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SPEAKER_02: Hey everybody, welcome back to This Week in Startups. It's August, it's 2020 when we're taping this episode. It'll come out sometime after August 26th when we tape this. And on the podcast today is a founder named Dom. You can follow him on the Twitter at D-O-M-M. He seems to be highly active on the Twitter for his company. Fast, but not fast.com, because if you type in fast.com, you'll get a speed test, which I'd use. It's a pretty good speed test. I think it's sponsored by Netflix. And it will tell you how fast your computer is going. But he does fast.co. And the company's raised a bunch of money.

SPEAKER_05: And they're working in what people would categorize as the checkout space.

SPEAKER_06: You know, a critical part of any e-commerce business is getting people not only to discover products, but eventually put them in a shopping cart and eventually get them to check out as fast as possible.

SPEAKER_07: And in fact, one-click payments was the promise of Amazon early on.

SPEAKER_08: How quickly you could get a customer from putting something in their cart to getting it in their hands is in the entirety of their business. Well, Dom is working on that. But for businesses other than Amazon, welcome to This Week in Startups, Dom Holland.

SPEAKER_10: Thanks, Jason. Thanks for having me.

SPEAKER_08: You heard my opening there. Starting off, I know you're in San Francisco in the Bay Area. But the accent, I believe, is Australian, correct?

SPEAKER_12: Correct. Where in Australia are you from?

SPEAKER_13: I was born and bred in Bondi, and then I moved to regional New South Wales. So I lived in the country.

SPEAKER_15: I lived in Bondi for 10 years, then country for six or eight years. And then I lived in Brisbane the last 10, and I've had stints around. So I moved around the country a bit. Bondi is the beach. Correct. Famous beach.

SPEAKER_17: Most beautiful beach in the world. That's right.

SPEAKER_02: Well, I mean, some people would say the Whithavens, the Whitsundee, would be the most beautiful. Correct?

SPEAKER_19: I wouldn't call it a beach as such, but an island, absolutely. Yes. But, yeah.

SPEAKER_20: Having been to both, one of them is abandoned and there's nobody on it, and one of them is a vibrant town where you can have lunch by the beach. What's that walk? That's the Bondi hike. Yeah, to Tamarama. To Tamarama. That's a nice hike. It's a nice hike. Beautiful. It's like a cliffside hike.

SPEAKER_08: So you decided to give up the beautiful and high-functioning Australia for San Francisco. Got here just in time for the collapse of the city. But in all seriousness, I'm hoping your family and yourself and your team are all safe in the age of the pandemic. It is April, May, June, July, August.

SPEAKER_26: It is five months since we started this pandemic. How are you doing in the pandemic? And then we'll get to your business.

SPEAKER_15: Yeah, look, you know, like the rest of the world, it's been a major change. And it's right, you know, we weren't here too long. We officially moved here in November last year. And so it's a lot has changed since November when we got here. To be honest, it's, you know, Australia has fared through COVID a lot better than the US.

SPEAKER_30: You know, I think it's been fairly well reported. And so my wife and I've got married with two kids. My wife and two kids actually went back to Australia for two and a half, three months. And they just got back to the States recently. But, you know, we were living in a two-bedroom apartment in SF. And I've got two of the most active kids in the world.

SPEAKER_31: And they were just going stir-crazy in an apartment and, you know, not allowed to go to parks or anywhere else. So it was really hard. And they went back to Australia and spent some time there. And, you know, they're back in now, thankfully. And we've moved into a house. But, you know, it's also affected our team. And, you know, we've had a team who have sadly lost people to COVID and been affected by it in different ways. So it's, you know, it hasn't been without its challenges. But we're here. We're stronger.

SPEAKER_28: Here to live another day like everyone else.

SPEAKER_33: And when you look at your business being in the e-commerce business, what I've seen in my portfolio is that e-commerce businesses and your SaaS e-commerce, I believe, explain to people what fast.co is. I'm going to say fast.co so we won't talk about fast.com. But you call it simply fast. Yeah. Explain to people who your customers are and what they pay you for.

SPEAKER_18: Sure. So fast is a one-click checkout for the entire internet with no passwords.

SPEAKER_30: So it's a button that you see on websites that when you click it, it says fast checkout. And when you click it, you instantly buy whatever it is you're looking at. It could be a pair of shoes. It could be, you know, a T-shirt. It could be a basket of groceries. And it's literally a frictionless checkout. So there's no extra steps. There's no confirmation step. It's just that easy. Of course, you can change address or change cards. We make it very easy. But for most of your purchases, you're just done in one-click and away you go. Now, we don't just do checkout. We do one-click checkout and one-click login. So you can log into any site in one-click. So that's obviously not just limited to e-commerce. It could be a SaaS company. It could be company intranet. It could be company software. Absolutely anything that has a login form currently, we can power one-click login to that. Again, with no passwords. But, you know, the one-click checkout for e-commerce is definitely a primary sector. We're a B2B2C company. We consider the consumer our end. They're our end user. So we actually consider them our customer from a product standpoint.

SPEAKER_38: But they don't pay you for their service.

SPEAKER_15: Yeah. So our product org is designed to build products for consumers. Obviously, there's a merchant element to it because the button goes on to merchant sites. But the business, our sales org, sell into businesses.

SPEAKER_30: And they get the businesses to install our button. Now, by default, we don't earn anything for just placing the button on a site. We only get paid even when a consumer uses that button to buy something. And we take a portion of the transaction as our fee to process the payment.

SPEAKER_43: So if I had a Shopify site or if I had a Squarespace website or any other site,

SPEAKER_12: and I wanted to support fast checkout, similar to using PayPal, I would pay you 1%, 2% of every sale?

SPEAKER_46: Yeah, obviously, a difference, but per country. You know, default retail pricing across most companies, including us for, you know,

SPEAKER_15: if you're starting out and you're just launching e-commerce, I'd be 2.9% plus 30 cents in the U.S. In Australia, it's 1.75% plus 30 cents.

SPEAKER_06: Now, is that the transaction fee or the transaction fee for the credit card processing goes on top of that?

SPEAKER_49: No, that includes credit card processing fee.

SPEAKER_06: And the credit card processing costs you 1.5% to 2%. So net net, after you pay, the credit card processes, you make 1% on every sale on their website if people use fast.

SPEAKER_30: Yeah, look, you know, there's hundreds of different interchange rates. Well, let's pick the U.S., yeah. Yeah, but no, in the U.S., there's hundreds.

SPEAKER_53: Oh, you're saying debit card versus American Express. But let's say I use a Visa card and I use a credit card, not a debit card.

SPEAKER_30: Yeah, about 2%, say, call it 2%. If you're using a debit card, it could be half a percent. So it really can wildly vary. And, you know, the portion of debit cards amongst millennials

SPEAKER_31: is greatly shifting to, you know, what it was 10 years ago. So there really is a dynamic, you know, a skew in the dynamics.

SPEAKER_57: What do you say, young people use debit cards more than credit cards?

SPEAKER_31: Correct, yeah.

SPEAKER_57: Why is that?

SPEAKER_31: Just a shift in, you know, they don't trust credit cards in the same way that people did 10 years ago.

SPEAKER_30: So there's a massive shift to, and so if you look at different segments of stores,

SPEAKER_31: like fast fashion and stores selling it to millennials as opposed to, you know, boomers, you'll see a different breakdown in the card, you know, the cardholder base.

SPEAKER_33: Fascinating.

SPEAKER_06: Boomers like acquiring debt, and millennials and Gen Z like to pay for cash and not carry a debt balance.

SPEAKER_61: Yeah, so this is, so you take a company like Afterpay, you mentioned Klarna earlier.

