Moe — Daxos Teardown

Moe is a consumer resale app that treats your possessions like a brokerage account. You point the camera at an item, a vision model identifies it, a valuation call with web search prices it, and it lands in a portfolio with a dollar value that a daily 8am cron re-computes. One tap cross-lists to eBay and Depop through their developer APIs and to Facebook Marketplace through a headless browser driving the user's own logged-in session. Moe charges $9.99/mo after 5 free scans plus 4% of external sales (8% native). The app is real and independently verifiable: App Store id 6759468571, released 2026-08-25, v1.0, 4.33 stars from 12 ratings, seller Market of Everything, Inc. Roadmap (not shipped): item-for-item trading, public profiles, agents that negotiate with buyers, Android.

The pitch is that hyper-collectors and "depop girlies" have closets of idle inventory and no patience for eBay's listing flow, so Moe becomes the consumer-casual front end to every marketplace and eventually the exchange itself. The state of play is much earlier: 967 users on the founder's own Sep 11 dashboard, $175.00 of lifetime GMV across 5 orders, $20.60 of lifetime take-rate revenue, ~25 genuinely paying subscribers implied by $249.75 est. MRR, and an LLM bill ($355.59/30d) larger than all revenue combined. It is one entry in a crowded 2025–26 wave of AI scan-value-list apps, in a category (cross-listing tools) that has never produced a venture-scale outcome.

Call 1 — Sept 10, 71 min (Mark, Joseph, Carlo)

What he claimed: "3,500 users overnight yesterday," ~5,000 downloads, 200–300 users/day "all converting to pro subscriptions" [45:22]; MRR "right around 10k" [50:44]; 70% download-to-subscription [50:33]; sell-through 15–20% in week one [45:35]; avg item GMV $400 [46:29]; team of 7 "all based in the US" [09:16], every engineer 7+ years experience, avg salary ~$125k [52:50–53:39]; DS/ML lead "ran Data Science at DraftKings for the last five years and then three years of Nike" [42:58]; eBay "signed agreements... they're done" [30:47], "full end to end partnership with Meta currently right now" [29:59], Mercado Libre signed, live early Q1 [32:53]; burn $20k/mo, 14 months runway; $700k of the $1M in.

Call 2 — Sept 15, 69 min (Mark, Joseph, Carlo, Jake)

What changed: users became "967... that was Friday... just approaching 2,000 now" [53:38] — his own refutation of 5,000, delivered as if the first claim never happened. MRR was never mentioned again. The 70% became "starting a subscription path" (free trial OR paid) [33:49] — same number, new denominator, no acknowledgment. GMV $400 became "hovered around the same mark, which I think was right, 300" [54:07] — a 25% drop described as unchanged. The all-US team became "a couple of engineers based in Spain," one at 50k EUR, one at 90k EUR [05:47–06:04] — which quietly breaks the $125k-average and 7-years-minimum claims. New extraordinary claims appeared where old ones fell: churn "sub two and a half percent" [34:04] on a one-week beta, and 97% trial-to-paid [41:25], irreconcilable with a $249.75 billing panel. The seed narrative escalated to a16z / Lerer Hippeau / Khosla / Headline / Bling / True "circling," "a couple of them are looking to do term sheets this week" [01:13], conceding "we don't have a term sheet obviously yet" [03:41]. Ownership went "I own 100" → "95" → employees 0.5–1% each → pool "right at like 10% max" [07:12–08:34], which does not add up and confirmed no real cap table exists.

How he handled pushback

Smoothly, never defensively — 140 minutes without irritation. The technique is redefinition and authority-borrowing, not confrontation: the 70% survives by changing its base; Meta risk is answered with an unnamed advisor's blessing and a claimed partnership; fundraise doubt is answered with six VC names (two of them mangled — "Jason Horowitz," "Larrey Hippo"). When a question has no good answer (DAU — asked directly by Joseph [53:13] — MRR update, items actually sold), he answers an adjacent question. The one genuinely candid lane is product limits: video scanning "basically crashes the phone... within 30 seconds" [58:26], the scanner misidentifies (he didn't dispute Jake's own experience of it), tap-to-scan is "basically static photos" dressed up [59:18], churn will rise toward 10% [41:58]. Credibility is bimodal: believable on product, not on metrics, partnerships, or money.

