Domm Holland, who started in Australia by ripping off tow truck companies, unsurprisingly did the same with Silicon Valley startup ‘Fast.’

Domm Holland is known by many Australians as the guy who ripped off Gold Coast tow truck companies before high-tailing it to the U.S. without paying his dues.

In a Twitter thread from user @jack_raines the self-proclaimed “fastest CEO” has his string of scams revealed one-by-one all the way up to his largest and most expensive— Fast.

Much of what is in the Twitter thread is sourced from an NPR article on the subject, who both reached out to Domm multiple times and trialed his service, both to no avail.

“Let’s get into it.

Holland, an Australian native, got his “start” by punking the nation’s biggest airline, Quantas. In 2010, Holland bought the domain Qant.as for $20, and waved it in the face of the airline.

He threatened to sell it to a rival airline and began redirecting all traffic to rival Virgin Blue’s site.

“The domain name Qant.as could be snapped up by a competitor, so damage to Qantas’s business could be in the millions of dollars,” Holland said at the time.

He sold the domain for $1.3M.”

“Holland later founded “the Uber of towing”, Tow.com.au.

His towing company provided a quick way to contact towing contractors when vehicles had violated reckless driving laws.

Tow.com landed an exclusive contract with the Queensland police.

The problem was, many of the vehicles towed weren’t worth much, and the owners refused to pick them up.

This left a massive unpaid bill for the tow companies.

Holland and the Aussie government engaged in a $15M legal dispute, with both groups claiming the other was liable.

As a result, Holland threatened to sell private bank account and drivers license data of 21,000 drivers.

“A driver’s license detail on the black market is worth $80, and we’re talking tens of thousands of these types of records,” said Holland.”

“When the Supreme Court blocked this sale, Holland shut down the company. He informed his employees via text on a Saturday.

“We’re livid because we thought we’d get some kind of notice. Now we don’t have work to go to on Monday and we still have rent to pay,” they said.

According to former employees, Domm owed $100k+ to multiple towing contractors.

So where does Domm go next? Silicon Valley.

After Amazon’s patent on one-click checkout expired, everyone and their mother wanted to build a competitor.”

“Fast hired Nigerian engineers to build early versions of the platform.

This is not uncommon, as it keeps costs lower. However, the engineers claimed that Fast paid them below-market wages ($800 a month vs. $1000).

Three months in, the Nigerian engineers were abruptly booted from the company.

One worker said he tried to log in on the team’s Slack, and no longer had access.

“We just got kicked out with no notice. Slack stopped working. Domm stopped replying. It was really weird.”

To add insult to injury, Domm then took credit for his engineers’ work when raising VC money.

“He fired everyone from Nigeria. He completely erased us even though we built the first version of the app he was demo-ing to VCs,” said one of the former engineers.

“Last January, they raised $100M+, led by a $20M investment from payment giant Stripe.

But what was going on internally?

Chaos.

Some Fast engineers said that integrating their tool on merchant sites was challenging, with some sellers reporting that it did not always function properly.

NPR took a random sampling of 50 of their e-commerce sites, 19 never showed the option of Fast’s one-click checkout.

“The one time a week we heard from the executive team, Domm was often not there because he was skydiving,” said one ex-Fast employee.

Domm pitched Fast as the future of one-click check out, a trillion dollar market with massive growth potential.

In reality, his company managed to generate just $600k in sales in 2021, after raising $100M.

The company both failed to raise new funding and find a potential buyer, largely because of their $10M per month cash burn.

How was the company spending 200x its revenue PER MONTH? I have no idea. Maybe concerts and skydiving trips are expensive.”

“Sources: npr.org/2022/02/17/108 tampabay.com/news/business/ abc.net.au/news/2018-06-2 internetblog.org.uk/post/1059/qant”

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