SPEAKER_15: You take a company like Afterpay, which is a buy now, pay later company, who do essentially like checkout financing for consumers. So instead of buying pairs of shoes for $100, you pay $25 up front and pay $25 a fortnight thereafter for three fortnights. And, you know, something like 90% of all the cards held by Afterpay are debit cards, I believe. So it's a huge skew towards debit cards amongst that base, it's obviously a large millennial base in their customers.

SPEAKER_06: So you only make money if you get a large number of merchants to put this option on their website, and the sell to them, from what I'm hearing is, if people use fast, they have a faster checkout experience. When we get back from this break, I want to understand, how do you keep my credentials safe? Where does it exist that this can go from site to site without me having to re-put them in?

SPEAKER_02: Is it a Chrome extension? Is it a cookie? When we get back on This Week in Startups.

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SPEAKER_02: All right, one of those precocious people on the Twitter I got to know the last couple of years is Dom, D-O-M-M. And I just assumed he was with Fast.com and was running a service that would tell you how fast your interconnection was, but then I realized it was Fast.co. And as you heard, he's from Australia, moved to San Francisco just in time for the city to collapse under the pandemic, crime, and taxation.

SPEAKER_70: Congratulations on the timing of that one. Your intention, I'm busting chops a little bit, but this has got to be like a gut punch for you because I'm certain your intention for coming to America

SPEAKER_33: from the wonderful, wonderful country of Australia where every top 20 list of countries to live in the world is populated by four cities, like literally Australia is 20% of anybody's top 10 to 20 list of countries. You left to come to San Francisco, I assume, because you wanted to build an at-scale technology company, and now everybody is fleeing and the city is filled with moving trucks.

SPEAKER_08: What are your thoughts now broadly, and we'll get back to the teaser question after that of how your product works, Fast.co. Now, what are your thoughts when you see what happened in exactly the 10-month period that you came here?

SPEAKER_19: Yeah, I sometimes wonder if it was something that I said. Look, I... I wouldn't take it personal, the pandemic.

SPEAKER_75: Unless you were in Wuhan and there's something you want to tell us. I was not in Wuhan.

SPEAKER_77: Not experimenting with any viruses or exotic animal treats from wet markets, no? No, okay.

SPEAKER_31: No, no, no. Yeah, look, you know, it's... The whole world's gone through this. I mean, you know, I think that you'll find that lots of cities around the world and lots of places around the world have been... will change, you know, greatly from this long-term SF, you know, probably more so than a lot of places.

SPEAKER_30: But I've got to tell you, as it has been a really tough time for a lot of people, you know, ourselves included. Like I said, you know, my family spent a long time... I spent a long time this year away from my family and that was really tough. And I, you know, and we've had a lot of staff affected by this. So, it definitely has been a challenging time. At the same time, you know, commercially, you talk about market share, you know, we sell into e-commerce. The e-commerce sector has, you know, got through 10 years of growth in three months and is accelerating. You know, last quarter, it increased by 31.8%. It's an incredible growth for a sector that's already many trillions of dollars in size.

SPEAKER_80: Wait, was that year over year or quarter over quarter?

SPEAKER_30: Year over year.

SPEAKER_81: I would have loved to see quarter over quarter. Yeah. But... I wouldn't be shocked if it was.

SPEAKER_83: Because, I mean, I'm sure Uber Eats and some of these other services I've seen have been growing, Rob, and it's better than 30% during the pandemic.

SPEAKER_30: Would still be significant. Yeah. But regardless, like there's not many sectors in the world, probably no other sectors in the world that are growing at that pace, especially at that scale. So, commercially, you know, and we are, you know, officially, I started this business in March 14, 2019 in Australia. I came over here in June and, you know, went back and forwards for a few months until November last year. Officially, basically started building the company here in November. Now, you know, we're a team of 60 people, 60, like highly, mostly, you know, very highly skilled engineers. We have built, you know, not just in terms of headcount, like a really phenomenal base of business and signed up, you know, a lot of customers. Obviously, this is being filmed a few days early, very large announcement coming in a few days. And, you know, so commercially, we've done, we've had a very, very good start.

SPEAKER_33: And so you attribute that to the talent pool here in the Bay Area, which is like, and this is not to deride Australia, but Australia has had a handful of unicorns.

SPEAKER_06: I mean, if you happen to have worked at Canva or Atlassian, you know, those top 25 people at those two specific companies would be incredibly valuable and sought after, but they're probably going to run their own companies or retire. Whereas here, you know, you've got, you know, hundreds of companies that have reached that level with, you know, dozens of them that have reached 10 times their level, 20 times, 100 times their level. So just the amount of talent in the Bay Area, you know, pre-pandemic was just ginormous.

SPEAKER_87: That was the draw for you. Talent and capital.

SPEAKER_61: Absolutely.

SPEAKER_30: Now, there's, we are building, and you alluded to this earlier, and you were bang on, we're building a network scale business, right? A consumer network scale business. And so we obviously, you know, have large success from having large networks of consumers. Now, Australia's got quite a few, you know, nowhere near the US, obviously, but quite a few strong technology companies, you know, especially over the last few years. But typically, they're starkly B2B companies, right? Atlassian's a great example of a phenomenal Australian business, but a B2B business. Canva is a consumer business, but it's, you know, it's a sort of quasi B2B consumer business. Now, the reality is that we're building a large scale network consumer business, which means we want to literally support hundreds of millions or billions of people. And so we've got to build infrastructure that supports that many people. Australia is a country of 25 million people. So you can have people who've built great products before, but they typically haven't worked at the scale that we need them to work at. They're not scalable to that size.

SPEAKER_15: And one city in the world that has a huge density of people who've worked at that scale is San Francisco. And so that was the primary sort of draw card.

SPEAKER_06: And how does your product remember who I am?

SPEAKER_33: So if I was on, you know, Jason's ice cream store and I went to Susan's, you know, motorcycle helmet store and I see the fast button and I click on it after buying my ice cream to get my motorcycle helmet. How does it technically know who I am and give me the one checkout?

SPEAKER_16: Did I have to restore a plug in? Do you have your fingerprinted my browser somehow with a cookie? How does it actually technically work?

SPEAKER_15: Yeah, so we sit as a third party, right?

SPEAKER_30: So think about it in the same way that you use or you used to use, you probably don't use it much anymore, like a Facebook login to log into a website or a Google sign in to log into a website, right? So there's an intermediary that keeps a session open on you and other websites can tap into that, right? Rather than them creating their own login for you, they'll leverage Google's or Facebook's or whoever else is. And so we work in a similar way, but we don't just work on login, we work across a larger profile on you, including payment, so that you can quickly and easily tap into that.

SPEAKER_15: So that's at a high level, that's how we work.

SPEAKER_06: So I've opened an account with you, I have a session open with you, you've cookied me, you know my browser, now I go to another website, when I click that fast button, it redirects you to your website, not theirs, gets the credential information somehow on the back end in some safe and secure way. And here we are off to the races, somebody who's got a motorcycle helmet store or an ice cream store, gets the same amazing instant checkout that Amazon has, correct?

SPEAKER_18: Yeah, and all of that happens in one click.

SPEAKER_20: No, wait a second, let me stop you at the one click thing. Didn't Amazon patent one click? How did that all work out? And are you in their crosshairs because of it? Because I know people have fought the one click. I don't know where that all ended up.

SPEAKER_95: It expired about three years ago.

SPEAKER_06: It expired about three years ago. Was that part of the motivation for starting the company is that you were watching the one click thing and said, hey, when that thing times out, maybe we should jump in?

SPEAKER_18: Not at all. My youngest child, my son, who's two now, he was one at the time, he was in hospital for three weeks.

