Murvah Iqbal on scaling one of Europe’s fastest-growing startups and disruption a billion dollar industry with Hived

0:0040 Minute Mentor:A lot of my leadership style, which I do today is similar to how I was on the football team, is lifting the team up when it's not going right, teamwork, communication, digging deep, having grit, having resilience, all those key qualities that I had from football.

0:21Murvah Iqbal:welcome back to 40 minute mentor the podcast on a mission to raise aspirations and inspire the next generation of category defining founders all in just 40 minutes today we're joined by the co-founder and ceo of hybed the uk's first customer-centric tech-enabled and all-electric parcel delivery company designed for e-commerce murder didn't always have her her eyes set on disrupting the parcel delivery industry, but the entrepreneurial streak was always there. Before Hived, she captained Manchester City's youth team, headed up marketing for her family's fast food restaurant chain, Archie's, and turned unused van real estate into data-driven advertising with VanVas Ltd.

1:01Murvah Iqbal:In 2021, Merva and her co-founder, Matthias Krieger, founded Hived, initially delivering parcels themselves by bike with a mission to build a truly sustainable, tech-driven logistics alternative. Fast forward to today, Hived operates a 100 % electric fleet. The team have built their own AI routing and logistics stack, and they've raised over$42 million in a Series B round earlier this summer. But as with any challenger in a legacy industry, the journey is not always smooth. So in today's conversation, we'll explore Murva's own leadership journey, the early days of Hived and how she scaled the business and her perspective on the future of sustainable logistics.

1:40Murvah Iqbal:So, Merva, it's a wonderful pleasure and a privilege to have you on the podcast. I'm a big fan from a distance of the work you do at Hive, so I can't wait to dig into your story and welcome you to the podcast. So thanks for being here. How are you?

1:5340 Minute Mentor:Thanks. Good. Great for being here. Thanks for having me.

1:56Murvah Iqbal:It's a real pleasure. Well, we're going to warm you up with some quickfire questions just to get you started so our audience can get to know you bit better. So please finish the following sentences after me. Number one, the moment that defined my career was when?

2:1140 Minute Mentor:Oh, I think when straight out of university, I declined a few consulting jobs. My parents weren't really happy about that, but I did it. And I think that was probably the creative finding move because I think if I went down that trajectory, I wouldn't have been entrepreneurial as I am today.

2:27Murvah Iqbal:Well done. Good call. There's often a lot of pressure from families to take those sorts of gigs. Definitely my family. Yeah, it's so funny how many of our guests have had the same sort of pressure and clearly this entrepreneurial spirit is that kind of rebel within is why we're here and why you've built such a great business. The biggest lesson I've learned about leadership is?

2:4840 Minute Mentor:I think the biggest lesson I've learned probably, and I'm still learning it, is trusting my gut a lot more. Often my gut has been right most of the times and being an authentic leader I think as a leader you can try you have this image of what a leader is supposed to be or should be and often more often than not it's just be yourself be authentic and trust your gut it's quite simple but it's something actually that I've reminded still

3:11Murvah Iqbal:today yeah I love that I think especially in this day and age you know all these people we're supposed to look up to and admire and it's very easy for founders to want to try and replicate the style or the rhetoric you hear from others but actually at the end of the day you've just got to be yourself you know I think people can see through it if you're not a skill I wish I had

3:3140 Minute Mentor:mastered earlier in my career is I think being an A-star communicator I'm still not a star at all but I think as you start to scale a team and grow you realize the power of communication and I think in the earlier part of Hived I probably wasn't as clear and as good and I'm still not anywhere where I want to be and I think I've learned the power of really good clear communication to your team because the team is everything and being able to communicate to them very clearly is a lot harder than one thinks and it takes a lot of time effort and practice to actually master

4:06Murvah Iqbal:yeah very well said uh yeah clarity of message concise messages as well i think it's so helpful isn't it it's so easy for things to get lost in translation or or not land with teams so that's something that comes up a lot on the podcast something i'm a constant work in progress on as

4:2340 Minute Mentor:Yeah, definitely.

4:24Murvah Iqbal:Well, I'm already telling from now that you are clearly a brilliant communicator, but it's good that we're always trying to be better, right? If I could change one thing about how companies build teams, it would be?

