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I was an engineer at Fast for over a year and wanted to clarify a few points-- - engineers did have access to data and could write their own queries to check re

• ushakov 5y ago
  > The company spent a lot of money on marketing events including sponsorship deals with the Tampa Bay Lightning and the rumored million dollar concert by the Chain Smokers here we go, this is late 90s all over again
  • throwmeariver1 5y ago
    You think we get parties with Kid Rock again?
    • relaxing 5y ago
      These days? Sure, an appearance by Kid Rock is much more affordable.
  • RC_ITR 5y ago
    This is such a revealing comment and here's why: The reason late 90's start-ups invested the way they did is because they had no meaningful way to track the effectiveness of their ads, much less the payback. A Super Bowl ad for Pets.com seems fine if you can (more or less) guess that it adds a bunch of customers. Since then, start-ups have built a bunch of tools to track customer acquisition costs and paybacks in a pretty sophisticated way, and some of the obviously crazier ads dies (or at least become more one-off). But now we are in a fintech/crypto era and nobody really knows how to calculate paybacks once again, because the business model is so new vs. a traditional ads or commerce business (will this new crypto.com user do $1k of transaction volume every year for the next ten? sure why not?) As a result of all this, we see crazy 'spaghetti on the wall' style advertising again, usually focused in the crypto/fintech space (See: this year's Super Bowl). I wonder when the music stops.
    • dinvlad 5y ago
      Worth adding AI to this list :-)
    • tomatowurst 5y ago
      Very good point and you are not alone seeing the deja vu Remember beanie babies? We call them NFTs today. Remember HYIP and e-gold? We call them cryptocurrencies now. The point is that crowd behavior, especially markets driven by envy & greed, lead to the same outcome. every. single. time. this is why guys like Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger keep making money.
      • nailer 5y ago
        Beanie babies aren’t scarce and can only be produced by a single company.
        • tomatowurst 5y ago
          neither is right clicking on a jpeg and saving it
• maybetoofast 5y ago
  I joined Fast towards the end of last year. I didn't get as much exposure to the rest of the company as parent comment, but I'll say I saw a weird air of complacency and assumed success. I first ignored my instincts that something was wrong, but as I saw more of how the company operated, I became convinced that the single largest problem the company had was the culture. On the surface, I agree with the parent comment, things were definitely positive, but rather than toxic, I think it was more of a naive one, like most of these people had never worked at a startup before, and didn't understand that it's always easy to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, and that if they didn't understand what they were doing and how it affected the company then probably nobody else did either. It felt like everyone was very smart, but somewhat foolish (myself included). That being said, I enjoyed my time there, and definitely learned a lot, especially organizationally. The people are solid and I think Affirm is going to get a pretty sweet deal.
  • pyb 5y ago
    Good point, I am always surprise when well funded startups hire former big-tech engineers, rather than experienced startup engineers.
    • matwood 5y ago
      Yeah...it's often a different type of person who goes from 0->1 than from 1->100. Neither type is better than the other, just different.
    • DevKoala 5y ago
      Hear hear.
    • danielmarkbruce 5y ago
      There is a pretty good reason. If the experienced engineer worked at a startup that went anywhere, they have a lot of money and aren't coming to work for you. So the choice in many cases is big tech engineer or failed startup engineer. It's not clear which is better, it is clear (ish) which seems better.
• suresk 5y ago
  I've been in situations somewhat like this before, definitely not as extreme, but the same sort of overall feeling. Everything talked about in Slack/Email is super positive and highlights all the great things customers are saying, but the financial results tell a different story. It definitely is hard to have conversations about what isn't going well, even though it doesn't have to be negative or gloomy. Often the disconnect in results is chalked up to external factors outside of your control, which is sort of depressing because if that is true then you can't do anything about it. It's like when someone encounters a bug in the stuff they wrote and look every which way they can to blame it on the library, framework, compiler, etc.. - I'd rather have the bug be in code I wrote because then I can fix it easily. You can show someone simple data that shows a strategy isn't working, and then they'll spend a week torturing the data to come up with a contrived counter-explanation. Ultimately, it is tough because part of doing a startup is remaining positive even in situations where it isn't warranted and there are times where the strategy may not be working out in the short term but needs more time to play out. Being unwilling to ever even entertain the idea that what you're doing isn't working seems like it might be problematic though.
• hibikir 5y ago
  Going after large enterprise sales is a well known trap, and it's just so easy for a startup to spin its wheels for months, and eventually years, and realize that all the efforts got nowhere. The first 1B+ seller is precisely the hardest: Even when you are a relatively well known company, you'll still see reticence in bids if they know you are going to be their biggest costumer by volume. The companies I know that succeeded with that strategy either have great starting relationships with insiders in their first sales, and had contracts signed before committing to a big staff, or got into said companies when they were small: If one of your customers turns into a rocket ship and you are tied to their revenue stream, their growth is your enterprise-sized company. Enterprise sales might not even be all that profitable when it's all said and done: How many other companies are going to try to bid on their business? With their large size, how good is their leverage to squeeze down the profits of the winning bid. You might have a relatively unique product, the right connections, and end up being Palantir, but it's a very narrow road with steep cliffs everywhere.
  • lowkey_ 5y ago
    But didn't Bolt succeed (order of magnitudes more revenue) by taking those enterprise customers while Fast was only getting SMBs? I'm currently at a seed-stage startup with a few Fortune 500 companies as users. We're lucky to have a great sales team that can bring that business in. If we're solving a problem for them, they're willing to use us regardless of our size, though they do care about some small particular issues around size.
