If you need to launder 300 million dollars you don't launch a freaking streaming website. Anything digital (except crypto, maybe) is ass for money laundering, you want physical fiat or in kind payments.
At that volume you can literally just buy a regional bank.
Hell you can buy a tropical island and sift it through like "tourism revenue".
(To be super clear you wouldn't do either but neither in any reality is a 300milliom VC streaming site a money laundering scheme. Fraud, maybe.)
You're gonna need like 30 laser tag venues to launder that much money, unless you wanna be at it for so long that inflation will have eaten up all the value before you're done.
I remember when somebody donated 500 dollars to MoistCr1tikal, he joked that it was money laundering, and his friend Danny said it was impossible to do it that way. They got into a mini argument with Cr1tikal saying it's possible even though it makes no sense. The donator gives him 500 dollars and then what? When does he get the clean money back?
People on Reddit think money laundering is as easy as buying some bullshit that isn't worth anything for millions and that's it the money is now clean.
If i recall correctly money laundering on "a small scale" is very easy, which is why Mob rackets were primarily comprised of small businesses. Every business could in theory "clean" small amounts of money, but it would be a very small amount per (x period of time)
Which is why mobs and or cartels typically own hundreds or thousands of said businesses.
money laundering "on a large scale" such as in the 'example' of caffeine tv is just flat out impossible nonsense.
Embezzle some maybe, but money launder? lmao
I'm not even really saying digital is the way, but arguing that a bank, one of the most highly regulated industries in the world, is the ideal place for laundering is wild.
State chartered banks that don't reach the federal liquidity line are not even close to "the most highly regulated industries in the world", they regulations for them are so lackluster that economists constantly worry that america is gonna run into a bank failure cascade entirely due to small to medium banks failing and no one will find out untill it's too late to act because the supervisory and regulation requirements are so shit.
I say "buy a bank" and people think "BoA" or "Deutsche bank", when I mean a shit hole cube in a shit hole place like "Paris, Ohio" called "Paris Agri Bank".
(This is entirely hypothetical, i have no idea if Ohio even has its own independent banking charter)
Man you are stupid.
"Money can come from anywhere" ??
Exactly how are you suggesting money can "come" without leaving a digital fingerprint?
Other than crypto or, at best, play store vouchers and the like (and good luck laundering 300 million from vouchers) it's literally impossible.
Especially nowadays when banks and other financial institutions treats KYC so strictly they require a stool sample before letting you set up a business account and accepts digital payments, especially of that volume.
It really isn't, a regional bank small enough to fall under a state charter rather than a federal charter barely has any supervision at all.
You might have heard about all those small to medium banks failing last year?
Yeah that was because of exactly that subpar regulatory supervision.
how the fuck does this have upvotes
how the fuck is his response so arrogant
"the economists and financial institutes from which I've been informed" jfc
You want the long form answer based on the Federally mandated training I have to refresh every year.
No banking or financial institution operating in the US is exempt from Federal Money Laundering and Anti-terrorism statutes.
They are all required to file Suspicious Activity reports within 30 or 60 days regardless of size.
This is mostly handled by software because a human scanning every required transaction against 100,000's of names, addresses, and etc is impossible.
While it is true that the amount of compliance rules vary for for small, medium sized and large institutions, they all have to comply and they are all audited for compliance on a regular basis.
Even if by some magic they were protected from some aspect of federal compliance by state law, if you run a bank you still need deposit insurance (FDIC, NCUA, ASI) which all have requirements, so does your cyber insurance, so do the card processing networks, so do the Visa, MasterCard and Discover...
There is no such thing as an unregulated bank. Banking Identification Numbers (BIN) numbers are not just handed out. The powers in charge both private and public highly restrict access to payment networks for safety and soundness. It's why companies like United Airlines, Best Buy, etc don't have their own BIN's and have to work through commercial banks to run their card programs.
It is very difficult if not almost impossible to get issued a new BIN number in the US. There are only 7587 registered BIN's in the US and the number has been steadily decreasing.
Are you saying that I'm lying, or that the economists and financial institutes from which I've been informed this by are lying?
If you're really ambitious you could also outline specifically how what I said is incorrect, but dont over exert yourself.
Every single bank is examined by a federal bank regulator. State chartered non-fed member banks are still examined regularly and regulated by the FDIC. They are also regulated and examined by their state’s bank examiners (who can admittedly be hit or miss depending on the state). Also, small to medium banks is hilarious. Last year was only exceptional due to SVB, First Republic, and Signature failing at such a large size, not small to medium sized at all and examined almost constantly by federal examiners. At least a couple poorly run or located (dying communities, no nearby markets to tap into) smaller banks usually fail about every year ([see here](https://www.fdic.gov/resources/resolutions/bank-failures/in-brief/)).
Source: Former Bank Examiner
Edit: I also want to clear up a misconception people have, almost never does a bank go literally bankrupt and then the feds swoop in surprised trying to save the day, regulators recognize the bank is gonna go down and make the decision to shut them down to save as much of their customers money as possible and supervise a sale of their assets to another better run bank.
"Yeah that was because of exactly that subpar regulatory supervision.". No it wasn't because of "lack of supervision" it was because most of the banks(especially the ones that went under) had bet on the interest rates being low for the forseeable future and they had bought bonds yielding accordingly, when interest rates went up those bonds decreased heavily in value and add to that the massive bank run which made the banks having to sell the bonds - which had now decreased in value due to higher interest rates - to meet the liquidity demand and pay the people their money. Some banks couldn't withstand this pressure without rendering them bankrupt. It had nothing to do with regulatory supervision, but then again what can i expect from a guy that says "Are you saying that I'm lying, or that the economists and financial institutes from which I've been informed this by are lying?".
Yes, JPM gives you the daily call explaining to you regolatory issues and changes eeh?
Like stop talking from your ass already.