SPEAKER_30: And we had my wife's grandmother staying with us, helping us out because, you know, obviously my wife or me was at the hospital 24 hours a day and my daughter looked after as well. And one night my wife's grandmother was sitting at the kitchen table ordering groceries. She forgot her password and just literally couldn't order groceries and she just couldn't check out. And I just thought it was preposterous to see this little old lady sitting at the kitchen table purse out perfectly able.

SPEAKER_98: So that's a great origin story, which every startup needs a great one. But when did you find out that the patent was off?

SPEAKER_08: Because that was always why I heard people didn't go after this opportunity was because of that patent.

SPEAKER_20: Like when you started building it, did somebody say, hey, Tom, did you know that Amazon has a patent? Or did you just do a Google search and find out it was inspired?

SPEAKER_15: We've had about 600,000 people say, doesn't Amazon have a patent on this?

SPEAKER_104: And of course, the first time somebody said that, I quickly Googled and went, oh, no, the patent's gone. So that's great.

SPEAKER_08: There's a very controversial patent for people who don't know. So it was called a business process patent. And the idea behind a business process patent of, listen, I'm no lawyer, was you could not only patent technology and, you know, unique technology to do things, but a unique business process. Priceline was also known for having one of these pay what you want, other types of auction systems. And, you know, they have a certain lifespan.

SPEAKER_33: When we get back from this quick break, I want to know what everybody in the audience is thinking, which is how do you compete in a world where Amazon is going into the same business and Apple has one click pay, which I finally set up. And now I am addicted to when we get back on This Week in Startups.

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SPEAKER_07: All right, Dom Holland is here. He is the CEO and co-founder of Fast, which has grown pretty fast.

SPEAKER_06: I think you guys have raised $20, $30 million to date. Is that correct? $22 and a half. Yep. In just two years or so of being in operation, ramped up to 60 people.

SPEAKER_97: How many merchants have you on their sites these days?

SPEAKER_15: So this is being filmed pre-launch. We've got about 100 launch merchants going live on basically day one or in a few days leading up to day one.

SPEAKER_06: So we're taping this as part of your launch, which is something my producers do here a lot. They make an agreement to release this on the day of the launch, I guess, as soon as that's what's going on down here. So tell us, you'll launch with 100 partners.

SPEAKER_30: So we've got 100 partners which are going to be live in the first week, right? And they process about a quarter of a billion dollars a year in sales across them. Now, we're also announcing a partnership with BigCommerce to roll this out to their 60,000 big merchants across their platform. And they'll be onboarded throughout the next few months, throughout the BigCommerce ecosystem. We also are working with enterprise customers who are integrating at the moment. So some of them do $500 million a year, some of them more.

SPEAKER_57: What do you mean by enterprise customers in this regard? Are you talking about a B2B company like Slack or something?

SPEAKER_30: No, no, no, no. Just enterprise in terms of scale. So, you know, household names, mattress companies, companies who process typically billions of dollars. Got it.

SPEAKER_122: The big fish are coming.

SPEAKER_08: So when we went to break, I finally bit the bullet and got my Amazon credit card, connected my bank account, put in some money, and then paid off. Because somebody had paid me. They lost a poker game to me. They showed me how sending money in my iMessage works. And I was like, okay, well, that's unbelievably easy and fluid. So then I signed up for it. I had to spend the money. So I bought everybody lunch.

SPEAKER_97: It was a de minimis amount of money. It wasn't a big game. But then I started signing up for it.

SPEAKER_05: And now and again, when I go somewhere, it's like, hey, would you like to pay with Apple Pay? Double click. And I'm like, yes, I would. Because I don't want to touch anything.

SPEAKER_33: And so what is the strategy for going up against something as fluid as Apple Payments for you?

SPEAKER_30: Yeah. So look, I think of Apple Pay as our number one competitor. I also think it's a great product. And as do you, obviously, and I use Apple Pay a lot. The reality is that Apple Pay is highly contextual. So if you're, you know, 50% of everyone in this country has an iPhone. And so they, you know, have typically have Apple Pay enabled.

SPEAKER_15: And if they're on that iPhone and they're buying something, then they can use Apple Pay. Now, you know, 70% of e-commerce is done through a browser on the web. And if you're using your iPhone on the Safari browser, then you can use Apple Pay if the website's integrated it. And if your bank, you know, has an agreement with Apple to let their cards be used in Apple Pay and pay Apple a fee.

SPEAKER_30: Now, that's a lot of context. And they do process a lot of volume.

SPEAKER_15: So even in that context, it is a lot of money. But to give you an example, if you're on a MacBook and you go to apple.com and you log in with your Apple ID and you buy an Apple cable, you can't use Apple Pay if you're using Google Chrome, like 77% of everyone else on the Internet.

SPEAKER_30: So it is highly contextual and it's not available in a lot of circumstances.

SPEAKER_61: And that is for somebody who uses all Apple equipment.

SPEAKER_127: So your defense is going to be to be all platforms and everywhere.

SPEAKER_06: Your Android, your Apple, your Chrome, your Firefox, your Safari. Just download this thing on your desktop. Download this thing on your iPad. Download it on your Android phone.

SPEAKER_129: And it'll be one profile to unite them all, correct?

SPEAKER_61: So that's one piece. Yeah. And that is a big piece. Absolutely.

SPEAKER_30: Every device, every card, every browser, absolutely everybody can use this all around the world. The second piece is no matter if you're using Apple Pay or PayPal or any other sort of express payment method, right? It's not like we invented the idea of express payments. We are the fastest. We are the easiest. But we didn't sort of invent the category. And you can pay with Apple Pay or something else like that if the website supports it. And the reality is the other part of checkout that's broken or shopping online that's broken at the moment is post-purchase. And this is a really large component, right? So let's say one of the components we all hated was filling in checkout forms and login forms. And so we fixed that. But then after you've bought something, what happens when the shoes don't fit, right?

SPEAKER_15: Or you want to know when the shoes arrive is Gmail or your email is kind of like the main place that you'll go to try and find a receipt or try and find a tracking number and then click it and then see where something's at. If you want to return something, go to Gmail, find a link to log into the store where the password you created for the one store that you can't remember and you log in. It's a terrible experience.

SPEAKER_30: And so every single purchase that you make through Fast on any website, it goes into your feed on Fast. So you can see all of your orders. You can track all your deliveries, download all your receipts in the future, be able to manage all your returns. If it's a product like shampoo or something else like that or groceries, you can reorder in one click right from Fast.

SPEAKER_15: And so this is a really huge missing part of the Internet that we built into Fast.

SPEAKER_06: From Fast, you mean a Fast app, a Fast website, how does Fast exist beyond the Fast button existing on a website for consumers?

SPEAKER_15: Sure. So you can go to Fast.co. If you have used Fast Checkout and you go to Fast.co, you'll land straight into your feed. You don't go to a website, you'll just land in that feed immediately.

SPEAKER_30: You'll see how long the ETA for the last purchase you made is going to sit right in front of you. We're also releasing mobile apps.

SPEAKER_15: They're not going to be available on September 2nd, but they are coming.

SPEAKER_06: So that would be nice, though, because if I had ordered Jason's ice cream and Susan's motorcycle helmets and Joe's, you know, coloring books, I would see them all in one feed, which would be quite nice to see all my returns and have one central location to put all that stuff that's not Amazon.

SPEAKER_13: Do you feel Amazon your orders for the rest of the Internet?

SPEAKER_08: Got it. What is your relationship with Amazon going to be, if at all any?

SPEAKER_18: I'm happy powering payments on Amazon and putting all your Amazon purchases in that feed as well. We'll just, we'll wait for them to. Well, there's no chance they're going to do that.

SPEAKER_132: I mean, you could do a tool to export the orders and put them there.

