Mobius was a scrap metal recycling marketplace co-founded by Amy, Elena Wagenmans, and Cinnamon Sipper while all three were MS Mechanical Engineering students at Stanford University.
Concept
Mobius aimed to automate recycling supply chains, connecting scrap metal sellers with buyers through a digital platform. The Stanford TomKat Center for Sustainable Energy supported the venture as a 2023-24 grantee, describing it as "automating recycling supply chains for companies, to help them turn their waste into an asset." Faculty advisor: Professor Xiaolin Zheng (ME).
The website was mobiussolutions.co. Amy built it. Elena's personal site still linked to it as of March 2026.
Roles
Amy was COO. Elena was CEO. The division of labor followed a pattern that would repeat at Taya: Amy handled the operational and technical work (site visits, labeling boxes, building a PostgreSQL database, coordinating logistics), while Elena held the public-facing title.
Failure
The core thesis was wrong. Middlemen in the scrap metal supply chain do everything valuable: sorting, grading, logistics, relationships. A software platform could not replace that.
A full postmortem exists as a Notion document.
The Cinnamon Firing
During Mobius, Cinnamon attempted to push Amy and Elena off the board. Elena convinced Amy to side with her. Together they fired Cinnamon.
This event is significant because it established the template for Elena's later treatment of Amy. See The Elena Pattern.
Legal Entity
The Mobius Solutions legal entity persists beyond the company's operational death. Taya was incorporated under it. A Mercury bank account for Mobius Solutions still exists as of 2026 (IO credit limit: $600). This is the corporate shell through which Amy's separation agreement was executed and the entity Carta needs to contact about the CS-7 cap table mess.
Legacy
After Mobius failed, Amy and Elena pivoted through AI CAD before arriving at Taya. The CEO/COO dynamic, the unequal distribution of credit, and the alliance-then-discard pattern all carried over.
A different company called Mobius Industries (mobiusindustry.com) exists in the recycling space but is unrelated.