YouSaid · the spoken record

Domm Holland

lines on the record: 33
first: 2019-11-15
most recent: 2019-11-15
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“My mission with FAST is to touch every single internet connected consumer in this planet, which hopefully is most consumers in five to ten years. And we want to be powering authentication. We want to be powering payments. We want to unlock the ability for consumers to control their data, secure their data, and share their data, if and when they want easily and allow them to make life easier for a consumer and for a customer. And my goal is to do that for every consumer on the planet. So I'd like to think that five years in, I'm getting pretty close to that mission, especially at the pace we're operating.”
2019-11-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Speed Is The Biggest Differentiator a Founder Can Have, How To Hire Seasoned Tier 1 Talent To An Early Stage Startup & How To Start, Scale and Manage Remote Teams with Domm Holland, Founder & CEO @ Fast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, I ruthlessly leverage every single connection that I can out of every investor, every partner, every angel. Like for me, I came to, you know, I came to SF in June with virtually no network here. And in that time, like we've done, I think I've built an incredible network of people. We've got an army of people behind us now. And it's because just leveraging connections. I also go cold. I've got no problem going to cold and reaching out to people. But then every person you get on board, every person that's on your team make them a promoter, make them want to connect you with people. And then if they do connect you with people, then jump on that. No one's inspired by someone who replies two weeks later or takes on a network once they're introduced to someone takes two weeks to reply. You know, I think that taking those opportunities as soon as they come are really important and finding those opportunities. If you've got investors, go through their portfolio companies and find the ones who could be great clients. Ask them who their biggest investments are because they're the ones that they're going to.”
2019-11-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Speed Is The Biggest Differentiator a Founder Can Have, How To Hire Seasoned Tier 1 Talent To An Early Stage Startup & How To Start, Scale and Manage Remote Teams with Domm Holland, Founder & CEO @ Fast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Technical people and engineers, there is so many resources out there these days. If you've got a thirst for knowledge, like and I do, I love to learn new things like, you know, I find tech, tech is my hobby and, you know, new tech is amazing. And so I think it's almost difficult for me to not constantly be coming across new things and learning new things. So I think absorb everything around you is the number one most important thing. I think Twitter is such an incredible tool at being exposed to a lot of this new tech new tools. amazing people again all about surrounding myself with incredible people and here is one of the greatest places to do it but twitter is where you can be exposed to some of the brightest spines in the world and they're telling you what they're doing they're telling you what they're working on you know there's an incredible indie maker community that are building amazing things things like product hunt you know constantly new sources of technology new sources of tools to play with so i think just being awake and opening your eyes you know”
2019-11-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Speed Is The Biggest Differentiator a Founder Can Have, How To Hire Seasoned Tier 1 Talent To An Early Stage Startup & How To Start, Scale and Manage Remote Teams with Domm Holland, Founder & CEO @ Fast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't have them anymore. Having been brought up in the School of Hard Knocks, my last company really took a lot for me to get through. I had a lot of stress in that going through. You know, I was suing a state government in the Supreme Court of Queensland and the police force. I was dealing with some absolutely horrible people who carry guns around. And I just don't have those moments anymore. This is why I have forethought, I think, constantly about everything that I'm doing, everything that's coming up, every possible scenario, something bad happens, then I just go and solve that. If something terrible happens, I just go and solve that. And then we move on. I just don't come across challenges that seem, you know, life-threatening. I come across problems that I see as, you know, needing to be solved, but none of them that make me quiver in my boot.”
2019-11-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Speed Is The Biggest Differentiator a Founder Can Have, How To Hire Seasoned Tier 1 Talent To An Early Stage Startup & How To Start, Scale and Manage Remote Teams with Domm Holland, Founder & CEO @ Fast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't think I've got a lesson that I've learned at the beginning of this. I think speed is still, you know, I keep harping on it, but I wish I had known years ago how productive speed is and how speed is a killer. It's just killing our competition, not us.”
