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X'Every Time You Solve One Problem, There's Another Three For You': Exploding Kittens' Quest to Stay Ahead of Coronavirus
Tami Abdollah was dot.LA's senior technology reporter. She was previously a national security and cybersecurity reporter for The Associated Press in Washington, D.C. She's been a reporter for the AP in Los Angeles, the Los Angeles Times and for L.A.'s NPR affiliate KPCC. Abdollah spent nearly a year in Iraq as a U.S. government contractor. A native Angeleno, she's traveled the world on $5 a day, taught trad climbing safety classes and is an avid mountaineer. Follow her on Twitter.

For Elan Lee, cofounder of the Los Angeles-based tabletop game company Exploding Kittens, signs of trouble began in January.
As the novel coronavirus swept through China during planned factory closures for the annual new year celebration, Lee started hearing ominous rumbles that factories just might not be coming back online. With 200,000 now unfulfilled orders, the creator of the immensely popular, crowdfunded Exploding Kittens game was worried.
"We started noticing in January that we were going to very quickly have to remove our reliance on China to produce anything at all," Lee told dot.LA.
The company looked at factories in Mexico, Poland, and the U.S. that could potentially produce cards in an effort to diversify its supply-chain away from sole reliance on Chinese factories.
But as Lee started preparing to manufacture the cards elsewhere, China started to come back online. Meanwhile, the virus started to sweep through the rest of the world, country by country the cases popped up.
"China went from 'you cannot get anything done here, go to other locations in the world instead', to all of a sudden, 'we have the fewest new incidences of coronavirus here'," Lee said.
On Thursday, China announced that for the first time since the outbreak of COVID-19 began in Wuhan in December, there have been no new locally transmitted cases in the country. Still, cases outside of China surged.
Lee's experience trying to fill surging orders for his card games is just one story of many. With the global supply chain dependent on China, businesses have been thrown into disarray — and the U.S. economy has plunged into recession. Businesses have scrambled to find factories to fill orders, frequently unable to move quickly enough to avoid the virus's spread.
Lee did end up doing print runs in factories in Poland and the United States, but the company has returned to printing exclusively at Chinese factories because, ironically, they're the only ones who can reliably print cards now as other nations struggle to contain the outbreak.
Photo courtesy of Exploding Kittens
Rather than working with two factories, Exploding Kittens is working with eight of them — all of which are operating at a percentage of full capacity — as the country has slowed the reopening of factories to prevent a resurgence of the virus. Lee said last week he ordered 1 million cards, or five times the number of cards he usually does, and plans to do so every opportunity he has just in case.
With ports clogged up all over the world and customs delayed, "even though we have boats on the water, it doesn't mean they're going to arrive in time," Lee said.
The original Exploding Kittens card game has sold 9 million copies worldwide, but it's one of many popular games designed and sold by Lee's company. The newest addition to the company's collection of tabletop games is "Throw Throw Burrito." It's a mixture of a card game and dodgeball, with a — you guessed it — burrito to throw around. Throw Throw Burrito is quickly moving into position to dethrone Exploding Kittens as the best-selling game in the world, Lee said.
The company distributes to retailers all over the world, in Canada, the United States, Australia, Europe and Asia, in 29 different languages, "but each one of those locations has their own supply chain issue that has to be solved individually," Lee said.
"My team hasn't slept in two weeks, because every time you solve one problem, there's another three for you," Lee said.
The silver lining, Lee said, is that there's continuing demand for game night and the product is successful, so the company should be able to survive the next few months. What happens after that is unknown. Exploding Kittens has seen its own form of exponential growth with a 40% increase in its sales over the previous week, and a 20% increase the week prior to that.
"What's happening is people are forced to stay at home right now and they want to play games," Lee said. "We happen to have one of the most popular games in the world, so our game sales increased. That's all great. That's the demand side of supply and demand.
"The ironic part is that it is the same thing that's creating demand that's shortening supply. This one virus has created quite a problem for us because it's unbalanced the two parts of the equation in a pretty substantial way."
One Down, Three More to Go
As Lee worked to address one problem, another loomed. The company had planned to hold its first ever "Burning Cat" convention, with 200 vendors and roughly 4,000 to 5,000 attendees, including game inventors and other tabletop game enthusiasts, in the second week of May. But on March 9, Lee said he had to make the call to cancel it so that attendees and vendors would have enough advance knowledge.
"It would be completely irresponsible for us at this point to ask a large group of people to come together," Lee said.
The company put a note on its website with a crying cat saying it was forced to delay its inaugural convention by one year. Lee said everyone would get a full refund.
"The whole team was running toward this thing for 18 months. We were just putting final touches on it and to do that was really heartbreaking," Lee said. "We were really hanging a lot on this" in terms of discovering the next big thing in tabletop gaming.