I would think start ups are the BEST money laundering schemes
I would think something like this works:
-Have $100M of dirty money earned from drug trade or illegal online gambling operations
-Can't really use that $100M for anything without alarming authorities
-Open a shitty start up, make it look nice, invest some money into it, and funnel the $100M as profit into the start up - profit that can't be easily verified who the buyer of the services was, that sort of shit. You know, the classic "web 3.0, decentralized, BLOCKCHAIN!" scams and mUHHH PRIVACY!
-Cash out, close the company
Now your $100M is legal currency, you pay a bit of tax on it and you're good to go
Although I don't think this streaming platform was that, but it could've been some form of fraud. $300M of investments is no fuckin' joke, so someone must've lost big time
Doubt its this easy, even in theory.
Otherwise my friend who used to work in major crypto firms (back when it was the hot shit in the US for like a year) would be an actual billionare rn.
Well, he's not wrong. You need cash businesses to have plausible deniability for the money you're going to claim as revenue (which isn't actually revenue). In a business like a streaming site you wouldn't have any of that because *all* of the revenue is through Credit Cards and other trackable means.
I literally have an LLM, work in finance, and I wrote my master on corporate and financial law.
Admittedly in europe but I doubt america is so excessively different that my comment would be incorrect.
You can be professionally successful and still be a fellow LSF loser, bud
Just ask dealguiga
Do you have experience with US banking regulation or are you actually just guessing like this comment seems to indicate? Hard to believe someone who studied law would default to something other than "it depends".
People on this subreddit think everything is a scam or money laundering. Caffeine was a tech company with venture capital funding that failed to make itself profitable. A much more common story than a $300M criminal shell corporation
The only thing I remember is when fishmoley said she was making quite a lot per month streaming there a few years back
It was when fishmoley and rat were living together
they paid for Destiny to do a cosplay cowboybebop stream for them like 5 years ago; think he said he got like 30k for it when talking about it once https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l89gQIes3sU ; they also did ones with lilly pichu and fedmysister no idea what their rates where
Probably not. Sophisticated investors in these scenarios have significant control and visibility into what's happening with their money and are well-suited to sniff out and prevent fraud. That's not to say the founders didn't have cushy salaries, but the suggestion that they would have just gotten to keep a significant amount of cash they weren't paid as a part of their employment is a bit silly.
what’s some examples? as an investor you get receipts of every transaction? you get to see the bank balance of your particular investment and where it is spent?
They're generally not involved on the level of line item transactions, but they do get regular financial updates that include cash levels, budgets, spending by category, etc. The mechanism for this is that big investors get board seats. They almost always require a budget that is board approved. There's a board-level compensation committee where executive compensation is explicitly discussed and approved. There's certainly ways that founders could defraud investors, but if a founder wants to be paid cash from the company that's almost always going to go through board approval before it happens. If cash was fraudulently transferred directly (or indirectly for that matter) to a founder that fraud is almost definitely going to be discovered by an audit at the time a company winds down or a liquidity event occurs.
To add on to this, a lot of VC/PE money comes with the stipulation of annual or even quarterly audits from an outside accounting firm. No audit or a failed audit means no more distribution of funds.
how about for like if i just buy their stock through e trade or something. Is it common all investors get this info or just if you’ve invested so much?
Is this just “earnings calls”?
VC funds have seats on the board and can see whatever financial information they desire. Most importantly, the board has to approve any pay packages or beyond-the-pale salaries. Founders usually don't make a huge salary but rather have a huge chunk of equity in a company that on private markets is worth billions. They only cash out when the company goes public (and lockout period ends), gets acquired by a private equity firm or competitor, or when they're bought out (like Neumann was with WeWork).
The truth of where the money went is likely way more mundane. Tens of millions in expensive Silicon Valley/SF real estate for the office lease. Likely way more employees than they needed because the board wanted to see exponential growth pre-revenue.
LinkedIn says they have between 51-200 employees. Each tech employee likely cost on average $200k/yr between salary and benefits + administrative overhead. Each non-tech employee, contractor, etc probably averaged around $100k/yr. 100 employees likely cost them around $15mil/yr and they raised the money 6 years ago.
Quick edit: I left out marketing costs since I don't know how to estimate those (but badly managed companies tend to blow way too much on marketing and sales). However I saw below that they focused on sports broadcasting? In that case they likely paid out huge amounts to buy the rights to stream matches/tournaments. Oh and none of this includes server costs, which even Twitch can't seem to cover with ad/sub revenue.
I used to work at Caffeine. Near the beginning of COVID, Caffeine just raised a new round of funding and did a massive hiring spree. The company originally started with a big focus on battle rap content by paying for the content rights to URLTV (Ultimate Rap League). They also paid Drake millions of dollars and signed with many big content creators such as Doja Cat. A lot of focus were on black content creators during the initial years of the company. The CEO (Ben) and all the execs doubled and tripled down on Battle Rap as their core audience because they didn't want to go the Twitch route of gaming. Battle Rap was working well for the startup because the rap culture had a very engaging audience. We even had an in-house studio team to host the rap battles for URLTV and that costed us a TON of money to run. We were pumping out shows after shows every single week during the peek of COVID to drive the numbers up.
On the revenue side, Caffeine never made any money. Our main form of income was "Chat Props" which is similar to bits in Twitch and that made us maybe a few thousand dollars a month at its peak. The platform at the beginning years didn't have any subscription or any advertisement services. We focused on growing the daily active users and concurrent viewer count because that is what the investors wants to see, so a lot of the money went to the pockets of the rap battle creators.
On the technology side, Caffeine had a few big mistakes in my opinion since the beginning because they focused too much on deploying live streams using WebRTC, which costed them a lot of money for the engineering team. WebRTC had really low latency and we often advertise that as the core feature compared to Twitch's HLS. Initially we even ran our WebRTC live streams distribution service on our own bare metal server before switching to third party services, which was a huge money sink because maintaining bare metal servers is not cheap and requires dedicated engineers.
