- Company — Fast
- Sector — Fintech / payments
- Founded / Died — 2019 / April 2022
- Lifespan — ~2.5 years
- Capital raised — ~$124M (Stripe, Index Ventures, Addition, Susa Ventures)
- Peak scale — ~$600,000 in gross revenue over its lifetime against a reported burn of roughly $10M per month at peak; ~500 employees at peak headcount. The revenue figure comes from reporting, was never disputed by the company, and is the single most-cited number in the story.
- What it built — A one-click checkout button for online merchants, competing with Shop Pay and Bolt.
- Stated cause of death — CEO Domm Holland's statement emphasised that the company chose "to grow fast" and that capital markets turned; the shutdown memo framed it as an inability to raise in a changed environment.
- Evidenced cause — Sharp divergence. The market did turn in early 2022, but $600k of lifetime revenue on $124M raised is not a market-conditions failure; it is an absence of product-market fit that funding concealed. Merchant integrations were slow, the conversion advantage was unproven, and headcount and marketing scaled years ahead of revenue. Holland's prior Australian company had also ended in unpaid-creditor disputes, surfaced in reporting after the raise.
- Warning signs visible earlier — Revenue disclosed to investors in 2021 was already trivially small relative to the round size. Burn/revenue ratio exceeded 100:1 for the company's entire life.
- Money outcome — Investors lost approximately $124M. Roughly 400 employees were laid off with limited severance; some were hired by Affirm in a talent deal. Holland faced sustained public criticism and started another company.
- Post-mortem quality — Poor. No candid founder post-mortem was published. The public statements attribute the outcome to macro conditions. This is the clearest example in the library of a large failure with no usable first-person account.
- Transferable lesson — Burn-to-revenue ratio is the cheapest early-warning metric that exists, and it was screaming for two years.
- Sources — TechCrunch · NPR · Payments Dive
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