Sounds like normal cold battery stuff, not some big scam.

That story hits hard because the guy actually had to learn it the expensive way instead of just reading about it. A 47 slide deck usually means the founder doesn't trust the product to stand on its own, and investors smell that fear fast. I went back and counted mine after a bad pitch once, and cutting it in half was the only thing that got people to actually listen.

Something similar happened to my buddy with one of those cheap glass carafes, the bottom just cracked while he was pressing and hot grounds went everywhere. He grabbed a Chemex the next day and never looked back. The mesh filter on a French press holds onto all those tiny bits, so the cup always ends up a little muddy, and once you taste it side by side with a paper filter it's hard to unsee it. Cleanup alone is worth the switch, rinsing a cone takes like ten seconds versus digging grounds out of that metal screen.