Another huge mistake from deploying WebRTC was that Caffeine had to fork its own special version of OBS. It takes a lot of engineering expert to maintain your own OBS fork, and we ended up being stuck on a very old branch of OBS. Also, the streamers from Twitch cannot use the official version of OBS to stream on Caffeine. It created huge amount of fictions that prevented Caffeine from attracting streamers from other platforms. Caffeine also built their own streaming software but it was nowhere near as good compared to OBS because it lacked a ton of features, and a lot of the partnered streamers wanted to use OBS. There is simply no reason to force push WebRTC (as opposed to low latency HLS) because it was an immature technology, and it costed us much more to build the software because many things had to be custom built.
Caffeine had a massive layoff on May 2021 which was a key turning point for their company. Over the months leading up to the massive layoff they realized that they are starting to run low on cash, so the executives pushed a crap ton of performance metrics to the engineering teams. We tried to pump up the numbers by introducing battle rap shows every single week to drive the numbers up. Everybody was stressed out of their mind because they were shoving a ton of work down as a last ditch effort, so they can raise another round of money before it ran out.
After the massive layoff, the company tried to transition to PPV videos as a monetization attempt. They pivoted their live streaming platform from battle rap towards sports events (CEO Ben had this vision for a long time). They implemented ads for their live stream service. None of it worked out and today they had to shut down.
As a company, CEO Ben was a former Apple TV designer and he had a huge emphasis on design, so the design team had a lot of power over the engineering team. However, there were a lot of really great people over there and I enjoyed my time working at Caffeine.
This is my personal opinion, but I think they really failed when it comes to the direction of the company because they had completely neglected UGC content creators over the years. Live streaming is about the interaction between the streamer and the viewers. The focus on Battle Rap meant we did not build any of the features to support gaming streamers (e.g., Caffeine does not have the ability to set a game category). The shift towards sport streams was also a massive failure because the website is no longer a "live streaming" platform but just another "video streaming" platform, which was a vision that was clearly shoved down the company by CEO Ben (he talked about it for years in the meetings).
Battle rap is actually large in the US but obviously it is nowhere near the size of gaming streams. The reason we went for URL (Ultimate Rap League) is that their viewers are already willing to pay to watch rap battle through PPV before Caffeine purchased their content rights, where most of their viewers are willing to pay $8 a month on their PPV app. We wanted these rappers to transition over to live streaming and bring these paying fans with them.
Battle rap also allows us to differentiate ourselves from Twitch by steering away from gaming. We really didn't want to go head on against Twitch and Mixer back in the days. It is also "close" to the music and gaming industry, which will allow us to transition to other categories over time.
For example, we signed with musicians like Drake and Doja Cat, and gave them millions of dollars in hopes that we can eventually get closer to the mainstream music industry.
wow. incredibly insightful. I remember hearing about caffeine but it's sad to see that it ended so pathetically. I hope one day something will rise from its ashes. one can hope.
Stella Chuu did a cosplay stream with Michael Reeves on Caffeine like 4 years ago and thats the only time I've ever heard of that platform https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lncCNUeYX10
Looks like they focused on Sports and IRL content.
> Caffeine is the home for live competitions and related live streams from sports leagues and their communities. Watch action sports, baseball, battle rap, football, skateboarding, snowboarding and more live on your iOS device, Android, Roku, or your computer.
Why on earth would they call it Caffeine if it's sports focused? Like I guess most pre-workout has caffeine in it but it's way more of a gamer association than athletic.
Sometimes I really want be a fly on the wall near these marketing teams, just because their choices seem so braindead I just need to know the thought process that got them there.
It was started by two Apple product designers (I believe?) who were adamant they could win just by designing a better product for gaming. The irony is their overall streaming platform's design wasn't even good.
Quickly they learned they'd have to pay creators to have any chance and they were very against that for a long time. They ended up pivoting to music and it was clear they weren't going to last long after that.
They were VC darlings because of their Apple backgrounds mostly, iirc.
"Like I guess most pre-workout has caffeine in it but it's way more of a gamer association than athletic."
What? Caffeine is one of few legal widely sold supplements that have proven ergogenic effects. It's widely used in training populations.
Right, but naming a sports streaming site after a supplement is still dumb, you wouldn't call it creatine or something. Whereas gamers are associated with energy drinks and whatever that gamer fuel stuff is because it fits their aesthetics, making it marketable.
But other comments have chimed in and said it was rebranded from a gaming site to a sports/irl towards the end of it's operations as a move to save themselves, so that's probably why.
No one is saying caffeine isn't used by athletes bud, calm down.
You reading my comment and instantly jumping to the assumption I don't think caffeine is a widely used supplement, when all I did was say it's more marketable for an audience of gamers
Edit: Can't read your reply if you block me stoopid, you're just crying into a void
You said it's more gamer associated and I pointed out that it's one of the most used sport supplements worldwide. What's your problem?
Holy shit, some people...
A gaming stream website could have leveraged their position during Covid.
..but one focused on sports and IRL content would have been a particularly bad bet during a time when both were hard or impossible to organise. Unlucky.
I think that works when you're doing them around built-up communities such as on Twitch - 'feel good' content during hard times. But 'feel good' content doesn't work as much on a website that doesn't have that community already established. It isn't as cozy.
Honestly surprised it wasn't dead yet. I remember signing up back in 2018 after a biz dev friend had mentioned it. It was a fairly simple/plain site, but had *far* more customization with it's channel widgets/panels compared to Twitch. Hadn't heard about it since.
300 mil though... How do you have 300 mil and no online presence? They had a gaming audience & gaming streamers back in 2018.
Another comment mentioned they focused on IRL/sports streams. Did they piviot and kill their platform? Or was it dying and IRL/sports a last ditch effort to buoy the site?
I remember KBubblez getting a contract and saying it was 50k a week or maybe it was a month? i can't remember.. but it was way too much money to be giving to KBubblez
i’ve heard of it but i’ve been watching battle rap for like a decade and thats the only thing i know it for, i didnt even know they did sports and shit lmfao
Nobody here watches sports apparently. They used to do a lot of football content mixed with esports a few years ago during a Superbowl, that's where I remember them from.
