So I went and watched the video myself - I should have probably done this sooner, as it seems to have clarified a bunch of stuff.
TL;DR: from my perspective, and if I believe what HST says, it reads like a fanboy with a savior complex and a desire to be in the industry made a bad investment, rather than a guy who was knowingly trying to perpetuate a scam.
Also, as a side note, I'm fairly convinced at this point that Guy wasn't running an actual scam. If Guy had made money instead of losing everything, I would have said this was definitely a scam. There's a lot of things Guy is probably guilty of- misleading consumers, misappropriation of money, not paying debts, lying, defaming good businesses... but if the point of a scam is to end up with money, he was sure shit at it.
Looks like HST was invested in the success of the company:
HST is a self-admitted S!K fanboy. (This probably explains his inability to assess the situation for what it was.)
He was talking about investing $75k into Survive, and was told by Guy that it would be more than enough to turn things around. (
)
As part of that, he was told he'd be a part owner of survive, to the tune of something like 20-30%, which was never decided on. (
)
He wrote an initial check for $30k, and got a piece of equipment put up for collateral. (Which he's now the proud owner of
)
Looks like he knew pretty early on that S!K was deep in the rears, but supposedly didn't know what the real numbers were until later:
When he got there, Guy and Ellie had nothing left in their bank accounts. ( Worst scam ever
)
"I wasn't given accurate numbers the whole way through, there were several times where it's like, look, this is how bad it is, now here's the real numbers." ( Guy the shyster
)
Ellie saved him from putting in the rest of his 75k investment by showing him the numbers. (Ellie has a conscience, I guess?)
by the end, they had $48k of bills a month and maybe $4k of income per week. ($75k wouldn't even take care of 2 months of bills.
)
There were 3 or 4 times (historically) when they got themselves out of the hole using preorders or some other undisclosed windfall. (BF called it here, first)
He probably bought 10-15 knives from guy when he went out there, and he (supposedly) sent some of those out for free to people he felt bad for. (wildly unethical, followed by generous)
3500 people aren't getting their orders.
Looks like selling new knives was an effort to keep the business going.
They had 4000 knife back log but a bunch of GSO 4's they could sell, so they'd send out a few preorders and 5 new knives to be sold.
Looks like the only way to keep the company going was to sell new knives to generate income. (no one here is surprised by that- that's what you'd have to do to stay afloat.)
His whole 40 minute video is best summarized with:
"I asked for this [siege of negative feedback] by joining this thing that, I didn't know at the time, had this much crazed and this much craziness and this much drama surrounding it in the knife community, but I knew what I was getting into... but I thought if we could come back hard and get all the preorders done by the end of the summer and hit blade show next year and have some new designs and... ya know... it would be really great."