2019-11-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Speed Is The Biggest Differentiator a Founder Can Have, How To Hire Seasoned Tier 1 Talent To An Early Stage Startup & How To Start, Scale and Manage Remote Teams with Domm Holland, Founder & CEO @ Fast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is if not the one of the greatest fintech investors in the world. And I think investors generally, not just fintech. And I think it's because he makes decisions, strong decisions, operates quickly, understands things, is able to break down problems very easily. He's got a lot of really great traits. And I think we probably share a lot of similar traits that he sees me and I see him. And so I think we just, you know, we had a great connection. We've got very big problems to solve. There's a long road ahead of us. And I think he doesn't baby me. I don't ask him for help doing silly things like getting leases or whatever. We're getting on with our roles. Listen and I couldn't agree more. Jan is one of the most incredible people, both in European and kind of global VC. Cool, let's do it”
2019-11-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Speed Is The Biggest Differentiator a Founder Can Have, How To Hire Seasoned Tier 1 Talent To An Early Stage Startup & How To Start, Scale and Manage Remote Teams with Domm Holland, Founder & CEO @ Fast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, my last name is Holland, so maybe Jarn took a liking to me straight off the car. And Jan doesn't know this yet, but he will probably from your podcast. But I'm half Dutch. So maybe he sensed that in my personality. How was that? The reality is, one of the magical things about Silicon Valley is that, you know, the ecosystem, the capital drivers here are about people who identify large problems, have the drive and the ability to go solve those problems. There is such a great capital system here for funding those people. And I think that people like Jan, I've had so many VCs contact us since we raised before we raised, as we were raising, interested in investing in this business. And I've had some of the biggest funds in the valley wanting to write tiny checks just to get in. I would still have Pityn every day of the week because he has a lot of the drivers that I really admire. He makes decisions very quickly, but very good decisions. I think he's a lot of people like Alison think, you know, and believe, and I do too, is that he.”
2019-11-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Speed Is The Biggest Differentiator a Founder Can Have, How To Hire Seasoned Tier 1 Talent To An Early Stage Startup & How To Start, Scale and Manage Remote Teams with Domm Holland, Founder & CEO @ Fast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I've just operated like this for a long time. I'm just better at doing it now probably than I was a long time ago. I think the tools are available now to make it easier than ever. Superhuman is tools like that are fantastic at me being able to sort of try-edge email very, very rapidly. You know, tools like WhatsApp, every one of our investors, every one of my partners, our advisors, our staff, I have like this incredible brand trust on WhatsApp, which means if I don't know an answer to something, I can typically find it out in minutes from people all around the world. Like I find that, you know, Twitter, I find these tools absolutely incredible at allowing me to operate very, very quickly. So last question. You mentioned that kind of learning from people all around the world. Now, when it comes to the new round, a huge congrats on that, by the way, hugely exciting. Thank you. In terms of the race itself, and Aussie moving to San Francisco, raising from Jan from the Netherlands based in London, what was the story there? How did it come about?”
2019-11-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Speed Is The Biggest Differentiator a Founder Can Have, How To Hire Seasoned Tier 1 Talent To An Early Stage Startup & How To Start, Scale and Manage Remote Teams with Domm Holland, Founder & CEO @ Fast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of sort of anger. My last business was incredibly challenging. My last large startup was incredibly challenging. I like to think that I don't have ups and downs. I sit on the same wavelength all the time. And I think I'm just driven like this. I don't know what it is. I don't have like a goal in mind. I just, I love what I do every day. I don't sort of celebrate the typical milestones that people celebrate because I literally just love doing what I do every day. And if I can be bigger than I was yesterday and if I can be faster than I was yesterday and if I can have more people around me than I had yesterday, then that's what I celebrate every day. I come home so happy at the end of each day. So that's, you know, just being able to do better than I did today, tomorrow. That's what drives me. Can I ask, we mentioned the element there of the speed being that core determinant for you. Is there ever a challenge? Because whenever I try and do something incredibly fast, normally the quality goes down, as I'm sure it does with most people. How do you manage and maintain speed and quality? Yeah, I think it just becomes a muscle.”