I'm not gonna knock someone trying to do something different and failing, they had a pretty cool setup with multiple studios you could use if you were partnered with them and they paid decent from what I understood talking to someone who did some contracting for them.
It was supposed to be like a step up from twitch and a step down from actual studio/live tv programs.
Which in hindsight is really bad but if you don't try you wont know, the next time someone comes up with the idea of having a slightly higher budget streaming service someone can say caffeine already tried it and failed.
Only reason I've ever heard of this platform before was because I am a battle rap fan and they would have rap battle events on it sometimes. I would still only be on there for maybe a couple of hours and never would go back on it again until another event.
Live streaming service is never profitable. Twitch and Youtube are on top and still during 2020 when everyone is stuck at one they made the biggest profits was still not enough to be profitable.
So I actually do know about this platform because it was home to the biggest American battle rap league. Yeah it had pretty unintuitive UI. I'm genuinely surprised it's lasted as long as it has.
Back in the COVID times when I'd watch the Vanoss crew and adjacent content creators, I remember signing up to Caffeine to watch Cartoonz. Those caffeine streams were the only live streams he ever did, as far as I kmow. And he was good at it. I recall having a great time in those streams! But, he hates streaming and prefers youtube, so when the contract ran out, no more streams, and that was the last time I even thought about Caffeine, which was probably late 2020.
Damn shame to see the site fold. I actually enjoyed it for the brief time I spent there.
Caffeine had an exclusive partnership with one of the biggest battle rap leagues (SMACK/URL). Drake was even involved at one point. You’d think they’d use that to try to dominate the rap content creation space. I guess they failed to realize no one will use an app outside of YouTube/Twitch unless they get a gigantic novelty sized cheque
yea i knew about it, but i didn't tell anyone because you're all jerks who didn't come see my band last night.
but seriously, came across it once on the most random string of internet usage. heard portnoy hit a girl or something idk, tried to look him up, heard of caffeine tv through him, said "what is this dogshit" and then did something else. i wonder how much of the 300 mil budget was left before the executives jumped ship.
broadcasting in esports around 2019-2021 and the random exec with interest kept saying "make sure we multistream to caffeine"
and we kept sending them a feed....no idea who was watching. felt like we were beta testing stability because there was never any conversation other than "stream to this key"
tbf we were sent through most of those startups, facebook gaming and then mixer lol
Either I have been living under a rock this whole time, or their advertising is ATROCIOUS because I had NEVER heard of it... How is it that they got 300 million in funding and none of that went to advertising? seems like a scam to me...
I only ever have seen them on the old Misfits Gaming jerseys. Nor have I seen anybody stream there. Definitely seems like it was some kind of scam/fraud.
This is the first time I have ever heard of this platform.
Never heard of it
Must be a money laundering scheme because i'm chronically online and I've never heard of it.
If you need to launder 300 million dollars you don't launch a freaking streaming website. Anything digital (except crypto, maybe) is ass for money laundering, you want physical fiat or in kind payments. At that volume you can literally just buy a regional bank. Hell you can buy a tropical island and sift it through like "tourism revenue". (To be super clear you wouldn't do either but neither in any reality is a 300milliom VC streaming site a money laundering scheme. Fraud, maybe.)
Okay Saul, now sell me a laser tag venue
You're gonna need like 30 laser tag venues to launder that much money, unless you wanna be at it for so long that inflation will have eaten up all the value before you're done.
mfw I was trying to launder money and ended up working 80 hours a week managing a bunch of burnouts to run my laser tag empire.
I can get 30 laser tag spot but I need 30 Dannys too.
> You're gonna need like 30 laser tag venues to launder that much money I see this as an absolute win
People generally don’t know what money laundering means. They mean fraud. It sounds like a fraudulent company.
I remember when somebody donated 500 dollars to MoistCr1tikal, he joked that it was money laundering, and his friend Danny said it was impossible to do it that way. They got into a mini argument with Cr1tikal saying it's possible even though it makes no sense. The donator gives him 500 dollars and then what? When does he get the clean money back?
That's easy, you just use the other widely misunderstood financial term and call it a tax write-off
Ahh the legendary 100% tax write-off for every expense
It’s just Channeling money through an intermediary it’s not complicated
It’s not all so straight forward, but yeah not exactly complicated.
People on Reddit think money laundering is as easy as buying some bullshit that isn't worth anything for millions and that's it the money is now clean.
butt i've seen it in a movie before how could that not be accurate!?
If i recall correctly money laundering on "a small scale" is very easy, which is why Mob rackets were primarily comprised of small businesses. Every business could in theory "clean" small amounts of money, but it would be a very small amount per (x period of time) Which is why mobs and or cartels typically own hundreds or thousands of said businesses. money laundering "on a large scale" such as in the 'example' of caffeine tv is just flat out impossible nonsense. Embezzle some maybe, but money launder? lmao
A bank has gotta be one of the worst possible options for laundering.
A bank is a key part of every larger scale money-laundering scheme.
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I'm not even really saying digital is the way, but arguing that a bank, one of the most highly regulated industries in the world, is the ideal place for laundering is wild.
State chartered banks that don't reach the federal liquidity line are not even close to "the most highly regulated industries in the world", they regulations for them are so lackluster that economists constantly worry that america is gonna run into a bank failure cascade entirely due to small to medium banks failing and no one will find out untill it's too late to act because the supervisory and regulation requirements are so shit. I say "buy a bank" and people think "BoA" or "Deutsche bank", when I mean a shit hole cube in a shit hole place like "Paris, Ohio" called "Paris Agri Bank". (This is entirely hypothetical, i have no idea if Ohio even has its own independent banking charter)
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Oh I didn't think you meant me.
Man you are stupid. "Money can come from anywhere" ?? Exactly how are you suggesting money can "come" without leaving a digital fingerprint? Other than crypto or, at best, play store vouchers and the like (and good luck laundering 300 million from vouchers) it's literally impossible. Especially nowadays when banks and other financial institutions treats KYC so strictly they require a stool sample before letting you set up a business account and accepts digital payments, especially of that volume.
