Haste

Adam Toll's co-founder, an engineer who had worked with him at his previous company Big Champagne, reached out with a personal project he'd been hacking together. Frustrated by lag while competing in amateur esports tournaments, the engineer had developed a prototype that used next-generation network software to optimize internet connectivity for real-time experiences. When he pitched it to Adam as a potential business, Adam was initially serving as a mentor, but as he learned more about the pervasive problem of latency in gaming and the broader potential for real-time applications like VR, video conferencing, and telemedicine, he became increasingly interested.

Adam began providing seed capital—personally investing $150,000 in preceed funding. After six months of working on the project together, they decided to formalize the relationship and founded Haste as a company, with Adam becoming CEO. The technology was sophisticated: a distributed network of physical points-of-presence (servers and switches) in key locations like Chicago, LA, Seattle, and Atlanta, connected through a mesh of dedicated fiber optic lines to residential ISP networks. Rather than routing data along a single path, Haste sent data simultaneously across multiple routes and reconstructed it on either end—a radical rethink of how the internet handles latency-sensitive traffic. Initially, they built support for two of the most popular games: League of Legends and Overwatch.

The company went into open beta in January with a $6.99/month subscription model, but they didn't rely on traditional paid marketing to acquire users. Instead, they worked directly with gaming influencers—YouTubers and Twitch streamers—who had authentic connections to their target audience. This grassroots, community-focused strategy was remarkably efficient: when they peaked at spending $75,000 on influencer marketing in a typical month, they were driving 35,000 signups, translating to less than $2 per signup. By the time they turned on the paywall, they had nearly 350,000 signups, with about 50,000 actively using the platform weekly across their supported games.

The influencer channel proved to be the "big pull in the tent"—by far their most effective acquisition strategy. However, Adam revealed that churn was "a little higher than we'd like" at 4-5% monthly, though they were observing some positive reactivation as lapsed users returned without needing to re-signup. On the monetization side, Adam was cautious about disclosing exact customer counts, though he confirmed they had "thousands of people paying" and estimated revenue somewhere between $7,000-$70,000/month based on their 1,000-10,000 paying customer range. The company had raised over $6M, which went primarily toward engineering salaries and infrastructure costs—they had dialed back paid marketing spending (which had reached $75,000 in one month) to let their engineering team catch up with game support expansion.

With a 15-person team based in Atlanta, Haste was on the cusp of major scaling. Adam mentioned they were "literally" about to open support for more games—"the dam breaks" on broader game compatibility later that month—which he identified as the critical bottleneck limiting growth. The company had already attracted $6M+ in funding and was in advanced conversations with ISPs (who could bundle Haste as a premium service like "Turbo Game Boost powered by Haste") and game companies themselves as key partnership channels. The long-term vision extended far beyond gaming into VR, telemedicine, and distance learning—any real-time, user-generated, multi-way interactive experience that demanded ultra-low latency.