SPEAKER_06: In all seriousness, do you think Apple is, you certainly watched Bezos testify, and he said, hey, we support third-party sellers.

SPEAKER_08: We believe in competition so much to such a crazy degree that we allow you to sell on our own platform, and we will compete with you heads up. If you want to make a better Amazon Basics cable, go for it. We'll put it right next to ours. Whichever one gets the best reviews will rank highest. Do you think Amazon is a fair company because of how they included third-party sellers, or do you think they're an unfair company because of the way they knock off basic products and create basic products, or knock off, you know, people's Amazon Web Services type products, and make, you know, cheap, you know, generic house brand versions of those on both Amazon and Amazon Web Services and Amazon Basics? Which is it for you, personally?

SPEAKER_15: Well, one of the things I agree with that you've said before is that, you know, and is that less than 1% of the products that they sell are their own brand. Um, so, uh, you know, and, and that's a, that's a big margin of difference when you compare that to other major, major retailers in this country. Um, now.

SPEAKER_53: When you're saying house brand, so if you're Whole Foods, which happens to be bought, but target house brand might be 20% of sales of products they sell. So for Amazon, it's de minimis.

SPEAKER_18: But, so the major thing is, the major thing that we focus on is as a consumer, um, uh, you know, I can tell you in, in Australia, Amazon is not the same as Amazon.

SPEAKER_30: Amazon here, Amazon only entered the Australian market a few years ago, um, like literally only two or three years ago, maybe, um, it does, has nowhere near the sort of, um, uh, status that it does here. And since moving to this country, it's only here that I realized the sort of impact and scale of Amazon. I really had no idea. I probably bought off Amazon two or three times in my life before moving to the U S and I, I can't tell you how many, how many orders I make from Amazon now, because it's so easy. It's so, it's just so fast to be able to, to buy whatever you're looking to buy.

SPEAKER_15: You know, my wife can mention something as I'm heading out the door and I'll sort of buy it within two minutes afterwards. Um, it's, it is a great experience. And then once you've bought something again, you know, if you've got a problem with it, if you want to know when it's arriving, if you want to, you know, sort of any of the post-purchase experience is great because it's all in one place.

SPEAKER_30: Um, so as a consumer, Amazon is, uh, Amazon is really quite a great service, uh, at least, you know, here in the U S, uh, outside of Amazon, that's just not true. And so, um, we really want to be able to let, um, businesses can, you know, compete with Amazon, uh, and offer that same delightful consumer experience to their customers outside of Amazon. And that's what we're focused on.

SPEAKER_07: All right, when we get back from this final break, I want to know, how did you convince people to invest in this company when the idea had been out there a bit?

SPEAKER_33: We mentioned some of the, you know, people who are adjacent to you, like Klarna, which I think is a Swedish company I met a couple of years back.

SPEAKER_06: You have a firm, you had a lot of competitors in the space. I want to know how you cleared market as a founder with so many embedded, uh, startups, as well as the 800 pound gorillas of, or in this case, now there are like $8 trillion gorillas of Amazon and Apple.

SPEAKER_136: I think they're, they're getting close to, you know, 4 trillion combined when we get back on this week at startups.

SPEAKER_66: All right. I'm an angel investor. You all know that. I've had a couple of companies go public. We just had desktop metal on the podcast and, you know, Uber went public and Hey, maybe Robin hood or calm. You never know. Maybe some of the other companies I've been able to invest in will go public. Well, how do you get access to those companies? Our crowd, O U R C R O W D.com slash twist is how you're going to get access to some of those IPOs before the IPO. And I'm sure many of you wish you had been part of those incredible, incredible, uh, performing IPOs in 2019 and 2020. Now you can get access to them. If you're an accredited investor, you can invest directly, easily, and most importantly, early with our crowd. They have investments, uh, in companies like beyond meat and lemonade. They did those before they went public, um, or before they get bought by big companies like Intel, Microsoft, and Oracle. Today, you can join our crowds investment in tech C T E C H S E E. It's a software company revolutionizing how leading enterprise companies provide remote customer support, which obviously everybody is doing. So tech C developed a cognitive visual engagement, supportive things platform powered by augmented reality and artificial intelligence. Sounds fascinating. That empowers customer support teams to deliver visual customer experience that significantly reduces service costs and enhances service quality. So go ahead and see that offering if you're an accredited investor. So you can get early access to tech C and other opportunities at our crowd.com slash twist. O U R C R O W D.com slash twist. Get early access to tech C and other deals at this great site.

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SPEAKER_129: All right. My guest today, Dom Holland from fast.co. They're launching fast checkout on September 2nd.

SPEAKER_16: This company is a bit of a cult. What do you, what do you, there's a, is there a nickname for all these fast employees or something? And you guys seem like you're like a, a blizzard of, uh, like a beehive.

SPEAKER_15: Fastronauts. Fastronauts. Fastronauts.

SPEAKER_18: Literally tens of thousands of people all around the world who are sitting on the edge of their seats waiting for September 2nd. And that includes like executives at major, major retailers, um, you know, banking execs, uh, you know, just, just people all around the world is, it has been such an incredible 18 months.

SPEAKER_16: So you got some real cultural DNA at the company that makes everybody so enthusiastic about this. Was there some book or person or moment that made you realize I need to have just an effervescent out there culture for my team?

SPEAKER_30: Nothing at all has been completely organic.

SPEAKER_15: I, you know, I say often two years ago, if you had told me that we would have, you know, have, uh, um, uh, you know, audience and a community and participation like this, I, you know, social participation, I wouldn't have believed you, but, um, it's just been really organic. And I think the number one reason is that we're building a product that as, as humans, as people, as internet connected people, every single one of us wants this to exist, like plainly as a product, um, it is a product that we all need.

SPEAKER_30: It's crazy that it, that it's, it's not out there and currently available and, uh, and everyone just can't wait to use it.

SPEAKER_15: And, um, and, um, and we're building in public, you know, where, um, we're very transparent in the way that we run and where, where that we grow and the way that we, you know, uh, treat our people and, and it's just something that the world really gets behind.

SPEAKER_07: How on earth did you raise money for this with such a competitive space filled with so many gigantic companies that are also focused on it?

SPEAKER_134: Um, yeah, so, uh, I, no one is doing the same thing.

SPEAKER_15: There's lots of people, not lots of ways you can make payments online. You can log into places online. Um, there's places that will finance your products online. Um, at the end of the day, we keep it really simple. We're a one click checkout for the internet. You want to buy something, you buy it one click. That's it. There shouldn't be any extra steps. There shouldn't be any extra friction friction. This should be how it works. Um, after you buy something, you should be able to see your purchase. You should be able to track your delivery. It shouldn't be there in one place. That's how the internet should be. That's a delightful experience. Um, and it should work for everybody.

SPEAKER_07: Wait, wait, didn't every single investor say to you, what if Amazon does this? And what was your answer?

SPEAKER_30: Amazon's got Amazon pay, but if, if you're Walmart, are you going to put Amazon pay on your website? If you're, you know, any other major retailer in this country, are you going to invite Amazon in to own your data and payments and customers?

SPEAKER_15: Um, of course not. And again, it's like this context. Why not?

SPEAKER_53: Like if I'm, if I'm Jane's motorcycle helmets, as I've been using as an example.

SPEAKER_06: Here, if I know people trust the Amazon brand, they have Amazon prime. They've got, you know, an Amazon account. Why wouldn't I want to have those accounts have access to it?

SPEAKER_15: Well, I mean, we, we just heard from all these, you know, from, um, uh, from the hearings about people who are concerned that Amazon's taking this data and using it to create their own products.

SPEAKER_18: That's one, that's one major concern.

SPEAKER_150: So fear of corporate espionage, got it. Yeah.