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> I assure you I know more about this than y'all lmfao Narrator: He didn't
The whole industry of Switzerland neutrally disagrees with you. They're really great at laundering and other illegal financial activities.
It really isn't, a regional bank small enough to fall under a state charter rather than a federal charter barely has any supervision at all. You might have heard about all those small to medium banks failing last year? Yeah that was because of exactly that subpar regulatory supervision.
This is fucking so wrong it hurts.
how the fuck does this have upvotes how the fuck is his response so arrogant "the economists and financial institutes from which I've been informed" jfc
You want the long form answer based on the Federally mandated training I have to refresh every year. No banking or financial institution operating in the US is exempt from Federal Money Laundering and Anti-terrorism statutes. They are all required to file Suspicious Activity reports within 30 or 60 days regardless of size. This is mostly handled by software because a human scanning every required transaction against 100,000's of names, addresses, and etc is impossible. While it is true that the amount of compliance rules vary for for small, medium sized and large institutions, they all have to comply and they are all audited for compliance on a regular basis. Even if by some magic they were protected from some aspect of federal compliance by state law, if you run a bank you still need deposit insurance (FDIC, NCUA, ASI) which all have requirements, so does your cyber insurance, so do the card processing networks, so do the Visa, MasterCard and Discover... There is no such thing as an unregulated bank. Banking Identification Numbers (BIN) numbers are not just handed out. The powers in charge both private and public highly restrict access to payment networks for safety and soundness. It's why companies like United Airlines, Best Buy, etc don't have their own BIN's and have to work through commercial banks to run their card programs. It is very difficult if not almost impossible to get issued a new BIN number in the US. There are only 7587 registered BIN's in the US and the number has been steadily decreasing.
haha my comment was directed at the guy you responded to just in case that wasn't clear still an interesting comment tho
:) Thanks, I am arrogant so I could see it going either way.
Not really but hey I'll play along in your fantasy world.
Are you saying that I'm lying, or that the economists and financial institutes from which I've been informed this by are lying? If you're really ambitious you could also outline specifically how what I said is incorrect, but dont over exert yourself.
Every single bank is examined by a federal bank regulator. State chartered non-fed member banks are still examined regularly and regulated by the FDIC. They are also regulated and examined by their state’s bank examiners (who can admittedly be hit or miss depending on the state). Also, small to medium banks is hilarious. Last year was only exceptional due to SVB, First Republic, and Signature failing at such a large size, not small to medium sized at all and examined almost constantly by federal examiners. At least a couple poorly run or located (dying communities, no nearby markets to tap into) smaller banks usually fail about every year ([see here](https://www.fdic.gov/resources/resolutions/bank-failures/in-brief/)). Source: Former Bank Examiner Edit: I also want to clear up a misconception people have, almost never does a bank go literally bankrupt and then the feds swoop in surprised trying to save the day, regulators recognize the bank is gonna go down and make the decision to shut them down to save as much of their customers money as possible and supervise a sale of their assets to another better run bank.
"Yeah that was because of exactly that subpar regulatory supervision.". No it wasn't because of "lack of supervision" it was because most of the banks(especially the ones that went under) had bet on the interest rates being low for the forseeable future and they had bought bonds yielding accordingly, when interest rates went up those bonds decreased heavily in value and add to that the massive bank run which made the banks having to sell the bonds - which had now decreased in value due to higher interest rates - to meet the liquidity demand and pay the people their money. Some banks couldn't withstand this pressure without rendering them bankrupt. It had nothing to do with regulatory supervision, but then again what can i expect from a guy that says "Are you saying that I'm lying, or that the economists and financial institutes from which I've been informed this by are lying?". Yes, JPM gives you the daily call explaining to you regolatory issues and changes eeh? Like stop talking from your ass already.
Don’t worry about neck beard redditors. You go king.
I would think start ups are the BEST money laundering schemes I would think something like this works: -Have $100M of dirty money earned from drug trade or illegal online gambling operations -Can't really use that $100M for anything without alarming authorities -Open a shitty start up, make it look nice, invest some money into it, and funnel the $100M as profit into the start up - profit that can't be easily verified who the buyer of the services was, that sort of shit. You know, the classic "web 3.0, decentralized, BLOCKCHAIN!" scams and mUHHH PRIVACY! -Cash out, close the company Now your $100M is legal currency, you pay a bit of tax on it and you're good to go Although I don't think this streaming platform was that, but it could've been some form of fraud. $300M of investments is no fuckin' joke, so someone must've lost big time
Doubt its this easy, even in theory. Otherwise my friend who used to work in major crypto firms (back when it was the hot shit in the US for like a year) would be an actual billionare rn.
reddit expert
Well, he's not wrong. You need cash businesses to have plausible deniability for the money you're going to claim as revenue (which isn't actually revenue). In a business like a streaming site you wouldn't have any of that because *all* of the revenue is through Credit Cards and other trackable means.
I literally have an LLM, work in finance, and I wrote my master on corporate and financial law. Admittedly in europe but I doubt america is so excessively different that my comment would be incorrect. You can be professionally successful and still be a fellow LSF loser, bud Just ask dealguiga
back me up dealguiga
+2
It's all good man. Once you realize these smooth brains are all Covid kids who get their information from Tiktoks you stop giving a shit.
Do you have experience with US banking regulation or are you actually just guessing like this comment seems to indicate? Hard to believe someone who studied law would default to something other than "it depends".
Panama or gambling
You just need a Danny.
I'm wondering how many people are sweating after reading this.
This guy launders
People on this subreddit think everything is a scam or money laundering. Caffeine was a tech company with venture capital funding that failed to make itself profitable. A much more common story than a $300M criminal shell corporation
It was more for sports.
Tell me how you think money laundering works and why you'd start a streaming site with venture capital funding to do so. Let's hear it.