2019-11-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Speed Is The Biggest Differentiator a Founder Can Have, How To Hire Seasoned Tier 1 Talent To An Early Stage Startup & How To Start, Scale and Manage Remote Teams with Domm Holland, Founder & CEO @ Fast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That inaction is exactly what I don't want to have in business. So someone gives me a task, or if I see a problem, I solve it immediately. That is how I operate. And I don't think about it as necessarily like that I need to act really fast or hastily. It's just that I act promptly and efficiently. And I find that I just managed to get through far more work. So far more problems and get on to far more tasks and grow the business far faster by operating like that. Can I ask Dawn? When I listen to you talk now, I mean, it's incredible, but the kind of instant thing that comes to my mind, and again, sorry, off schedule. What fundamentally drives you? Because when you're as obsessed as I think, you know, you and I are, what drives you fundamentally every day get up at 4.30, like pound, pound, pound, like it is, and there are harder times. What drives you? Honestly, I can't answer that. I have been like this, you know, I was brought up in the school of hard knocks, being told for a long time. I didn't have an easy upbringing boxed my way through years.”
2019-11-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Speed Is The Biggest Differentiator a Founder Can Have, How To Hire Seasoned Tier 1 Talent To An Early Stage Startup & How To Start, Scale and Manage Remote Teams with Domm Holland, Founder & CEO @ Fast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Nice exercise, but you know, I listen to your podcast on the way, so I listened to Vlad from Webflow this morning. And it gives me time to debrief on what's come in overnight. It gives me time to sort of have a quick look at the progress of the team, what they've done that day, you know, spend time sort of going over my tasks that I've got coming up. And, you know, the whole world is asleep at this time. It's my favorite time to be awake. One, because I know that I'm awake and my competitor Zahan, I love that feeling. But two, it really does give me extra hours in the day to prepare for the day before other people start coming at me. And I think that's really important. The other thing I love, I talked about this a lot, is I love walking through the tenderloin. It is an absolutely horrific place and I find it miserable as a human to see that, but it's such a stark reminder for me because every day seeing people camped on the side of the road, I see what inaction looks like. I see, I can't believe that every mayoral candidate doesn't just stand there and say, I'm going to fix this problem this term. That's my only thing that I'm doing. And I think.”
2019-11-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Speed Is The Biggest Differentiator a Founder Can Have, How To Hire Seasoned Tier 1 Talent To An Early Stage Startup & How To Start, Scale and Manage Remote Teams with Domm Holland, Founder & CEO @ Fast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Your time. Now, Dom, I don't think I've ever been quite so impressed with anyone's work ethic genuinely since I have communicating with you in the last few days. Honestly, it's astounding. I always like to thought to myself, no one works as hard as I do. You know, I'm like four hours sleep, fuck with a subscribing, I've got this down. And then I DM with you. And despite whatever time zone you're in, you're always responsive and back in seconds. So I guess my question is, I chatted to Yan before the show and he said you have this mentality of it being a race against the clock. How do you structure your day? What does it look like for you? My number one value is definitely speed and it's not actually the sole reason why we call the company fast, but speed really is, I think, my big differentiator. And it is just the way that I like to operate. So, you know, I wake up at 4.30. I sort of cleared through the emails that have come in overnight jumping this year. I'm out the door in 25 minutes. At the moment, I walk to work. I walk through Tenderloin and get my exercise in on the way to work. It's sort of three and a half, four miles.”