SPEAKER_18: Yeah.

SPEAKER_30: Um, but, uh, but the reality is, you know, there isn't any other offering that just serves everybody. Um, and, and that just does it simply lets you just pay with a card and it should just be out of, get out of your way.

SPEAKER_15: And that doesn't exist. And, um, and it should, and, and we've built it.

SPEAKER_06: And when you look at the affirms of the world and the Clarnas of the world, take me through those adjacent companies, which ones, uh, cause I know a number of them will have your payment information and they'll do exactly what you're doing. I know Clarna for a fact does that, right? Like you'll go to the next Clarna site, very popular in Europe, your information's already in there.

SPEAKER_08: They do.

SPEAKER_18: It's a finance product though.

SPEAKER_100: Uh, so explain what that means.

SPEAKER_18: So, uh, so instead of paying a hundred dollars for a pair of shoes, then you'll pay $25 today.

SPEAKER_157: You could add that to your, you could add that to your product, I assume.

SPEAKER_15: Uh, yeah, sure. I mean, these companies are our partners, to be honest, as opposed to competitors. Um, so it, you know, again, we're making it fast and easy for you to buy things, simple for you to buy things. Off then sure, we can enable that for you through one of these partners, but, um, it should still be easy if you don't want to use one of these partners. Right. And so we enable whether, whether you want to use a finance product or you just want to pay for the a hundred dollars upfront, we just make that quite simple.

SPEAKER_33: What do you think the impact of Amazon's credit card and this payment plan, which gives you 0% for like, you know, whatever, four payments or 10 payments to buy an iPhone or an iPad.

SPEAKER_06: What do you think the impact of that's going to be on their business? Cause I saw it and I was like, Hmm, that seems pretty interesting to me.

SPEAKER_08: Maybe I'll buy an iPad pro with that $17,000 keyboard on it. Uh, I think it's keyboard is more like $300 for an iPad keyboard.

SPEAKER_160: They've lost their minds, but it's a pretty cool keyboard.

SPEAKER_161: Uh, given that, that magic keyboard looks pretty sweet, but I don't know if it's $350 sweet, but I mean, I think that's what a Chromebook costs the same person as a keyboard.

SPEAKER_102: Yeah, I can still see it in your bag in a few months, you know, it'll make it sweat. Do you have it? Is that out yet, is it?

SPEAKER_118: That floating keyboard?

SPEAKER_104: I don't know, maybe. They bring out another one every six months, it will buy as well, you know.

SPEAKER_05: What do you think of the impact though, of them offering 0% financing since they have so much money, they're just like, Hey, we'll finance it for you.

SPEAKER_06: Do you see that as a reoccurring trend of the stores and the manufacturer saying, we'll just, we'll take care of your financing. We're making a Tesla. We'll do the financing for you. We have access to capital or we have all this cash in our bank account. Screw it. If you want to buy a nest and pass 10 bucks a month for it for 30 months, we'll just do it for you because we're Google with on a pile of cash.

SPEAKER_167: Yeah.

SPEAKER_15: So this is, you know, to me, this is one of the major threats of the buy now, pay later companies is, you know, and a lot of people think this is, is retailers doing it themselves, right?

SPEAKER_30: Is if it's only four payments and just all we're doing is take a hundred dollars divided by four.

SPEAKER_15: Well, eventually our engineers can build that ourselves and we've got, you know, we've got the balance sheet to be able to front that and we'll just save the, you know, extra two bips that you're charging us on the transaction. So, look, I think that-

SPEAKER_168: By the way, I meant Apple card, not Amazon card. Does Amazon have a credit card?

SPEAKER_170: Well, I probably will now that you've, now that you've given them the idea.

SPEAKER_172: Oh yeah, I'm sure Jeff Bezos, you know what, knowing Jeff, he listens to the pod. He, there's no way he ever considered an Apple card, you know, competitor.

SPEAKER_173: He's like, oh my God, that is Jason. Jason. Yeah, that's incredible.

SPEAKER_174: You're an Amazon card, we never considered that. We could put the Prime logo on it too.

SPEAKER_161: I've got 50,000 Bebel, yeah, yeah. I've got 60,000 Bain consultants here. And none of them came up with the idea.

SPEAKER_179: An Amazon card for Prime users would be bonkers.

SPEAKER_102: So, I can tell you, I've never seen, you know, I'm sure you see this a lot and I'm not just talking about that, like, I'm talking about behind the doors.

SPEAKER_18: I've never seen companies and, like, C-level executive teams of very, very, very, very big companies.

SPEAKER_15: So, petrified of a company like they are of Amazon. And they could be in completely different sectors. It's really, it's really amazing. Why is that?

SPEAKER_181: Why are people scared of Amazon?

SPEAKER_31: When Amazon move into a space, they do so with conviction. And they're typically very, you know, very good at executing. And, you know, they're not another company who just, you know, tips their toes in the water and something. They normally really, really get behind it. So, it's an amazing thing to see. So, if they did offer a card, I'm sure that they would be so with the same level of conviction.

SPEAKER_06: The picture of their approach that is so impressive. When they decided to make that Kindle, he went all in.

SPEAKER_05: When they made the Fire or the Fire Stick, I think the Fire Stick won, but the Kindle phone didn't. He just goes all in. And you know what? The other thing that's super dangerous about him as an entrepreneur is he doesn't care if he made it or not.

SPEAKER_16: Because he's like, yeah, we'll buy Twitch. We'll buy Whole Foods. We don't care.

SPEAKER_20: Whereas Apple's got this, like, insane, like, almost blind spot where they're like, well, we didn't make it. And it wasn't made in our laboratory. Therefore, it doesn't exist in the world. And it cannot exist in our ecosystem. And why would we buy Tesla and have a Tesla Model 3 there? And it's because, well, because you're so incompetent. You can't build your own goddamn car. And that car is brilliant. Like, buy. And now it's too late. I told Apple, buy Tesla at $75 billion when it was a $40 billion company. And now, oops. And they could have bought it. They could have bought it.

SPEAKER_191: Should have told Amazon. Imagine they had them. You had to want to take it to have your ideas. I did. I put it on CMB. Well, actually, that actually makes sense. Amazon owning a car company.

SPEAKER_05: I think Amazon's going to buy Lyft. Actually, that I know is a crazy idea. But I think Lyft is in so much trouble now for $9 billion.

SPEAKER_06: Why wouldn't they buy it and just make the Lyft network part of the delivery packaging network and go for it?

SPEAKER_97: What do you think is going to happen to retail? Because when you and I drive around San Francisco or walk, there's a lot of stores that are closed because of this pandemic. I mean, they're not coming back. And they were already on Vennice.

SPEAKER_06: Is it over for retail? Is it going to be? What's the footprint going to be like in five years in your mind?

SPEAKER_30: I absolutely believe it is. You know, drastically different.

SPEAKER_15: And not just in SF. All around the world. I can tell you in Australia, you know, there was, you know, the average store was closing down, you know, over the last 10 years. You know, over the last few years, if you have a look, we've had major retail chains, major, you know, going bankrupt and being put into liquidation left, right and center over the last few years.

SPEAKER_30: And, you know, the trend was here well before COVID. COVID has just like stuck the knife in and screwed it.

SPEAKER_15: It is not coming back to the same degree. There is always going to be a level of like, I think retail is just going to become the boutique, you know, the boutique offering. Right. But it is absolutely not going to be the mainstay.

SPEAKER_30: I think that the adoption of e-commerce is only going to increase and like dramatically even from here. And, yeah, retail is just going to be radically different. Commercial real estate is going to be radically different.

SPEAKER_33: Is this ultimately better for consumers or worse for consumers? Let's take the consumer first.

