Fast.com's $200M Failure
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A story about a startup called Fast that raised massive funding but collapsed due to lack of real business fundamentals.
"Fast was this new company that suddenly appeared on Twitter. They had the domain fast.com and this CEO named Dom. They were building a universal checkout button, similar to PayPal - saves your information so you can use it across different websites.
They raised nearly $200 million, including from Stripe and possibly Shopify. They became this Twitter hype machine. I met an Indian engineer who worked there who was just collecting it as a stamp on his resume, but when I asked if they had any real users, he said no.
The red flags were everywhere. The CEO kept tweeting screenshots of technical scale tests, saying things like 'we can handle 400 billion payments per second' - but they had no actual customers using the product. It was classic premature optimization - planning for massive scale before having any real users.
Then they moved to Tampa and threw this ridiculous event. The CEO arrived in a NASCAR-style truck with Fast.com branding, crawled out the window, got handed a peach blazer, and gave a speech to a small crowd in Fast t-shirts. They even had a stuntman doing flips on a Fast-branded jet ski in Tampa Bay.
The more parade you throw before you have customers, the bigger the red flag. Now the news has started to leak and it looks like the company is going down."
Shaan Puri
Host of MFM
Shaan Puri is the Chairman and Co-Founder of The Milk Road. He previously worked at Twitch as a Senior Director of Product, Mobile Gaming, and Emerging Markets. He also attended Duke University.