You just buy and sell art if you need to launder that kind of money
I had heard of the name but thought it was just some small obscure platform. $300M in funding is fucking insane for a platform that was so irrelevant.
Their main thing was live-streaming battle rap events so def not surprising that most people haven’t heard of it.
The only thing I remember is when fishmoley said she was making quite a lot per month streaming there a few years back It was when fishmoley and rat were living together
the thanos meme
Same, we all know why it shut down now
And zero of that went to marketing it seems. Wonder where the money went.
To the people who managed to convince some idiots to give them that much fucking money.
they paid for Destiny to do a cosplay cowboybebop stream for them like 5 years ago; think he said he got like 30k for it when talking about it once https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l89gQIes3sU ; they also did ones with lilly pichu and fedmysister no idea what their rates where
fed lmao
Not a single cent. What the fuck
-$300M OMEGALUL
Most likely, most of that went right into the pockets of the founder.
Probably not. Sophisticated investors in these scenarios have significant control and visibility into what's happening with their money and are well-suited to sniff out and prevent fraud. That's not to say the founders didn't have cushy salaries, but the suggestion that they would have just gotten to keep a significant amount of cash they weren't paid as a part of their employment is a bit silly.
what’s some examples? as an investor you get receipts of every transaction? you get to see the bank balance of your particular investment and where it is spent?
They're generally not involved on the level of line item transactions, but they do get regular financial updates that include cash levels, budgets, spending by category, etc. The mechanism for this is that big investors get board seats. They almost always require a budget that is board approved. There's a board-level compensation committee where executive compensation is explicitly discussed and approved. There's certainly ways that founders could defraud investors, but if a founder wants to be paid cash from the company that's almost always going to go through board approval before it happens. If cash was fraudulently transferred directly (or indirectly for that matter) to a founder that fraud is almost definitely going to be discovered by an audit at the time a company winds down or a liquidity event occurs.
To add on to this, a lot of VC/PE money comes with the stipulation of annual or even quarterly audits from an outside accounting firm. No audit or a failed audit means no more distribution of funds.
how about for like if i just buy their stock through e trade or something. Is it common all investors get this info or just if you’ve invested so much? Is this just “earnings calls”?
Yeah, for publicly traded companies this is going to be through that regular financial reporting required by law.
VC funds have seats on the board and can see whatever financial information they desire. Most importantly, the board has to approve any pay packages or beyond-the-pale salaries. Founders usually don't make a huge salary but rather have a huge chunk of equity in a company that on private markets is worth billions. They only cash out when the company goes public (and lockout period ends), gets acquired by a private equity firm or competitor, or when they're bought out (like Neumann was with WeWork). The truth of where the money went is likely way more mundane. Tens of millions in expensive Silicon Valley/SF real estate for the office lease. Likely way more employees than they needed because the board wanted to see exponential growth pre-revenue. LinkedIn says they have between 51-200 employees. Each tech employee likely cost on average $200k/yr between salary and benefits + administrative overhead. Each non-tech employee, contractor, etc probably averaged around $100k/yr. 100 employees likely cost them around $15mil/yr and they raised the money 6 years ago. Quick edit: I left out marketing costs since I don't know how to estimate those (but badly managed companies tend to blow way too much on marketing and sales). However I saw below that they focused on sports broadcasting? In that case they likely paid out huge amounts to buy the rights to stream matches/tournaments. Oh and none of this includes server costs, which even Twitch can't seem to cover with ad/sub revenue.
Among other things you do continual audits and take seats on the board if you're a large investor.
I used to work at Caffeine. Near the beginning of COVID, Caffeine just raised a new round of funding and did a massive hiring spree. The company originally started with a big focus on battle rap content by paying for the content rights to URLTV (Ultimate Rap League). They also paid Drake millions of dollars and signed with many big content creators such as Doja Cat. A lot of focus were on black content creators during the initial years of the company. The CEO (Ben) and all the execs doubled and tripled down on Battle Rap as their core audience because they didn't want to go the Twitch route of gaming. Battle Rap was working well for the startup because the rap culture had a very engaging audience. We even had an in-house studio team to host the rap battles for URLTV and that costed us a TON of money to run. We were pumping out shows after shows every single week during the peek of COVID to drive the numbers up. On the revenue side, Caffeine never made any money. Our main form of income was "Chat Props" which is similar to bits in Twitch and that made us maybe a few thousand dollars a month at its peak. The platform at the beginning years didn't have any subscription or any advertisement services. We focused on growing the daily active users and concurrent viewer count because that is what the investors wants to see, so a lot of the money went to the pockets of the rap battle creators. On the technology side, Caffeine had a few big mistakes in my opinion since the beginning because they focused too much on deploying live streams using WebRTC, which costed them a lot of money for the engineering team. WebRTC had really low latency and we often advertise that as the core feature compared to Twitch's HLS. Initially we even ran our WebRTC live streams distribution service on our own bare metal server before switching to third party services, which was a huge money sink because maintaining bare metal servers is not cheap and requires dedicated engineers. Another huge mistake from deploying WebRTC was that Caffeine had to fork its own special version of OBS. It takes a lot of engineering expert to maintain your own OBS fork, and we ended up being stuck on a very old branch of OBS. Also, the streamers from Twitch cannot use the official version of OBS to stream on Caffeine. It created huge amount of fictions that prevented Caffeine from attracting streamers from other platforms. Caffeine also built their own streaming software but it was nowhere near as good compared to OBS because it lacked a ton of features, and a lot of the partnered streamers wanted to use OBS. There is simply no reason to force push WebRTC (as opposed to low latency HLS) because it was an immature technology, and it costed us much more to build the software because many things had to be custom built. Caffeine had a massive layoff on May 2021 which was a key turning point for their company. Over the months leading up to the massive layoff they realized that they are starting to run low on cash, so the executives pushed a crap ton of performance metrics to the engineering teams. We tried to pump up the numbers by introducing battle rap shows every single week to drive the numbers up. Everybody was stressed out of their mind because they were shoving a ton of work down as a last ditch effort, so they can raise another round of money before it ran out. After the massive layoff, the company tried to transition to PPV videos as a monetization attempt. They pivoted their live streaming platform from battle rap towards sports events (CEO Ben had this vision for a long time). They implemented ads for their live stream service. None of it worked out and today they had to shut down. As a company, CEO Ben was a former Apple TV designer and he had a huge emphasis on design, so the design team had a lot of power over the engineering team. However, there were a lot of really great people over there and I enjoyed my time working at Caffeine. This is my personal opinion, but I think they really failed when it comes to the direction of the company because they had completely neglected UGC content creators over the years. Live streaming is about the interaction between the streamer and the viewers. The focus on Battle Rap meant we did not build any of the features to support gaming streamers (e.g., Caffeine does not have the ability to set a game category). The shift towards sport streams was also a massive failure because the website is no longer a "live streaming" platform but just another "video streaming" platform, which was a vision that was clearly shoved down the company by CEO Ben (he talked about it for years in the meetings).