SPEAKER_15: Well, I'll tell you what. I just bought. We moved into a house recently. I just bought a grill, right? We call them barbecues in Australia, but it grills here.

SPEAKER_30: And I was desperate to see a grill in a store. Like websites have not worked out how to sell barbecues or grills. There was, you know, not enough photos of the burners, you know, like the experience is kind of terrible. But there was no stores that had stock, no stores open that sell, you know, sold barbecues or grills. And the ones that were had just no stock. And so it was a pretty bad experience. Buying it online, I had to just really kind of wing it and go off reviews and, you know, whatever else.

SPEAKER_15: I actually quite like the grill, but that experience wasn't great. So the reality is, and this is why, you know, Fast has had such, you know, really large adoption and there's a lot of excitement is COVID has been a forcing function for business to adopt e-commerce at a much faster rate than they were, especially enterprise.

SPEAKER_30: And so right now, the e-commerce experience for a lot of consumers isn't as good as it needs to be, right? And it's kind of substandard. And that's why we're really excited to be offering a product that actually makes the e-commerce experience fantastic. And enterprise is, you know, we've seen some of the biggest brands in the world engage us already pre-launch and getting ready to integrate.

SPEAKER_06: Is your experience illustrative of the fact that it might have been in your head that you needed to go visit a store because products are so good right now? Product review vectors are so good. You could go to the Wirecutter now owned by the New York Times. You can go to Consumer Reports. You could look at Amazon's ratings of them, see which ones is the editor's choice over there, and just pick whatever the consensus is.

SPEAKER_16: And that's actually going to be a better experience than going and playing with it.

SPEAKER_55: Yeah, and I think that in 90% of cases at the moment, that's typically true, especially high-moving. Yeah, but in the 10% it's not, you just return it.

SPEAKER_15: Well, the 10% is getting better, is my point, is that enterprise is now forcing function, going, well, we're going to have to just get better at this because the only way that people are buying grills now is online. So maybe take better photos and go deeper on descriptions.

SPEAKER_05: That's true, too, is like they don't even have the 360 view. Sometimes they don't even know what people want to know. This is one of the things I think is brilliant about Amazon is, I don't know if you've had this experience, where you go down and you just look at the questions. I just go down and look at the questions people are asking, and I expand it.

SPEAKER_86: I'm just curious what people who are making a decision are asking. Does it come with batteries?

SPEAKER_102: Search the questions.

SPEAKER_31: You know, it's always like, what's the width, right? I had a very small width that I could fit this thing in. And, of course, go to questions, search width. Like, that's, you know, again, Amazon's got a lot of data and they've got a lot of scale and they've worked out a lot of this stuff. And so, you know, it's the same thing is that other enterprise now are going to go, well, we just need all of these pieces in our own e-commerce experience.

SPEAKER_15: And that's what we offer.

SPEAKER_02: All right. Let me ask you another question because you're smart. You study this space. You know a lot more than I do. So, what's the story with Instagram commerce?

SPEAKER_05: Have you ever bought anything there? Are people going to buy stuff there? Is it the right medium to buy the stuff there?

SPEAKER_06: And if so, what would people buy on Instagram versus going to Amazon and who are they competing against?

SPEAKER_15: So, I mean, to be honest, I think Facebook and Instagram here are competing against Shopify.

SPEAKER_30: And I think Shopify is their partner. I would presume that Shopify did that partnership through gritted teeth. I think that's who they're chewing into.

SPEAKER_15: But the reality is that, you know, if you're a D2C company sitting on Shopify, right, basically the way that you get customers is by advertising on Facebook and Instagram, right, in a very large way. For a lot of these brands, that's what they rely on.

SPEAKER_30: Obviously, the bigger they get, they get more sophisticated and can diversify. But if you're starting out, that's typically how you start out. And the reality is that you're going from Instagram to a site and then you have drop off and, you know, and abandonment rate and whatever else. And Instagram is just trying to keep as much of that value as they can, right. And so, rather than just pay for an ad off Instagram, then go to the site and then have abandonment levels. If they can keep the transaction within Instagram, they can reduce the abandonment, but also increase the amount that they're charging for the ad, right.

SPEAKER_15: And so, one, I think that's smart. They are trying to keep typical sort of, you know, Facebook fashion, though. They're also keeping all of your transaction history.

SPEAKER_30: They know everything that you're buying. Like, they're building up a very smart profile on you that they can better, you know, so they can better target you in the future.

SPEAKER_207: Are you saying that at some point, Mark Zuckerberg may copy Shopify and steal his idea?

SPEAKER_209: Oh, I'm a guest at this accusation.

SPEAKER_15: Well, I mean, it's not even just a copying thing, right? So, Shopify makes something like 60% of its money through from transactions, right? And now the transaction is not happening on Shopify.

SPEAKER_31: And so, that's, I mean, they've called it Facebook shops and Instagram shop and Shopify's consumer offering is called shop.

SPEAKER_30: So, I, you know, this is, I think that there is going to be a big clash of these, you know, enterprise titans now. And yeah, but the reality is, if you're a brand, you want to build your brand.

SPEAKER_15: And if your sale is taking place on Instagram, that's a very transactional sale, right? It's like, you don't have LTV now. Your LTV is the amount that you're selling in that one transaction. You don't own the customers, you know, so.

SPEAKER_118: Oh, they'll obscurify the customer. You don't even get the customer's email.

SPEAKER_97: You have to get the customer's email address and an email and phone number, right? In case you have to service them or not. What do you think?

SPEAKER_18: Well, I don't know. I mean, I'm not going to be going to detail on the product there. But I can tell you that you're not earning a customer.

SPEAKER_15: They haven't been your site. They haven't, you know, interacted with you. They don't have that experience. So, you've just earned yourself a transactional customer. And if it's cost you $30, then you better have more than $30 of margin in that sale because you're not earning another sale from them.

SPEAKER_30: And, you know, so, I don't know. It's going to be a very transactional, you know, business for retailers. And, you know, maybe that's great for some lines. But obviously, you're not going to be able to build a big business off that. And I think, you know, if you're a company that's going to raise money, the first question investors are going to ask is how much of that is going to be coming through that channel.

SPEAKER_15: So, it's an interesting…

SPEAKER_43: What's Google's strategy in all this?

SPEAKER_06: Because they have Amazon buying ads. They've got everybody buying ads on their site. They have Google Shopping, which, as far as I can tell, is just a bunch of clicks.

SPEAKER_16: Like, it's just a bunch of click ads. But they…

SPEAKER_204: Google's got the same strategy, to be honest. Google's got the same strategy, right?

SPEAKER_15: So, if you're Facebook, if you're Google, if you're everyone else, right, the last piece that you need is to be processing the transaction, right? If you're an advertising business, that's the last piece that you need. Because now, you can completely abstract the merchant out of the equation. They don't have to visit the merchant site. And so, if you're Google, again, some people are searching for a product, they click an ad, they go to the site, and then they have to check out. And there's a certain level of abandonment in between. If Google can own the transaction, which is the first step they've got. So, they've got, you know, pay with Google, which, you know, isn't actually widely used. But they do have that product. That if the merchant uses that, well, then now, why even send the traffic to the merchant site at all? Why not just embed the checkout within Google search results? And that would increase, you know, one, Google's advertising revenue, which is their primary goal. And so, I think that's what you're going to see is Google abstracting away the merchant as well. Again, whether you're Shopify, Facebook, Google, everyone is abstracting the merchant out of the equation. And, you know, Shopify's got their payment product and whatever else now. They're all becoming the marketplace.

SPEAKER_31: And so, all of these companies have the same strategy because, you know, they're so big. How else are they going to extract the most value?

SPEAKER_33: What's the last big piece of e-commerce that hasn't been resolved? Is it the last mile delivery? Is it groceries?

