How Deliveroo Got Acquired by Doordash for $3.9B | Will Shu

24:41Makes sense. Makes sense. Makes sense. Because otherwise you have just crazy shit happen, right? And then you look, it's like, if someone comes to you and says, well, I don't really know what the short-term impact is, but like, I think like 90 % of the value of this initiative is going to come in terminal value. You're kind of like, yeah, I don't, I don't love that. Right. Yeah. Because you might be right, but you also might be wrong, you know, pretty wrong. And you know, I don't, you know, your, your terminal value, like who, who the hell knows. Right. And so there's a lot of art and science in that.

25:14But that your question is a great one. It's, it's, I think a very easy thing to answer in the abstract and quite a difficult thing to actually execute on. Well, you need a link between your finance organization and your analytics organization that is like really tight. And it, yeah, it's not easy. Sorry, we, we, we, we jumped for business, uh, you know, uh, business stuff on Deliveroo but I want to learn more about your story from the beginning so tell us where you're from um so I'm from a place called New Haven Connecticut where Yale is right yeah Yale's there yeah yeah so I that's where I grew up yeah um and how how were you in uh how were you as a kid or high school um well what do you mean like uh just you know where you're like what you're into or you know where you're like um popular you're not popular you know where you're into you know, definitely not popular.

26:09Um, I just went to like a really normal high school, I think like, you know, public high school. Um, you know, I'm, I'm the son of, um, Asian immigrants. I think people that are Asian American can kind of understand what that, that means, but it was probably a culture of hard work and thrift. There's an expectation that you do well in school. um i was in retrospect very entrepreneurial though even though i didn't realize it at the time i was always just trying to create little businesses right so i uh this is funny i actually gave piano lessons and i was like not a great piano player but i thought i could just do it right that's awesome i made fake ids for people when i was like 15 how did that work i mean didn't work they were terrible everyone wanted a refund but i like figured out how to like use photoshop and this is back in the 90s right i had a laminator and like we yeah because when i was like 14 you can get a fake idea in times square back in the day like but the thing is they were like terrible they they said state identification on them didn't specify which state just just state and so i i wanted to do something better so i was like working on that um i would just do all kinds of stuff.

27:25I used to go to the flea market in New Haven and buy stuff and sell it in school. Wow. That's very interesting. I don't know. I think I always loved business without knowing that, right? Like I just wanted to, I don't know. I want to create stuff, you know? What do you think you wanted to do growing up when you were younger? I had no idea. No idea. I really had no idea. Didn't even think about it that much, you know? I read a lot of books, I was really into computer games, PC games. So my co-founder and I would play PC games all the time. And I guess one of the things that was cool about my mom working at Yale, though, is like, and I'm much older than you, right?

28:07I'm 45. I remember the Internet before Netscape, right? So I remember BBSs. I remember, you know, FTP, like all this stuff. And I remember Usenet groups and all of this stuff you could use at the Yale library, right? So I remember being like an 11-year-old, just spending a lot of time and getting into that stuff, right? And then getting into PC games with my co-founder, Greg. So that's how we spend a lot of time. If you think if you ask your classmates back then, I asked this question to every guest, do you think they could tell that you're going to be super successful? No, I don't think so. No?

28:46No. have you ever seen someone recently and they were like uh from growing up and they were like surprised have you ever had any story like that if they think it they don't say right um i don't think it's popular to say that but i think like in in retrospect though like thinking about i just went to like this really normal high school you know i don't i don't know it wasn't like i don't think the top 10 percent of students i think were driven i don't really think the others were like particularly driven right um and i think i i did i i'll tell you this i really didn't care what other people thought like that that is one thing that i don't know why i just didn't really care interesting yeah tell me more about that like what how did that manifest like what would you not care about you think other kids would care about i just had not much interest in like i don't know being popular being cool or popular i think i was fine but i just didn't, I don't know.