4:3540 Minute Mentor:I think I am trying to get this right at Hive, and it's still not something that we've got perfect, but I think as team scales, we bring in a lot of layers. Then it's really hard for different people to get their ideas forward, especially people who may be a bit more junior on entry roles, but actually their voice is so important because they are the ones on the ground or they're often the ones seeing the problems and Hive we did an amazing job in the early stage where we had a very lean team of 2030 and no everyone could say what was wrong or what need fixing and I think as we scaled we lost a little bit of that connection from a lot of people in different roles and and not having to be the most senior person in the room not having to have go through all these layers to put your idea forward to get your message across and to deliver results I think that's something that I see in big corporations gets a bit stifled and as Hived is scaling and trying to make sure that that doesn't happen at Hived.

5:32Murvah Iqbal:Yeah really interesting thank you for sharing well we've warmed you up beautifully there and I can't wait to dive into your career we're going to start a place we don't often which is football and it's one of my favorite topics to talk about and not normally on the podcast we have had one professional footballer on the podcast before but stilly and petrov my beloved aston villa former captain but you were the captain of manchester city's women's team from under nines all the way up to under 18s which must be something you're incredibly proud of so can you share a bit for our listeners about your path from football to ultimately starting high like where did this entrepreneurial sort of spark come

6:0840 Minute Mentor:from yeah well i think there's a lot of parallels actually from being an athlete to being a leader and i think i've actually only started to realize that in the past few years a lot of my leadership style which I do today is similar to how I was on the football team is lifting the team up when it's not going right teamwork communication digging deep having grit having resilience all those key qualities that I had from football I've tried to I've tried to take to being a leader today and it's not really a traditional career path for sure I think I used to play football with my brother in my garden all the time he was older than me I wanted to be better than him so he was my competition and that just meant that my I guess who I was competing with day in day out was four or five years old older than me and so from as early as I could walk I started kicking a football and I played football up until yeah I was 18 but alongside it wasn't just football I was working on my family business I had to do work really hard at school so I was multitasking quite a lot of things and I think that enabled me to from a young age really understand prioritization and being a fast-paced founder one of the key things that you have to absolutely learn to do is prioritization at lightning speed and I think growing up from age nine to 18 having to balance playing football working in my found business and ensuring that I got really good grades at school that enabled me to I think yeah have a high working performance mentality and prioritization all these skills I was soft skills I was learning that sometimes you don't learn through school or education they're actually just pure life skills and I took that into I went to university and I realized I always had an entrepreneurial streak in me whether that's seeing my family around me have businesses they didn't have you know huge businesses growing up my dad had a business a small business my uncle had a business that wasn't as then it was successful but now it's even more successful so I had a lot around me to look up to to think actually I want this is really I found this really interesting really fun how you can start something from the ground up but around me were all the males in my family had started businesses.

8:1340 Minute Mentor:And I was, you know, had a bit of maybe as a, hmm, I can also do this. And so naturally after university, like I said, I already mentioned before, but I got a few job offers in consulting and I was probably going to go down that route. And then actually I realized, well, if I don't start my business now, when am I going to? And so just naturally happened. I don't think I set out to very, very clearly, like I'm going to do at this age, go to that age. Life just happened. It just fell into place for me. and I'm incredibly grateful that I didn't overthink things at any stage in time I just what's the worst that can happen and that's something that I live by even today what's the worst that can happen if I fail I'll learn from it and I'll go again I'm sure and I can always go back to the consulting job later.

8:53Murvah Iqbal:Yeah it's a great mentality and does not surprise me you know from the early football grounding that kind of high achieving yeah attitude and approach has clearly you know carried through to where you are today so tell our audience if you don't mind where did the idea for Hive come from and how did it all begin?

