The Exchanges

Q Not at all, but I want to start, and I want to start with, as we always do, a little bit of context. So how did you make your way into the world of tech? How did you make your way into the world of startups, and what was that entry point for you first?

A I've been building for a long time. I, uh, started programming when I was about 14, so that's about 20 years ago now, so I've been building stuff for a long time. Building software and hardware and whatever else. First e-commerce store when I was 15, so I've always kind of been in tech, I would say. I grew up in loving everything to do with computers, and this was well before the stage that it was cool to love everything to do with computers. I've had two sort of startups. First one was a company in Australia called Toe, which was not a venture-backed startup. It was a sort of bootstrap company. It was an on-demand towing business that failed and shut down in 2018, and then I launched My second startup, Fast, which in 2019, which was venture backed, and is likely what we're going to spend a lot of time talking about today. And Fast taught me a whole lot of new experiences and lessons.

AI assessment note: “started programming when I was about 14, so that's about 20 years ago”

Q Not at all, but I want to start, and I want to start with, as we always do, a little bit of context. So how did you make your way into the world of tech? How did you make your way into the world of startups, and what was that entry point for you first?

A I've been building for a long time. I, uh, started programming when I was about 14, so that's about 20 years ago now, so I've been building stuff for a long time. Building software and hardware and whatever else. First e-commerce store when I was 15, so I've always kind of been in tech, I would say. I grew up in loving everything to do with computers, and this was well before the stage that it was cool to love everything to do with computers. I've had two sort of startups. First one was a company in Australia called Toe, which was not a venture-backed startup. It was a sort of bootstrap company. It was an on-demand towing business that failed and shut down in 2018, and then I launched My second startup, Fast, which in 2019, which was venture backed, and is likely what we're going to spend a lot of time talking about today. And Fast taught me a whole lot of new experiences and lessons.

AI assessment note: “I, uh, started programming when I was about 14”

Q hours sleep, fuck all this hustle porn, I've got this down. And then I DM with you, and despite whatever time zone you're in, you're always responsive and back in seconds. So I guess my question is, I chatted to Jan before the show, and he said you have this mentality of it being a race against How do you stretch your day? What does it look like for you?

A My number one value is definitely speed, and it's not actually the sole reason why we called the company Fast, but speed really is, I think, my big differentiator, and it is just the way that I like to operate. So, you know, I wake up at four 30, I sort of clear through the emails that have come in overnight, chapter this hour, I'm out the door in, you know, 25 minutes. At the moment, I walk to work. I walk through Tenderloin and get my exercise in on the way to work. It's, you know, Sort of three and a half, four miles, and it's a nice exercise, but, you know, I listened to your podcast on the way, so I listened to Vlad from Webflow this morning, and, you know, it gives me time to debrief on what's coming overnight. It gives me time to sort of have a quick look at the progress of the team, what they've done that day, you know, spend time sort of going over my tasks that I've got coming up, and, you know, the whole world is asleep at this time. This is, it's my favorite time to be awake. One, because I know that I'm awake and my competitors aren't. I love that feeling, but two, it really does give me extra hours in the day to prepare Prepare for the day before other people start coming at me, and I think that's really important. The other thing I love, I talk about this a lot, is, you know, I love walking through the tenderloin. It is an absolutely horrific place, and I find it…

AI assessment note: “I wake up at four 30, I sort of clear through the emails”

Q Well, ego inflation will get you everywhere, Dom. Thank you so much for that. But I do want to kick off today. You know the drill. A little bit about you. So hit me. How did you make your way into the world of startups, And then what was that kind of founding aha moment for you with FAST?

A Yeah, sure. I like, I've been interested in tech and startups for a very long time. So when I was 15, I started, or 14, I started programming, but that was 17 years ago in regional Australia when it was not cool to be programming. So I did boxing at the same time to try and protect myself from my other hobbies. So I've really enjoyed the whole experience for a long time and built a lot of tech products over the years. It's only in the last sort of five or six years I really got into the sort of High scale startup side. I had a large startup in Australia, and I've moved on, I've launched a couple of ventures, but last year, to sort of jump tail into fast directly, I'm married with two little kids, and my youngest child was in hospital for a, for three weeks last year, and so my wife or myself was at the hospital, 24 hours a day, and we'd alternate, and one of us would stay at the hospital looking after my son, and the other one would be at home looking after our daughter, and we had my wife's grandmother staying with us at the time. One night I was at my kitchen table doing some work on my laptop, and she was on her laptop ordering groceries, and she literally couldn't order groceries because she forgot her password, and this is one of Australia's largest companies to turn over, you know, nearly seventy billion dollars a year, and they simply wouldn't take a credit card off her …

AI assessment note: “she literally couldn't order groceries because she forgot her password”

Q hours sleep, fuck all this hustle porn, I've got this down. And then I DM with you, and despite whatever time zone you're in, you're always responsive and back in seconds. So I guess my question is, I chatted to Jan before the show, and he said you have this mentality of it being a race against How do you stretch your day? What does it look like for you?