29:45I think it's a good thing, but I don't really know where it comes from. I just wasn't, you know, super just that way. Right. You know, it's funny, but it is a very common trade I see in entrepreneurs and I'm interviewing them here is most entrepreneurs, I think they need to be kind of comfortable with everyone thinking they're wrong. Right. And they're crazy. And you can kind of see them throughout life, kind of not caring too much about what people think yeah but it wasn't like i was like this misfit either i just i just like kind of didn't yeah i just didn't care yeah right it's like okay like you think that great you didn't want to go to the opposite direction either right yeah i wasn't like trying to i was just like kind of okay with myself right i think that that that is definitely something that was the case where did you go to college um i went to college but i was gonna say like i'm just thinking back like high school middle school um yeah i don't you asked me an interesting question like when people see you what do they say i don't see that many i don't like have any friends from high school really right and i think one of the reasons is i don't i didn't really care what people thought but i don't think i like enjoyed it that much either yeah you know like people were not intellectually curious for the most part um you know growing up in the 90s in where i grew up like you know i think they're maybe more middle school a lot of people just kind of racist all the time i don't know and i don't think i cared that much but like i'm thinking about it now like probably wasn't cool you know um but did you ever feel that when you're growing up someone being racist here oh like all the time oh that's what i was saying yeah yeah how did that manifest like what does that look like pretty directly yeah just like but like hey you're asian like what's the yeah and probably not those words probably harsher words but yeah and then there were like teachers that were just racist like i remember there was a teacher who told my friend he shouldn't hang out with me because i'm chinese right um maybe that's an adult like i forgot that till like last year and then i was like that's messed up man how do you think that impacted you so i didn't care what people thought that much but like if people like messed with me i would definitely fight them oh yeah for sure you know did you ever have big get in a fight as a kid yeah like real punching fight i don't think i was that skilled but you know like yeah like i would i would get mad you know yeah yeah yeah yeah makes sense yeah um did that change when you go to college college is totally different yeah where did you go northwestern in chicago how was that experience really enjoyed it you know i was like i think the best part was you know we were in this hallway you know freshman year and like just met people that actually like gave a shit about something you know so that was pretty cool um and we just stay up all night talking about like our classes random stuff and i enjoyed that you know um if uh i i similar to you i don't have any friends that i went to a lot of different high schools and yeah i don't have any friends from high school I just made a lot of friends on the internet because the internet is a place where you can kind of, you know, meet people that have similar interests.

32:52So we didn't have that, right? Yeah, that's what I'm saying, yeah. Like if I think about high school, senior year, finally Netscape came out maybe, you know? So like there was the visualization of the internet. But before that, you know, I was at Yale or, you know, Greg and I, we set up a BBS at a Hayes 2400 modem. I mean, this is like way back when, right? Got excited when the U.S. Robotics 14.4 modem came out, right? Like I had a hard drive at home. It was 30 megs was like this big. Right. That kind of thing just didn't really exist. But the BBS stuff, though, I mean, also like back then there were some real.

33:27Tell the world. Tell people what BBS is for the younger. It's a dial up. So you host the dial up like community, basically. Right. And you play games and you, you know, everything's in the ASCII characters like the games. and you would just like have these bulletin boards where you discuss topics, but like, it's just like real weirdos on there, right? Because like, this was not a mainstream thing, right? Like everyone's a total weirdo. And then, you know, on these Usenet groups as well, it's just like, it's not a mainstream thing. So you just, there's some real, real, real people out there, you know?

34:04Yeah. Yeah. No, totally. Totally. And when you're into college, did you have more of an idea what you wanted to do? Like how did you end up in investment banking? Like how was that experience in college? I did investment banking simply because, well, first of all, I was interested in financial markets. But I don't really know why. I just remember watching like whatever was it CNBC, whatever was the network when I was a kid, stock tickers. And I thought it was like kind of interesting. So I started reading up on that, found that interesting. My dad did some investing. So that was kind of interesting.

