20VC Exclusive: Fast's Domm Holland on What Really Happened at Fast? Were they really Burning $10M per Month? Where did Bolt Succeed Where Fast Did Not? What is It Really Like To Have Stripe Invest in your Company?

Domm Holland is the Founder and CEO @ Fast. Last week Fast announced they would be shutting down the company. In this exclusive 20VC episode we discuss: What really happened with Domm's towing business in Australia? What are the 1-2 biggest mistakes made at Fast? Why has Bolt worked in a way that Fast has not worked? What is it like having Stripe as an investor in your company? Could the board have done more to prevent what happened at Fast?

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Harry Stebbings?

  This is 20 VC the Memo with me, Harry Stebbings. And as you know, the Memo is where we focus on a specific company and bring their story front and centre. Now, Fast is likely one of the most discussed and written about companies of the last month with their recent closing slash aqua hire. But the one thing that none of these articles or publications have, the voice of the founder. And so today, Dom Holland is joining me in the hot seat for an exclusive to discuss what went wrong, what statements reported are true, which are false. What's it like having Stripe as an investor and so much more. I want to say a huge thank you to Dom for this one. It's a really tough time. We do need to celebrate failure still today and he was great with my prime questions. And so a huge thanks to Dom for giving up the time today to do this episode. But before we move into the show today, for the challenges you face as a startup founder, Microsoft for Startup Founders Hub is here to help.

• 0:44Harry Stebbings?

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• 2:47Harry Stebbings?

  But that's enough from me. So now I'm very excited to hand over to Dom Holland.

• 2:56Speaker 01

  You have now arrived at your destination.

• 2:59Harry Stebbings?

  Dom, this is a joy to do. It feels a long time since we did our first episode, but thank you so much for joining me once again.

• 3:06Speaker 02

  Of course, Harry. Thanks for having me back.

• 3:07Harry Stebbings?

  Not at all, but I want to start and I want to start with, as we always do, a little bit of context. So how did you make your way into the world of tech? How did you make your way into the world of startups? And what was that entry point for you first?

• 3:18Speaker 02

  I've been building for a long time. I started programming when I was about 14. So that's about 20 years ago now. So I've been building stuff for a long time, building software and hardware and whatever else. First e-commerce store when I was 15. So I've always kind of been in tech, I would say. I grew up in loving everything to do with computers. And this was well before the stage that it was cool to love everything to do with computers. I've had two sort of startups. First one was a company in Australia called Toe, which was not a venture backed startup. It was a sort of bootstrap company. It was an online towing business that failed and shut down in 2018. And then I launched my second startup, Fast, which in 2019, which was venture backed

• 4:00Speaker 02

  and is likely what we're going to spend a lot of time talking about today. And Fast taught me a whole lot of new experiences and lessons.

• 4:06Harry Stebbings?

  Blunden, there's controversy around Toe and the Aussie business. People have kind of whisper about it. How do you respond to what actually happened with Toe? And what's your take when people go like something's dodgy?

• 4:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, look, I think it's funny that we talk about tech embracing. Failure, and I think that's changed over the years. And I think we really aren't embracing failure anymore, right? In anywhere to the same degree that we were. Toe's actually kind of simple. It was complex legislation, but it's actually kind of, kind of simple outcome. We were doing a lot of work for the Queensland government. We won a statewide towing contract with the Queensland government. They wanted one company to manage everything. There wasn't a statewide towing company, so they put us in place, a basically tech company to manage the whole thing. And so we would manage the dispatch of towing jobs for the Queensland police right across the state, 24/7. There was 1,200 police officers who used this software every single day, booking on toes. It was really successful. We did a lot of toes for them. But there was a contract dispute

• 4:57Speaker 02

  and the government didn't want to pay for about 17 million dollars worth of toes and impounds that we did for them. So what happened is they would book the request for the job through our system. We would go send it out to one of the local towing companies somewhere in the state and the flow of funds kind of came through tow. Couple of years into the contract, the government just turned around. We're not going to pay for 17 million dollars worth of these toes and impounds. We were locked up in a dispute for about two years. In the end, they refused to pay and we ended up taking them to court. They just strung us out, right? We just ran out of money. And so we were left holding the bag for all the money owed to the subcontractors for work was done for the state and state going, we just don't want to pay for this. It was really that simple. And to be clear, the government doesn't dispute the work happening. The government doesn't dispute booking the jobs. They just don't want to pay for it.