Best quotes

• [C1 45:22] "We gained 3,500 users overnight yesterday and in the last week we've been growing about 200 to 300 users a day, all converting to pro subscriptions."
• [C1 50:35–50:44] "we've had about 5,000 downloads... our MRR right now is right around 10k."
• [C2 53:38] "We're at 967 users on... That was Friday, so four days ago. We're just approaching 2,000 now." — his own refutation of both lines above.
• [C1 30:46] Mark: "They're like signed agreements?" Erik: "Yeah, they're done." — eBay/Depop; the memo says self-serve APIs, not partnerships.
• [C1 09:16] "a team of seven people currently right now, all based in the US" vs [C2 05:47] "there's a couple of engineers that are based in Spain."
• [C2 41:25] "97 of the people that go on to a free trial end up converting to being a paid."
• [C2 07:12–08:20] "I own 100... [Mark: what's your ownership?] 95."
• [Loom 01:35] "This basically shows our K factor, which we're hovering around 1.2, 1.4 right now" — over a screen of company-minted single-use waitlist codes.
• [C2 58:26] "It basically crashes the phone... after I scanned more than four items and basically within 30 seconds shorts out the phone" — the candid register he's capable of when not selling.
• [C2 63:19] Joseph: "I know you sent over the safe. We're all buttoned up on that. We can execute that like probably in the next day or so." — the reason this teardown exists.

Erik Schutzler — Founder/CEO, claims 95% ownership REAL, INFLATED ~2x, ADVERSE

Verified: real person (LinkedIn, Harmonic 94373779, App Store seller, side-letter signatory). BA Finance, U of Denver 2014–18; no technical education, zero engineering skills listed, GitHub account created 2025-12-31 with zero public repos. T-Mobile enterprise AE ~1.5 yrs; Amazon 2 years (his own LinkedIn: Middle East expansion — UAE, Saudi, Egypt, "$30M revenue"); PingPong Payments ~2 yrs (US employee #30 → head of sales N. America); Sport IQ (DTC pain-cream brand, dead, no exit); Yiftee GTM advisor. Almost certainly the son of Michael Schutzler (ex-CEO Classmates.com/Livemocha, WA Technology Industry Association CEO) — co-governor of Erik's college LLC at the same Seattle home address (WA registry 604083592) — which explains the Seattle angel network.

Claimed vs found: "4.5 years early-stage Amazon plus ~2 years at an Amazon subsidiary in APAC" [C1 07:48] — LinkedIn says 2 years, and PingPong is a Hangzhou-founded payments company, not an Amazon subsidiary. Roughly 2x tenure inflation plus a fabricated affiliation. Claimed country launches include Japan (launched Oct 2000, when he was ~4) and Turkey (Sept 2018, before he joined); his own LinkedIn claims only UAE/Saudi/Egypt. "I'm leading a lot of the other engineering pieces as well" [C2 06:10] is not credible against a finance degree and an empty GitHub.

Adverse: Schutzler v. PingPong Global Solutions and Kenny Tsang, D. Colo. 1:24-cv-03084 (filed 2024-11-04, employment discrimination, Erik as plaintiff, judgment entered 2026-06-02, prevailing party needs PACER). Not misconduct per se — but he cited PingPong as pedigree on both calls and never disclosed he sued them and their CEO. Pull the judgment before any wire. Otherwise clean: no cases as defendant, no SEC/FINRA/BBB/Ripoff hits. Harmonic still shows a concurrent "Founder @ Stealth Company" record from 2026-03, unresolved.

"Yagev" (Yagev Levi) — claimed DS/ML lead RESUME FABRICATED

Erik: DS/ML lead who "ran Data Science at DraftKings for the last five years and then three years of Nike before that" [C1 42:58], with 3 engineers under him [44:41]. The only matching person on earth (linkedin.com/in/yagevlevi, Apify 2026-09-15): BA Computer Science, Boston University, May 2023; ~2 years of IC ML-infrastructure stints at DraftKings; ~1.5 years of pre-graduation Nike co-op work; MS Georgia Tech in progress; currently "AI @ terra" (Terra Security, Tel Aviv), started ~1 month ago; no Moe anywhere on the profile. The claim assigns 8 years of department-head seniority to a person with ~3.5 total as an IC who appears to work full time for another company. At best a moonlighting contractor whose resume Erik inflated to close a round; the claim as delivered is false.

