⚔️ 3 Fights You Need to Watch

There’s blood in the streets, and we’re going to point the camera at it while yelling ‘Worldstar!!’. Here’s what’s going down this week:

• 🔥 Scorched Earth: Startup CEO is paying people to smear his adversary

• ⚔️ Tech Gladiators: Zuck vs Elon, in the…Colosseum?

• 👨‍⚖️ Court Jesters: DealMaker throws down with Issuance

There’s a lot to unpack in this one.

A few years back, a startup called CityZenith raised funds via equity crowdfunding. They promised revolutionary software geared towards architects and fundraised millions across StartEngine, Wefunder, Republic, and others.

I don’t know for certain (I wasn’t an investor), but I’m 95% certain it was a sham and they never delivered any sort of product.

Negative press and investor commentary started surfacing about CityZenith. The CEO, Michael Jansen, then announced that CityZenith would be selling its assets to a new company of his called TwinUp. What I think happened is that Jansen wanted to raise more money but ditch the toxic brand of CityZenith. So he likely sold his own company to himself for 1 penny or something like that.

Anyway, that whole sham isn’t even the main story here.

Along the way, Jansen contacted crowdfunding consultant Shane Liddell to help promote his fundraising round. The two had a very quick falling out before they could even work together, and their LinkedIn messages spilled out onto Twitter.

The vulgarity of Jansen’s language was honestly shocking as he threatened both physical violence and legal action against Liddell. Here’s a snippet from the exchange…

If you want to see the full LinkedIn message exchange, grab some popcorn and view it here.

That conversation happened back in August of 2022. Fast-forward to today and the two are ensnared in court, but things do not appear to be going well for Jansen.

He apparently committed perjury by doctoring court documents, and his legal team has withdrawn support for the case citing that they no longer had alignment with Jansen.

Jansen also took to social platforms, posting an odd picture of Liddell that referred to him as a fraud. He even offered viewers $10 apiece to repost the picture to their own account.

What a wild story that’s continuing to unfold before our eyes.

Some takeaways:

• Don’t invest your money in any entity owned by Michael Jansen

• Always research the founders to see if there’s dirt hiding behind the shiny image they present on their fundraising page

• Comical that of all places, those vulgar DMs went down on LinkedIn.

Tech Billionaires to Fight in the Colosseum?

That first story was about small fish beefing with each other. Let’s head over to the bigger pond, where two mega-billionaires are duking it out.

Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg have had some under-the-radar beef for some time now. In 2016, a SpaceX rocket exploded and destroyed one of Meta’s satellites. Most recently, Zuckerberg has been planning the release of a Twitter clone to take advantage of the massive restructuring Musk has done.

On Twitter, Musk responded to a user that warned him about messing with Zuckerberg, saying “I’m up for a cage match if he is lol”.

What started as a joke gained momentum when Zuck chimed in on Instagram with a story that screenshotted Musk’s tweet and said ‘Send me location’.

Musk has 7 inches and around 85 pounds on Facebook’s founder, but most believe Zuckerberg to have the edge. Zuck is 12 years younger than Musk (39 vs 51), and has been training Jiu Jitsu for some time now.

Over the weekend, rumors surfaced that Italian officials were interested in hosting the cage match in the Roman Colosseum. This was already going to be the fight of the millennium, but a venue like the Colosseum hosting would blow my mind.

However, actual Roman officials have debunked this rumor (sad!), but the chance at a fight between the two billionaires remains alive.

I read 25 pages of legal documents so you don’t have to…

Back in February, I wrote about a nasty legal battle between DealMaker + Darren Marble.

As a quick refresher, Marble partnered with DealMaker to raise funds for his company Pieta. The fundraise brought in a whopping ZERO dollars, and just a few months later Marble launches a competing platform, very similar to DealMaker’s.

DealMaker is now suing Marble on accounts that he fraudulently partnered with them to gain access to trade secrets and reverse engineer their software.

Well we now have an update in that legal battle.

Marble’s legal team had requested to dismiss all 6 of DealMaker’s claims before moving to trial, and the judge has granted this request on 5 of the claims. DealMaker will have the chance to resubmit those claims if they so choose (update: they are decding to amend these claims and resubmit), and their key argument around fraudulent interference is set to move to court.

Marble took to Twitter to frame this update as a victory, claiming that 80% of the claims have been dismissed. But being only 80% innocent doesn’t count in a court of law.

We’ll see how this one shakes out and will keep you all updated!

Please note that this is not financial advice, nor a recommendation to invest in any of the startups mentioned. Readers should conduct their own due diligence and understand that startup investing is a risky asset class.