• 5:42Speaker 02

  It's really absurd. And to be honest, for two years, we had one of the biggest law firms in the country. We had anyone in the industry, people who worked for the government, just saying this, don't worry, like, hang in there. There's no way that this is not going to get resolved. They're just, it's government playing hardball. And it just went on for so long and we just couldn't, couldn't keep going, right? We couldn't take that loss. Sad thing is, so there was small business tow truck operators around the state who wanted to get paid rightly, right? We wanted to get paid. They, they wanted to get paid. We wanted to get paid. I feel sorry for them. They should have got paid. That's like the plain and simple truth. It's not like we needed all, have all those cars towed and impounded, right? It was this government that needed to have all those cars towed and impounded, didn't want to pay for it. Anyway, that's toe. We just got villainised for it.

• 6:22Harry Stebbings?

  My question to you is, okay, if we think now to fast and if we reflect on it, high level, what do you think went wrong? The ones, two things for you where You're like, actually, these were the one or two needle movers that didn't play out.

• 6:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, I had a call from one of our biggest investors, I won't name them, last week. They said to me, we're obviously getting slammed by the media, the media's contacting us all the time and trying to get more of a comment. They're really looking for that kind of salacious story. And you know, Fast was a high profile company. And so I think that people naturally are looking and expecting and wanting this kind of salacious story. The reality is, it was far more boring. Our burn was just far too high at the end. Over the last two quarters of twenty one, we basically doubled our burn. We got to a point where the time that we were fundraising, we needed a fundraise, the market also shat itself and fell upside down. Any company with high burn was having issues fundraising and we were on the high end of high burn. We just couldn't keep fundraising.

• 7:16Speaker 02

  The reality was, we had moved into the enterprise space. We hadn't scaled our revenue as fast as we had scaled out our burn. And we just got to a point that we just needed to get money in. And so in the end, after about four months of being out in market fundraising, we ran a process and sold the business. It was Aqua hired by, um, as we know, and shut down the rest. And it's sad, sad outcome. And I can tell you, I worked day and night for months and months and months to come, have a different outcome and just got too difficult.

• 7:45Harry Stebbings?

  Can I interrupt you Dom? On the burn itself, it's normal for companies as they scale into enterprise to invest heavily in customer success, sales reps, marketing. It's a whole new motion.

• 7:54Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 7:55Harry Stebbings?

  Was it that? And then the fundraiser market just shat the bed and bluntly you didn't have time to catch up? Or bluntly, and I'm just being direct here.

• 8:02Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 8:02Harry Stebbings?

  Was it also access? Was it the chain smokers? Was it, I don't know, sponsoring race cars? Was there access? You're like, you know what? Shouldn't have done that.

• 8:12Speaker 02

  It's so funny. I really disagree, right? The vast majority of our burn came directly from people. Like well over eighty percent of our cost base was just wages, healthcare benefits, over eighty percent. Like, our money just went to people. We just hired a lot of people. That was where the burn came from. I think if you have a look at our marketing spend, it would be surprisingly lower than anyone would actually think, right? We actually didn't spend that much money on marketing. And we did these like specific high profile events like racing or whatever, and we would do them. Was one offs, it was very low spend. We didn't have huge consumer marketing campaigns. We didn't have buses rolling around with fast ones out of them. We didn't take over train stations, like we didn't spend tons of money TV ads. We just had these like very specific events that we managed to kind of increase the awareness of.

• 8:57Speaker 02

  Our cost base was just people. It was just people cost and we hired the very best people. And I think you can see that in the last two weeks, we've had staff, we've had hundreds of job offers from companies because our people were great. And that's what I mean. Frankly, the salaciousness of spend is just not there.

• 9:12Harry Stebbings?

  Did you get over your skis in hiring then? Or actually, was it not?

• 9:15Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 9:16Harry Stebbings?

  You did?

• 9:16Speaker 02

  Well, yeah, it was our plan. We had a board. It wasn't like we went rogue, right? We had a company plan. We had a board. We were all on board with going aggressively going after enterprise. One, we still outpaced that hiring, right? We had a customer success team that was just too big for what we needed at that time, right? It was where we needed probably two years later. I had a partnership team that was probably too big for what we needed at that point in time. Frankly, you can be aggressive and we were still just too far ahead in terms of hiring. That's just the reality of it. Completely bull market where people just happy investing in that, then it's maybe it's okay, but we weren't in that market. We were just ahead in the people count and headcount area. Our burn was just too high because again, right?