34:35But in college, I got in the banking simply because like I had pretty good grades and like, I guess I was competitive and didn't know what I wanted to do. That's kind of what people did. They're like, oh, I go work at Morgan Stanley or I'll go work at McKinsey. Right. Like people did consulting and rest and banking, or you went to law school or medical school. Right. So it's not like I had this, like, I love, you know, merger analysis. Right. I really love the, the dilutive impact, studying dilutive impact of like, you know primary issuance no i don't think i thought about it like that it was like i get to work at who would have thought that years later very relevant topic i think about that a lot then i'm like okay when you're a principal as opposed to an agent you start thinking about it pretty hard right yeah yeah but i think like working at i don't know it was like this is 2001 right i don't know if people even want to work at the banks anymore i don't really know but like back then it was like you worked at you know morgan stanley or like one of these places you were like you felt like that was a the brand was important right you're like i'm in this place where wow like you've kind of made it a bit right and there was a bit of that emotion i think what did you uh graduate oh one no no which major i guess i was uh econ econ yeah what was your favorite class in college i had a lot of favorite classes um you pick a more numbers one a more i i really um human i remember this professor is israeli guy that taught us micro and he was the funniest he was such a dickhead but he was such a good professor he just yelled at the class all day um i remember his name too seagull i think his name was i'm pretty sure it was seagull and the guy, I remember like some of these, some of these economics classes are sort of like maybe narrative and he just explained everything in terms of proofs.

36:36Right. And so he would just make us run through all the classic proofs mathematically. And I just remember being so, I just found it so elegant that like what he was describing and the proofs we were doing could relate to something that was human behavior. And I just thought that was really awesome. I really, really enjoyed that class. I think it was micro. I don't really remember, actually. Maybe it was game theory. I don't remember anymore. But he was really good. Were you part of Greek life? Was that a thing? What's that? Like sororities, fraternities. Oh, Greek life. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, Northwestern is like 40 % Greek.

37:18Oh, wow. So you were having a fraternity? Yeah, for a year. it was a how was that experience well we got kicked off campus so um it was like it was it was a nerd fraternity man it was none of us were cool it was it was fun but yeah yeah do you have friends from college yes yeah so those you kept yes yes yes i have a number of really good friends from college um so then you said you went to investment banking where where did you go uh so So Morgan Stanley. And this was kind of during the dot-com bust, right? Yeah, bust, right. So first year I actually worked at a place called Solomon Smith Barney, and then I transferred to Morgan Stanley.

38:00But, yeah, I mean, that was, yeah, it was 01, right? In 9-11 it just happened beyond that. And so, you know, every day you look out the window and you see the tower is just not there, right? Because at Solomon, we were at, we were downtown, right? It's crazy that, you know, you're mentioning that fact. The last podcast I did, it was with Barry Diller. Yeah. And he told the story that they were buying Expedia during 9-11. They had signed but not closed. And then 9-11 happened and they had to make this call to like buy Expedia. And yeah, it turned out being the great decision to do it. But it's crazy, you know, like how at different moments in time, people are having like these completely different experiences you know like i was there man what was uh you're in new york i mean i was at you know i was there right in there i saw it happen you literally saw it happen yeah because like we we we were at seven world trade right so like yeah yeah yeah yeah that's crazy yeah how was that not great you know but were you looking down the way like what people say like what was the experience like you just uh yeah you just you just ran you know you just ran out of the building i mean i saw i saw i saw it happen so yeah i just started running that's crazy man yeah yeah do you think that like shaped your future experience in some way shape or form i don't know but it was uh was not good right it was tough yeah um and so okay so you're wow banging and this is so that's my point it's like sort of the dot-com crash sure but then on top of that it's 9 11 yeah right yeah and like you you're kind of i remember we're in training in 01 and everyone's like excited and all this stuff and then it's like fuck man you start and it's like you know your first week you're working like 100 hours a week and suddenly this stuff happens and you're like oh wow you're like this is this is crazy yeah and was wall street kind of ass crazy as they described in the movies kind of back then what how do they describe it i don't know just like you know traders going to strip clubs and like all that shit i would say that what was constituted as like okay behavior is probably not tolerated now like screaming at people throwing loose sites at people this is not even the traders this is the bankers they're they they were just doing that stuff too yeah throwing staplers at people um just breaking stuff any crazy story happened to you yeah yeah like totally like all the time and and i think like you know when you're in it you just you're like okay this is this is how it is it's look i'll put it this way i actually really enjoyed my experience overall because i got to work with really smart people that were really driven um and made a lot of good friends through that but was there behavior back then that it's like 25 years later you're like how is that okay right like in what workplace can you just go up to people menace them you know throw heavy objects at them and you're an analyst and it's like okay literally throwing objects yeah like you know do you know those you know what a loose site is no it's a deal toy it's it's like that we'll say like you know brex acquired blah blah blah company or ipo and it weighs like three pounds this thing it's just heavy it's like a glass-ish kind of thing like i just remember this md would get mad and like throw it against the wall the fuck that shit that should happen man all the time that's crazy so did you look at this and be like okay this is like not my thing like what did you decide to i don't know i just didn't like really i like i said i had a good experience overall i'm just i'm just just pointing out that some of the behaviors were like kind of insane actually yeah but but that those were the times it was different times different times for sure um but then so what did you do after that so oh sorry yeah so then i was transferred over by morgan stanley to to london that's how i ended up in london so i got i went there in 04 and i thought i'd stay so you stayed for a few more years at Morgan Stanley.