Janice Cheng — Founding Head of Growth REAL, CLAIM CONTRADICTED

Verified: real (Harmonic 199300379, current since Jul 2026). Claimed: "built organic growth strategies for three huge applications to number one in the App Store, including Hinge" [C1 43:49]. Her LinkedIn shows Aavia marketing/community plus fractional gigs (Dipsea, Rodeo, Ditto), SFU comms degree — no Hinge, no #1 apps. Likely fractional.

Jordan Novack — Head of Social REAL, POSSIBLY GONE

Real (Harmonic 28425493, started Jun 2026); sports social background (UFC, XFL, PitchBook), non-technical. The v1 LinkedIn pull showed the tenure end-dated 2026-09-01 (~one quarter); today's Harmonic company record still lists the seat current. Either way not an engineer.

Engineers, designer, advisors, investors ZERO VERIFIABLE

• "3 engineers under Yagev" / "a couple of engineers in Spain" (€50k, €90k): zero engineers on Harmonic (headcount "12" but engineering 0, data 0, product 0, design 0), zero on LinkedIn, never named. The all-US claim [C1 09:16] was false when made by his own later statements.
• Head of product design: unnamed, "built many different Y Combinator..." [C1 44:05]. Unverifiable.
• "OfferUp founder" advisor ("scaled to 20M MAU... nearly a billion in revenue" [C1 44:17]): unnamed; OfferUp founders are Nick Huzar and Arean van Veelen, no public link to Moe; the revenue figure is unsupported anywhere.
• "One of the first creators of Facebook Marketplace" [C1 29:51] who becomes "the first employee from Facebook Marketplace" [C2 44:47]: unnamed, description mutates between calls, and "first employee" of an internal Facebook product line is not a real construct.
• Investors: SPV of ex-marketplace execs, ex-Facebook/OfferUp angels, "a VC," and the Moto Pizza founder's "pretty large family office" (Lee Kindell is real; no public record of a family office). Harmonic: funding_total $0, 0 rounds, investors []. EDGAR: no Form D for "Market of Everything" (searched 2026-09-15). A Reg D raise must file within 15 days of first sale — either nothing has closed, or the filing is missing.

Team verdict

A real, energetic solo founder with a genuine mid-level sales/GTM history and a well-connected Seattle tech father — and nothing else that survives contact. No technical cofounder, no verifiable engineer anywhere, both named non-founder hires non-technical (one possibly already gone), both marquee advisors unnamed with mutating descriptions, every named investor unverifiable, his own resume inflated ~2x against his own LinkedIn, his claimed ML lead's resume invented outright, and a federal suit against the employer he cites as pedigree left undisclosed across 140 minutes of calls. Team 2.0/10.

Verdict

Not a fraudster on the public record: as of today he has zero defendant-side lawsuits, no bankruptcy, no liens or UCC filings, no regulatory, criminal, sanctions, or consumer-complaint trail in any database reachable, and his identity (name, age, Seattle roots, Eastside Catholic 2014, U. of Denver) is internally consistent.

Pattern of embellishment: confirmed — but the proof lives in his own pitch (the team DD), not in court records; the adverse sweep adds a habit of abandoning entities (Schutzler Enterprises LLC administratively dissolved 2019; DealsDepot L.L.C., Denver, delinquent since 2022-09-01 and never wound down, previously undisclosed) and an App Store launch where 8 of 9 reviews are generic day-one 5-stars that the only substantive reviewer calls paid.

Strongest evidence on each side: clean side, one federal case ever and he is the plaintiff, with no counterclaim filed against him; adverse side, the claimed $700k raise has no Form D, no Harmonic trace (funding_total $0, 0 rounds, checked today), and Market of Everything, Inc. has no findable registration in NY or WA.