SPEAKER_54: Logistics sucks. Logistics still sucks? I mean, well, look at, you know, USPS at the moment and what's happening there. It's going to be disastrous for the holidays.

SPEAKER_15: But, you know, logistics is really tough. There's just so much work that needs to go in there. We've sold, you know, we've sold checkout. We've sold login. We've sold post-purchase. I think logistics is the last big piece.

SPEAKER_06: Why is the US post office not charging the Amazons of the world like a rate that makes them profitable or at least break even? I don't understand who's running it.

SPEAKER_16: Like, I mean, I don't think we should make any changes to the post office before an election during a pandemic, obviously. But why, I mean, why does the post office have to be six-day-a-week service and service every single person in the United States?

SPEAKER_06: Like, why not make it, you know, twice a week and make it profitable? And it's sort of the backup to the UPSs, the FedExs, et cetera. I'm not saying it has to be once a month, but it doesn't seem like this is a business the United States needs to be in.

SPEAKER_16: Do you, is this how post works in Australia? And what are your thoughts when you see the post office losing all this money? Yeah. And Amazon making all this money, it seems like a wealth transfer to me or some kind of weird shenanigans.

SPEAKER_15: Australia Post has gone through similar, sort of similar experiences. You know, from, I think the letter business is the real money loser, right? The parcel business is where they make money. And we're coming to an age of e-commerce where the parcel business is really what you want. You just don't want to have the letter business anymore, right? And because it's a money loser, but typically it's like mandated that that business has to exist. It has to operate at a certain schedule and you're just not making money off sending a letter for, I don't know how much costs here actually to send a letter, but in Australia, it's a dollar, I think now.

SPEAKER_230: I think it's 55 cents or something. Yeah.

SPEAKER_15: So, so you imagine like that, that's, they lose, they would be losing a lot of money on that, right?

SPEAKER_30: Whereas when you're sending a parcel, that's a much higher margin product to sell. So, I think if you shut down the letter business, it'd probably, it'd probably be profitable very quickly.

Chamath Palihapitiya: But that's the one people need. They have to come up with a way to raise the price.

SPEAKER_15: But to divide it. And that, that is the government service, right? Do the, do the letters once a week and then let the parcel business thrive. Or, you know, I, I don't know. I don't, I don't have the answers.

SPEAKER_31: I'm not running USPS, but, but it's, the letter business is, is the issue. And, you know, at least.

SPEAKER_33: And it's crazy that the letters are done so cheaply. Like, the idea that I can send a letter to anywhere in the United States for 55 cents in 2020 and a cup of coffee costs $3.

SPEAKER_16: Like, maybe sending a letter should cost a dollar or two. And maybe if a letter cost a dollar or two, we wouldn't get so much junk mail. Like, I think that there's this perverse, weird hamster wheel that some non-business person put the post office on where they're like, we need to charge less so that we can get more volume, so we can make more money. And nobody ever explained to them that, like, increasing the number of money losing transactions results in a greater loss.

SPEAKER_20: Like, they just don't understand basic economics.

SPEAKER_54: Yeah, I, you know, I'm sure there's lots of, you know, economics at play here.

SPEAKER_15: Like, perhaps it's, you know, lower socioeconomic, you know, demographics can't afford higher postal rates. I don't know. I don't have all the answers. But, but typically, it's a letter business that brings it under. And that, that's one that you need to, like, work on, work on the economics of. Whether it's, whether it's that the government just cops that hit and keeps it low for whatever reason. Or, you increase the price of letters. That's right. I mean, in Australia, they were 40 cents for a long time and they were a dollar, I think they were a dollar something now. So, maybe, maybe that's the answer. And I think they did cut back the number of days a week that letters are delivered. It can have a profound impact on, on cost, you know, and network.

SPEAKER_207: I come home and I'm like, why am I getting six day a week mail? And I think one in 50 is what's important.

SPEAKER_05: You need only look at the amount of spam in your mailbox to realize that this model is severely broken. The unfortunate thing is we live in such a polarized time here in the United States that we're actually making these changes before the first election that would be dramatically impacted by mail-in votings because of a once in a hundred year pandemic. It's just so weird.

SPEAKER_16: The world's gotten weird. What are you going to do if this pandemic goes into year two?

SPEAKER_97: You're, you know, you come from the just amazing island of Australia where with the exception of the outbreak in Melbourne, which was a sordid tale. If there ever was one, I'll let you look it up. A little outbreak there, but you guys take it pretty damn seriously down there. Everybody had to go on curfew.

SPEAKER_31: Two weeks. So if you land, only Australian citizens are allowed to go home once you land.

SPEAKER_15: So this is what happened, obviously, to my family when they got there. Two week mandatory lockdown. Government, the army escorts you from customs to a hotel that they put you up in for two weeks. Originally, they were paying for it. Now you're paying for it. And you sit under guard. You can't leave, can't leave the room. And then at the end of the two weeks, you can go about your business. You know, during, at the sort of peak of COVID, Australia locked every state in between. You couldn't travel in between states. Same thing. Two weeks quarantine to travel between states.

SPEAKER_31: They just locked the, I mean, we're an island in the middle of nowhere. So they just locked all the borders and went, well, no one's coming in.

SPEAKER_243: And that tended to work pretty well. It's pretty simple, yeah.

SPEAKER_97: And then unless the security guards are getting involved with the people in the hotel, which was what the outbreak in Melbourne resulted in. I'll leave it to your imagination. But when it did happen, I don't know if you heard it. Did you hear about the Melbourne re-lockdown two weeks ago?

SPEAKER_249: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_05: I mean, they basically said we're going to be curfew from, I don't know if it was 7 p.m. to 5 a.m. or something. It was like a 10-hour curfew.

SPEAKER_97: Then you were allowed to go five kilometers from your house for one hour a day to go shopping, one person from the house at a time. One person was allowed to go out and exercise. Or everybody was allowed to go out for one hour of exercise per day in the non, those hours. I mean, they took it seriously and it's worked.

SPEAKER_254: Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_97: It's the only way to do it. Are you going to move the company? What could possibly be going through your mind right now in terms of the best?

SPEAKER_255: Launch September 2nd.

SPEAKER_257: Well, there's that, yeah. But post that, are you even thinking?

SPEAKER_05: Is it even worth it thinking about what the world will look like post-pandemic for your team? Because there are team members, I'm sure, who took this opportunity.

SPEAKER_02: You shut the office until what, Q2 next year, Q1?

SPEAKER_15: Nah, we're a small company. We're nimble. You know, people will come back as soon as they're able to. So, this is a topic I like talking about. We introduced something. I know that you're like this. I'm actually like this. I was always a little bit old school, right? I like to have everyone come in, be in an office. We all work together. It's, you know, one, the camaraderie. It's just easier communication flows. And it's a job.

SPEAKER_31: Yeah. And you can kind of see what people are doing. Exactly. So, I, you know, to be honest, that was my view. I didn't come into this, you know. I haven't been working remote the last 10 years thinking this is how the world works.

SPEAKER_15: Now, the second that we went into COVID, and so, you know, 50% of our team, 60% of our team now is still based in SF, in the Bay Area. And 100% of our team was going into COVID. Now, as the second that we went in, I knew that this lockdown was going to happen for months. I had no predisposition to think we were going to be out of this early. It was obviously that we were just being told that to try and keep everyone calm about being locked up for the first time ever. And so, we made a decision to start hiring remote as well, right? So, obviously, keep hiring here too. But for roles that we don't need that scale, that we don't need that Bay Area scale, if there's great people in other places, let's hire them as well. We've hired 50% of the people, you know, outside of the Bay Area, as in the Bay Area, since COVID. In fact, we've hired more people since the start of COVID than we had before. So, we definitely have widened that. My view has completely changed and we now have a policy called Fast Flex that's going to be forever, which is you can work from our office once we reopen. You can work from your home. You can work from the other side of the world. And you can change on a daily basis. We don't care. Everyone, you've just got to get your work done. And I can tell you, our head of engineering, who's, you know, based here in the Bay Area, he's worked Apple, Google, Apple, Netflix, and Uber most recently. He is in Turkey at the moment. He's in Turkey for three months with his family because I've never met him in person.

