VCs sometimes follow "hot" companies. Companies become hot when several VCs think they are hot for whatever reason. When the company is hot and gets offers, other VCs will rush to give them more offers and at that point you might not even need a deck or any metrics anymore. The startup can then bid those offers against each and can end up raising even more they initially were trying to.

Fast did great job hyping the company on Twitter, likely the founder also was a good storyteller. The old adage is that you raise with a story, team or traction. Sometimes the story actually pans out, like with YC Airbnb is often an example of company that struggled for a long time in the beginning and no-one could really predict how big they could become.

traction doesn’t matter. or we would have raised. story and team maybe. i think that VCs buy into a certain type of person. maybe a younger version of themselves. somebody they want or wanted to be. that rules out anyone who is nerdy or weird. and they like to go to parties to hear what others are investing in and then do the same.

I'm all in if a founder can "sell" a company to raise money. It becomes a problem once people believe their own hype, so.

> we never raised any money

Who? (Also, given an open market, as was the case when the Amazon patent expired in 2017, the company fundraises to scale will beat its more timid competitor. This is basic strategy.)

If you were in a different industry…great execution in the wrong industry is as good as a Ferrari in a swamp.

> all that matters is knowing people

Sounds like you’ve been through some shit. I’m sorry for that.

The point I was making, summarily, is that Bolt ate Fast’s lunch. It went straight for the big customers. Fast wanted to grow towards them incrementally. In this story, if anyone had a fundraising connections advantage, it was Fast—they were Stripe backed. Bolt outmanoeuvred them (and was lucky).

This is unorthodox strategy. Fast played it conservatively. Bolt swung for the fences. Curiously, Bolt landed the home run.

FAST wasted $100M on nothing. That's not conservative.

I don't know why on earth this is downvoted. You're 100% correct and I'm bewildered that this 'conservative' trope is prevailing in the thread. Both companies spent functionally the same amount of money, and both maximised different terms of the [customer count]*[customer revenue] equation.

Fast made what was manifestly the wrong decision, both in hindsight and in foresight (I'm happy to post my WhatsApp screencaps from a year and a half ago when I was exploring starting a co in that space). It's not possible to build a hands-off 'platform' like Stripe in that space - integrations are complex, and so integrating a large number of small clients predictably bogged them down till they ran out of money.

(That's not the only reason, I'm sure. It was also a shitty implementation of one-click checkout: most saliently, it wasn't one click. Anyone who actually tried Fast at the time - and I & my prospective cofounder shared the few tiny client websites either of us found like they were rare gems - could see that it was a terrible implementation, in a space where UX is literally the entire game. Many actually did, e.g. this guy from back then: https://chrisfrantz.com/checking-in-on-fast/)

you can build a great business in any industry. VCs think this is limited to a handful of industries which they happen to think are hot. because of that thinking many good deals are lost.

maybe Bolt knew a couple of things Fast did not.