A My number one value is definitely speed, and it's not actually the sole reason why we called the company Fast, but speed really is, I think, my big differentiator, and it is just the way that I like to operate. So, you know, I wake up at four 30, I sort of clear through the emails that have come in overnight, chapter this hour, I'm out the door in, you know, 25 minutes. At the moment, I walk to work. I walk through Tenderloin and get my exercise in on the way to work. It's, you know, Sort of three and a half, four miles, and it's a nice exercise, but, you know, I listened to your podcast on the way, so I listened to Vlad from Webflow this morning, and, you know, it gives me time to debrief on what's coming overnight. It gives me time to sort of have a quick look at the progress of the team, what they've done that day, you know, spend time sort of going over my tasks that I've got coming up, and, you know, the whole world is asleep at this time. This is, it's my favorite time to be awake. One, because I know that I'm awake and my competitors aren't. I love that feeling, but two, it really does give me extra hours in the day to prepare Prepare for the day before other people start coming at me, and I think that's really important. The other thing I love, I talk about this a lot, is, you know, I love walking through the tenderloin. It is an absolutely horrific place, and I find it…

AI assessment note: “I wake up at four 30, I sort of clear through the emails”

Q Well, ego inflation will get you everywhere, Dom. Thank you so much for that. But I do want to kick off today. You know the drill. A little bit about you. So hit me. How did you make your way into the world of startups, And then what was that kind of founding aha moment for you with FAST?

A Yeah, sure. I like, I've been interested in tech and startups for a very long time. So when I was 15, I started, or 14, I started programming, but that was 17 years ago in regional Australia when it was not cool to be programming. So I did boxing at the same time to try and protect myself from my other hobbies. So I've really enjoyed the whole experience for a long time and built a lot of tech products over the years. It's only in the last sort of five or six years I really got into the sort of High scale startup side. I had a large startup in Australia, and I've moved on, I've launched a couple of ventures, but last year, to sort of jump tail into fast directly, I'm married with two little kids, and my youngest child was in hospital for a, for three weeks last year, and so my wife or myself was at the hospital, 24 hours a day, and we'd alternate, and one of us would stay at the hospital looking after my son, and the other one would be at home looking after our daughter, and we had my wife's grandmother staying with us at the time. One night I was at my kitchen table doing some work on my laptop, and she was on her laptop ordering groceries, and she literally couldn't order groceries because she forgot her password, and this is one of Australia's largest companies to turn over, you know, nearly seventy billion dollars a year, and they simply wouldn't take a credit card off her …

AI assessment note: “she literally couldn't order groceries because she forgot her password”

Q we recognize that kind of the innovation on the consumer side there, as it said, needs to change Very outdated, maybe experience on your PayPal's of the world. My immediate thought then is why haven't all the large internet platforms built this? And then related to this, does it need to be an independent platform or can the monopolistic regimes of Facebook and Amazon and Apple not do it themselves?

A Yeah. So I think that there's two parts. The first part is that one, it has to be a third party, right? And not saying that it can't be, you know, one of the fang, but it needs to be a third party and not the merchants themselves. The problem that we've had over the last 10 years is that everyone's been building their own authentication and their own payment forms and their own registration forms, and they're doing it first party, which is a terrible experience for consumers, right? Replicating that customer token over and over and over and over and over. The reality is it needs to be a third party that scales and that provides a great consumer experience, great merchant experience in the same way that Visa and MasterCard scale credit cards between merchants. Whether or not it's Apple, Facebook, Amazon, the problem with them is that they have alternative business models which conflict with The raw purpose of the consumer wanting to transact or wanting to authenticate themselves or wanting to share data. And so, you know, we've seen, we don't need to go into Facebook's disaster with data management. We know that Google is tied to an advertising platform. We know that Amazon is so conflicted with merchants that merchants don't want to be incorporating Amazon into their own environments. So there does need to be a party which is completely independent. Which their business model i…

AI assessment note: “So there does need to be a party which is completely independent.”

