Under what circumstances is this not a foolish thing to want? I thought it was cool on Amazon until I realized it was just a tool for generating unwanted orders that you then have to cancel.
I love one click checkout. Amazon is okay, and I've used it a few times on sites that support it. But if a site has one click Apple checkout it makes it so much easier. I don't have to worry about them having my credit card info, and it takes 1 second to check out.
And I'm sure they all knew it was happening as they were working on it. Things like that are why I gave up on caring about anything in this industry and just do the bare minimum to earn my paycheck.
Like this is just so bizarre, they had seemingly top tier engineers (and a lot of them!) and they couldn't get a working check out experience? Can't wait for the post mortems
Maybe they couldn't agree on the frontend framework to use. Not entire companies, but I've seen projects fail because of this or some similar decision paralysis
That's a crazy salary for someone 4 years in the industry. Way above average. When you get offered that, the company is either truly hiring the best of the best and doing revolutionary work, or throwing away cash and about to go bust. Seems we found out which one this was.
In the tweet: Ryan Breslow, CEO of Bolt, talks about how Stripe funded Fast which is a competitor of Bolt, and for the same valuation despite Fast having no traction and being relatively new.
(I do not condone or condemn the opinion of this person, just thought it would be relevant to this post)
The page isn't loading, but anyway it's pretty clear that what makes a mob a mob is its use of violence to get its way, so... that doesn't sound right.
Their YouTube account was a guilty pleasure of mine it always looked like straight out of Silicon Valley… the tvshow. Straight cringe inducing marketing bro culture bullshit.
You're right but how the hell is this patentable!? The patent system is patently nonsense if "make there be as few clicks as possible" is worthy of a couple of decades of protection. Probably more context in the patent doc which I'm not going to read because any energy expended on the whole stupid system (other than ranting) is wasted.
I think the reason a lot of people have heard about the one-click-patent is that it has served as the poster child for frivolous patents for the last 25 years.
So yes, your outrage is shared by most people. I stopped holding my breath for reforms though.
It might be hard to believe but that is closer to the norm than not. Unicorn-bound tech startups tend to operate by spending all their cash to grow the business as fast as possible, intending to raise another round once the previous round dries up. An annual cycle is about right.
What happened here isn’t necessarily poor management of finances, instead they failed to grow the business and thus couldn’t attract more investors for a second round.
>Unicorn-bound tech startups tend to operate by spending all their cash to grow the business as fast as possible
That seems slow and risky. I come from the world of B2B slow and steady startups - painful both ways I guess.
IMO “failure to grow the business” is totally the same as poor management of finances, when the financial health of the business demands growth.
If you keep your burn rate high while you fail to reach your sales targets then you need to pivot well before you run out of cash.
I’m continually astounded by the acceptance of businesses which fly themselves into the ground. Repeatedly failing to meet targets requires change, not just charging ahead and damn the torpedoes.
I don’t necessarily disagree with you, just wanted to draw a distinction between a blatant failure to manage finances and an excessively aggressive growth strategy that fails to pan out.
I think it's fair to draw this distinction, sure. The bean counters aren't necessarily able to change direction of the business, even if they can see it coming.
And I also think it's OK to have an excessively aggressive growth strategy too. Why not? Maybe it will work out.
The problem is when such a strategy can't be falsified until after all the money is spent. That's not a strategy, that's just gambling. It's been really common in my experience - when a strategy isn't hitting its objectives, double down on it, and spend more! Until ultimately all the investor's money is wasted.
LinkedIn says they had north of 600 employees -- 666 oddly enough. 456 in the US.
If your average payroll cost is $100k for 600 employees, that costs the business $135k, so payroll alone is $76m/year, or $6.5m/mo. If average payroll were closer to $200k, double that obviously. You can blow through $100m in no time.