2019-11-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Speed Is The Biggest Differentiator a Founder Can Have, How To Hire Seasoned Tier 1 Talent To An Early Stage Startup & How To Start, Scale and Manage Remote Teams with Domm Holland, Founder & CEO @ Fast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, look, I think the biggest incremental mover for us was setting up those daily calls. So before that, I would just sort of periodic, ad hoc calls. I communicate a lot with them, you know, 100 Slack messages with, you know, each of them a day. They love to, you know, love to sort of talk with us. And I'm in constant communication and WhatsApp and good playingouts and everything else. But having that structured time every day that each functional area speaks to us is so helpful. And I take the 15 minute calls with each functional area. Like they're not long, but they give us time to go over the work that they it's my sort of 8 a.m. is their four or five p.m. So it's at the end of the day. So we can go over what they did that day as I'm getting up. We can go over what they're going to do the next day and having that regularity for them is so important. One, they feel so connected. They get really fast feedback loops on the work that they've done. I spend the time before those calls going over what the work that they've done, looking at the outputs. And so, yeah, that's definitely been the greatest unlock. You mentioned that kind of the first thing you do when you wake up and how you structure.”
2019-11-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Speed Is The Biggest Differentiator a Founder Can Have, How To Hire Seasoned Tier 1 Talent To An Early Stage Startup & How To Start, Scale and Manage Remote Teams with Domm Holland, Founder & CEO @ Fast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And stuff like that, too. So it's neither here nor there, whether they're physically sitting next to me in the next room, in the next office or in another country. I think the mentality, getting good communication structure in place, getting sort of regular communication in there, making sure people feel appreciated, feel kept in the loop. These are important things. And so I get up every morning and first meetings in the day typically for me, I'm meeting with.”
2019-11-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Speed Is The Biggest Differentiator a Founder Can Have, How To Hire Seasoned Tier 1 Talent To An Early Stage Startup & How To Start, Scale and Manage Remote Teams with Domm Holland, Founder & CEO @ Fast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Average earnings and the average earnings for that type of role in Nigeria, and we still paid like 50% above market, I think, but we were really happy doing so. So obviously he's still with us. He's a fantastic employee. And we started hiring more in Nigeria. I think we've got now 10 people in our remote team from Nigeria. So eight from Lagos and two from Port Harcourt. And it's an absolutely incredible market. It's opened my eyes to Africa, to that area. Nigeria is a country of 190 million people. English is their first language. They're extremely passionate. They work so incredibly hard. They're really passionate about our mission. And as all of advocates for us. And it's been an amazing experience. I find has been really seamless. And they're in a completely different time zone too. I do the hard work to work to their time zone, not so that they work to my time zone. But, you know, I find managing engineers remotely or in person is actually quite similar. A lot of engineers that I've managed in person that prefer to chat over Slack.”
2019-11-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Speed Is The Biggest Differentiator a Founder Can Have, How To Hire Seasoned Tier 1 Talent To An Early Stage Startup & How To Start, Scale and Manage Remote Teams with Domm Holland, Founder & CEO @ Fast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, look, so we raised an angel around in Australia before we came over to America. So we raised 600,000 Australian dollars, which is about $400,000 America dollars. So it's not a lot of money to build a team off. And prior to that, I built all the tech myself. So I needed some people to, one, take over some of the ends that I couldn't keep doing on a day-to-day basis, but obviously to continue product development and work in other areas that I don't have expertise. And so we put out a job ad for a remote role and we thought we'd get one or two people have a sort of relatively mild earn rate and sort of just progress the product along. We had a fantastic applicant apply from Nigeria. And like most people, especially here, I hadn't even considered Nigeria as a possibility for a place that we would be hiring talent. I just naively was not a market that came to mind, but he had fantastic background, you know, really great code review, gave him a coding challenge. He performed extremely well. The money that he wanted was so much less than we had budgeted for this role. And we looked at sort of country.”