Q Was it that, and then the fundraise market just shat the bed, and bluntly you didn't have time to catch up? Or bluntly, and I'm just being direct here, was it also access? Was it the chain smokers? Was it, I don't know, sponsoring race cars? Was there access? You're like, you know what, shouldn't have done that.

A It's so funny. I really disagree, right? The vast majority of our burn came directly from people. Like, well over 80% of our cost space was just wages, health care benefits, over 80%. Like, our money just went to people. We just hired a lot of people. That was where the burn came from. I think if you have a look at our marketing spend, it would be surprisingly lower than anyone would actually think, right? We actually didn't spend that much money on marketing, and we did these, like, specific high-profile events, like racing or whatever, and we would do them as one-offs. It was very low spend. We didn't have huge consumer marketing campaigns. We didn't have buses rolling around with fast on the side of them. We didn't take over train stations. Like we didn't spend tons of money, TV ads. We just had these like very specific events that we managed to kind of increase the awareness of. Our cost base was just people. It was just people cost. And we hired the very best people. And I think you can see that in the last two weeks, we've had staff, we've had hundreds of job offers from companies because our people were great. And that's what I mean. Frankly, the salaciousness of spend is just not there.

AI assessment note: “Frankly, the salaciousness of spend is just not there.”

Q we recognize that kind of the innovation on the consumer side there, as it said, needs to change Very outdated, maybe experience on your PayPal's of the world. My immediate thought then is why haven't all the large internet platforms built this? And then related to this, does it need to be an independent platform or can the monopolistic regimes of Facebook and Amazon and Apple not do it themselves?

A Yeah. So I think that there's two parts. The first part is that one, it has to be a third party, right? And not saying that it can't be, you know, one of the fang, but it needs to be a third party and not the merchants themselves. The problem that we've had over the last 10 years is that everyone's been building their own authentication and their own payment forms and their own registration forms, and they're doing it first party, which is a terrible experience for consumers, right? Replicating that customer token over and over and over and over and over. The reality is it needs to be a third party that scales and that provides a great consumer experience, great merchant experience in the same way that Visa and MasterCard scale credit cards between merchants. Whether or not it's Apple, Facebook, Amazon, the problem with them is that they have alternative business models which conflict with The raw purpose of the consumer wanting to transact or wanting to authenticate themselves or wanting to share data. And so, you know, we've seen, we don't need to go into Facebook's disaster with data management. We know that Google is tied to an advertising platform. We know that Amazon is so conflicted with merchants that merchants don't want to be incorporating Amazon into their own environments. So there does need to be a party which is completely independent. Which their business model i…

AI assessment note: “they have alternative business models which conflict with The raw purpose”

Q to discuss it? You said the short to medium term there, and in the short term, it's super interesting. You decided to have an HQ or a base in San Francisco. Obviously, you're there now with rising rents with war for talent, capital inefficiency, and it's highest in SF. It is an interesting choice, Dom. Can I ask, why did you decide for the SF base, and how's it been?

A To me, it's no choice at all. As an Australian, we're a country of twenty-five million people. The US is a country of three hundred and thirty million people. I only have a certain number of hours in a day, and I would love to increase that number of hours. I try as hard as I can. But the reality is, is I only have a certain amount of my output. And obviously, sitting in bigger markets, naturally, you're going to have larger result for the same amount of output. So just on that level, it makes sense to be in larger markets. But the reality is, is that the US or San Francisco itself is home to the largest tech companies in the world. And it has undisputedly built More tech companies, more successful tech companies than any other place in the world. You know, the top 10 companies are worth far more than our entire stock exchange in Australia, and it's because there's this concentration of capital and expertise that just doesn't exist anywhere else in the world, and the expertise is so incredibly important. It's not to say that you can't have teams outside of San Francisco, and you can't have people outside of San Francisco, but there's, if you want to build a tech company, you know, there's not a place in the world that has engineers that That have worked at companies that have gone from one to a thousand employees in a matter of years as there are in San Francisco. And, you know…

AI assessment note: “it's because there's this concentration of capital and expertise that just doesn't exist anywhere else”

Q kind of structuring your meetings to check in with them, and each function. Are there any other elements where you say it's really been a needle mover for you? Maybe documentation of processes, maybe the way you do stand-ups, whatever it may be. Is there any other things where you've really seen like needle moving progress on Communication between remote and core teams, and how you think about improving that?