9:1240 Minute Mentor:Yeah I think with all businesses I never to be honest thought I would ever build a logistics company never and still to this day I'm a bit confused as to how I ended up in logistics but it was truly so I went to San Francisco on my second year of university and sort of like a university organized trip to Silicon Valley and that was hugely eye-opening for me because prior to that I had known a lot about business but very small businesses growing year after year very slowly and profitable it's sort of the SME way which is of course a great avenue to go down as well but going to Silicon Valley opened my eyes in terms of how you can build a category defining business if you build a huge billion dollar company in a very short space amount of time I was visiting companies like Tesla etc and that was like inspiring and so going to Silicon Valley opened my eyes out and after university actually luckily enough to meet my co-founder Matthias on that trip after university I realized I want to start a business had no idea what to do and just started lots of different things through anything at the wall some of it of course didn't stick some of it I just did to make a bit of money and hustle through and then eventually with Matthias we landed on one business idea that sold advertising space on parcel delivery vans in a similar way that you see advertising on tubes and taxis we thought all this prime real estate of white delivery vans driving in densely populated areas why don't we apply advertising on them and then we installed gps trackers inside of majority of delivery vans in london or extracted the data to realize to understand where these delivery vehicles were driving to apply the correct advertising on them and we did this for about eight months to a year and then a few things became apparent firstly that outdoor advertising was on the decline and it wasn't going to be a big massive billion dollar company that we wanted to build and there wasn't really a technology angle that you could really build here but secondly we realized and discovered how massive parcels and logistics is as part of the economy how big e-commerce is e-commerce is 10 percent of uk gdp and parcels and delivery tracks there and then how massive these logistics incumbent companies are and how profitable they are but also how bad the delivery experience is both from a shipper you're actually using these companies and from a recipient experience and it just didn't feel right and we were thinking about this you know day in day out we were looking at all this data the routing didn't make sense there was no we could see there was no technology and so maybe nine evenly or maybe brunantly we just thought actually should we just build a parcel for the company it literally just started like that and we just twist changed and from my flat we just said okay well let's just start how do you stop by getting your first customers went on to linkedin messaged a few people who had small shopify's and said hey look are you after a better delivery experience that everyone was like yes please please and then matthias built the first version of the platform i got the first few customers and we both want our bikes delivering parcels and i think the best way to do something is just start and that was in sort of 2021 and we've never really looked back since and we so we i guess invalidated that was a massive problem massive area massive tam and market size growing as well massively e-commerce still continue to grow and low technology and we thought well this

12:25Murvah Iqbal:is definitely a market for disruption amazing what yeah what a great call you made and i'm sure that everyone listening to this can remember many a time where they've had a terrible experience so such a great idea and seems so obvious now but just so brilliant to have come up with it and then just got on with it before we come on to talking about the journey you've been on the co-finder dynamic is something i find very fascinating mainly because i was a bootstrap founder, solo founder for 12 years. And I often felt how much I'd love to have had a co-founder. And I now have that since our business got acquired and can really see the benefit.

12:57Murvah Iqbal:But tell us a bit about your dynamic as co-founders and how do you both kind of complement each other's skills and experiences?

13:0340 Minute Mentor:I don't know how I would have done this journey without a co-founder. So credit to you for doing it for so long as a solo founder.

13:10Murvah Iqbal:It's lonely.

13:1140 Minute Mentor:Yeah, for sure. I think co-founder success is one of the main reasons why startup works or inevitably fails and I think for a good co-founder relationship you have to have deep trust between you both and thankfully Matias and I do have that and complementary skill sets Matias is an extraordinary person who's in the details and knows everything about the business and can put it all together and it's a moonshot business idea thinking will come up with 10 crazy ideas two absolute genius eight you're like what the hell but that's what makes it brilliant because he can come up with those two incredible ideas that not many people can and it's very technical very into the details knows how everything needs to be i on the other hand is very very much my leadership style is completely different i'm much more commercial so i'm very commercially minded i spend a lot of time with our customers i think more about the team the strategy the six months plan the five-year plan how that all relates to today and we both are very complimentary now because all the stuff that i do matthias absolutely hates dealing with you know fundraising investors board packs all of that stuff and the stuff that matthias does i'm happy he's doing it and but because we have this great level of trust between each other we both feel very comfortable to challenge each other's opinions in a healthy, constructive way and ultimately come to the right decision and work together.

14:3540 Minute Mentor:And we've been doing this for quite a while. We've been working together pre-hived as well. That gave us a good, I guess, test bed if this is working. And as we've evolved our leadership styles, it's continuing to get even stronger and stronger.

14:46Murvah Iqbal:Love that. What a great team. And I'm sure our audience would be kind of itching to know how you went from kind of going on bikes, delivering things as the two of you to where you are today. So can you talk about how the offering has evolved and who your typical customers are? Firstly, I think it all comes down to having the belief, and I say this to everyone, is I was on my bike for six months delivering passes for my flat.

