E75: Fast shuts down, board culpability, Elon buys 9% of Twitter, deplatforming's evolution & more

Fast’s collapse looked preventable, not merely cyclical. The checkout startup had 450 employees, about $600,000 in revenue and roughly $10 million monthly burn after raising $124 million; Sacks argued that cutting spending three months earlier could have preserved about $30 million instead of ending in shutdown.

PayPal offered the opposite case: change the model before cash disappears. Sacks said PayPal was burning $10 million monthly with $40 million left after the dot-com crash, then added paid accounts and transaction fees and cut costs, stretching four months of runway until it could raise again.

The fundraising boom shrank venture diligence from weeks to days. Calacanis said processes that historically took four to six weeks fell to four to six days; Sacks said the hardest signal to fake is an “off-sheet” customer reference found independently rather than supplied by the founder.

The panel traced weak startup governance partly to venture firms chasing more assets and deals. Friedberg said partners can now sit on a dozen boards, while Chamath argued asset-gathering firms increasingly optimize for LP fundraising rather than company-building, leaving less attention for spending, strategy and financial discipline.

At the time of recording, Elon Musk’s 9% Twitter stake was seen as a governance intervention more than a financial bet. With Musk set to join the board as Twitter’s largest shareholder, the panel expected concentrated ownership to push management toward a more speech-permissive posture despite pressure from employees, regulators and shareholders.

Chamath Palihapitiya said his view on platform bans changed after recognizing his own political bias. He admitted he initially supported Trump’s Twitter ban partly because he feared reelection, then moved toward a broader free-speech default after what he regarded as escalating deplatforming.

Friedberg’s food warning centered on rigidity: calories are theoretically interchangeable, but real supply chains are not. Wheat mills cannot simply switch to corn or soy, US corn planting had fallen from 93 million to 89 million acres, and he expected import-dependent countries such as Sri Lanka and parts of Africa to face greater shortages.