTok style feed showing short video reviews of restaurants near them that they can go to or make a booking

• There’s also a map view where users can click on restaurants near them and view video reviews made by food influencers in those specific restaurants

• Food influencers have their own profiles (similar to Linkin.bio) which they share in their social media bios and shows all of their reviews they’ve shared

Go-to-market: The key to get early users is to get influencers to link to the platform in their bios

Business Model: Charge restaurants to verify their profiles and for added functionality, similar to Trustpilot

Startup Costs: You’ll need a few thousand dollars here to work with app developers and get v1 of this product built

3. How You’ll Get Rich 💰

Exit Strategy: Sell to a large food content business, like the Food Network

Exit Multiple: Hard to know here, but 3x - 6x revenue is probably the right multiple here

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DRUNK BUSINESS IDEA

Griddle Clock

They say that breakfast is the most important meal of the day. But most of us don’t prioritize it and even skip breakfast most days.

But now, with this new alarm clock griddle, you have no excuse for skipping breakfast. It’s called the wake and bake (not to be confused with a different type of waking and baking) and allows you to create a delicious breakfast right from your bedside.

Rise and dine baby.

JUST THE TIP

Trend 📈: Defense Tech Startups

Venture funding for defense tech startups is ready to set new records. Silicon Valley pumped almost $35 billion into defense tech startups in 2023, and over $9 billion so far this year, anchored by Anduril's huge $1.5bn round.

Recent Raises

• Defense tech startup Defcon AI raises $44M to improve military logistics

• Helsing, which develops artificial intelligence software for defense, raises $489 million in funding

• US defence tech start-up Anduril raises $1.5bn at $14bn valuation

THE MONEYSHOT

The Most Ridiculous Comeback in Silicon Valley History

Silicon Valley’s history is marred by eccentric and controversial founders.

And just yesterday it emerged that one of the most controversial founders in recent memory is returning to his +$10bn company that famously lost 97% of its value.

This is his story.

Ryan Breslow is a born and bred founder.

In middle school he taught himself to code through online tutorials and YouTube videos. While in school he also founded an online mattress company and designed websites for clients including a LeBron James–backed streetwear brand.

His early entrepreneurial endeavours were impressive…so impressive that they earned him a scholarship to the founder Mecca, aka Stanford.

As a computer science student at Stanford, Ryan became interested in digital currency. So he and a classmate began to develop a digital wallet that would allow Bitcoin to be used for routine transactions, but after his co-founder lost interest and their seed investor backed out…he canned the project.

But Ryan still knew he was destined to be a founder, so in 2014 he dropped out of Stanford to find his big idea. And one day it hit him like a bolt of lightning.

One day while shopping on Amazon Ryan realised that Amazon had offered one-click checkout since 1999, but no-one else did. Ryan envisioned one-click checkout software that could plug into the existing payments platform of any business.

He teamed up with Eric Feldman and they built the first version of his product out of his dorm room with a team of 10 and in 2016, after operating in stealth mode for more than a year, Ryan officially launched his business.

He launched Bolt.

Pretty quickly Bolt became one of the hottest companies in Silicon Valley. In 2018 and 2019, Bolt raised $71 million from investors. But behind the scenes things were not as rosy for the company. The fraud detection system for their platform (which was a bunch of humans approving payments) was causing heavy losses and problems with Bolt’s technology cost Forever 21, one of their merchants, $150 million in sales.

But the business kept moving forward and in 2021, Bolt raised $333 million at a $4 billion valuation. A bigger jump came in January, when Bolt raised $355 million at an $11 billion valuation from investors including BlackRock. Ryan was lauded as a generational founder.

But pretty soon, it all fell apart in record time. The company was facing multiple lawsuits, the SEC came knocking and Ryan allegedly withdrew millions from the company’s reserves to cover a personal loan. All of this led to Ryan leaving as CEO in early 2022.

After working through these issues, and with the company performing poorly, Bolt’s valuation plummeted to $300 million, a 97% decrease from its peak.

This was particularly hard on the employees Ryan told to take out loans to buy stock in the company when it was worth $11 billion who had big loans to payback with shares worth almost nothing.

But despite all of this, just this week a letter went out from Bolt’s management team stating that Ryan is returning as CEO to the company, while it raises $450m at a $14bn valuation. Non-one knows what to make of this, but given Bolt’s revenue so far in 2024 was just $19m, this values the business at over 500x its current revenue.

Who knows how this will all pay out, but it’s a fascinating story playing out in real time that we’ll be watching closely.

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