đ Good morning. Were you admiring the plush red carpet trod on by all the stars at last nightâs Oscars? You can thank Steve Olive. The owner of Event Carpet Pros, heâs behind the 50k-square-foot rug in the classic Academy Red hue. Oliveâs company makes up to 10 carpet installs a day during awards seasons and completes 30k+ a year â including custom jobs like a carpeted pool design for Barbie and a green-and-black slime drip one for Ghostbusters.
đ§ On the pod:Are plant-based and lab-grown meats beyond broken?
NEWS FLASH
đ Your company probably didnât land on the moon this weekend⊠unless you work for Firefly Aerospace. Then yeah, that happened. The startup, on a mission backed by $101.5m in NASA cash, successfully landed its Blue Ghost lander on the big block of cheese in the sky, the second-ever commercial moon landing. Firefly bested the first craft, from Intuitive Machines, by landing upright. Blue Ghost will now spend two weeks bopping around and serve as a moon thermometer, burying itself in lunar soil to test the moonâs temps.
đŠ Move over Ronald McDonald, thereâs a new mascot in town. And itâs a little snowman in a crown. Chinaâs Mixue Ice Cream and Tea has become the worldâs largest food-and-beverage chain by number of locations, eclipsing megabrands like McDonaldâs and Starbucks. The chain, which has locations in Asia and Australia, closed 2024 with 45k stores, more than doubling its storefronts in three years. Now, Mixue is looking to raise up to $510m in an IPO valuing the brand at ~$10B. Realistically, though, the secret sauce is the brandâs catchy theme song: âI love you. You love me. Mixue Ice Cream and Tea.â What a banger.
đą RIP, Kingda Ka, a 456-foot-tall roller coaster at Six Flags Great Adventure in Jackson, New Jersey, that the park imploded on Friday. Kingda Ka was once the worldâs tallest and fastest coaster, bringing riders up 45 stories, then (thrillingly or terrifyingly, depending on who you are) accelerating to 128 mph in mere seconds. The demolition â part of Six Flags Entertainment Corp.âs $1B+ investment into its 42 parks â will make way for a new âmulti-record-breaking launch coasterâ in 2026, per park president Brian Bacica.
MORE NEWS TO KNOW
ICYMI: Skype, once the preeminent video-calling service, is going to internet heaven in May. Parent company Microsoft is shelving it to focus on its Teams product.
Use AI! Just not like that. Amazon told its internal recruiters that job applicants can be disqualified from the hiring process for using AI tools during their interviews due to the âunfair advantageâ it can offer.
Well, thatâs nice: Every year, marketing company Distinctive Assets gives Oscar nominees a gift bag full of luxury products and trips â which celebs rarely redeem lest the IRS tax them. This yearâs $216k+ bags included $50k in home renovation services, which are transferable to people impacted by wildfires.
STOP LEAD LEAKS
Where do prospects go when they ghost?
Honestly, whoâs to say. Your best move is to stop them from reaching that point in the first place.
Take our step-by-step marketing audit checklist to start sussing out your funnel and stop all the lovely leads from leaving. Whether they bailed around first-touch or just before converting, all of it is covered in the steps.
Consider it funnel-fixing fun time. Have a blast patchinâ up the leaks.
There are many unfair certainties in life, but chief among them is that we canât spend as many years with our dogs as weâd like.
The average lifespan for a dog is 10-13 years, depending on its size, and thatâs clearly too damn short.
Thatâs where Loyal comes in: The canine longevity startup just closed a $22m fundraising round, bringing its total investments to $150m+.
Loyalâs first product slated for approval is LOY-002, a daily tablet for dogs ages 10+ and weighing 14+ pounds.
The pills target metabolic dysfunction â a main underlying cause of aging â to reduce the chance and severity of age-associated diseases.
LOY-002 just cleared the FDAâs âreasonable expectation of effectivenessâ requirement , moving the company one step closer to approval.
Teaching old dogs new tricks isnât Loyalâs only goal: The startup is also developing LOY-001 and LOY-003, a long-acting injectable and a daily pill for larger dog breeds â which have as little as half the lifespan of smaller dogs.
Once itâs FDA-approved, the companyâs revenue would come through veterinarians writing prescriptions for its products.
Long live doggos
Since American consumers spent an estimated $150.6B on their pets in 2024, there are other pet health startups trying to fetch big profits:
Embark, a DNA testing company for dogs, has raised ~$94m in funding to assess health risks and recently released a line of supplements.
German startup Mammaly is focused entirely on supplements, with longevity products that promise to promote cell renewal and protect against damage.
And a growing group of startups are promising to keep pets healthier through customized, human-grade food.
InterestinglyâŠ
⊠learning how to extend the lives of our beloved dogs might also help us live longer. Or at least, thatâs Loyalâs thinking.
The startupâs CEO, Celine Halioua, toldTechCrunch that since humans and dogs share environmental factors â and sometimes even the same diet â their aging diseases can be similar.
To be clear: We only want to be immortal if our good boys and girls can be, too.
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NEWSWORTHY NUMBER
Amount that an Indian court ordered PVR INOX, Indiaâs largest movie theater chain, to pay Abhishek M R, a 31-year-old lawyer from Bangalore who said he experienced âmental agonyâ after enduring 25 minutes of commercials.
In 2023, Abhishek purchased three tickets to see Sam Bahadur, a 145-minute war drama that was scheduled to finish at 6:30pm. Yet a deluge of trailers and other ads caused Abhishek to miss a work call on top of âlosses which cannot be calculated in terms of money.â
The court agreed that âtime is considered as money,â and that 25-30 minutes of ads is a pretty long time. It awarded Abhishek less than the $600+ heâd asked for, but also fined the theater an additional ~$1.1k that it must pay to Indiaâs Consumer Welfare Fund.
Now weâre wondering how much the dozens of times weâve sat through the Nicole Kidman AMC ad is worth.
AROUND THE WEB
đ On this day: In 1875, the first indoor hockey game was played in Montreal. It ended in a brawl.
đȘČ Thatâs interesting: An archive of extremely odd software bugs.
đ„ Going to SXSW? Same. Register for the unofficial official founder party weâre hosting with HubSpot for Startups. Free BBQ and beer, live music â oh, and Hustle subscribers get to skip the line.
What does the future hold for coffee lovers? Bad beans, as predicted by Dr. Honeybrew, a âcoffee fortune tellerâ in NYC, perBusiness Insider. You donât need a medium to foresee that, though: Climate change experts expect the droughts that have plagued recent coffee bean harvests will only become more regular, and that coffee cultivation acreage will shrink by 50%+ over the next two decades, meaning lower supply and worse quality.
Your AM brewâs best hope? According to Honeybrew, thatâd be people reaching across political divides in a shared effort to save their beloved drink, which is a sweet thought.
Honeybrew is also quoted as saying a cocker spaniel in the White House could fix things, for some reasonâŠso maybe take this one with a grain of salt?
SHOWER THOUGHT
Expensive paintings are basically just trading cards for the rich.SOURCE