The employer lawsuit, in detail

Schutzler v. PingPong Global Solutions, Inc. and Kenny Tsang, D. Colo. 1:24-cv-03084-RMR, filed 2024-11-04. Erik is the sole plaintiff. Cause: 28:1332 Diversity, Employment Discrimination; nature of suit 790 Other Labor Litigation; jury demanded by plaintiff. Plaintiff counsel HKM Employment Attorneys (Shelby Sue Woods); defense Greenberg Traurig (Martine Tariot Wells). Judge Regina M. Rodriguez, Magistrate Susan Prose. Defendant corporate disclosure names parent PingPong Global Holdings, Ltd. Kenny Tsang is PingPong's US Managing Director per Crunchbase (Erik's "US CEO" framing is close enough).

Docket arc (52 documents, quotes from RECAP): complaint 11/4/24; defendants ANSWERED 1/6/25 with no counterclaim on the docket, which matters: PingPong did not accuse him of anything; scheduling order 2/3/25; protective orders 2/18-19/25; then a long discovery grind with five stipulated-looking extensions (7/23/25, 10/7/25, 12/22/25, 3/3/26, 4/22/26); motions for leave to restrict (sealed filings) 4/3/26, 4/23/26, granted 4/10 and 5/8/26; two "Motion for Issuance" filings (4/3, 4/23/26, likely subpoena or letters issuance, text not public); an attorney withdrawal filed 5/7/26, granted 5/8/26 (which side withdrew is not visible in the short descriptions); orders on both issuance motions 6/1/26; JUDGMENT entered 6/2/26 (entry 57, pacer_doc_id 039012721976).

Reading: no motion to dismiss, no summary judgment, and no trial ever appears, and judgment lands 19 months in, right after sealed filings and an attorney change. That pattern is most consistent with a settlement reduced to judgment or an accepted Rule 68 offer of judgment, but the prevailing party and terms are not knowable without the PACER document (about $3 all-in via the "Buy on PACER" links on the docket page). Recommend buying entries 57, 50, and 1 before any wire. Suing a former employer for discrimination is not misconduct; the issue remains what the team DD flagged: he cites PingPong as pedigree on calls while never mentioning he sued them and their US chief, and the docket shows the judgment landed three months before he pitched Daxos.

What Daxos must ask him directly

• The PingPong case: what was the judgment entered 6/2/26, who prevailed, what were the terms, and why was it never mentioned while PingPong was cited as pedigree. (We will read the PACER judgment either way.)
• Where is Market of Everything, Inc. incorporated, and produce the certificate: it is not registered in NY, not findable in WA, and Delaware could not be searched; also why a Seattle-HQ company with claimed US staff shows no state registration anywhere we looked.
• The $700k: no Form D exists and Form D is due 15 days after first sale; produce the filed Form D or signed closing docs and wire receipts. Harmonic still shows $0 raised as of today.
• DealsDepot L.L.C. (Denver, 2021, delinquent since 9/1/22): what was it, why was it abandoned rather than dissolved, any debts or customers left behind. Same question for Schutzler Enterprises LLC (admin dissolved 2019).
• What legal entity operated Sport IQ (no CO entity or trade name exists), did it have creditors or unfulfilled orders at shutdown, and who owns the still-live Amazon listing.
• The App Store launch reviews: were any solicited or compensated. The one substantive reviewer says the rest are paid.
• Is Michael Schutzler (father) an investor, advisor, or LP in the SPV, and is any claimed "family office" check actually his network. No public link exists; get it on the record.

Rating impact

Unchanged — Company 4.75/10 PASS, FOR DAXOS 2.0/10. The sweep is clean exactly where a rating change would require new facts (no defendant-side record, no bankruptcy, no sanctions, identity consistent), and its adverse finds (abandoned entities, astroturf-pattern reviews, no findable state registration) corroborate risks already priced into Base 2.75 and the paper-risk section rather than adding a new category.

Not checkable (clean findings hold within these limits): Delaware ICIS (captcha-walled — presumed DE incorporation unverified), the PACER judgment/complaint text (~$3; buy entries 57, 50, 1 before any wire), WA SOS full name search (bot-gated), state courts / small claims in every state (captcha, login, or paywalled), NY and WA UCC, the DU degree (no public verification path), and the EP 222 podcast audio (flagged for a manual listen).

