Fast

Feature, not a product: why Fast and Dropbox get absorbed

Andrew's recurring critique: single-purpose tools are features that platforms eventually absorb. Like OSes building in cloud storage to commoditize Dropbox, e-commerce platforms will just make their own checkouts faster, killing standalone one-click checkout startups like Fast.

“So many people miss— VCs, entrepreneurs— the idea of feature, not a product. I think this is something— it's kind of like what's happened to Dropbox. Dropbox has found a niche, but at the end of the day, it was a crazy, amazing product that everybody needed. And then over time, all the OSes just built this in.”

Culture and swag before launch is a red flag

Shaan's critique of Fast: they hyped culture, named employees 'Fasternauts', sold branded hoodies, and ran scaling tests before launching. Building hype-first instead of product-first is a warning sign.

“They like have this name for like new employees called Fasternauts, and they have like a whole bunch of swag in their store for their hoodies, their fast hoodies. And, you know, they talk about their like culture and all this shit all the time. And I'm like, you haven't launched. Why do you even have culture? Why do you have an onboarding program?”

Steal thisBefore launch, put every hour into the product and customers, not culture rituals and swag.