Photo credit: GolfChannel.com
Today, at Under30CEO we’re publishing an interview with 27 year old Adam Adler, CEO of Fuse Science, our first Under30CEO running a publicly traded company, ticker symbol: DROP. With a 27 year old CEO at the helm, Fuse Science has signed Tiger Woods, Michael Vick, David Ortiz and Arian Foster to their list of endorsers of their energy boost products. Adler can be seen with Tiger during an interview on CNBC yesterday. After conducting my research for the interview, I quickly became skeptical and wanted to be sure that this penny-stock wasn’t too good to be true.
The endorsement team is extremely impressive, aside from Woods’ and Vick’s off the field troubles and Ortiz’s positive steroid tests. Professional athletes do have a record of making terrible investments, but as Adler points out in the interview, to sign Tiger must have been quite the ordeal. You would think Woods has a whole team of trainers, scientists, lawyers, agents, and PR people. Fuse Science’s board of directors is filled with scientists from places like Duke and leaders from former Fortune 500 companies.
While most conversations I have with start up CEOs are easy going, as you can tell by my facial expressions in the interview, I was mainly perplexed. I couldn’t find much data on the newly debuted ticker symbol DROP and again, I wanted to be sure this company was for real for the sake of our readers. One thing is for sure … Adler is a damn good salesman.
Adler says he led his previous company Ultimate Social Network Inc. (USNI) to an IPO and says it was “one of the first social networking companies to go public.” USNI doesn’t have a single mention in Techcrunch that I could find and their signature web property is parked and for sale on GoDaddy. When I asked Adler about USNI, he didn’t seem to know much about it these days or what the company was up to.
Here’s where it gets a little technical and I get even more perplexed. Adler explains how his second company Fuse Science went public. After doing some post interview research, it turns out that Double Eagle Holdings, the company that is now Fuse Science, actually bought USNI, Adler’s first company he IPO’d. This would mean through this complex trail of mergers and acquisitions, Adler is CEO of the company that acquired his previous company. Why wouldn’t he know anything about USNI, if he is CEO?
Adler also claims that people are viewing Fuse Science “as the next Facebook”, which is a surefire way to get me to doubt you. The company who is yet to report earnings, is paying Adler $18k/month + $1k/month for a car. If your product hasn’t launched yet, why would you take shareholder’s money and pay yourself that type of salary?
In any event, Fuse Science’s story is impressive and Alder claims they are going after two huge markets in the consumer nutrition space as well as licensing the intellectual property to the pharmaceutical industry. Raising other people’s money in an IPO to capitalize a company in the pharmaceutical space probably makes sense if you can pull it off. Listen to the interview below and make your own call. There is a lot to be learned about how capitalization in the public markets work and how this young CEO has convinced some people that Fuse Science is the next big thing…or is it going to DROP?
The sure bet is we will be watching this story for you on Under30CEO.