A Yeah, look, I think the biggest incremental move for us was setting up those daily calls. So before that, I would do sort of periodic ad hoc calls. I communicate a lot with them, you know, a hundred Slack messages with, you know, each of them a day. They love to, you know, love to sort of talk with us, and I'm in constant communication and WhatsApp and, you know, Google Hangouts and everything else, but having that structured time every day that each functional area speaks to us is so helpful, and I take They're 15 minute calls with each functional area, like they're not long, but they give us time to go over the work that they, it's my sort of eight AM is there four or five PM. So it's at the end of the day. So we can go over what they did that day. As I'm getting up, we can go over what they're going to do the next day. And having that regularity for them is so important. One, they feel so connected. They get really fast feedback loops on the, on the work that they've done. You know, I spend the time before those calls going over what they've worked that they've done, looking at the outputs. And so, yeah, that's definitely been the greatest unlock.

AI assessment note: “the biggest incremental move for us was setting up those daily calls”

Q Was it that, and then the fundraise market just shat the bed, and bluntly you didn't have time to catch up? Or bluntly, and I'm just being direct here, was it also access? Was it the chain smokers? Was it, I don't know, sponsoring race cars? Was there access? You're like, you know what, shouldn't have done that.

A It's so funny. I really disagree, right? The vast majority of our burn came directly from people. Like, well over 80% of our cost space was just wages, health care benefits, over 80%. Like, our money just went to people. We just hired a lot of people. That was where the burn came from. I think if you have a look at our marketing spend, it would be surprisingly lower than anyone would actually think, right? We actually didn't spend that much money on marketing, and we did these, like, specific high-profile events, like racing or whatever, and we would do them as one-offs. It was very low spend. We didn't have huge consumer marketing campaigns. We didn't have buses rolling around with fast on the side of them. We didn't take over train stations. Like we didn't spend tons of money, TV ads. We just had these like very specific events that we managed to kind of increase the awareness of. Our cost base was just people. It was just people cost. And we hired the very best people. And I think you can see that in the last two weeks, we've had staff, we've had hundreds of job offers from companies because our people were great. And that's what I mean. Frankly, the salaciousness of spend is just not there.

AI assessment note: “well over 80% of our cost space was just wages, health care benefits”

Q Can I ask, how do you deal with shit hit the fan moments?

A I don't have them anymore. Having been brought up in the school of hard knocks, my last company really took a lot for me to get through. I had a lot of stress in that going through, you know, I was suing a state government in the Supreme Court of Queensland and the police force, you know, I was dealing with some absolutely horrible people who carry guns around and I just don't have those moments anymore. You know, it's, this is why I have forethought. I think constantly about everything that I'm doing, everything that's coming up, every possible scenario, something bad happens, then I just go and solve that. You know, if something terrible happens, I just go and solve that, and then we move on. I just don't come across challenges that seem, you know, life-threatening. I come across problems that I see as, you know, needing to be solved, but none of them that make me quiver in my boots.

AI assessment note: “I don't have them anymore. Having been brought up in the school of hard knocks”

Q Totally love that. And I think you're so right in terms of just extracting just enough value from your investor base and just how to do it. So totally with you there. Tell me, and this is the most exciting, what are the next five years hold for you and for Fast? Paint that kind of roadmap for me.

A My mission with Fast is to touch every single, you know, internet connected consumer in this planet, which hopefully is most consumers in, you know, in five to 10 years. And, you know, we want to be powering authentication. We want to be powering payments. We want to unlock the ability for consumers to, you know, control their data, skewer their data, and share their data if and when they want easily, and allow them to make life easier for a consumer and for a customer. And my goal is to do that for every consumer on the planet. So I'd like to think that five years in, I'm getting pretty close to that mission, especially at the pace we're operating.

AI assessment note: “My mission with Fast is to touch every single, you know, internet connected consumer”

Q I'm sorry. Another accusation is around like letting team members go and not doing that the right way. How do you respond to that one?