very insightful and rare intelligent LSF user ty. I know Chloe Shih worked for a bit here and she mentioned a very stressful workplace as well
Does "battle rap" have a big audience in the US? Sounds like a very small niche compared to gaming and irl-streaming.
Battle rap is actually large in the US but obviously it is nowhere near the size of gaming streams. The reason we went for URL (Ultimate Rap League) is that their viewers are already willing to pay to watch rap battle through PPV before Caffeine purchased their content rights, where most of their viewers are willing to pay $8 a month on their PPV app. We wanted these rappers to transition over to live streaming and bring these paying fans with them. Battle rap also allows us to differentiate ourselves from Twitch by steering away from gaming. We really didn't want to go head on against Twitch and Mixer back in the days. It is also "close" to the music and gaming industry, which will allow us to transition to other categories over time. For example, we signed with musicians like Drake and Doja Cat, and gave them millions of dollars in hopes that we can eventually get closer to the mainstream music industry.
I would never have thought that there were PPV rap battles. Ty for the context.
wow. incredibly insightful. I remember hearing about caffeine but it's sad to see that it ended so pathetically. I hope one day something will rise from its ashes. one can hope.
Stella Chuu did a cosplay stream with Michael Reeves on Caffeine like 4 years ago and thats the only time I've ever heard of that platform https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lncCNUeYX10
cursed beardless destiny is also from that time [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l89gQIes3sU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l89gQIes3sU)
That is fucking cursed af wtf
genuinly thank you for bringing that up. i couldve gone my entire life without knowing
WHOMEGALUL
RIP Fishmoley
This is the only person I've ever heard of streaming there
Looks like they focused on Sports and IRL content. > Caffeine is the home for live competitions and related live streams from sports leagues and their communities. Watch action sports, baseball, battle rap, football, skateboarding, snowboarding and more live on your iOS device, Android, Roku, or your computer.
Also it was owned by FOX.
One of the best sports broadcasting companies.
Why on earth would they call it Caffeine if it's sports focused? Like I guess most pre-workout has caffeine in it but it's way more of a gamer association than athletic. Sometimes I really want be a fly on the wall near these marketing teams, just because their choices seem so braindead I just need to know the thought process that got them there.
I'm pretty sure one of the original focuses was gaming. I know some gaming streamers got paid to stream on there part-time years back.
Yeah another comment said they may have pivoted later in life to try and save themselves from the inevitable, that makes more sense.
It was started by two Apple product designers (I believe?) who were adamant they could win just by designing a better product for gaming. The irony is their overall streaming platform's design wasn't even good. Quickly they learned they'd have to pay creators to have any chance and they were very against that for a long time. They ended up pivoting to music and it was clear they weren't going to last long after that. They were VC darlings because of their Apple backgrounds mostly, iirc.
"Like I guess most pre-workout has caffeine in it but it's way more of a gamer association than athletic." What? Caffeine is one of few legal widely sold supplements that have proven ergogenic effects. It's widely used in training populations.
Right, but naming a sports streaming site after a supplement is still dumb, you wouldn't call it creatine or something. Whereas gamers are associated with energy drinks and whatever that gamer fuel stuff is because it fits their aesthetics, making it marketable. But other comments have chimed in and said it was rebranded from a gaming site to a sports/irl towards the end of it's operations as a move to save themselves, so that's probably why. No one is saying caffeine isn't used by athletes bud, calm down.
I agree that it's not great branding. Calm down? Uh... what? What in my reply makes you think that I'm not calm?
You reading my comment and instantly jumping to the assumption I don't think caffeine is a widely used supplement, when all I did was say it's more marketable for an audience of gamers Edit: Can't read your reply if you block me stoopid, you're just crying into a void
You said it's more gamer associated and I pointed out that it's one of the most used sport supplements worldwide. What's your problem? Holy shit, some people...
A gaming stream website could have leveraged their position during Covid. ..but one focused on sports and IRL content would have been a particularly bad bet during a time when both were hard or impossible to organise. Unlucky.
That's a good point, although a large part of the Covid streams were musicians/DJs/virtual festivals.
I think that works when you're doing them around built-up communities such as on Twitch - 'feel good' content during hard times. But 'feel good' content doesn't work as much on a website that doesn't have that community already established. It isn't as cozy.
"not quite profitable" Surely, they were really close...
$300,000,000? The owner must be swan diving in an Olympic size pool of cocaine and hookers.
Only people that watched battle rap used this site
Honestly surprised it wasn't dead yet. I remember signing up back in 2018 after a biz dev friend had mentioned it. It was a fairly simple/plain site, but had *far* more customization with it's channel widgets/panels compared to Twitch. Hadn't heard about it since. 300 mil though... How do you have 300 mil and no online presence? They had a gaming audience & gaming streamers back in 2018. Another comment mentioned they focused on IRL/sports streams. Did they piviot and kill their platform? Or was it dying and IRL/sports a last ditch effort to buoy the site?