15:1140 Minute Mentor:And I have lots of images and painful videos to show this, but I never once doubted that we would become a billion dollar company. And we're far from that, but I still have that same vision and belief. and I think that's what gets you through this is having being a little bit crazy right when you're delivering some passes on your bikes to being nope nope we're going to do this in 10 years or whatever we're going to be this big we're going to dominate the UK and so I think having such strong belief and almost like manifesting what you want to happen is a really key part in all of this so I think that and having the confidence and belief gets you half the way there to be completely honest and then second is just never accepting failure taking no for an answer and always finding a solution to a problem we've had so many instances at the start where it's like yeah we're delivering possible like how do you escape that and when you're in some momentum when you get the first customer second customer flywheel starts to happen and that momentum doesn't slow down and i think that's all we've been doing and even today i've not really had time to really stop and pause and think well what happened but it's only been just over four years and from delivering parcel my bikes now we're delivering millions and millions of parcels for some of the biggest customers globally and we're going to continue to do so next year and the year after so i think it's just having the belief and tactically just having a clear idea of okay what next year looks like and what today looks like and what tomorrow looks like and how you have to constantly go go go and truthfully a lot of hard work i'm not going to deny that yeah no definitely

16:42Murvah Iqbal:And that's something that is, there's no point denying because otherwise we set the wrong expectations for people that are thinking about careers in entrepreneurship. It is, there's no point hiding. It's brutal at times. And, you know, you cannot build a big business unless you work incredibly hard and get people along the journey that are also willing to kind of commit to that, that way of doing things. So clearly the businesses have evolved considerably, but that's not without challenge, right? When you're disrupting particularly a huge legacy industry like you're doing, you're going to have difficult times.

17:11Murvah Iqbal:So how did you start to build that early traction? What were some of the biggest pushbacks you had from your early customers? And how did you, what were the learnings and things you had to do to overcome them?

17:2140 Minute Mentor:I think the first thing was, is obviously getting the first few customers is always the hardest thing. And we had a target in mind that we wanted to get our first enterprise customer. But how we couldn't knock on the doors of a Zara or a source or a John Lewis, like the customers that we're working with now, right? And it's just me and my bike's living parcel. So we had to establish a bit of a reputation, a bit of a brand, a bit of a name. And the way that we could do that was by onboarding a lot of the smaller customers and more and more and get slightly bigger. But fundamentally is making sure that the product does the talking.

17:5240 Minute Mentor:And so when customers are experienced, they have service. That's the proof in the pudding. I don't have to do much selling. And then all I can say to them is actually order from one of our early customers, let's say minor figures as a quite famous milk brand, one of our smaller, bigger customers and stuff, like order from them and see the experience for yourself. And so I guess the main thing that I always say to founders or people who are trying to build enterprise sales or is just focus on building a great product. And that in itself will do a lot of the selling and talking. So it's really having a clear mind and clear strategy and clear vision of, OK, who are my top tier customers?

18:2840 Minute Mentor:who do I want to go after and what's the strategy to get to them and it's like getting smaller customers going up the ladder making sure the product does really well being very persistent being in their inboxes constantly being at the right events getting the right industry people also hiring people who have worked at these companies before lots of different tactics you can deploy but the first enterprise customer is always the hardest the smaller customers for us were a little bit easier to get going but the first enterprise customer I think took about from when we launched in 2021 end of 2022 we went live with our first enterprise customer and then it's been a flywheel so it's staying pretty persistent but just ensuring that you're building a phenomenal

19:07Murvah Iqbal:product that they just can't turn down yeah i love that persistent is such a great word for it i i always talk about being politely persistent i think it's really important to kind of keep that going keep that drum beat and not letting the knockback set you off the mission which clearly from day one has been huge and you're well on the path which is super exciting and now you work with all these incredible brands like big enterprise retail clients and uh get lots of incredible feedback so yeah kudos to you for all you've achieved on that front i guess thinking about the um when you go back in time if you were to have a time machine to go back in time to one moment that you could do things differently could you give me an example of what you would choose