2019-11-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Speed Is The Biggest Differentiator a Founder Can Have, How To Hire Seasoned Tier 1 Talent To An Early Stage Startup & How To Start, Scale and Manage Remote Teams with Domm Holland, Founder & CEO @ Fast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The value that even senior leadership will take on 50 basis points, 100 basis points, 150 basis points, it's incredible seeing that here. And I think that the reality is as well is, you know, senior leadership obviously want to take a decent chunk of a business for it to be worthwhile for them. But they also know, like I do, that we need other good people in a business and we need to share that pie around. People always talk about dilution and what are you going to end up with after rounds and rounds of capital, but the size of the opportunity for us is so big and we need more people to actually get to that size. And so it's far more valuable for us and for the business to be sharing that equity around. So I think you definitely need to be generous with stock to get the right people into the business, but not so generous that you can't actually get more really great people into the business.”
2019-11-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Speed Is The Biggest Differentiator a Founder Can Have, How To Hire Seasoned Tier 1 Talent To An Early Stage Startup & How To Start, Scale and Manage Remote Teams with Domm Holland, Founder & CEO @ Fast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's a couple of things on this. So FAST has one of the largest company Aesops, I think, of any company. Our company ESOP is huge. And it's because I want to have the best people in this business. I find San Francisco such an amazing place because people here value equity so much higher than in Australia. This is another thing is that Australia doesn't have phenomenally huge successful exits in our tech scene, right? And we've got some great companies. We've got Atlassium, which is undisputedly a great company. But most of the stock is still held by the founders. We've got companies like AfterPay, which has been immensely successful in recent times. But, you know, the Australia's got problems with the way that we do company stock and employee stock. And so we just don't have a thousand people walking around who've made a lot of money from tech startups. So people in Australia don't value stock highly. And so, you know, people in Australia would want five or ten percent of the company to come on as a sales manager for it to be interesting for them, which is crazy, right? And in SF, that's just not the way it is. So I find it amazing.”
2019-11-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Speed Is The Biggest Differentiator a Founder Can Have, How To Hire Seasoned Tier 1 Talent To An Early Stage Startup & How To Start, Scale and Manage Remote Teams with Domm Holland, Founder & CEO @ Fast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Know, I think, especially in SF here, is that there are so many, so many companies, right? There's a new breed of companies, you know, a new batch of companies coming through every week. Everyone's working on sort of unique things. There's so much capital here that people can be fairly transient with jobs and move between jobs. Mission, sizes problem, size of scale, interesting problems. These are things that people want to look for in new roles. I think the scale of our opportunity is absolutely huge. I want to assemble the best possible team that can solve these problems and that can work with me to solve these problems. And I think that other people here want to work with exceptional people too. And I think that mission and the problems you're solving are the number one thing that you need to look at when assembling that leadership team. And there's other triggers for other team members that are going to come in later and when we're going to expand that team and different people have different triggers. But I definitely think mission purpose size scale.”
2019-11-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Speed Is The Biggest Differentiator a Founder Can Have, How To Hire Seasoned Tier 1 Talent To An Early Stage Startup & How To Start, Scale and Manage Remote Teams with Domm Holland, Founder & CEO @ Fast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Outside of San Francisco. But if you want to build a tech company, there's not a place in the world that has engineers that have worked at companies that have gone from one to a thousand employees in a matter of years, as there are in San Francisco. And the engineering problems that come with growing a business to that level, the people who are used to solving those problems sit here in San Francisco. And they're the people that we need to be leading our engineering challenges. We're a product and engineering-led company and we need the smartest people in the world to be working in our senior leadership team. and to be leading our engineering decisions. And those people are here.”