42:18Yeah. I became an associate and I, I, I, and, and, and so like, I, um, and there wasn't the whole thing where like PE recruited at like, you know, that whole thing there was, well, there was, so I had an offer at a hedge fund, um, which is a big hedge fund, um, at the time. And look, man, but I was just, I didn't really know what I wanted to do. Right. And I'm just like making money. Right. So I'm like, this is pretty cool. Right. I'm like, you know, it's kind of nice working here. And then, um, this hedge fund, pretty prestigious place, like offered me a job. And I was like, Oh, okay. Then Morgan Stanley said, do you want, do you want to like go check out a different office?

43:00And I was kind of like, okay. And then, so like they set up this thing in London and I'd never lived, you know, anywhere really outside this. I mean, I guess I went to college in Chicago, but I was, uh, you know, grew up in Connecticut, New York, all this stuff. And so just this, I wanted to see something different. I didn't know what it was like, but I took a trip over there and I met the team and it was so international, right? It was like every different ethnicity, nationality, all this stuff. And I was like, wow, it's kind of different than the New York team. And London had so much history and I just like fell in love with the place.

43:35Right. So I was like, I'm going to, I'm going to come out here so it wasn't so much a decision predicated on like can i make more money here blah blah it wasn't like that it was just like i want i wanted to try something else in my life that was different i was 24. and did you at this point care about money? sure i i wanted to make money but it was never the sort of driving thing for me i would say. but were you doing mental math like oh if i make this by this age i'm gonna make this much like was kind of like all that kind of going on No, no, I'm not like that. But I did think like that was normal, right?

44:11At the time for most people. Oh, I'd say my colleagues thought about it a lot. Yeah, I just it's just not really me. And also they would be like, I want to buy this thing. I want to and I just I wasn't really like that. But I definitely wanted to make more money than less. I just didn't think about it in that context. I wasn't like hyper structured about what's the potential. Like, what do I need by what age? It wasn't like that. So that's how you got to London. and then what was the next step after that? I just was in London for a bit, right? So like I worked at Morgan Stanley and then I worked at a different hedge fund.

44:43I'd say for London, for me, I just made so many great friends. So you went to a hedge fund eventually? I did eventually. But I just, for me, the sort of meeting people that all came to London when they were like 21 to 24 to 25 from all over the world was an amazing experience, right? So I had these two Italian roommates, two of my best friends still today, just met a lot of really good people. And I think, yeah, it was a community, right? I think London's one of these places where you don't have to, like day seven of you being there, you're kind of a Londoner, right? And they don't really care like what country you're from.

45:23I think things are a bit different now. But back then at least, right? Like, you know, you just felt like part of this community. Do you feel that, you know, you felt more at home in London than in the U.S. in some way? Because it's like full of immigrants everywhere. And like, you know, that was I feel very American, you know, but there was just something I really liked and continue to like really love about the city. Right. Which is like there's people from all over the world coming into this place. And being a Londoner, you know, means that. Right. That part I really liked. Makes sense. Makes sense.

45:57How was your experience at Hedge Fund? it wasn't it wasn't the greatest experience let's put it that way okay yeah yeah yeah we can we can get it out yeah yeah um i mean it was it was it was i don't think i worked at the best place makes sense yeah um and then was deliver right after that oh i went to business school after that so i went i went to wharton for two years but but i had the idea for deliver like way before going to business school oh really yeah because the day i got to london because I just moved from New York, right? Everything was delivered. And then we're sitting in the office.