• 9:59Speaker 02

  If it was just some event that you spent money on once, then that's fine, right? You don't have this like long lingering overhead burn. Our problem was we had this high burn which came from staff. Now, the one thing I will say on this, the burn that's being reported by the media is not the real burn. Our burn was much lower, was significantly lower. We've never done ten million dollars a month of burn before, right? Let alone all the last year. We would have run out of money a long time ago.

• 10:23Harry Stebbings?

  Where do you think they got that from then?

• 10:25Speaker 02

  Oh, I don't know. Media doesn't mind, you know, doesn't want facts getting in the way of a good story. Anyway, all those, so we definitely didn't ever reach that point, right? Not even in our, at the end was our burn ever that high. And our revenue was higher than they reported, but we still had too high a burn. Like that's just the reality of what happened. It's just that again, they're over exaggerating.

• 10:43Harry Stebbings?

  The takedown bluntly on you has been pretty rough and bluntly, I think you are trying to analyze why. Think it's because you're loud and you built in public and you were very strong in sticking your head above the parapet. My question to you is, do you regret the build in public? Do you regret being so loud?

• 11:01Speaker 02

  It's a hard question. I'll tell you that it's really awful kind of going through this, right? And it's awful seeing people say nasty things. It's just a hard thing to go through. But I am loud. It's just like how I do things. I'm brash in style and like, you know, someone reported and I think the reality is, right? Take me aside, every high profile figure is polarizing. There simply aren't people who are high profile and not polarizing. It's just not possible, right? Because the people viewing them have different beliefs and different views and whatever else, right? It's not so much just the person, it's that it's everyone else, right? I'm not saying that that kind of football we do and saying whatever, but people see things differently. There isn't a politician that's universally loved. There isn't a famous sporting artist that's universally loved or musician or founder or CEO at all, right?

• 11:44Speaker 02

  Everyone is polarizing. Take Elon Musk's is they cause controversy because they're high profile. That's just the reality. To be honest, I take no joy in the highs or the lows of being high profile. I have no interest in like specifically being high profile. But the one thing I will say is I don't know how to do anything other than build and like want to accomplish things. And I want to see things come to life and I want to build products that are used by lots of people. That it's just what I want to do. I've got a style and a process. This is what happens, that people see it and they talk about it and it has an impact on people's lives. I don't know how to make an impact in the world without my profile kind of getting mixed into it. It's not an intentionality thing. It's just something that happens as well, right?

• 12:27Speaker 02

  Because people want to understand what's happening behind the scenes of what they're seeing. And so I hate the kind of profile side and I hate all the nastiness and it's horrible to see this. And it's horrible for my wife to read nasty things about me and I wish that it wouldn't happen. It'd be much easier for me to just want to go sit on an island or a beach and drink pina coladas. But I love building and this is how my body is wired. It just kind of comes with the territory.

• 12:50Harry Stebbings?

  How does it feel when you read the articles?

• 12:51Speaker 02

  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. Again, same thing, right? Some people are gonna love you, some people are gonna hate you, and I don't wanna know about it. I'm here to work on what I'm working on. I'm here to like carry out my mission. That's not to say that I'm oblivious to it at all, but I can't just fester on people's thoughts and whatever is, I got a job to do. But it's horrible. I think it's more like media just loves to have a crack, right? If you're on the way up, media loves to build you up. If you're on the way down, media loves to kick in the guts. You've got social media, which is just like, or Twitter, which is just the pressure part, whatever. And it's awful, but you can sit and dwell on it and feel sorry for yourself and whatever, or just one foot in front of the other and move on.

• 13:33Harry Stebbings?

  And sorry, another accusation is around like letting team members go and not doing that the right way. How do you respond to that one?

• 13:40Speaker 02

  Well, I don't know. I mean, with Fast, literally fought for months and months and months to keep the team together, right? That was like my primary goal, not, you know, letting people go. I tell you what, it would have been a lot easier come December last year just to let half the team go and fundraise, right? Like, that would have been a much easier scenario, and I fought hard to not have that. So I think it's the opposite. In the end, when it just was clear that cost base wouldn't work, like I said, we, Firmac were 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 take on hundreds of them without going through formal interviewing, and then likely will take on a lot more. You know what? I used to put myself in a screen in front of everyone and deliver the news myself. In a virtual era, when we've got people in a dozen countries, in twenty states around the country, I don't know how I could have done that any better or any differently, other than standing in virtually in front of everyone.