2019-11-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Speed Is The Biggest Differentiator a Founder Can Have, How To Hire Seasoned Tier 1 Talent To An Early Stage Startup & How To Start, Scale and Manage Remote Teams with Domm Holland, Founder & CEO @ Fast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To me, it's no choice at all as an Australian, we're a country of 25 million people. US is a country of 330 million people. I only have a certain number of hours in the day, and I would love to increase that number of hours. I try as hard as I can. But the reality is I only have a certain amount of buy output. And obviously sitting in bigger markets, naturally, you're going to have larger result for the same amount of output. So just on that level, it makes sense to be in larger markets. But the reality is that US or San Francisco itself is home to the largest tech companies in the world and has undisputedly built more tech companies, more successful tech companies than any other place in the world. You know, the top 10 companies are worth far more than our entire stock exchange in Australia. And it's because this concentration of capital and expertise that just doesn't exist anywhere else in the world. And the expertise is so incredibly important. It's not to say that you can't have teams outside of San Francisco and you can't have people.”
2019-11-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Speed Is The Biggest Differentiator a Founder Can Have, How To Hire Seasoned Tier 1 Talent To An Early Stage Startup & How To Start, Scale and Manage Remote Teams with Domm Holland, Founder & CEO @ Fast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, like, I don't personally consider us a fintech. And, you know, I guess in a sort of typical sense, people would call us identity. I don't consider it so much identity. I think of this whole customer token where more than identity. But yeah, I definitely see our opportunity is far broader. And, you know, looking at e-commerce payments, it's over a three and a half trillion dollar industry this year. This is definitely our focus in the short to medium term. And so for that reason, we have a lot of investors who invested in us as a fintech, but our opportunity is far bigger and the opportunity for consumers, the problems that we're solving is actually far bigger than just payments.”
2019-11-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Speed Is The Biggest Differentiator a Founder Can Have, How To Hire Seasoned Tier 1 Talent To An Early Stage Startup & How To Start, Scale and Manage Remote Teams with Domm Holland, Founder & CEO @ Fast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“With merchants, that merchants don't want to be incorporating Amazon into their own environments. So there does need to be a party which is completely independent, which their business model is through allowing authentication or through allowing payments and making that the easiest possible way to authenticate and the easiest possible way to pay whilst being incredibly secure. And there's that drastic need for that business. And I think that it's undeniable that that's there. We think about the whole customer stack and beyond just payments. and we think you went into that walk into a doctor instead of having to fill in that form manually with a pen and paper is what if you could easily share your you know sensitive information you're not going to give that information to facebook you're not going to give that information to amazon there needs to be a third party which has that consumer trust and brand trust”
2019-11-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Speed Is The Biggest Differentiator a Founder Can Have, How To Hire Seasoned Tier 1 Talent To An Early Stage Startup & How To Start, Scale and Manage Remote Teams with Domm Holland, Founder & CEO @ Fast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so I think that there's two parts. The first part is that one, it has to be a third party, right? And not saying that it can't be one of the fang, but it needs to be a third party and not the merchants themselves. The problem that we've had over the last 10 years is that everyone's been building their own authentication and their own payment forms and their own registration forms. And they're doing it first party, which is terrible experience for consumers, right? Replicating that customer token over and over and over and over and over. The reality is it needs to be a third party that scales and that provides a great consumer experience, great merchant experience in the same way that Visa and Mastercard scale credit cards for between merchants. Whether or not it's Apple, Facebook, Amazon, the problem with them is that they have alternative business models which conflict the raw purpose of the consumer wanting to transact or wanting to authenticate themselves or wanting to share data. And so, you know, we've seen we don't need to go into Facebook's disaster with data management. We know that Google is tied to an advertising platform. We know that Amazon is so confronted.”