46:32It's late. I'm like, what are we doing? Right. And everyone's like, yeah, we're going to the Tesco. Tesco is the big supermarket in the UK, in the mall in Canary Wharf. And like people are ordering microwave meals and eating them at their desk. And I'm like, you're telling me I have to work like a hundred hours a week and eat like microwave meals. This is terrible. Right. And so that's when I initially had the idea. So Grubhub, was that the first kind of delivery thing? So Seamless, which Grubhub bought. Yeah. These are like the web 1.0 marketplaces where they don't actually do the delivery, right?

47:07The restaurant has to do the delivery. And so all they really did, sorry, I'm not trying to take anything away from them. What they did was effectively in New York, you know, back in the day, you used to have a drawer full of menus, like paper menus. You might still even have a few of these. And what Seamless did is they took those menus and put them online. Because New York already had a delivery culture in the restaurants. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like literally starting in the 1950s, right? Like, you know, if you're in New York in the 90s, like, you call the bodega downstairs. They'll bring you up a chicken parm hero.

47:43Right? That's just in like 3 Advil or whatever else you need. That's the culture of the place. I wonder what made that be the case. Because of population density, merchant density, and the ability. And I think Manhattan's a grid. It's like easy to get around, right? But you think London didn't have that? London didn't have that at all. They didn't have any sort of convenience culture. London's a much less densely populated city. It's also like the city of London where our office is is like a Roman city. It's over 2 ,000 years old, right? These streets are kind of like hard to get around. London famously, you know, the cab drivers have to take a, you know, it's a three to four year course to master the streets.

48:25Obviously now with, you know, with smartphones and GPS, it's not really the case. But yeah, so you had this like kind of culture of convenience that really only was in New York. It's not like you had this in America at all. It's just New York City. That's it. Wow, that's so interesting, man. And so you had the idea for Deliveroo, you know. Because I'm like, London's got all these great restaurants that I knew. And I'm like, it's densely populated enough. And I'm like, why didn't this, why didn't this happen? And I guess like when I started looking into it, this is probably like 07, right? I realized quickly like, okay, well, actually, yeah, maybe GrubbM Seamless.

49:09And there's a company called Just Eat that was the equivalent in the UK. But the reason it didn't exist is simply because the logistics part is actually very hard. Right. And remember in 07, a smartphone, iPhone had just come out. Right. And I don't think anyone knew what like this device would actually mean, you know, enabling all of these different industries. When did you get your first iPhone? Was it 2010? Was iPhone 4? I think so at that point. Yeah, it was the 4. That was my first iPhone too. Yeah. So I was like behind this, you know, I had the Blackberry. because I'd come from finance, right?

49:44You're still Blackberry, right? BBM was how you communicated with people, right? Yeah, yeah, totally. This episode of HD in HD is brought to you by a brand that's close to my heart, Brex. When we started Brex, it wasn't just about creating another financial product. It was about solving the real gritty challenges that founders and startups face every day. Building something from the ground up is hard enough without having to navigate clunky legacy banks with endless fees. That's why Brex is the financial stack that scales with you, no matter where you are on your journey. From maximizing runway to earning yield on your cash, Brex was designed to make every dollar count.

50:20So you can focus on what really matters, building your dream. So whether you're just getting started or you're ready to take on the next big thing, Brex has your back. Check it out and see why the world's most innovative startups like Anthropics, Scale AI, and Robinhood trust Brex. you went to business school to Wharton how was that experience for you it was amazing man I loved it I loved it loved every second of it I'd worked for nine years yeah and so I was a bit more experienced than some of the other students and I just had a great time man I met amazing people Philadelphia is a great city parts are dangerous but but you know great city I've never been to Philadelphia you should go man you know it's an hour seven minutes on the Amtrak I know I know it's so close I gotta go I just never been yeah I mean you might not like it but I I liked it oh yeah well i don't um but you should go check it out i would love to when you were a business school you already you thought you were going to go back to finance or you already knew that was kind of the end of it for you um well so so i always had this idea in my head and and i was thinking to myself like what do i want to do i wasn't really sure again i i worked for a hedge fund in the summer i did my summer internship like a real legit one worked for a place called sac capital um yeah yeah yeah this is before the before his legal troubles yeah yeah yeah um and uh you know um so you worked at the og billions i guess yeah i did i did um and i just realized like other people were going to be better at that job than me like i just didn't like i could do okay in it for sure but like i didn't i don't think i cared as much you know What do you think it takes to be created that job?

