Assertion Not publicly verifiable
Holland: Fast never burned $10 million a month despite media reports
“The burn that's being reported by the media is not the real burn. Our burn was much lower. It was significantly lower. We've never done ten million dollars a month of burn before, right?”
Assertion Supported
Holland: Excessive burn rate killed Fast, not investor Stripe
“Having Stripe as an investor isn't what killed our company. Having too high a burn is what killed our company. There's just no other way to put it.”
Assertion Partly supported
Holland: Queensland government refused to pay Tow $17 million owed
“The government didn't want to pay for about seventeen million dollars worth of tows and impounds that we did for them.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Holland: Stripe never engaged in mob attacks or criminality against Fast
“I have never once witnessed a mob attack by Stripe or any sort of organized criminality of any type, I'll tell you.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Holland: Bolt raised checkout funding using legacy fraud product revenue
“And what happened was that revenue from the last couple of years wasn't for one click checkout. It was for their sort of old fraud checkout form thing, right? And, but they were able to raise a lot of money last year, now selling one click checkout, save one c…”
Assertion Not publicly verifiable
Holland: Over 80% of Fast's burn went to compensation and healthcare
“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%.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Holland: Fast's largest merchant was twice the size of Bolt's
“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.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Holland: Fast had $8B in signed enterprise deals when it shut down
“We had won, we had eight billion dollars of enterprise merchants in signed deals that we were onboarding.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Holland: Fast's insider investors refused to lead bridge round to extend runway
“I think our insiders just really wanted to see external investors come in and lead that process, and them to participate, but other people lead.”
Assertion Partly supported
Tow.com.au collapsed after the Queensland government refused to pay $17M
“In the end, our largest customer, the state government, actually owed us and refused to pay seventeen million dollars. We were locked into a sort of bitter legal dispute, and in the end ran out of cash.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Independent merchants reject Amazon checkout tools due to business model conflicts
“We know that Amazon is so conflicted with merchants that merchants don't want to be incorporating Amazon into their own environments.”
Opinion
Holland: Tech industry no longer embraces startup failure like it used to
“We really aren't embracing failure anymore, right, in anywhere to the same degree that we were.”
Assertion Not publicly verifiable
Holland: Fast acqui-hire absorbed hundreds of staff without formal interviews
“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…”
Opinion
Holland: Checkout startup Bolt has yet to prove product-market fit
“I think that they still are yet to kind of prove out their product market fit.”
Opinion
PayPal feels like outdated technology due to lagging checkout innovation
“If you've used PayPal, you know, in the last few years, you know that it doesn't feel like an experience that was made in the last few years. It feels like older technology.”
Insight
Managing remote engineers is identical to managing in-office teams
“I find managing engineers remotely or in person is actually quite similar. You know, a lot of engineers that I've managed in person that, you know, prefer to chat over Slack and stuff like that too. So it's neither here nor there, whether they're physically si…”
Assertion Not publicly verifiable
Holland: Fast doubled its burn rate over final quarters of 2021
“Over the last two quarters of 21, we basically doubled our burn.”
Disclosure
Holland: I stopped reading all media coverage about myself years ago
“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.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Holland: 50 companies reached out to buy Fast's product or IP
“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.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Holland: Next venture will maintain an exponentially lower burn rate
“I would absolutely keep burn a lot lower is a significantly lower exponentially lower.”
Disclosure
Holland: Existing Fast investors and new VCs pledged to back next venture
“I've had lots of existing investors who said that they would back me again. Other investors would love to back the next thing.”
Insight
Passwords are a symptom of businesses refusing to share customer identity
“Passwords aren't the problem. They're a symptom. The issue that we have is that we don't scale customers between businesses, and that doesn't make sense. It does make sense that businesses don't share customer databases. That would be weird, but it doesn't mak…”
Insight
E-commerce spent a decade optimizing discovery but neglected transaction innovation
“Consumers have spent the last 10 years optimizing for discovery. We've put a lot of money into advertising, you know, Google and the Facebook business models and Instagram and getting people to click and go Go visit a site and look at a product, but there hasn…”
Insight
Universal checkout must be built by an independent third party
“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? Rep…”
