What software engineers can learn from the rapid collapse of Fast • Hacker News Board

Re: What software engineers can learn from the rapid collapse of Fast

#11

Post by ceeplusplus » Thu, Apr 07, 2022, 6:27 PM UTC

meetups323 wrote: post #8

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #6

> Tiny daily sales numbers which all employees received was the first such warning sign. Internally, Fast was transparent on sales. Every day, every employee would receive a sales summary email that listed the number of sales completed with Fast checkout, and the total sales amount. > Fast did less than $300K worth of sales and below $6K in revenue on most days from January 2022 to April 2022. There were days with ar…

The entire culture of b2b startups IME is "yes we're burning money now, but just you wait till Moby Dick comes along... just implement XYZ features marketing/sales says are important and we'll have him in no time!" Of course, this is somewhat tautological: if they weren't burning money, they'd just be a company. Startup phase complete.

The difference being that in successful B2B startups you don't have 600k ARR at 500 employees.

Re: What software engineers can learn from the rapid collapse of Fast

#12

Post by gregdoesit » Thu, Apr 07, 2022, 6:29 PM UTC

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #6

> Tiny daily sales numbers which all employees received was the first such warning sign. Internally, Fast was transparent on sales. Every day, every employee would receive a sales summary email that listed the number of sales completed with Fast checkout, and the total sales amount. > Fast did less than $300K worth of sales and below $6K in revenue on most days from January 2022 to April 2022. There were days with ar…

Author here. I was wrong on this information and updated the article - got a correction since. L6 and above employees would receive this: staff+ engineers, eng leadership, sales etc.

There are companies where this information does go out to all employees in the spirit of radical transparency. Skyscanner is an example where every day, every employee gets the full revenue breakdown. These numbers are also shown on monitors across the company.

Re: What software engineers can learn from the rapid collapse of Fast

#13

Post by buf » Thu, Apr 07, 2022, 6:31 PM UTC

Wow, I make the same revenue as Fast as a one-man entrepreneur.

It really amazes me sometimes the strategies of these heavily funded companies. Why pile on so much burn so quickly?

Re: What software engineers can learn from the rapid collapse of Fast

#14

Post by brundolf » Thu, Apr 07, 2022, 6:36 PM UTC

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #6

> Tiny daily sales numbers which all employees received was the first such warning sign. Internally, Fast was transparent on sales. Every day, every employee would receive a sales summary email that listed the number of sales completed with Fast checkout, and the total sales amount. > Fast did less than $300K worth of sales and below $6K in revenue on most days from January 2022 to April 2022. There were days with ar…

> I'm actually surprised that everyone was receiving daily updates of company revenue.

My company posts daily new user signups in #general on Slack. That's not quite revenue, but you could almost extrapolate

Re: What software engineers can learn from the rapid collapse of Fast

#15

Post by hidelooktropic » Thu, Apr 07, 2022, 6:45 PM UTC

lbrito wrote: post #2

"Inside Fast’s Rapid Collapse" Can't believe they missed the chance to headline a pun with the company's name "That was one Fast collapse"

I'd assume it was on purpose, given the obviousness of the pun.

Re: What software engineers can learn from the rapid collapse of Fast

#16

Post by me_me_mu_mu » Thu, Apr 07, 2022, 6:48 PM UTC

i guess everything was fast

Re: What software engineers can learn from the rapid collapse of Fast

#17

Post by encoderer » Thu, Apr 07, 2022, 6:49 PM UTC

gregdoesit wrote: post #12

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #6

> Tiny daily sales numbers which all employees received was the first such warning sign. Internally, Fast was transparent on sales. Every day, every employee would receive a sales summary email that listed the number of sales completed with Fast checkout, and the total sales amount. > Fast did less than $300K worth of sales and below $6K in revenue on most days from January 2022 to April 2022. There were days with ar…

Author here. I was wrong on this information and updated the article - got a correction since. L6 and above employees would receive this: staff+ engineers, eng leadership, sales etc. There are companies where this information does go out to all employees in the spirit of radical transparency. Skyscanner is an example where every day, every employee gets the full revenue breakdown. These numbers are also shown on moni…

Lol. L6.

Look no further folks. This guy Dominic was clearly LARPing a startup.

Leveling frameworks before traction is a joke to me.

Re: What software engineers can learn from the rapid collapse of Fast

#18

Post by AYBABTME » Thu, Apr 07, 2022, 6:49 PM UTC

adamsmith143 wrote: post #7

That Startups are fundamentally risky and despite all the talk on HN you are highly likely to spend years working in a high pace high stress environment for equity that will ultimately be worthless or at best match comp at FAANGs all while having questionable WLB.

But working at FAANG is not much fun. I think a mix of both startups and Big Tech leads to a happy life.

Re: What software engineers can learn from the rapid collapse of Fast

#19

Post by xrd » Thu, Apr 07, 2022, 6:49 PM UTC

gregdoesit wrote: post #12

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #6

> Tiny daily sales numbers which all employees received was the first such warning sign. Internally, Fast was transparent on sales. Every day, every employee would receive a sales summary email that listed the number of sales completed with Fast checkout, and the total sales amount. > Fast did less than $300K worth of sales and below $6K in revenue on most days from January 2022 to April 2022. There were days with ar…

Author here. I was wrong on this information and updated the article - got a correction since. L6 and above employees would receive this: staff+ engineers, eng leadership, sales etc. There are companies where this information does go out to all employees in the spirit of radical transparency. Skyscanner is an example where every day, every employee gets the full revenue breakdown. These numbers are also shown on moni…

That's really fascinating information.

Dashboards are all the rage as a way to get teams aligned around "critical numbers" (the metrics that matter).

But, if your dashboards start telling a story of impossibility, your best people are going to leave earlier rather than hang on.

A definite downside to the dashboard cult.

Re: What software engineers can learn from the rapid collapse of Fast

#20

Post by mwcampbell » Thu, Apr 07, 2022, 6:51 PM UTC

I think the most applicable warning for engineers when it comes to the actual work, as opposed to whether one should join a particular startup, is this:

> Engineers calculated the load Fast had in needing to serve their traffic. The Fast button was rendered less than 500,000 times per day - rarely needed to ever serve more than a few requests per second.

> One of the few warning signs engineers noticed is how Fast spent far more on infrastructure than the scale of the operation would have called for. Engineers sometimes brought up suggestions to scale infra down, and save costs - given there was not much revenue generated.

Sounds like the whole thing could have run on a single cheap VM, perhaps with a second one for redundancy.