The arithmetic (all from the founder-controlled dashboard)

• Gross margin: negative by design. Revenue ≈ $249.75 MRR + (generously) the entire $20.60 lifetime fee take ≈ $270/mo. LLM alone = $355.59/mo. LLM spend = 142% of MRR; margin ≈ −32% before AWS, Steel browser sessions, and Stripe fees.
• Revenue per user: $249.75 / 967 = $0.26/user/mo. LLM cost per user: $355.59 / 967 = $0.37/user/mo. The average user costs ~40% more in LLM calls than they pay.
• GMV per user: $175.00 / 967 = $0.18 lifetime. Of $71,692 in tracked "inventory value," $175 has ever transacted — 0.24%.
• The structural bleed: 66% of LLM spend is the daily 8am revaluation cron re-pricing already-scanned inventory ([C2 50:43] confirms it). Cost scales with items tracked; revenue scales only with the ~2.6% who pay and the 0.24% that sells. His dream customer — the depop girlie with a thousand-item closet — is his worst unit economics: maximal scan/revalue cost, flat $9.99.
• Fixable in principle (cache valuations by product, revalue on triggers, cheaper backfill models, meter scans) — ordinary engineering. But he presents the cost dashboard as a strength while claiming a trend his own chart refutes, so nothing suggests he sees the problem.

Instrument: $1M post-money SAFE, $10M post cap, 10% discount, MFN (verbal, C1 49:12; memo adds 1x cash-out floor). The SAFE was sent to Daxos after call 1 but is not in the data room; nothing here verifies cap/discount/MFN/floor from a primary instrument. ~$700k claimed committed, ~$300k open. Side letter (Pro Rata and Investor Rights Agreement, read in full): pro rata into the priced round, participation in any earlier SAFE, Major Investor efforts, quarterly financials + KPIs, QSBS covenant, cap-table rep (§6 reps a cap table was delivered — it wasn't), SPV assignment. Genuinely good rights for an angel check. NOT signed: both signature blocks blank, date "September ___, 2026," despite the _EXECUTION filename. No board seat, no vetoes — no enforcement lever except the rep.

Structure red flags: no Form D on EDGAR for a claimed ~$700k Reg D raise (late, unfiled, or not actually closed — each is a different problem); entity ("Delaware C-corp") unverified, no charter or good standing; cap table never delivered; employee equity is handshake-stage ("I own 100" + a promised ~10% pool cannot both be true unless grants are unissued — meaning no plan, no vesting, no 83(b), and a pool still to be created that dilutes Daxos at the seed); prior SAFE stack opaque; IP unassigned as far as the room shows (engineers in Spain, no PIIAs).

Is $10M defensible? No. Comps (Harmonic, re-pulled 2026-09-15): SellRaze — the tightest peer, YC F25, same scan-to-sell wedge — $500k pre-seed. Vendoo (YC W22, 7 years in, 39 people) $125k. The category ceiling is Flyp: $15.8M total at Series A after 7 years, last round 2022. The memo's "$15–25M consumer-AI teams" defense imports a comp set the resale vertical does not support. $10M post on a week of beta with $175 of lifetime GMV is the vertical's Series A valuation asked at day 7, justified only by team claims that are fabricated or unverifiable.

What to ask for before any wire (items 1–3 are the gate; a founder whose numbers are real produces them in a day): (1) countersigned SAFE + side letter, cap/discount/floor read from the instrument; (2) the cap table §6 already promises, plus every outstanding SAFE and side letter; (3) proof of funds actually received — bank/wire confirmations for the $700k and the Form D or WSGR's written explanation for its absence; (4) charter, good standing, board consents; (5) equity plan docs, founder stock purchase, 83(b)s; (6) signed IP assignments from every engineer/contractor, Spain included; (7) read-only Stripe/RevenueCat: paying subs excluding comped "PRO forever" accounts, reconciled against the $10k MRR claim; (8) the OfferUp advisor's agreement and name.