52:01So I think that type of place is actually quite different than like being a long only or even a VC, right? Because you have to maniacally care about why every stock goes up and down. And you have to trade the shit out of stuff, right? Like that's just how it works, right? You're running market neutral. Like there's a lot of, you know, risk control on. You're running a lot of leverage probably maybe 2 to 3x. I don't remember what it was. and so you just have to be in the flow of the markets all the time and it it it's a stressful job right it's not like hey you know what i've got i've got these sort of like long only i've got these 10 longs and a few shorts i'll just kind of see no man like you you're like in the markets constantly and my boss he used to just he used to send me these bloomberg messages he's such a great guy, but he's, he'd just send me tickers.

52:56Like he couldn't even write complete sentences. He'd just be like, ticker, ticker, ticker, question mark, question mark, question mark. And that's just like how you communicated. And I, I think that there are the people that were like so talented and smart. But for me, I think that would have been not the right environment. And when you're at that point, you know, did you appreciate, and we're going to talk about this in a little bit but like did you appreciate the nuances between the new york stock exchange and the london stock exchange no no i was a intern right i didn't really know much about that i i was just like what i love though is looking at companies right i love that part like analyzing companies but that's not the vast majority of the job no it is like but the thing is to be it like there's a reason why those guys charge three and fifty right like you you have to know the companies and you have to mitigate risk all the time and you have to like cut positions and you know you got to do that so it's it's just very intense it's not just an intellectual activity of like do i like this company or not it's not really not like being warren buffett that make a few no it's not but like and you look at the track record it's like they were so good right totally so this is probably what the citadels and the millenniums are today and what they are today And 1.72 is running like, you know, I don't know, 50 billion or something, right?

54:14But this pod model, yeah, I guess Steve Cohen was the one that really came up with it. And you were kind of in the early, early days. I don't know about early, but SAC back then, yeah, that was kind of 2011. Yeah, and I worked for this like awesome guy. So, yeah. And did you think that you learned at this point, you know, MBA, et cetera, like about business in a sense of like what a good business is? Like, did you feel when you started Deliver, you already understood business really well? No, no. And I don't think I ever like think about things that way. No, sorry. Like for me to start a business, it's never about sort of like, what do I think the end state unit in economics are?

54:56And what are the end state sort of like industry dynamics up and down the value chain? Like for me, it's really simple, right? And by the way, there are no, there's no single path to success or failure ever, right? But for me, it's like, do I think a user wants this experience? Do I want this experience? Is it solving a customer pain point for me? That's how I always think about stuff. And then later, you start thinking about that other stuff. But do you think that, let's say, you were born 10 years later and you got to London when you were 22 and iPhones already come out. Do you think you could have built and did deliver the same way?

55:39Oh, you're saying if I started later? If you started, meaning like you hadn't gone through your finance experience. Yeah, I think I could have. I think, though, it's not like finance taught me that sort of running a DCF or comparables analysis or understanding Porter's Five Forces or any of that stuff really is going to help you start a business. No, I don't think so. I think it will help you maybe later on scale a business or understand things quicker than other people. But like you're not you're starting a business. You're out doing fucking deliveries. You're signing up restaurants. You're you're you're building the product.

56:19You're not sitting around. Well, hey, if I'm you know, if I get squeezed by the merchants because they have too much, you know, the merchant, you know, base is too concentrated at the top. What happens to my margins out your three? Like not thinking that. You're like, get shit done, man. Like fucking. Yeah. You know, delivery is too slow. You know, I keep thinking about Diet Coke's missing. I keep thinking about this, which is like, I wonder if that kind of stuff, knowing it, it's even like harmful because I think so sometimes, you know, like you probably like overthink the issues instead of like just fucking doing it.

56:58Yeah, I think so. There are people that are smarter than me, but are too deliberate, you know? Like I can be a real meathead about stuff. And I don't think that's a bad thing sometimes. Right. It's like, I mean, I don't think I'm like a total meathead, but I just mean like, you know, I'm like, all right, this has got to be solved. We got to go do it now. Now, like not tomorrow. And I don't care about your fucking, you know, six page analysis on this. Right. We got to figure it out now. Yeah. You know, it's so interesting, man, because, you know, obviously I'm in New York now, so I have a lot of finance friends and it's crazy, like how theoretical people are in some way.