2019-11-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Speed Is The Biggest Differentiator a Founder Can Have, How To Hire Seasoned Tier 1 Talent To An Early Stage Startup & How To Start, Scale and Manage Remote Teams with Domm Holland, Founder & CEO @ Fast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That we do have this infrastructure now. We are transacting online. And it's the same thing as Shopify free commerce is that Shopify gives businesses the ability to have stores online easily. So it's that infrastructure layer, but no one has optimized the front end, the consumer face, right? So because all of the development to date has been in the infrastructure side, PayPal side. But if you've used PayPal in the last few years, you know that it doesn't feel like an experience that was made in the last few years. It feels like older technology. So I think that that's why we are here where we are. And again, in the e-commerce space is you look and you kind of go, consumers have spent the last 10 years optimizing for discovery. We've put a lot of money into advertising, you know, Google and the Facebook business models and Instagram and getting people to click and go visit a site and look at a product. But there hasn't been much innovation in actually getting them from that point to the point of transaction. It's kind of been, well, we've just got the infrastructure to process credit card. So let's just let them process credit card. Whereas how do we make that easier? How do we make it more fluid for people?”
2019-11-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Speed Is The Biggest Differentiator a Founder Can Have, How To Hire Seasoned Tier 1 Talent To An Early Stage Startup & How To Start, Scale and Manage Remote Teams with Domm Holland, Founder & CEO @ Fast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, look, you know, I think Stripe is a really great example. I love the Stripe business. I love the Stripe Founders, their story, their mission. I think it's fantastic. I've been a longtime customer of Stripe. The reality is that Stripe came in because, and I know because I was building tech products a long time ago as well, is we couldn't process credit card payments online, right? We couldn't get a bank to give us merchant facility. I still don't know if we'd be able to get a merchant facility easily with a bank these days. And so Stripe came in and they built the ability for startups transact credit cards online, right? They gave businesses and entrepreneurs, the infrastructure that they need to process credit card payments. And that is still very much the core of what Stripe does today, you know, and the advent and whatnot do the same thing. So these businesses built critical infrastructure that the internet didn't have. And it's the same thing as in the authentication space is that there are a lot of providers like Auth Zero and Octas who give businesses the ability to manage authentication. It's critical infrastructure that businesses need to do that. The reality is.”
2019-11-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Speed Is The Biggest Differentiator a Founder Can Have, How To Hire Seasoned Tier 1 Talent To An Early Stage Startup & How To Start, Scale and Manage Remote Teams with Domm Holland, Founder & CEO @ Fast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, I definitely don't agree with it. At the same time, I don't think of myself as an entrepreneur. You know, I guess what I do is highly entrepreneurial, but the reality is I'm a problem solver. My job is to solve problems. I think of startups as just a series of problems, or all businesses, as just a series of problems. It doesn't matter how long they last, they're just a series of problems. I love solving problems, but I get up every day to go and do. And I think that mentality is a different piece too. Some people don't like solving problems. And if you don't like solving problems, then you definitely don't want to be in this business. But I love it. thrive off it. And the goal for us is to go and find the problems that need solving is not to try and run away from problems. And so I think people who are good at solving problems, people who would be serial problem solvers and they're the exact people that need to be in this business.”
2019-11-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Speed Is The Biggest Differentiator a Founder Can Have, How To Hire Seasoned Tier 1 Talent To An Early Stage Startup & How To Start, Scale and Manage Remote Teams with Domm Holland, Founder & CEO @ Fast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Look, directly solve problems. I learned this lesson over many years. That wasn't when I learned this lesson, but again, put it into practice there and it just reiterated.”
2019-11-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Speed Is The Biggest Differentiator a Founder Can Have, How To Hire Seasoned Tier 1 Talent To An Early Stage Startup & How To Start, Scale and Manage Remote Teams with Domm Holland, Founder & CEO @ Fast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Real shame, such a we get funded the Deloitte Tech Fast 50 Telstra Business Awards, you know, won so many awards for that business. But in the end, Cash is a killer. So it taught me a lot dealing with legal system. We ended up launching a large legal action against the state government, which obviously we ran out of money for in the end. But it took me a lot about resilience, a lot about dealing with government stakeholders, large corporate stakeholders, a lot of our clients were sort of multinationals, growing and scaling teams, product. It was one of the best experiences of my life despite the outcome.”