A Well, I don't know. I mean, with fast literally fought for months and months and months. To keep the team together, right? That was like my primary goal. I'm not, you know, letting people go. I tell you what, it would have been a lot easier come December last year just to let half the team go and fundraise, right? Like that would have been much easier than I, and I fought hard to not have that. So I think it's the opposite. In the end, when it just was clear that cost pace wouldn't work, like I said, we firm aqua hired the company. We picked a company that would take on a huge amount of our team. Hundreds of people. It's not often you have a team so good that Another company will take on hundreds of them without going through formal interviewing, and then likely will take on a lot more. You know what? I used to put myself in a screen in front of everyone and deliver the news myself. In a virtual era, when we've got people in a dozen countries, in 20 states around the country, I don't know how I could have done that any better or any differently, other than standing in virtually in front of everyone. It's just an awful thing having to let people go in general. My whole thing is how can we tell as many people as quickly as possible at the same time so they hear it from us? Today, the way to do that is Zoom or whatever your general form of communication is, right? It's like, that'…

AI assessment note: “I don't know how I could have done that any better or any differently”

Q Appreciate that. I'm glad that you have no mob, like, characteristics tied to you. Always a relief. Question, like, on Bolt, have they done something right? Did they do enterprise much sooner than you? Like, bluntly, why did they survive? Why did they survive and fast not?

A Yeah, I mean, best thing they did, I think, was copy out our sort of messaging, right, is what happened after we launched. If they started talking about one-click checkout, they stopped talking about Bitcoin early, and then they stopped talking about fraud checkout, and started talking about one-click checkout, and people started going, ah, yeah, that's it. You're a Fast competitor. The reality is, and part of the reason why we grew the team, right, is especially on the R&D side, which was the majority of the business, was you do have to build. There was a lot of stuff to build to support enterprise. It's not just about having an enterprise-grade product. E-commerce is very fragmented, right? Lots of different platforms, lots of different integrations. There's a lot of stuff that you've got to build before you can actually kind of onboard enterprise and whatnot, and we had been building that. We had been doing really well, and we're just at the start of our curve of onboarding enterprise. In January, we onboarded our first Billion dollar merchant. There were 50 X the size of our second biggest merchant. Twice the size of Bolt's biggest live customer, right? More than twice the size. And so I think we were doing a lot of things right. The reality though is that Bolt had just been building all of those integrations for a lot longer. They had five-year head start on building all t…

AI assessment note: “Bolt had just been building all of those integrations for a lot longer.”

Q they do in SF. And, uh, it's a, yeah, it's a big contributing factor, I think, to the building early great teams. I do want to ask, because another element of the team, which is super interesting, is the element of the remote So how have you structured this remote team? And have you had some big lessons in what it really takes to drive effectiveness in a remote team?

A Yeah, look, so we raised an angel around in Australia before we came over to America. So we raised 600,000 Australian dollars, which is about 400,000 American dollars. So it's not a lot of money to build a team off. And prior to that, I built all the tech myself. So I, you know, I needed some people to one, take over some of the edge that I couldn't keep doing on a day to day basis, but obviously to continue product development. And work in other areas that I don't have expertise. And so, we put out a job ad for a remote role, and we thought we'd get one or two people, have a sort of relatively mild burn rate, and sort of just progress the product along. We had a fantastic applicant apply from Nigeria, and, you know, like most people, you know, especially here, I hadn't even considered Nigeria as a possibility for, you know, a place that we would be hiring talent. I just, you know, naively, it was not a market that came to mind, but he had a fantastic background, you know, really great code review, gave him a coding challenge, he'd Performed extremely well. The money that he wanted was so much less than we had budgeted for this role, and we looked at, sort of, country, you know, average earnings, and the average earnings for that type of role in Nigeria, and we still paid, like, 50% above market, I think, but we were really happy doing so. So he's still with us. He's a fantasti…

AI assessment note: “I think we've got now 10 people in our remote team from Nigeria”

Q Well, I mean, that British friendly face, listen, I appreciate that, and I appreciate the honesty, man. You've also kind of been through this experience personally, emotionally. Is there anything that I haven't asked, honestly, that you feel you would like people to know?

A I think one of the reasons as well, people find it easy, maybe easier to kind of villainize me through this, is the Aussie male in me, right? I was brought up as a very traditional, hardened Aussie males attitude, right? And frankly, this is not a great way to live. We don't bring up our kids like this, but I will never complain in suffer quietly, right? Even as a kid, I would never talk about my emotion. I don't talk about, you know, feelings of it. I just kind of get through. My job is I have to be the rock always. I've always been the rock in my family. That's the job, right? It's really easy for people to want to hate or want to talk about or want to have a go at people who don't suffer publicly, but a lot more Popular these days to kind of suffer publicly, and to talk about your feelings, and to talk about mental health, and talk about the toll that it's taking on you, and people really appreciate that these days, right? And I think the world wants to know when things are hard. It's just not me, right? And talk about when it gets hard. Get through it.