• 14:33Speaker 02

  It's just an awful thing, having to let people go in general. My whole thing is, how can we tell as many people as quickly as possible at the same time so they hear it, hear it from us? Today, the way to do that is Zoom or whatever your general form of communication is, right? Is like, that's the way that you can get it out. It would be lovely to hold one-on-one interviews with every single person, but unfortunately, it's just not a practical exercise.

• 14:56Harry Stebbings?

  Let's switch topics a little bit. A lot of been sad for Ryan Braslow about the joys of having Stripe invested in company. How's that been? Like, what is the truth behind what it's like to have Stripe invest in the company? Is Ryan right around how they invest and then kill? What is the truth?

• 15:13Speaker 02

  Look, I think his tweet threads are great at generating likes. Look, I'm still a big fan of Stripe the company. I think it's an incredible business. I think they've got a great team, great things to say about them. I have never once witnessed a mob attack by Stripe or any sort of organised criminality of any type, I'll tell you. Like in general, right, having strategics behind you can add complexities. 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. And so I think that's it. And now us partnering with Stripe meant that we weren't partnering with a different payments company. And I can tell you, we've got a lot, a tonne of banks that wanted to partner with us and wanted to process our volume. And maybe if we partnered with a bank instead, then they would have given us huge amounts of consumer networks earlier or whatever. But I'm not saying that that was a better path. It's just we pick a path and whatever.

• 15:58Speaker 02

  And I think we had a good partner in Stripe. There was a lot of benefits in working with them. I'd work with them again. I think they were good. Stripe didn't kill the company.

• 16:05Harry Stebbings?

  Appreciate that. I'm glad that you have no mob like characteristics tied to you. Always a really question, mate, on Bolt, have they done something right? Did they do enterprise much sooner than you? Like bluntly, why did they survive? Why did they survive and vast not?

• 16:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, best thing they did, I think, was copy out our sort of messaging, right? It's what happened after we launched. If they started talking about one click checkout, they stopped talking about Bitcoin early. And then they stopped talking about fraud checkout and started talking about one click checkout. And people started going, ah, yeah, that's it. You're a fast competitor. The reality is, and part of the reason why we grew the team, right, is especially on the R and D side, which was the majority of the business, was you do have to build, there was a lot of stuff to build to support enterprise. It's not just about having an enterprise grade product. E-commerce is very fragmented, right? Lots of different platforms, lots of different integrations. There's a lot of stuff that you've got to build before you can actually kind of onboard enterprise and whatnot. And we'd been building that. We'd been doing really well and we'd just at the start of our curve of onboarding enterprise.

• 17:02Speaker 02

  In January, we onboarded our first billion dollar merchant. They were 50x the size of our second biggest merchant, twice the size of Bolt's biggest live customer, right? More than twice the size. And so I think we were doing a lot of things right. The reality though, is that Bolt had just been building all of those integrations for a lot longer. They had five year head start on building all these pieces. They had been chipping away at the sort of Medium sized business. And so they were bigger than our small business that we had gone on board lots of. They weren't as big as our big ones. They definitely weren't growing very quickly, but it was enough to kind of give them this foundation now that they can go and raise from. 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?

• 17:44Speaker 02

  And but they were able to raise a lot of money last year, now selling one click checkout, save one click checkout product to investors on the back of revenue from a different product. And frankly, we just didn't have that traditional revenue to kind of that large bucket of revenue from an old product for us to raise against. And so, but I don't have any ill feeling towards Bolt. I think that I actually quite like the team. I think they're generally nice people and they've done really well at fundraising over the last twelve months. And since they've been fundraising over the last twelve months, they've been hiring some really great people as well. I think that they still are yet to kind of prove out their product market fit. They've kind of got this view on what the future will look like. And I think they've still got a lot of work to do there, but they've got the money to do it now and they've got a great team who can execute on that and good luck to them.

• 18:26Harry Stebbings?

  I do want to ask, I think all experiences shape our thinking moving forwards. When you look to the journey with Fast, what would you, on the next company that you do, what would you do the same and you think really worked? And what would you do differently?

• 18:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, obviously been pondering this a lot. We got so much right. I'll answer that directly in a second. But kind of like looking back, I look at since we stopped, right? Since we closed down, I've had, obviously, everyone's had their views and stuff. Our team has been in such incredible high demand. We have literally people with hundreds of offers. The vast majority have already been snatched up. We got team right, right? We hired the right people. We hired the best people. From a product standpoint, I've had probably fifty companies aggressively reaching out to me, wanting to buy the product, wanting to buy the IP, wanting to build it again, made it come and launch a new division to build the same thing under their company. I think we got the product right. And it's because we focused on the consumer and that's something I would definitely do again, right? What's the consumer problem that we're solving?