Great contextualization.... I can see the payroll now. But on $600k revenue?? That is super nuts. There are sites selling on 'empire flippers / flippa' that make equal to that revenue for a WHOLE lot less valuation. nuts...
Seems like they have a bunch of highly expensive sports sponsorships. This seems to happen often when you have a bro-y CEO who wants to rub elbows with that kind of crowd. I can't imagine that moved the needle much for them - but it sure costs a lot
At least in my experience, many more founders than you might expect have zero business sense and basically think that "growing the business" = hiring lots of employees. At 200k a pop all in, 100 employees will cost you 20 million. And so on.
Whats the secret sauce here to Fast or Bolt or whatever? 1000 integrations, a plugin for WooCommerce or Shopify that points at your profile that has loaded your Paypal or Visa or merchant processor(another set of integrations)?
What websites was the 1 click checkout on?
Honestly with Amazon dominating so much of online retail can a company like this even land enough customers to make a profit?
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 188 ms ] threadhttps://twitter.com/fast/status/1511399486836334592
I see what you did there.
https://www.fast.co
Under what circumstances is this not a foolish thing to want? I thought it was cool on Amazon until I realized it was just a tool for generating unwanted orders that you then have to cancel.
Just seems like a great way to accidentally order the wrong thing occasionally.
Apple Pay, Shop Pay etc. have made a big difference in conversions and customers seem to like it as it skips a few steps for them.
Yikes
https://chrisfrantz.com/checking-in-on-fast/
Like this is just so bizarre, they had seemingly top tier engineers (and a lot of them!) and they couldn't get a working check out experience? Can't wait for the post mortems
30k sign 220k base
4 yoe as a react developer
he told me he didn’t understand the business bit it seemed cool. at least i can steal him away now but damn
https://twitter.com/theryanking/status/1485784884681474048
In the tweet: Ryan Breslow, CEO of Bolt, talks about how Stripe funded Fast which is a competitor of Bolt, and for the same valuation despite Fast having no traction and being relatively new.
(I do not condone or condemn the opinion of this person, just thought it would be relevant to this post)
Don't think the how is important.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30066969
He still has a nice compilation twitter https://twitter.com/domm/status/1423346248329879554
https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/37/e6/81/3ebb1f3...
So yes, your outrage is shared by most people. I stopped holding my breath for reforms though.
Apple Pay - 1,621,494 customers
Google Pay - 1,107,759 customers
Bold - 7,593 customers
Fast - 1,203 customers
Bolt - 581 customers
Bolt is next?
They somewhat quietly released ShopPay which at least based on our store is doing well.
What happened here isn’t necessarily poor management of finances, instead they failed to grow the business and thus couldn’t attract more investors for a second round.
If you keep your burn rate high while you fail to reach your sales targets then you need to pivot well before you run out of cash.
I’m continually astounded by the acceptance of businesses which fly themselves into the ground. Repeatedly failing to meet targets requires change, not just charging ahead and damn the torpedoes.
And I also think it's OK to have an excessively aggressive growth strategy too. Why not? Maybe it will work out.
The problem is when such a strategy can't be falsified until after all the money is spent. That's not a strategy, that's just gambling. It's been really common in my experience - when a strategy isn't hitting its objectives, double down on it, and spend more! Until ultimately all the investor's money is wasted.
It’s only a difference of scale, not of kind.
If your average payroll cost is $100k for 600 employees, that costs the business $135k, so payroll alone is $76m/year, or $6.5m/mo. If average payroll were closer to $200k, double that obviously. You can blow through $100m in no time.
On, unbelievably, $600k in revenue in 2021 per The Information. https://www.theinformation.com/articles/why-stripes-fast-hor...
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30922051
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30923032
https://www.nerdydata.com/reports/fast/72951386-2c5a-4372-9c...
Apparently the founder has a shady past https://www.npr.org/2022/02/17/1081201040/domm-holland-fast-...
Whatever was at the Airtable link submitted is now private
some notes and learnings to take away