AI assessment note: “people find it easy, maybe easier to kind of villainize me through this”

Q kind of structuring your meetings to check in with them, and each function. Are there any other elements where you say it's really been a needle mover for you? Maybe documentation of processes, maybe the way you do stand-ups, whatever it may be. Is there any other things where you've really seen like needle moving progress on Communication between remote and core teams, and how you think about improving that?

A Yeah, look, I think the biggest incremental move for us was setting up those daily calls. So before that, I would do sort of periodic ad hoc calls. I communicate a lot with them, you know, a hundred Slack messages with, you know, each of them a day. They love to, you know, love to sort of talk with us, and I'm in constant communication and WhatsApp and, you know, Google Hangouts and everything else, but having that structured time every day that each functional area speaks to us is so helpful, and I take They're 15 minute calls with each functional area, like they're not long, but they give us time to go over the work that they, it's my sort of eight AM is there four or five PM. So it's at the end of the day. So we can go over what they did that day. As I'm getting up, we can go over what they're going to do the next day. And having that regularity for them is so important. One, they feel so connected. They get really fast feedback loops on the, on the work that they've done. You know, I spend the time before those calls going over what they've worked that they've done, looking at the outputs. And so, yeah, that's definitely been the greatest unlock.

AI assessment note: “setting up those daily calls... that's definitely been the greatest unlock.”

Q What advice would you, and Alison actually recommended this one, she said, what advice would you give to engineers and technical people looking to broaden their skill sets?

A To technical people and engineers, there is so many resources out there these days. If you've got a thirst for knowledge, like, you know, and I do, I love to learn new things. Like, you know, I find tech Tech is my hobby, and, you know, new tech's amazing, and so I think it's almost difficult for me to not constantly be coming across new things and learning new things, so I think absorb everything around you is the number one most important thing. I think Twitter is such an incredible tool at being exposed to a lot of this new tech, new tools, amazing people. I'm, again, all about surrounding myself with incredible people, and here is one of the greatest places to do it, but Twitter is where you can be exposed to some of the brightest minds in the world, and there are They're telling you what they're doing. They're telling you what they're working on. You know, there's an incredible indie maker community that are building amazing things. Things like product hunt, you know, constantly new sources of technology, new sources of tools to play with. So I think just being awake and opening your eyes, you know, is what any good engineer or product person or technical person or founder could do.

AI assessment note: “absorb everything around you is the number one most important thing. I think Twitter”

Q What advice would you, and Alison actually recommended this one, she said, what advice would you give to engineers and technical people looking to broaden their skill sets?

A To technical people and engineers, there is so many resources out there these days. If you've got a thirst for knowledge, like, you know, and I do, I love to learn new things. Like, you know, I find tech Tech is my hobby, and, you know, new tech's amazing, and so I think it's almost difficult for me to not constantly be coming across new things and learning new things, so I think absorb everything around you is the number one most important thing. I think Twitter is such an incredible tool at being exposed to a lot of this new tech, new tools, amazing people. I'm, again, all about surrounding myself with incredible people, and here is one of the greatest places to do it, but Twitter is where you can be exposed to some of the brightest minds in the world, and there are They're telling you what they're doing. They're telling you what they're working on. You know, there's an incredible indie maker community that are building amazing things. Things like product hunt, you know, constantly new sources of technology, new sources of tools to play with. So I think just being awake and opening your eyes, you know, is what any good engineer or product person or technical person or founder could do.

AI assessment note: “absorb everything around you is the number one most important thing”

Q I do want to ask, I think all experiences shape our thinking moving forwards. When you look to the journey with Fast, what would you, on the next company that you do, what would you do the same, and you think really worked, and what would you do differently?

A Yeah, obviously been pondering this a lot. We got so much right. I'll answer that directly in a second, but kind of like looking back, I look at since we stopped, right, since we closed down. I've had, obviously, everyone's had their views and stuff. Our team has been in such incredible high demand. We have Literally people with hundreds of offers. The vast majority have already been snatched up. We got team right, right? We hired the right people. We hired the best people. From a product standpoint, I've had probably 50 companies aggressively reaching out to me, wanting to buy the product, wanting to buy the IP, wanting to build it again, me to come and launch a new division to build the same thing under their company. I think we got the product right, and it's because we focused on the consumer, and that's something I would definitely do again, right? What's the consumer problem that we're solving? And there was a lot we got right. I'm not saying you're going to go out and build a checkout product again, but they're the things that I would focus on right now. What would I do differently? I would absolutely keep burn a lot lower is a significantly lower exponentially lower.