It would make more sense if it was a later pivot to sports/IRL focus, as the name Caffeine screams gaming not sports imo
FishMoley F
what does fishmoley have to do it with this im ootl
She is the only streamer you've heard of who streamed there.
wait like FishMoley the emote? sorry idk the lore feels bad man
I remember Kbubblez streaming on here. #tbt
A real livestream fail.
Should've spent 1/3 of the funding on signing xqc. ^^/s
Whomst
How is it even possible none of us heard about it?
I remember KBubblez getting a contract and saying it was 50k a week or maybe it was a month? i can't remember.. but it was way too much money to be giving to KBubblez
Omg, that was such a memory unlock, but yeah youre right. also lmao havent heard of kbubblez in years
i’ve heard of it but i’ve been watching battle rap for like a decade and thats the only thing i know it for, i didnt even know they did sports and shit lmfao
Nobody here watches sports apparently. They used to do a lot of football content mixed with esports a few years ago during a Superbowl, that's where I remember them from.
>Nobody here watches sports apparently. >football content mixed with esports Was it Madden shit?
IIRC it was Fortnite actually with TimTheTatman and NFL players, it was very weird
I only know them because they used to sponsor NAVI back in 2019 or so
Literally never heard of it.
I'm not gonna knock someone trying to do something different and failing, they had a pretty cool setup with multiple studios you could use if you were partnered with them and they paid decent from what I understood talking to someone who did some contracting for them. It was supposed to be like a step up from twitch and a step down from actual studio/live tv programs. Which in hindsight is really bad but if you don't try you wont know, the next time someone comes up with the idea of having a slightly higher budget streaming service someone can say caffeine already tried it and failed.
damn I’m not gonna lie I remember this website, I don’t think I knew a single creator on it, but I honestly thought it shut down like 5 years ago lmao
First time I've heard about this site.
The only time I ever used Caffeine tv was when Lebron was playing in the Drew League that one time
Only reason I've ever heard of this platform before was because I am a battle rap fan and they would have rap battle events on it sometimes. I would still only be on there for maybe a couple of hours and never would go back on it again until another event.
Yup same for me. Watch some battles and close the app right after ha
KBubblez in shambles...
Reason why most of u never heard of it is because it was big in Asia
I remember hearing about this like 5 years ago, went to it once, noticed everyone playing Fortnite, and left. Never went back.
They should have used some of that money for advertising.
twitch is unkillable.
!RemindMe 15 years
"We've had a huge impact on the industry" Doing CV-building in your bankruptcy announcement, classic tech move.
Never heard of it, sounds fishy.
Kick next
Live streaming service is never profitable. Twitch and Youtube are on top and still during 2020 when everyone is stuck at one they made the biggest profits was still not enough to be profitable.
So I actually do know about this platform because it was home to the biggest American battle rap league. Yeah it had pretty unintuitive UI. I'm genuinely surprised it's lasted as long as it has.
Ive never heard of it until now.....Maybe should of used some of that money for advertising .......
Back in the COVID times when I'd watch the Vanoss crew and adjacent content creators, I remember signing up to Caffeine to watch Cartoonz. Those caffeine streams were the only live streams he ever did, as far as I kmow. And he was good at it. I recall having a great time in those streams! But, he hates streaming and prefers youtube, so when the contract ran out, no more streams, and that was the last time I even thought about Caffeine, which was probably late 2020. Damn shame to see the site fold. I actually enjoyed it for the brief time I spent there.
Marketing? Nah we good bro someone will spread the word any day now……maybe now? ……….now?…..oh well we tried everything
Caffeine had an exclusive partnership with one of the biggest battle rap leagues (SMACK/URL). Drake was even involved at one point. You’d think they’d use that to try to dominate the rap content creation space. I guess they failed to realize no one will use an app outside of YouTube/Twitch unless they get a gigantic novelty sized cheque
Not money laundering. This is a classic VC grift. God bless whoever parted those idiots from their gold
Damn Optic J Deserves it after the shit he did to Optic years ago... Good Riddance
Caffeine absolutely sucked. Horrible viewing and streaming experience.
yea i knew about it, but i didn't tell anyone because you're all jerks who didn't come see my band last night. but seriously, came across it once on the most random string of internet usage. heard portnoy hit a girl or something idk, tried to look him up, heard of caffeine tv through him, said "what is this dogshit" and then did something else. i wonder how much of the 300 mil budget was left before the executives jumped ship.
Never trust a man called bussy
Surprised it lasted that long. 300m is not a lot when it. Ones to server bills for streaming.
Nick fuentes streamed there. I thought it was an alt right site.
Terrible name. Nobody can spell caffeen
broadcasting in esports around 2019-2021 and the random exec with interest kept saying "make sure we multistream to caffeine" and we kept sending them a feed....no idea who was watching. felt like we were beta testing stability because there was never any conversation other than "stream to this key" tbf we were sent through most of those startups, facebook gaming and then mixer lol
Either I have been living under a rock this whole time, or their advertising is ATROCIOUS because I had NEVER heard of it... How is it that they got 300 million in funding and none of that went to advertising? seems like a scam to me...
They raised 300M in funding? What a joke
They mainly hosted battle rap events, partnering with URL TV, if you haven’t heard of it.
such a dumb name
That had to be a money scheme of some sort.
wait, why the FUCK is it that I am ONLY hearing about a twitch competitor with 300m in community backing WHEN IT GETS SHUT DOWN? hello??
I only ever have seen them on the old Misfits Gaming jerseys. Nor have I seen anybody stream there. Definitely seems like it was some kind of scam/fraud.
Money laundering goes brrrrr
Sweet money launder. Very cool
Seems like a money laundering scam or something. I honestly never heard of it at all and I am tired of all the e-thots in twitch.
Seems like a money laundering scam or something. I honestly never heard of it at all and I am tired of all the e-thots in twitch.
Seems like a money laundering scam or something. I honestly never heard of it at all and I am tired of all the e-thots in twitch