57:35of like about kind of stuff. But for them, that makes sense. Totally. That's their job. That's the levers they have, right? Right, right. But do I think that is beneficial to starting a business? Probably not. Totally. Totally, totally. So then, okay, so you started, you know, came back from business school, already had the idea for Deliveroo, but what was the decision point you decided to actually start it? Yeah, man, I sort of did that summer internship and I was thinking to myself, like, maybe I'll do investing, but maybe that place is too intense for me. And after a while, I was just like, you know what?

58:11I don't know if this is like that interesting to me. And I've always had this idea. And I was thinking, do I go back to London? Do I stay in the US? I don't know. And one day, just decided, you know, I called, I'd been talking to Greg, my co-founder, about this. And I was like, no, man, let's just go for it. Let's do it. That's it. That's awesome. How do you guys meet in MBA? No, no, we're childhood friends. He's the guy. he's the guy he used to play pc games with oh yeah yeah yeah yeah and he was like a technical background or no yeah he was yeah oh that was nice yeah yeah yeah for sure um and then like if i look at the deliveroo history right like i guess what how would you classify the key moments you know in the history of like so let's say starting as one and you know right now is i I think there are phases, kind of phases of the company.

59:01How would you separate the phases? I had this like farewell speech to the company a bit, and I wanted to give them a bit of history because I'm not a retrospective person, but I wanted them to understand the things that we went through to get to where we are. So the first phase I would characterize as a solitary phase, right? Because it was just me and Greg. But Greg didn't live in the UK. So he was in Boston. Oh, wow. Yeah. So it was like, I was just on the ground, like, man. So during the day, I would like sign up merchants, kind of just do random stuff. I would at night do deliveries every day.

59:42We didn't have a delivery person, right? So it wasn't a lot of orders. I would do customer service at the same time as doing deliveries. So like get calls in, like not safe, not good. and then at night go back make product decisions greg and i would do that um but it was very tough i would say because it was you know we get like 10 orders a day and you know and and i think i told the story before but like i had a moment where

1:00:12um so great so at this at this time right this is very early on like i had no interface to actually see like where the orders were, like where they were coming in or whatever. Just Greg would just call me and be like, okay, dude, you know, the next order is going to be coming from here. Like you've got to hurry up. And I remember it was two degrees out Celsius at the time in the winter of, in the winter of 13. And he would just call me. He's like, you got to hurry up. You got to do this order faster. The next one's going to be coming from here. If you don't get to the restaurant in time and I'm taking customer service calls.

1:00:46And at some point, I remember I called him up and I'm like, fuck you, man. Like, seriously, like I'm busting my ass, like delivering food. You're like in a warm place at least. Right. And you're telling me. And I just remember getting real mad at him. And then I went back to my apartment and I was I was living with a guy called the forest. He's a good friend of mine. He went to warden with me. So we're buddies from there. And I had this helmet, my scooter helmet on. And for whatever reason, it just got stuck and I couldn't take it off. so i felt the suffocation like this intense suffocation in in our flat and i just i didn't know he was there so i just started yelling fuck like super pissed off and i just then lied on my bed with my helmet on and then forest just popped out and he i guess i'd heard all this and he he looks at me on the bed and he goes he goes you he's like you're fucking insane man he's like you you've lost your mind right um because he he was working at he still works at fidelity he's a you know p.m there and he was like you had this like really great job and he just said to me he goes you're fucking like crazy delivery you need a person now that that's what you are i was like oh shit man so that was a rough moment that was a solitary phase i think how long that lasts year and a half you didn't have any funding right i was funding it myself right so this is just money you saved up from your hedge fund days and yeah yeah yeah i budgeted an amount that i was going to spend how much 30k that's how much i was going to spend that was your total one year and a half living expenses no i didn't include living expenses i had more money than that but that was the amount i wanted to spend on the company got it right and the next phase you know was sort of like the scrappy phase right we got this office with no windows no heating you raised some money at this point we raised 100k who was the it was um some of my friends and like um a few guys that were in the restaurant industry that were helpful so it wasn't like silicon valley i mean this is london 2013 right i don't think there were vcs but there weren't a lot of them right so that phase was like 10 people you know like you can have 10 people of 100k i mean dude we were on gumtree gumtree is like the craigslist in the uk and all of the employees who were hired on gumtree refused to acknowledge the fact that we're actually hired on gumtree they like deny it completely but it's true yeah so like we just had the you know we didn't we're just like hiring people and at this point we started developing some traction right like we had real user growth we had real repeat rates frequency all that type of stuff right what is like order of magnitude of the traction you know around that i mean dude it went from like 10 orders like 100 a day right so I wasn't like, but still, right?

