When things don't go to plan

The news of the day in the VC world is the one-click checkout company Fast shutting down their doors. There’s a lot of stuff to be said about the Founder/CEO’s past and some of his antics, but I’m going to refrain from writing about that. It’s been written about plenty over the last few weeks.

Instead, I wanted to focus on what’s been missed by the media, the employees.

Startups are hard. We all know it. We know part of the risk of going to a startup is that you may fail and your equity may be worth nothing. Unfortunately that’s what happened here at Fast.

Employees often get the short end of the stick when things don’t work out. They take a paycut to come join the company. Put in long and hard hours to build the company. And when things don’t work out, their hard work in form of equity is last of people to get paid out. It’s a brutal realization.

In this situation, you had a charismatic CEO who was popular on social media. I can imagine he no doubt attracted some top tier talent to come join Fast and their mission. Unfortunately for most of these employees, they will be left with nothing in form of equity. The hope is that these employees learned a ton and I do believe that going to a startup, even one that fails enables gives you the opportunity for massive personal growth.

Hopefully things work out the next time around for these employees. For now, I feel for the employees who have had to endure these last few weeks.