• 19:23Speaker 02

  And there was a lot that we got right. I'm not saying we're going to go out and build a checkout product again, but they're the things that I would focus on, right? Now, what would I do differently? I would absolutely keep burn a lot lower, is significantly lower, exponentially lower.

• 19:36Harry Stebbings?

  Did you raise too much too soon? People say this is like the epitome of raising too much too soon and having too much cash.

• 19:43Speaker 02

  Ah, we just spent too much money. We had a burn too high. Now, I'm not saying that you need to raise that much money. But I think it's like an easy way to like blame VCs on our business failing. And to be honest, I'm just, I'm not any shift blame. We scarred up our burn too high. Now, you can scar up your burn high, having not raised enough cash or having raised too much cash. I don't think it's the reason have helped the cause, maybe. I think there's other companies who raised a lot of money that haven't gone and scaled their burn too high. And then the one thing again about e-commerce and getting into the checkout stack, right? It's very complex, it's highly fragmented and it's very complex. It takes a long time to get these integrations built, takes a long time to get integrations done per company. It's just the way it is, right? It's the most complex part of their business. A lot of these big enterprises are running really old tech, right?

• 20:26Speaker 02

  Which is why they haven't got like the experience, buying from big companies is typically so bad. Because your tech is old, right? It's held, it's like these old platforms held together with sticky tape. And so it just takes a long time to kind of get through that stack. They have inertia about change because their systems are old. So it takes you a long time to get them to say yes. And then once they say yes, then it takes a long time to get integrated. It's just the way it is, working with payments and checkout, right? It's hard. This is why it takes time. This is why it takes capital. You have to get in and get it right in the middle of these big hairy systems. And so we'd been doing that and we had just sort of gotten in through into that big hairy stack. Next time, pick a product that doesn't require getting into that big stack. I mean, the reality is, if you can get through that, right? We were like bulldozing our way through, you get to the other end, there's big rewards, right?

• 21:10Speaker 02

  If you've come out and you've now done all those integrations, now you can scale this right across the net, right? You can take all of those big merchants, big catalogs and put them everywhere. But for us, we just obviously ran out of.

• 21:21Harry Stebbings?

  I mean it respectfully, man. It feels like you were super close to the tipping point. When you see the customers that were tipping, the Honest Company and a couple of others. So I mean it respectfully, man. Why not cut burn in January? Fucking eke it out and get another 10 months, not three months.

• 21:36Speaker 02

  I'm with you. I think that was a plan. And to be honest, it's exactly what I wanted to do. You're right, we were super close. And I tell you, we had won, we had eight billion dollars of enterprise merchants in signed deals that we were onboarding. We were so past the tipping point and my vote was to do that, right? Was to raise money, whatever, and keep going, right? It's a no brainer. I think we just got to a point that we all decided to run it, run the process and.

• 21:56Harry Stebbings?

  Sorry, man, I am picking here. Why didn't you then? Your vote was to do that. Why didn't it happen? Was it the board's? Vote nought to?

• 22:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, look, you know, I think we really would have needed the existing investors, the insiders to step up, execute the restructuring, execute a sort of right sizing, right, reduce burn, then go out and raise money. 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.

• 22:23Harry Stebbings?

  Which I get, I'm an investor, but if I was, if I was on your board, and I've thought about this, sorry, this is me. They could have done more. In December, January, I would have told you, man, we need 10 months. We need to last till the end of the year and we need to prove our X, Y and Z.

• 22:37Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 22:38Harry Stebbings?

  I don't care about, I'm sorry, cutting heads, we're saving the company. And then you don't need external investors because you've just extended your runway. By that time, you should be a much more attractive proposition. Why was that not what the board did?

• 22:52Speaker 02

  I agree.

• 22:54Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 22:55Harry Stebbings?

  Well, I'm in that British friendly phase. Listen, I appreciate that and I appreciate the honesty, man. You've also kind of been through this experience personally, emotionally. Is there anything that I haven't asked, honestly, that you feel you would like people to know?