• Facebook Marketplace (the load-bearing leg): no public listing API for C2C sellers. Moe's own description: "a headless browser spins up through an oauth token that they've provided to us and then goes and actually posts it in Facebook Marketplace" [C2 10:40], plus agents messaging buyers in-account [C1 18:40]. That is browser automation of user accounts against Meta's automated-means terms, whatever his "we're not scraping so we're fine" theory [C2 44:27]. The failure mode lands on users' own Facebook accounts — the classic cross-lister death. His mitigation is an unnamed advisor's blessing plus a claimed Meta partnership the memo says does not exist.
• eBay: user agreement effective Feb 20, 2026 explicitly bans LLM-driven bots and automated flows without human review (verified). Sell-side listing via the official Sell API with human review is the compliant lane; Moe's claimed "direct API" is plausibly that — a self-serve developer key, not the "signed agreements... done" of call 1. The roadmap agentic buyer-messaging points directly at what eBay just banned.
• Depop: ToS prohibits bots and unauthorized API use; "we were on their integration roadmap" is founder-claimed. And eBay now owns Depop (~$1.2B, Feb 2026, closing ~Q2) while shipping its own AI listing — the strategic-acquirer story and the platform-dependence story are the same company.
• Track record of the category: cross-lister users report Facebook and Mercari integrations broken for months at incumbent tools — breakage is routine even for the compliant players.

• Founder integrity. Every headline metric moved 3–40x under five days of scrutiny, and he never once acknowledged a revision. The Yagev resume is invented; his own Amazon record is doubled; the PingPong federal suit is undisclosed. Nothing he says can be taken at face value, which makes every other diligence lane founder-gated.
• Negative gross margin by design. LLM spend ($355.59/30d) exceeds all revenue (~$270/mo); 66% of it is a daily revaluation cron whose cost scales with tracked inventory while revenue scales with the 2.6% who pay. Growth makes it worse.
• No technical team. Solo non-technical founder "leading engineering," zero verifiable engineers, "own models" contradicted by a ledger literally named sonnet-vision. Who owns the code (Spain contractors, no PIIAs shown) is open.
• Platform dependence is existential. The differentiating leg (Facebook) is a ToS violation whose blast radius is users' own accounts; eBay just banned the agentic roadmap; the acquirer of last resort owns Depop and ships the feature free.
• No moat in a proven-dead category. Commodity jobs, two corpses, no venture-scale survivor, incumbents native and free.
• Paper risk. Unsigned everything, no cap table, no Form D behind the claimed $700k, informal employee equity, entity unverified. The §6 rep is the only lever and it reps a document that was never delivered.
• Price. $10M post — the vertical's Series A number — on day 7 of a beta with $175 lifetime GMV.

PASS. Company 4.75/10 (Base 2.75 + EV 1.00 + Geo 1.00 + Chain 0). FOR DAXOS 2.0/10 — do not execute the SAFE, at any check size, at this cap.

The honest bull case: a real shipped app that pulled ~967 genuine signups in two weeks on zero claimed marketing spend, a founder with real marketplace GTM history and unusual candor about product limits, instrumented cost telemetry most seed founders don't have, and a big secondhand backdrop with a live strategic acquirer. The reasons it still fails: the founder pitched numbers his own dashboard refuted within 24 hours and his own mouth refuted within 5 days; the team that justifies the $10M premium does not exist as described (one resume fabricated, the rest unverifiable); the unit economics are negative by design and presented as a strength; the load-bearing integration violates Meta's terms with users' accounts as collateral; and the category has never returned venture capital. The memo's 5.5 stands on founder-only inputs; strip them and its own framework lands where this teardown does.

The 3 things that change the answer (all three, not one): (1) Money and metrics verified at source — read-only Stripe/RevenueCat reconciling paying subs and MRR against the call-1 claims, wire confirmations + Form D for the $700k, and the cap table. (2) A real technical team — named engineers with LinkedIn, signed IP assignments, and a truthful correction of the Yagev claim on the record. (3) A price that matches the evidence — a cap in the low single digits ($3–4M, SellRaze territory), because at $10M you are paying the vertical's Series A price for a week-old beta. Even then, the demonstrated willingness to state a 40x MRR figure to investors' faces is a character fact no term sheet cures; any re-engagement should be a small relationship check sized for that risk, not conviction.