A note on Exploding Kittens' website states that the company was forced to delay its inaugural annual convention.Image Courtesy of Exploding Kittens
A New Way to Card Game?
In the meantime, the company has been exploring alternate ways of delivering new card game content with an unreliable supply chain and diminishing inventory amid surging demand, that includes investing more in digital offerings, potentially allowing people to get games on their phones and to connect with others — perhaps quarantined elsewhere — to play.
The company is also exploring games it can produce over the next few months that are lower impact, have fewer cards, can be done locally or perhaps even printed out at home.
"There's a lot of constraints that yield amazing creativity, and right now we're dealing with some pretty massive constraints," Lee said.
Exploding Kittens has a paid app, but is also working to get a new, free version of their app into the Apple App Store that would allow players from around the world to connect to play a digital version of the game. Such an effort was already underway roughly a year ago, but in January the company hit the gas on it, Lee said. The hope is that the free app will be able to launch in the next 30-45 days, he added.
Still, at its most basic level, Exploding Kittens is a card game company. Its bread and butter is having people stay home and enjoy a game with family or friends.
"That was a really great message when life was normal, but now that it's enforced or mandatory, things have gotten a little strange," Lee said.
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Do you have a story that needs to be told? My DMs are open on Twitter @latams. You can also email me at tami(at)dot.la, or ask for my Signal.
Tami Abdollah was dot.LA's senior technology reporter. She was previously a national security and cybersecurity reporter for The Associated Press in Washington, D.C. She's been a reporter for the AP in Los Angeles, the Los Angeles Times and for L.A.'s NPR affiliate KPCC. Abdollah spent nearly a year in Iraq as a U.S. government contractor. A native Angeleno, she's traveled the world on $5 a day, taught trad climbing safety classes and is an avid mountaineer. Follow her on Twitter.
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Greater Good Health Raises $10 Million To Fix America’s Doctor Shortage
Keerthi Vedantam is a bioscience reporter at dot.LA. She cut her teeth covering everything from cloud computing to 5G in San Francisco and Seattle. Before she covered tech, Keerthi reported on tribal lands and congressional policy in Washington, D.C. Connect with her on Twitter, Clubhouse (@keerthivedantam) or Signal at 408-470-0776.
The pandemic highlighted what’s been a growing trend for years: Medical students are prioritizing high-paying specialty fields over primary care, leading to a shortage of primary care doctors who take care of a patient’s day-to-day health concerns. These physicians are a cornerstone of preventative health care, which when addressed can lower health care costs for patients, insurers and the government. But there’s a massive shortage of doctors all over the country, and the pipeline for primary care physicians is even weaker.
One local startup is offering a possible answer to this supply squeeze: nurse practitioners.
On Wednesday, Manhattan Beach-based Greater Good Health unveiled a $10 million Series A funding round led by LRVHealth, which adds to the startup’s $3 million seed round last year. The company employs nurse practitioners and pairs them with doctor’s offices and medical clinics; this allows nurse practitioners to take on patients who would otherwise have to wait weeks, or even months, to see a doctor.
“This access and equity issue is just going to become more pervasive if we don't do things to help people gain more access,” Greater Good founder and CEO Sylvia Hastanan told dot.LA. “We need more providers to offer more patients appointments and access to their time to take care of their needs. And in order to do that, we really need to think about the workforce.”
There has been a growing movement in the medical industry to use nurse practitioners in place of increasingly scarce primary care physicians. California passed a law in 2020 that will widen the scope of nurse practitioners and allow them to operate without a supervising physician by 2023. Amid a shortage of doctors, there’s also the question of what will become of the largest and longest-living elderly population in recent history, Baby Boomers. Public health officials are already scrambling for ways to take care of this aging demographic’s myriad health needs while also addressing the general population.
“By the time you and I get old enough where we need primary care providers to help us with our ailments and chronic conditions, there aren't [going to be] enough of them,” Hastanan said. “And/or there just isn't going to be enough support for those nurse practitioners to really thrive in that way. And I worry about what our system will look like.”
Nurse practitioners function much like doctors do—they can monitor vitals, diagnose patients, and, in some cases, prescribe medication (though usually under the supervision of a doctor). Nurse practitioners need to get either a master’s degree or higher in nursing and complete thousands of hours of work in a clinical setting. All told, it usually takes six-to-eight years to become a nurse practitioner, compared to 10-to-15 years to become a practicing physician.
