barrrrald

We love love love https://arcade.software/

reminds me of fuckitdb https://pypi.org/project/fuckitdb/

We built Hex’s Magic features using GPT-4. You can generate, edit, debug, and explain SQL and Python. We have a few hundred people using it every day, and are opening it more broadly soon.

https://hex.tech/magic

Hex just launched a diff view feature, along with git sync and a clean file format: https://hex.tech/blog/github-sync

That was not the case here though! Fast's primary backers were Index, one of the leading valley firms, and Stripe, which, while not a professional venture firm, is highly sophisticated and deeply knowledgable in this space.

It's highly, highly uncommon, which is why the "Ponzi scheme" label falls flat to anyone who is close to venture. Seed investors will typically not exit their positions until very late in the company's life, either in later growth rounds (C, D, etc.) or at IPO.

If the question is "how did they get that valuation despite being a very bad business", it's simply that investors gave them too much forward credit against the very big risks they had to surmount, the biggest of which seemed to be the Founders lack of discipline and inability to execute properly.

>> So they hired a massive team of oncologists no expense spared, but their abiilty to deal with cancer isn't good enough

The Fast founders highlighted their team at every turn, showcasing trophy hires from larger, successful companies. Investors bought into this hard especially at the Series A and B fundraises, and believed that a strong executive and engineering bench de-risked the business more than they had.

>> Well, they wouldn't be risks otherwise.

Not to them! The issue here was the high degree of self-delusion and spin amongst their team and investors. They downplayed the challenges at every turn, and tried to convince others (and themselves) that they had already gotten past all the hard parts. As it turns out they had not.

Venture valuations can be most simply understood as: potential exit value (reward) * probability of reaching that value (risk).

In this case the potential exit was big: owning checkout for the web is a multi-multi-$B business.

The risks, however, were also big. This was a highly competitive market, with lots of complicated technical and GTM problems to solve. But, investors seemed to believe in their vision + chutzpah + ability to execute, hence they discounted the risk and gave them a rich valuation.

As it turns out, the risks were very real! They successfully hired a big, seemingly-experienced team (something many companies struggle to do) but failed to make enough progress to justify their valuation, i.e., de-risk the business and demonstrate a higher probability of achieving a big exit to potential next-round investors. The product never worked well (actually 502 hard-crashed on launch day) and their team got bloated and slow. Their GTM strategy was fundamentally flawed (horrible CAC/LTV on small merchants) and the founder spent like a mad man. This wasn’t foreseen but perhaps should have been especially by the pros at Stripe

Fast lived a short, insane life and will quickly fade into obscurity versus the more infamous WeWork and Theranos implosions. But I think it’s a more relevant cautionary tale: Fast was backed by “proper” Valley institutions (Index, Stripe, etc.), was a pure software business, and from the outside had all the trappings of hypergrowth success. Lots to be learned by investors, employees, and founders here.

How is this different than Eppo [1] or Optimizely?

[1] https://www.geteppo.com