AI assessment note: “What would I do differently? I would absolutely keep burn a lot lower”

Q How does it feel when you read the articles?

A Years ago, I stopped reading, reading the articles. The good or the bad. Doesn't matter. I don't want to see it. I don't care how nice they're being. If they're glorifying us, I don't read it. Same thing for the nasty ones. Again, same thing, right? Some people are going to love you, some people are going to hate you, and I don't want to know about it. I'm here to work on what I'm working on. I'm here to, like, carry out my mission. That's not to say that I'm oblivious to it at all, but I can't just fester on people's thoughts and whatever. It is I got a job to do, but it's horrible. I think it's more like media just loves to have a crack, right? If you're on the way up, media loves to build you up. If you're on the way down, media loves to kick in the guts. You got social media, which is just like, or Twitter, which is just the pressure pot, whatever. And it's, it's awful, but I, you can sit and dwell on it and feel sorry for yourself and whatever, or, or just one foot in front of the other and move on.

AI assessment note: “Years ago, I stopped reading, reading the articles. The good or the bad.”

Q Can I ask, we mentioned the element there of the speed being that core determinant for you. Is there ever a challenge? Because whenever I try and do something incredibly fast, normally the quality goes down, as I'm sure it does with most people. How do you manage and maintain speed and quality?

A Yeah, I think it just becomes a muscle. It's like you, you, I've just operated like this for a long time. I'm just better at doing it now probably than I was a long time ago. I think the price, you know, the tools are available now to make it easier than ever. You know, superhuman is, you know, tools like that are fantastic at me being able to sort of try edge email very, very rapidly. You know, tools like WhatsApp, every one of our investors, every one of my partners, our advisors, our staff, I have like this incredible Incredible brain trust on WhatsApp, which means if I don't know an answer to something, I can typically find it out in minutes from people all around the world. Like I find that, uh, you know, Twitter, I find these tools absolutely incredible and allowing me to operate very, very quickly.

AI assessment note: “if I don't know an answer to something, I can typically find it out in minutes”

Q How does it feel when you read the articles?

A Years ago, I stopped reading, reading the articles. The good or the bad. Doesn't matter. I don't want to see it. I don't care how nice they're being. If they're glorifying us, I don't read it. Same thing for the nasty ones. Again, same thing, right? Some people are going to love you, some people are going to hate you, and I don't want to know about it. I'm here to work on what I'm working on. I'm here to, like, carry out my mission. That's not to say that I'm oblivious to it at all, but I can't just fester on people's thoughts and whatever. It is I got a job to do, but it's horrible. I think it's more like media just loves to have a crack, right? If you're on the way up, media loves to build you up. If you're on the way down, media loves to kick in the guts. You got social media, which is just like, or Twitter, which is just the pressure pot, whatever. And it's, it's awful, but I, you can sit and dwell on it and feel sorry for yourself and whatever, or, or just one foot in front of the other and move on.

AI assessment note: “Years ago, I stopped reading, reading the articles.”

Q Well, I mean, thinking about next steps forward, final one, and I'm not doing a quick fire, because this is obviously a kind of special show in its own right, but in terms of, like, next steps and next chapter, What are your thoughts on what you want to do now?

A Like I was saying, right? I think what I want to do is the same thing is keep building and keep solving problems. And I've seen a lot is I love what I do. I love building product. I love building teams. I love this. It's what I'm here to do. How I will do that is what I'm still trying to decide now. What shape does that look like now? And kind of go and figure that out. But I'm back in my ideation phase and I'll figure that out at the moment, but it has been really nice. I've, um, whilst there's been a lot of negativity in There's also been a lot of amazing support coming out of this, right? I've, most of our team have been incredible at being messaging and obviously been messing with a lot of them, making sure that they're all getting placed in new roles and whatever. But I tell you, I've taken 300 screenshots of messages that our team has sent me saying how much of an incredible time they had that they would do it all over again. And so that's been great. I've had lots of existing investors who said that they would back me again. Other investors would love to back the next thing. And customers have had huge customers reach out and say, you know, how sad they are, the product's gone, how much they loved it, and what the impact had on them. And so it's the reality behind what happened that keeps me driving forward, right? The media and whatever scumbags on Twitter can say whate…

AI assessment note: “what I want to do is the same thing is keep building and keep solving problems”

Q What fuckers, if you're listening, we absolutely hate you. We hate you, and we're much more powerful than you know, I'm joking. But I do want to ask, you know, you said that about the learnings in particular. Were there anything that actually you saw very operationally that worked well, be it product, be it hiring, where you are now transferring that to the time with fast?