SPEAKER_30: Like, there's no benefit to him being in San Francisco right now other than he has to work along the time zones.

SPEAKER_06: How are you going to deal with salaries?

SPEAKER_05: Zuckerberg said, listen, if I paid you an extra $30,000 a year to live in San Francisco, cost of living, and you move to, you know, Mexico or Costa Rica or pick a place with the extremely low cost of living, Thailand, you can't expect to get that salary. Salaries will be reduced if you go move to one of those places, and obviously, overall, there'll be an equilibrium. If we're not paying Silicon Valley salaries, which were 50% to 100% greater of other places, all salaries will come down, and there'll be a level playing field for people, whether they're in Canada or Mexico or Thailand or Manila. I mean, it may come down to time zones, but how are you dealing with that? Because this feels extremely unfair to cut somebody's salary. It also feels extremely unfair for somebody who got a different deal for not moving from Nashville to the Bay Area to then have the person from the Bay Area doing the same job with a higher salary move to Nashville and get the benefit and bring the premium that they get paid for working in the Bay Area.

SPEAKER_31: Yeah, so I think that big tech is going to love bringing the salaries down, right?

SPEAKER_30: And I think people, if people don't believe that the cost of, you know, the salaries being paid to tech workers isn't going to come down because of this and because of the proliferation of remote work, then I think they're crazy. They absolutely are going to come down.

SPEAKER_15: Now, we don't have, like, a finite strategy about bringing, you know, these costs down at all, and I think it won't be for a long time before we're seeing that sort of reduction. Now, the reality is, like, to a point, there's just complexities. What happens if, you know, Jerm, our head of engineering, he's in Turkey at the moment, he's there for a few months, so, of course, like, why would we be paying him less? But what if he's there for a week, if he's there for a month, three months, at what point would you reconsider what wage they're on? If we hired him and he was based in Turkey, but he used to live here in the Bay Area, is he worthless? Now, I don't have all the answers is a short thing, is a short answer. And the reality is we will just look at people as people and price dynamically like we do all the time. And I can tell you that if there's a phenomenal engineer that's come from a top-tier tech company that has worked at this scale, that has the exact skill set that we need, then regardless of where they are, we're going to compete for that person. And if that means that we're paying a Bay Area salary or a Colorado Spring salary or an Australian salary or whatever it is, or an Indonesian salary, then that's what we'll do. I just, I don't think there are great answers, but I do think that you'll find that, you know, salaries are going to be coming down over time.

SPEAKER_07: Yeah, it's now becoming a global marketplace.

SPEAKER_05: It was not a global marketplace because people said you have to be within 50 miles of the office, reasonably 30 miles, really reasonably 20 or 30 miles of the office because of traffic. And now, if you're saying you have to be in the same time zone, plus or minus five hours, we're cool with it. As long as you do well, man, that's going to change everything. It's, I mean, I can see it happening already. And I think what's going to happen is it's just going to be, some people will be grandfathered in and then there'll just be a great reckoning a year from now when people look at their balance sheet and go, well, this doesn't make sense.

SPEAKER_06: I've got a sales executive in San Francisco and a sales executive in, you know, this place.

SPEAKER_02: And this sales executive has got a bigger book of business than this one and they have two different bases and it's all going to reset.

SPEAKER_31: I've got an engineer with two years experience, you know, over here that cost me $1,000 a week and an engineer with two years experience over here that cost me $5,000 a week.

SPEAKER_15: Like, why are we keeping the engineer that's costing $5,000 a week?

SPEAKER_20: Why don't you do the cultural issue of firing the $5,000 person or saying you have to take a pay cut? Now they hate you for all time. Yeah, well, I mean, we're not going to be doing that. This isn't us, but if you're a big tech, are you going through this?

SPEAKER_270: Why are you giving everybody a pay cut, Dom?

SPEAKER_273: No, not us, not us.

SPEAKER_277: No, no, no. Fast Company employees, it's a joke, it's a joke. We, no, we champion people. Not Zuckerberg.

SPEAKER_279: Zuckerberg had no problem. He came out the first two weeks, he's like, yeah, you can go anywhere you want.

SPEAKER_281: But just ask, all I have to do is ask. And January 1st, I'm more than willing to lower your salary. I mean, he's hardcore.

SPEAKER_227: And this is why, you know, our whole team have come from big tech companies. I mean, not just because of that, but, you know, we're a much more interesting place to work.

SPEAKER_31: We've got much more interesting engineering challenges. We treat people as people. And we're not, you know, big, big, boring tech. Yeah. So.

SPEAKER_127: All right, listen, Dom, it's great to get to know you finally after watching you bounce

SPEAKER_97: around on the Twitter. Twitter's a great branding thing for you, huh? You went from nobody knew who you are to being like, you got some pretty high profile followers.

SPEAKER_236: Oh, I think my mom would be annoyed at you saying that, Jason.

SPEAKER_284: I mean, in the industry, Dom, in the industry. Of course your mom.

SPEAKER_15: In the Bay Area clique, yes. Look, absolutely. Twitter's a phenomenal channel for us. It lets us, you know, talk to people at scale and lets them talk to us at scale.

SPEAKER_287: But are you building a cult?

SPEAKER_05: Is this a bit of a cult? That's what somebody would say. Somebody's breaking your chops. I can't remember the thread. They're like, oh, those fast people are a cult. It's like a cult over there.

SPEAKER_15: Yeah, well, yeah. A lot of people. How many people? I mean, we're just building something that the whole world wants and we can't wait to give it to them. September 2nd.

SPEAKER_06: September 2nd. You heard it here first or on Dom's Twitter feed for the last six months. That's today.

SPEAKER_263: And that is today.

SPEAKER_06: You heard it here first today because we, although we recorded this a couple of days early, and for those PR marketing people who are out there, we don't take pitches for the podcast, period, end of story.

SPEAKER_16: Unless, unless there's some gigantic news dropping and the company's pretty hot, that we might play ball. But if you email me or any of the producers and say, hey, I'm from this PR company, we immediately write you back. We do not take PR pitches. It's instructive for these PR people to understand.

SPEAKER_20: If you want to be on this show, show some respect. The CEO emails me, Jason at Calacanis.com. Hey, I got something dropping. I would love to be on the pod. I'm a big fan. I like these two episodes. Don't send your PR people. They automatically get banned. I've got every PR firm on my banned list. I just hit shift exclamation point on my superhuman and I ban, you know, Joe Schmoe PR.com, blank communications. That's why none of you get a response because the PR people is too many of you and you don't even watch the show and you spam us with nonsense. But if you have something legit, this is a lesson for every founder. Founder, email host of show. Say I'm a fan of the show. I watch this podcast. I know Dom's listened to a couple of pods. We've talked about it on the Twitter. Be a human being and just ask somebody. Say, I love being on your, love your show. Would love to be on sometime. We've got a big announcement coming. Big announcement's a good excuse to do. I'm not saying Dom did that.

SPEAKER_06: I don't know if he did or not. But it's great to have you on the show. Everybody go check out Fast.co. He's hiring and yeah, commerce.

SPEAKER_20: A lot of work to be done. Fast checkout coming September 2nd, which is today. We'll see you all next time. Thanks, Dom.