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Frank Mycroft

Co-founder & CEO, Booster · 1 appearance on the record.

computed by AI from the episodes · how this works → · full disclaimer →

founderexecutiveengineer@FrankMycroft ↗LinkedIn ↗boosterusa.com ↗

Frank Mycroft is the co-founder and CEO of Booster, a mobile fueling and energy intelligence service that delivers fuel directly to commercial fleets and corporate campuses. Prior to launching the company in 2014, he worked as an aerospace engineer with NASA and Boeing, and served as Vice President of Strategy at Planetary Resources.

10statements → 3claims → 2claims resolved → 3.6/5average certainty → 2.2/5average debate potential → 4.4/5argument clarity · the sources → 5said about them ↓

1 supported 0 partly supported 1 contradicted 1 not checkable as stated how the 3 claims stand · each chip opens the sources

1 prediction · 2 assertions · 7 insights · every statement was checked. The prediction and assertions are the 3 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 2 are resolved, and 1 names no date, number or outcome precise enough to check. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.

The record, in short

What the tape says about how Frank argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.

Their most notable supported claim

Assertion Supported
Mycroft: Scheduled batch delivery makes Booster Fuels cheaper than gas stations
“This allows us vast levels of efficiency in our operations that we wouldn't have if we were trying to do this purely on demand, and that helps us keep our costs very low, and it lets us actually be more affordable than a gas station.”
Frank Mycroft Jul 8, 2016 ▶ 9:06 20VC: When To Transition From Growth to Profitability & The KPI's of The On Demand Economy with Frank Mycroft @ Booster Fuels

Their most notable contradicted claim

Assertion Contradicted
Mycroft: Fuel represents roughly 10% of all consumer spending
“People forget that about 10% of all consumer spending is fuel.”
Frank Mycroft Jul 8, 2016 ▶ 26:39 20VC: When To Transition From Growth to Profitability & The KPI's of The On Demand Economy with Frank Mycroft @ Booster Fuels

Argument clarity: do they answer the question? how? →

4.4 / 5 directness 4.7 · coherence 4.8 · precision 4.1 · compression 3.9

redirected or did not address 1 of 15 assessed questions (7%). Watch them ▸

This is a score against a rubric. It is not a rank. Every host question → answer exchange is scored with names hidden on directness, coherence, precision and compression, 1–5 each, on meaning alone: disfluencies are ignored, and only raw unedited episodes count. This is the score that measures thought. Every scored exchange, scores shown → · The rubric and its checks →

How they sound: speaking style how? →

214 words/min while actually speaking · 16.8 um and uh per 1k words

Measured by listening to the audio itself: 3,624 words across 1 episode of raw-level tape, transcribed verbatim with every um and uh kept, each one attributed only where the alignment onto our timed stream is unambiguous. These are measurements of speaking style. We do not rank them: across this corpus, fluency and argument quality are nearly uncorrelated (ρ≈0.2), and smooth talking does not signal clear thinking. How it's measured →

How the interview went all their pushback → series average →

Across 1 rated episode:

host pushback ▾ 2/10
pushed back at the host ▾ 0/10
setup questions received 65%

Everything Frank Mycroft said on 20VC that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →

Insight
Mycroft: On-demand startups need 5-10x minimum scale before unit economics focus
“Take what you think is your minimum viable scale, right? That the minimum level at which you've got the density to make money on a consistent basis. And you should probably multiply that number By five to 10.”
Frank Mycroft Jul 8, 2016 ▶ 12:25 20VC: When To Transition From Growth to Profitability & The KPI's of The On Demand Economy with Frank Mycroft @ Booster Fuels
Insight
Mycroft: Copying successful business models into new verticals leads to failure
“I think that any entrepreneur, any starting company that is trying to simply apply what was a successful business model in a different space to their new vertical is setting themselves up for failure.”
Frank Mycroft Jul 8, 2016 ▶ 7:02 20VC: When To Transition From Growth to Profitability & The KPI's of The On Demand Economy with Frank Mycroft @ Booster Fuels
Assertion Supported
Mycroft: Scheduled batch delivery makes Booster Fuels cheaper than gas stations
“This allows us vast levels of efficiency in our operations that we wouldn't have if we were trying to do this purely on demand, and that helps us keep our costs very low, and it lets us actually be more affordable than a gas station.”
Frank Mycroft Jul 8, 2016 ▶ 9:06 20VC: When To Transition From Growth to Profitability & The KPI's of The On Demand Economy with Frank Mycroft @ Booster Fuels
Insight
Mycroft: Focusing on unit economics too early stalls on-demand startup growth
“If you focus too soon on the unit economics, you may never get to the scale and the growth that you need for that engine to actually continue on its own.”
Frank Mycroft Jul 8, 2016 ▶ 10:57 20VC: When To Transition From Growth to Profitability & The KPI's of The On Demand Economy with Frank Mycroft @ Booster Fuels
Insight
Mycroft: Gas station distribution is the primary barrier for carbon-neutral fuels
“And what's interesting about these solutions is that the number one thing they struggle with is distribution. It's very hard to get into a gas station. It's very hard to get your solution blended into the mix. And no gas station wants to put in another undergr…”
Frank Mycroft Jul 8, 2016 ▶ 23:21 20VC: When To Transition From Growth to Profitability & The KPI's of The On Demand Economy with Frank Mycroft @ Booster Fuels
Insight
Mycroft: Starting a company is irrational unless driven by deep obsession
“You should never start a company. It's actually a pretty irrational thing to do from a probability of outcome perspective, so only do it if it's rubbing at your soul and eating at you every day that you're not going out and creating this idea.”
Frank Mycroft Jul 8, 2016 ▶ 4:19 20VC: When To Transition From Growth to Profitability & The KPI's of The On Demand Economy with Frank Mycroft @ Booster Fuels
Insight
Mycroft: Outsider founders require deep naivete to disrupt unfamiliar industries
“For those entrepreneurs who don't know the industry players, don't know the complexities of the business that they're trying to disrupt, you need a lot of naivete to actually jump in and do that.”
Frank Mycroft Jul 8, 2016 ▶ 5:51 20VC: When To Transition From Growth to Profitability & The KPI's of The On Demand Economy with Frank Mycroft @ Booster Fuels
Insight
Mycroft: Regulated startups should target innovative regulators first
“I also think that the regulators are people too, and some of them are late adopters, but some of them are early adopters or even innovators, and what you have to do as a startup in any regulatory complex environment is find those regulators that are the innova…”
Frank Mycroft Jul 8, 2016 ▶ 15:49 20VC: When To Transition From Growth to Profitability & The KPI's of The On Demand Economy with Frank Mycroft @ Booster Fuels
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Mycroft: Parking lots will become hubs for refueling, servicing, and grocery delivery
“We view parking lots as an underutilized asset, especially in this day and age with real estate prices being as high as they are and mobile technology allowing you to Pinpoint locations very precisely, and so we believe that there will come a day where you can…”
Frank Mycroft Jul 8, 2016 ▶ 26:56 20VC: When To Transition From Growth to Profitability & The KPI's of The On Demand Economy with Frank Mycroft @ Booster Fuels
Assertion Contradicted
Mycroft: Fuel represents roughly 10% of all consumer spending
“People forget that about 10% of all consumer spending is fuel.”
Frank Mycroft Jul 8, 2016 ▶ 26:39 20VC: When To Transition From Growth to Profitability & The KPI's of The On Demand Economy with Frank Mycroft @ Booster Fuels

The other half of the tape: Frank Mycroft's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 4 times in 1 episode on 20VC. 1 statement on the record names them. every mention, with the transcript →

Statements about Frank Mycroft, by other people (1)

Assertion Supported
Booster Fuels founder Frank Mycroft previously worked on refueling satellites off comets
“The entrepreneur is super special, Frank Mycroft, Literally, before this was figuring out how to refuel satellites in space off of comets.”
Rebecca Kaden Mar 23, 2016 ▶ 23:43 20VC: Maveron's Rebecca Kaden on The Patterns Of Entrepreneurship and Taking A Consumer Product From Niche To Mass Market

Every mention by year

tap a year for its mentions
0021412016episodesmentions
0112016episodes it came up in
0020.5412016episodesmentions per episode
2016 4 mentions in 1 episode

Appearances (1)

EpisodeDateSpeaking time
20VC: When To Transition From Growth to Profitability & The KPI's of The On Demand Economy Jul 8, 2016 20m
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