A Look, directly solve problems. I learned this lesson over many years. That wasn't when I learned this lesson, but again, put it into practice there, and it just reiterated this. When you find a problem, I think people are so good at trying to find complex solutions to problems. Or solutions that don't actually solve the problem, they're band-aid fixes. Solve the actual problem, and like, it's, it's incredible the success and scale you can get from doing that. And so, if the issue is, is that police don't want to book tows all around the state, then you don't go and put tow trucks in every part of the state, which is a 150,000 dollars a pop, and try and build this huge industrial business. You build a network of independent towing contractors, and you use tech to, you know, to manage that. Like, it's an, it's a no-brainer solution. You just solve the direct And of course, it wasn't just the police who had this issue. It was in the country's biggest insurance companies and fleet operators and so many more. It's when you take on problems directly at their core, it's, it's incredible the opportunity to unlock.

AI assessment note: “directly solve problems. I learned this lesson over many years.”

Q What fuckers, if you're listening, we absolutely hate you. We hate you, and we're much more powerful than you know, I'm joking. But I do want to ask, you know, you said that about the learnings in particular. Were there anything that actually you saw very operationally that worked well, be it product, be it hiring, where you are now transferring that to the time with fast?

A Look, directly solve problems. I learned this lesson over many years. That wasn't when I learned this lesson, but again, put it into practice there, and it just reiterated this. When you find a problem, I think people are so good at trying to find complex solutions to problems. Or solutions that don't actually solve the problem, they're band-aid fixes. Solve the actual problem, and like, it's, it's incredible the success and scale you can get from doing that. And so, if the issue is, is that police don't want to book tows all around the state, then you don't go and put tow trucks in every part of the state, which is a 150,000 dollars a pop, and try and build this huge industrial business. You build a network of independent towing contractors, and you use tech to, you know, to manage that. Like, it's an, it's a no-brainer solution. You just solve the direct And of course, it wasn't just the police who had this issue. It was in the country's biggest insurance companies and fleet operators and so many more. It's when you take on problems directly at their core, it's, it's incredible the opportunity to unlock.

AI assessment note: “Look, directly solve problems. I learned this lesson over many years.”

Q Can I ask, with that in mind, and this is totally off schedule, but I'm too interested, would you say that Fost is a payments company or actually more an identity management company?

A No, like, I don't personally consider us a fintech. And, you know, I guess in a sort of typical sense, people would call us identity. I don't consider it so much identity. I think of this whole customer token where more than identity is But yeah, I definitely see our opportunity is far broader. And, you know, looking at e-commerce payments, it's over a three and a half trillion dollar industry this year. This is definitely our focus in the short to medium term. And so, you know, for that reason, we have a lot of investors who invest in us as a fintech, but our opportunity is far bigger. And the opportunity for consumers, the problems that we're solving is actually far bigger than just payments.

AI assessment note: “I don't personally consider us a fintech... I don't consider it so much identity.”

Q I spoke to Jan, he said about the incredible team that you've put together. As you know, I know Alison, who is exceptional, but you've got this incredible base of kind of experienced operators. What have been some of the biggest lessons and learnings of what it takes to hire some kind of truly exceptional and experienced individuals? As an SF outsider one, but also just very early, what's worked?

A You know, I think, especially in SF here, is that there are so many, so many companies, right? There's a new breed of companies, You know, a new batch of companies coming through every week. Everyone's working on sort of unique things. There's so much capital here that people can be fairly transient with jobs and move between jobs. Mission, size of problems, size of scale, interesting problems. These are things that people want to look for in new roles. I think the scale of our opportunity is absolutely huge. I want to assemble the best possible team that can solve these problems and that can work with me to solve these problems. And I think that other people here want to work with exceptional people too. And I think that mission and the problems that you're solving are the number one thing that you need to look at when assembling that leadership team. And there's other triggers for other team members that are going to come in later. And when we're going to expand that team and different people have different triggers, but I definitely think mission, purpose, size, scale, opportunity are very driving factors for key leadership.

AI assessment note: “mission and the problems that you're solving are the number one thing”