2019-11-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Speed Is The Biggest Differentiator a Founder Can Have, How To Hire Seasoned Tier 1 Talent To An Early Stage Startup & How To Start, Scale and Manage Remote Teams with Domm Holland, Founder & CEO @ Fast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That startup was well covered, and it was a really interesting time of life. So we launched in July 1st, 2014. It was an on-demand towing platform called Totalcom.au to give you an idea. I want to tender with the state government to be the only towing operator in Queensland, towing into powerment of sailor motor vehicles for the Queensland Police Service. Queensland is a 1.8 million square kilometre state. It was an absolutely huge contract. It was the first ever statewide contract. And we won that, not having a towing company, not even having the original business incorporated from building a tech platform that would solve the problem for them. So on our first day of trading, we took over towing for the entire state. We grew to a $50 million business inside a four-year. We did $50 million over four years. We grew very, very quickly. I was the sole founder of that business. I had two private backers. In the end, our largest customer, the state government, actually owed us and refused to pay $17 million. We locked into a sort of bitter legal dispute and in the end ran out of cash.”
2019-11-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Speed Is The Biggest Differentiator a Founder Can Have, How To Hire Seasoned Tier 1 Talent To An Early Stage Startup & How To Start, Scale and Manage Remote Teams with Domm Holland, Founder & CEO @ Fast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Couldn't order groceries because she forgot her password. And this is one of Australia's largest companies that turn over nearly $70 billion a year. And they simply wouldn't take a credit card off her to send food to the house because of some arbitrary string attack. And I just thought it was absolutely ridiculous. I whipped up a prototype of a passwordless solution at the time that essentially becomes a passwordless auth as an SSO, a simple sort of solution. I put it on product hunt. It was number two most voted product on product hunt of the day and I realized the world really hates passwords. But the biggest fundamental learning was the issue that we've got. Passwords aren't the problem. They're a symptom. The issue that we have is that we don't scale customers between businesses. And that doesn't make sense. It does make sense that businesses don't share customer databases. That would be weird. But it doesn't make sense that we don't let customers move freely between businesses and we keep making them replicate themselves.”
2019-11-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Speed Is The Biggest Differentiator a Founder Can Have, How To Hire Seasoned Tier 1 Talent To An Early Stage Startup & How To Start, Scale and Manage Remote Teams with Domm Holland, Founder & CEO @ Fast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, sure. I've been interested in tech and startups for a very long time. So when I was 15, I started 14, I started programming, but there was 17 years ago in regional Australia when it was not cool to be programming. So I did boxing at the same time to try and protect myself from my other hobbies. So I've really enjoyed the whole experience for a long time and built a lot of tech products over the years. It's only in the last sort of five or six years I really got into the sort of high scale startup side. I had a large startup in Australia and I've moved on to have launched a couple of ventures. But last year, to sort of dovetail into Fast Directly, I married with two little kids and my youngest child was in hospital for three weeks last year. And so my wife or myself was at a hospital 24 hours a day and we'd alternate and one of us would stay at the hospital looking after my son and the other one would be at home, look after our daughter. And we had my wife's grandmother staying with us at the time. One night I was at my kitchen table doing some work on my laptop and she was on her laptop ordering groceries and she'd lift”
2019-11-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Speed Is The Biggest Differentiator a Founder Can Have, How To Hire Seasoned Tier 1 Talent To An Early Stage Startup & How To Start, Scale and Manage Remote Teams with Domm Holland, Founder & CEO @ Fast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Thanks so much for having me, Harry. It's a real pleasure to be here. I've spent many hours listening to your voice. It's amazing to hear you on the line live to me.”
2019-11-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Speed Is The Biggest Differentiator a Founder Can Have, How To Hire Seasoned Tier 1 Talent To An Early Stage Startup & How To Start, Scale and Manage Remote Teams with Domm Holland, Founder & CEO @ Fast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source