• 23:09Speaker 02

  I think one of the reasons as well, people find it easy, maybe easier to kind of villainize me through this is the Aussie male in me, right? I was brought up as a very traditional hardened Aussie males attitude, right? And frankly, this is not a great way to live. We don't bring up our kids like this. But I will never complain in suffer quietly, right? Even as a kid, I would never talk about my emotion. I don't talk about, you know, feelings of it. I just kind of get through. My job is I have to be the rock always. I've always been the rock in my family. That's the job, right? It's really easy for people to want to hate or want to talk about or want to have a go at people who don't suffer publicly.

• 23:49Speaker 02

  A lot more popular these days to kind of suffer publicly and to talk about your feelings and to talk about mental health and talk about the toll that it's taking on you. And people really appreciate that these days, right? And I think the world wants to know when things are hard. It's just not me, right? And talk about when it gets hard. Get through it.

• 24:06Harry Stebbings?

  The only thing I say to you though, Dom, as a friend is you can't always be the rock. Sometimes the rock will crack.

• 24:12Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 24:12Harry Stebbings?

  I just hope that you have. Someone who is your.

• 24:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, I just wonderful wife and my beautiful kids. When times really tough, I guess spend more time with my family. Right. That's what makes me feel better and that's my process, right. And my process isn't to write a blog post. How it's making me feel. I'm not going to do that. It's just not me. It would be a lot easier if that was. So probably get a lot more of a sympathy vote if that was. It's not what I'm never gonna ask for that. I'm never gonna want that. I'm never gonna do that. But, you know, it is hard and it does take a toll and you don't have to read an article to know that people are saying awful things about you. I think that's pretty obvious. Again, I know no way but forwards and I know nothing but to put one's foot in front of the other. And again, you took to think about the experiences, learnt so much and I've seen, having gone through fast, I've seen so much opportunity and so many problems to solve.

• 24:58Speaker 02

  And so many things that need to get built and so many people that we can help. I'm just gonna keep doing what I do.

• 25:04Harry Stebbings?

  Well, I mean, thinking about next steps forward, final one, and I'm not doing a quick fire because this is obviously a kind of special show in its own right. But in terms of like next steps and next chapter, what are your thoughts on what you want to do now?

• 25:16Speaker 02

  Like I was saying, right. I think what I want to do is the same thing is keep building and keep solving problems. And I've seen a lot of these. I love what I do. I love building product. I love building teams. I love this. It's what I'm here to do. How I will do that is what I'm still trying to decide now. What shape does that look like now and kind of go and figure that out. But I'm back in my ideation phase and I'll figure that out at the moment. But it has been really nice. I've, whilst there's been a lot of negativity, there's also been a lot of amazing support coming out of this, right. Most of our team have been incredible, have been messaging and obviously been messaging with a lot of them, making sure that they're all getting placed in new roles and whatever. But I tell you, I've taken three hundred screenshots of messages that our team has sent me saying how much of an incredible time they had, that they would do it all over again.

• 26:01Speaker 02

  And so that's been great. I've had lots of existing investors who said that they would back me again. Other investors would love to back the next thing and customers. I've had huge customers reach out and say, you know, how sad they are their product's gone. How much they loved it and what the impact had on them. And so it's the reality behind what happened that keeps me driving forward, right? The media and whatever scumbags on Twitter can say whatever they want about me, but reality is gonna go and build something magical again.

• 26:26Harry Stebbings?

  Dom, listen, thank you so much for doing this. Honestly, I really do appreciate it. I understand that I moved away from my British charm and ego stroking. But I really appreciate it and so thank you for doing this.

• 26:37Speaker 02

  Thanks for having me, Harry.

• 26:40Harry Stebbings?

  I think whatever you want to read or believe about Dom or Fast, that's not a nice show to necessarily do. It's not an easy time and I do think that we need to celebrate failure, as Dom said there. I hope you enjoyed the show today. If you'd like to see more from us, you can of course on 20vc.com. I always love to see you there. But before we leave you today, for the challenges you face as a startup founder, Microsoft Startup Founders Hub is here to help. The platform provides founders with free resources like Azure credits, development tools like GitHub, mentorship resources, productivity software, training and so much more. It's an incredible suite of products. The programme is open to all and takes just five minutes to apply with no funding required. Learn more and sign up at startups.microsoft.com. And speaking of amazing resources like Microsoft

• 27:24Harry Stebbings?

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• 28:52Harry Stebbings?

  As a 20 VC lister, when you sign up to Ledgy's growth or scale plans, you get your first month absolutely free. Go to ledgy.com/20vc. That's L E D G Y dot com forward slash two zero V C to find out more. As always, I so appreciate all your support and I cannot wait to bring you an incredible episode with Enrique at Brax on Friday.