19:4640 Minute Mentor:loads i mean i've made so many mistakes along the way but funny enough i wouldn't change any of it because every mistake has taught me a massive lesson and so if I didn't make that mistake I wouldn't have learned that lesson and I wouldn't have adapted and evolved so every failure everything every setback every challenge I've taken in my stride and it also now allows me to take any future challenge or setback a lot easier because I'm I love it now I'm like great what am I going to learn from this so that my mindset has changed so refreshing time yeah so many times but I look back and the way I think about it I wouldn't we have wouldn't be here today if we hadn't gone through all those mistakes challenges etc I think we were probably growing a bit too fast in 2022 2023 that meant we had to you know like for a couple of days our service and quality wasn't where it wanted to be and that was a huge lesson for me to learn actually growing too fast isn't always a great thing and like understanding what a growth throttle should be so there's been painful experiences where you know in christmas 2022 we onboarded our first enterprise customer then quickly our second and third all was in the space of a few weeks when it was coming up to black friday christmas peak the royal mail strikes were happening it was snowing i was in the warehouse me and my co-founder doing 20 hour days for two weeks consecutively sleeping four hours a day just eating domino's pizza but yeah i hated it i still probably have ptsd from that but we learned so much from that came back fresh into the new year with all the learnings that we take from that and that enabled us to have a really strong 2023 and change perspective on a lot of things so like i said so many challenges that we've had so many failures that i personally had made lots of different wrong hires that's part of the journey and you learn from that and I've changed myself as a leader I've made some bad calls as a leader before but like I said you don't learn by not making mistakes and I think that's one of the key things where I think a lot of British people have a hard time with is failing and I think failing is is incredible as long as you learn from it and change from it and don't be afraid of it.

21:57Murvah Iqbal:Yeah really well said and clearly those learnings you turn them into positives and you've you've you know you've built great team you've you've got incredible investors you've won plenty of awards along the way so of all of those many achievements what's been your personal

22:1140 Minute Mentor:highlight and why I think anything that revolves around the team stuff is gives me and it's not even a particular achievement it's sometimes when you've seen a hired employee that we hire hired maybe as a driver and now is like leading a team and knowing that you've had that impact or created that I think those are the biggest times in my career where I felt a sense of achievement and pride and proud of what we've done a lot of the personal stuff is cool but really nothing really impacts me as much as those moments at hived and seeing the team evolve and get through so we we've put our team we've grown incredibly fast in 2021 to now like ridiculously fast and that's not just because of me my co-founder that's because of what the hive team have done and put through put into that and so being you know one of the fastest growing startups in europe is a great sort of I guess a seal of approval but I see it day in day out I see it day in that how hard the team is working I see you know we had one of our busiest days yesterday and we hit 99 % SLA on our busiest day ever and that was like incredibly for me like an incredible achievement a lot of the external world won't see those things they just see glorious personal words and that's great in its own way but it's always about what the team can achieve and delivers and I think every time we grow massively and the team just grows continues to grow that for me is the biggest

23:31Murvah Iqbal:i guess achievement i'd love that thank you i wanted to come on to talk about another topic that we talk about in this podcast quite a lot because it's one of the harder parts of building a business in the venture ecosystem and that's fundraising yeah and you have been very successful at this you've raised a 42 million dollar round recently to expand your ai powered parcel delivery service. So you know how to raise a lot of money from great investors and our audience who are kind of maybe in the earlier stages of building their businesses, I'm sure would love to pick your brain. So can you share a bit more about your fundraising experience?

24:05Murvah Iqbal:How's that been for you? And perhaps how did you sort of approach raising a bigger round compared to the earlier ones and any learnings you might have to pass on to our listeners would be amazing.

24:1440 Minute Mentor:I think fundraising is incredibly tough. I think it's the media, you see a lot of the the outlier creates success stories of raise 100 million and took two weeks things like that but there's a lot of companies that don't have it like that fundraising is incredibly tough and a lot of for a lot of reasons mentally resilient you have to be incredibly mentally strong you have to you have to be able to go through a lot of these processes and get rejected and still have the belief and continue and opportunity costs right you're fundraising whilst the business is still happening and fundraising can sometimes take from the start to actually all the legal docs everything closing six months and so six months where your focus intention as a ceo is on funding the business as opposed to running the business and so it's all you must do both at the same time so it's very very demanding i don't think much has changed actually from raising an earlier round to a later round i actually found that the later rounds for me particularly for hive is weirdly becoming not easier because fundraising is hard but it sells itself um in the earlier days you're selling a lot of founder belief energy conviction and you're a lot of these investors just backing founders and truthfully me and my co-founder first-time founders taking on this massive logistics industry a lot of investment leaders are you guys are crazy this is a hard business you're young you have no experience and probably fair they're probably fair to think that if i was an investor in their shoes and I came to pitch I'd probably say the same thing so I had no warm intros into the VC world no contacts and that's the way the world works and so the earliest stages were probably a little bit trickier for me simply because I didn't have the network probably didn't have the confidence that I do have today if I was to go start a new business and raise from the start now I'd be a lot more confident in myself and so I wasn't you know I wasn't as mature as I am today And then the later I've just become the metrics start to do the talking, the X amount of revenue, our margin levels, the kind of customer testimonials, all the rest of the metrics.