    • danielmarkbruce 5y ago
      If you can get them, that's awesome. Which company?
      • marketerinland 5y ago
        Quick comment on this. I also work for a seed level startup and we have gotten dozens of Fortune 500s, plus most of the big accounting, auditing and consulting firms. The reason this is possible for us is because our tech isn’t mission critical for them. I doubt the CEOs/CXOs of any of these companies even know we exist. We’ve just been fortunate that a lot of ops teams in these companies need our thing. So - that has really changed my paradigm of enterprise sales. Sometimes, if you’re SAP, you need to get whole of company buy-in. But if you’re SurveyMonkey, you don’t
• somehnacct3757 5y ago
  If you're at a SaaS startup that tries to solve a churn or burn problem by moving upmarket, run. It means your leadership can't think of a way to make the business work other than to get bigger checks from the same size customer base. "If only all our customers could pay us an extra zero!" Moving upmarket doesn't work that way. They are totally different companies with purchase requirements and habits that will generate tons of work orthogonal to your core product. Spend a few quarters on compliance accreditations so you can tick boxes, multi-month sales conversations where you aren't even sure if you're just there to pressure the real Belle of their ball, etc. If you can't do it small, you can't do it.
  • thegginthesky 5y ago
    Agreed. I've been on companies that did the opposite from going small to big. They started big, very big, with Fortune 50 costumers. That meant they hired a small but very specialized sales team with the right connections very early on. Because the burn rate was very small (due to needing just a few engineers and employees and a small infrastructure) and the sales cycle took months, we could easily develop a strong product with the requested features, and then it turned out when we moved down to medium and small businesses most of the features were already in place all we needed to focus was on scaling the architecture. Plus, big costumers pay very good and are loyal as long as you don't cause them headaches. The only downside of this approach is if we hired the wrong sales people, the company would never take off.
• cbsmith 5y ago
  > The story is a lot more complicated and nuanced than the headlines you read in publications You could put that as subtext for pretty much every story you read. ;-)
• danielmarkbruce 5y ago
  An overly positive culture is default behavior for most startups. It does appear to be poisonous and there is nothing you can do about it. If you call people out on BS, you are painted as a negative person. Not sure there is a fix.
  • throwthere 5y ago
    Makes me think about theranos or wework. Charismatic leaders can get a lot of people/talent following them without necessarily having a solid grasp on all of the complicated aspects of the business they run. Of course you have really great charismatic leaders in startups like Marc Benioff for example who kind of get everything right.
    • danielmarkbruce 5y ago
      I don't work at salesforce, but I can almost guarantee people who work there will tell you they are miles from getting everything right. Every company is pretty messy internally. As for theranos and wework - i don't mean those kinds of things. I mean standard non-fraud startups. The always positive culture is there, and at least for folks who take some pride in being rational, it is quite demoralizing.
      • Nextgrid 5y ago
        > I mean standard non-fraud startups. Fraud is not black and white. "Toxic positivity" can enable shenanigans or conceal problems in an otherwise non-fraudulent startup.
        • danielmarkbruce 5y ago
          Yep true. I should have been more clear - I just meant that toxic positivity is more widespread, it's not only at fraudulent companies.
  • nowherebeen 5y ago
    If you rock the boat, you are toxic and not a team player. That’s how it works at most startups. It’s career suicide to say anything else other than what the team wants to hear.
• ec109685 5y ago
  What I couldn’t understand was that there were times where something like ApplePay was a clearly superior way to pay. E.g. JavaScript says the user has it configured and able to make payments, so one click payments were actually possible. At least publicly, Fast never addressed this, and insisted on requiring the user to log into Fast to make a payment even when it was a worse option. Browsers like Safari are explicitly designed to prevent people from remaining logged into third party sites like Fast. All this was just brushed under the rug and instead it was just a bunch bluster on how Fast was a revolution. At least Bolt allows payment via ApplePay, and seems more about doing whatever it takes to maximize each seller’s conversion, rather than having an ulterior motive to push its own brand everywhere.
  • samhw 5y ago
    I briefly made an MVP of 'basically Fast', and had to deal with mobile Safari, so I can tell you (hell, I can give you the code if you want it). We had to load our own site in a zero-sized iframe, at a specific endpoint which ran a script that read the cookies and sent them over the Window.postMessage API to the merchant page, where our JS was running and intercepted the cookie contents. But that was an MVP, and I was uncomfortable about the security implications even so - not sure how Fast's engineers hacked it together, if they even did. The two of us ditched it when we realised how inhospitable the economics were, but even then we knew Fast's shitty play was bound to fail, and I heard the news from my prospective cofounder sending me a text ("we called it!") when it happened...
• ec109685 5y ago
  I don’t get this sentiment: https://twitter.com/dcarter_js/status/1509916298574442498 https://twitter.com/dcarter_js/status/1509916298574442498 “I could not be happier or more proud of my teams and what they have accomplished.” If the company wasn’t successful, then that’s partially on engineering. As employees, we win as a team and lose as a team. It seems like they were way overbuilt and should have gone much slower from a hiring perspective. Perhaps these are just words that folks say to put best light on things as they leave, but it strikes me as disingenuous and lacks that ownership mentality that engineering leadership should display.
  • smabie 5y ago
    Maybe what you're not getting was that it was posted on April Fools day?
    • aidaman 4y ago
      no
• hef19898 5y ago
  There is a lot of truth in that. Refusal to acknowledge failures and hard truth, ignoring the elephants in the room, default assuming success, hiding or keeping information secret... That's quite a risky combination.