Greater Good Health’s platform puts nurse practitioners in often years-long care settings where they manage patients—most of whom are chronically ill, high-risk patients that need to be seen regularly and thoroughly. This allows them to follow up more carefully on patients they have managed for years, instead of catching up on a new patient’s history and treating them in the moment. Patients, meanwhile, don’t have to see a rotating door of clinicians and can talk to a provider they already have an established rapport with.
The one-year-old startup will use the funding to provide learning and development opportunities for its nurse practitioners and also connect them with each other through virtual support groups. Burnout has been an issue across health care during the pandemic, spurring an exodus of nursing and support staff and leaving health care facilities woefully understaffed. Greater Good hopes that keeping nurse practitioners in more stable, years-long care situations and offering them career development opportunities will help retain them and keep them in the workforce longer.
“We want them to be well-rounded and balanced both in work and life, and we see that returns us healthier, more engaged and ready nurse practitioners,” Hastanan said.
Keerthi Vedantam is a bioscience reporter at dot.LA. She cut her teeth covering everything from cloud computing to 5G in San Francisco and Seattle. Before she covered tech, Keerthi reported on tribal lands and congressional policy in Washington, D.C. Connect with her on Twitter, Clubhouse (@keerthivedantam) or Signal at 408-470-0776.
Plus Capital Partner Amanda Groves on Celebrity Equity Investments
On this episode of the L.A. Venture podcast, Amanda Groves talks about how PLUS Capital advises celebrity investors and why more high-profile individuals are choosing to invest instead of endorse.
As a partner at PLUS, Groves works with over 70 artists and athletes, helping to guide their investment strategies. PLUS advises their talent roster to combine their financial capital with their social capital and focus on five investment areas: the future of work, future of education, health and wellness, the conscious consumer and sustainability.
“The idea is if we can leverage these people who have incredible audiences—and influence over that audience—in the world of venture capital, you'd be able to help make those businesses move forward faster,” Groves said.
PLUS works to create celebrity partnerships by identifying each client’s passions and finding companies that align with them, Groves said. From there, the venture firm can reach out to prospective partners from its many contacts and can help evaluate businesses that approach its clients. Recently, PLUS paired actress Nina Dobrev with the candy company SmartSweets after she had told them about her love for its snacks.
Celebrity entrepreneurship has shifted quite a bit in recent years, Groves said. While celebrities are paid for endorsements, Groves said investing allows them to gain equity from the growth of companies that benefit from their work.
“Like in movies, for example, where they're earning a residual along the way, they thought, ‘You know, if we're going to partner with these brands and create a tremendous amount of enterprise value, we should be able to capture some of the upside that we're generating, too’,” she said.
Partnering in this way also allows her clients to work with a wider range of brands, including small brands that often can’t afford to spend millions on endorsements. Investing allows high-profile individuals to represent brands they care about, Groves said.
“The last piece of the puzzle was a drive towards authenticity,” Groves said. “A lot of these high-profile artists and athletes are not interested, once they've achieved some sort of level of success, in partnering with brands that they don't personally align with.”
Hear the full episode by clicking on the playhead above, and listen to LA Venture on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.
dot.LA Editorial Intern Kristin Snyder contributed to this post.
Rivian Stock Roller Coaster Continues as Amazon Van Delivery Faces Delays
David Shultz is a freelance writer who lives in Santa Barbara, California. His writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Outside and Nautilus, among other publications.
Rivian’s stock lost 7% yesterday on the back of news that the company could face delays in fulfilling Amazon’s order for a fleet of electric delivery vans due to legal issues with a supplier. The electric vehicle maker is suing Commercial Vehicle Group (CVG) over a pricing dispute related to the seats that the supplier promised, according to the Wall Street Journal.
The legal issue could mean that Amazon may not receive their electric vans on time. The dispute hinges on whether or not Commercial Vehicle Group is allowed to raise the prices of its seats after Rivian made engineering and design changes to the original version. Rivian says the price hike from CVG violates the supply contract. CVG denies the claim.
Regardless, the dispute could hamper Rivian’s ability to deliver electric vans to Amazon on time. The ecommerce/streaming/cloud computing/AI megacorporation controls an 18% stake in Rivian as one of the company’s largest early investors. Amazon has previously said it hopes to buy 100,000 delivery vehicles from Rivian by 2030.
The stock plunge marked another wild turn for the EV manufacturer. Last week, Rivian shares dropped 21% on Monday after Ford, another early investor, announced its intent to sell 8 million shares. The next few days saw even further declines as virtually the entire market saw massive losses, but then Rivian rallied partially on the back of their earnings report on Wednesday, gaining 28% back by Friday. Then came yesterday’s 7% slide. Today the stock is up another 10%.
Hold on tight, who knows where we’re going next.
David Shultz is a freelance writer who lives in Santa Barbara, California. His writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Outside and Nautilus, among other publications.