1:03:30Like I was like, oh, this isn't some, it's not my friends ordering, right? It's like people I don't know. That was the most exciting part. It's like, I don't know this user. Who the hell is this user? You know? And was the like delivery, like I guess quote unquote profitable at that point or at least break even? I mean. yeah because like yes yes definitely because the order values were really really really large back then because like it was the most expensive parts of london right that's where we launched the business hedge funds you know ordering for everyone yeah or just like kind of affluent people right so the unit economics at that point were like amazing i was like oh shit this is gonna this is gonna be good business great business yeah little little did i know that it would have to come through efficiencies but but yeah like that that's that's what it was in the beginning like we were you know we were hiring writers but the scrappy phase like was so scrappy because like it was just greg building the tech right and and and and me working with him on that and so like it was like yeah it was it was really nuts and we had to come up with solutions like restaurants didn't have wi-fi back then a lot of them right so like we we would buy a dongle or i would go fucking install you know a router like in in a restaurant i had no idea what i was doing like drilling drilling in their walls like running wires like doing stuff like that whatever it took you know so okay so that was the scrappy phase then when you raised your first first real funday index yeah index uh jan 14 jan martin mignot yeah what was what were the terms back then like what was like oh yeah oh fuck um what was it three million on 10 million pre yeah yeah yeah and did you think those are great terms back then no didn't know never did never did never did okay just was like it's what it was dude i remember someone else offered us like this is london back then someone's like okay one million on one one million on on um two million pre and i was like i just asked because i mean i did come from a finance background i just asked the guy i go why would i do this like i really would like to understand he's like he's like look man you you need capital we'll we'll do it i was like so insulted by this guy that i just left um yeah so that was back then yeah so that was and we had a business with actual traction it wasn't like an idea at that point right yeah so then we just ended up raising a lot more money after that and then because then we got into the that really like mega growth phase right and when did you go from feeling like oh wow like this is like a you know scrappy company you were raising terms to kind of like a hot deal?

1:06:14Like when did it feel like you were like have ECs chasing you or like you're kind of having an easy time raising? When did that happen? I don't know if I ever had an easy time raising, but I would say like Series C, right? Green Oaks led that one. I went out to SF for the first time because Series A was indexed, but they were obviously huge back then, but London, I thought about them as a London place. Yeah. Affirm. Accel did our Series B. um that's when i met luciana um from sequoia um and then the sea though i went out to to sand hill road and all these places i've read about but never been out there and like yeah like met all these like legends of vc or whatever um yeah so that that was probably when it felt like okay like we could raise from a lot of different people etc when did like this become kind of like an a market that like there were like u.s comps and china comps in brazil like when did this like whole like dude i think like around 20 like tony started the comp door dash in 13 like i think the guy who really did it first was probably basti from postmates actually because he was like oh nine so he was like ahead of everyone else but like you know if i think about it you have the web 1.0 guys right but if you think about the logistics enabled marketplace it's all around the same time right yeah iFood was much earlier because it was also web 1.0 but like tony me mickey from vault um nicholas from delivery hero might have been a little bit before travis remember did started doing this in 2014 2015 like pretty early on right and did you did you meet all these folks like early on not i don't know about super early but i must have met I met Mickey and Tony like 2015.

1:08:02Travis, I ended up meeting a little bit later. Probably 2015, 2016. 2016 Uber was a fucking piece of story. I'll tell you about that. Yeah, they were at the peak of their powers at this point. I was like terrified of the guy. Yeah, I can imagine. He's a terrifying guy. Actually a good guy, but just kind of, you know, he can be intimidating. Intense, yeah. Yeah. Intense guy. But yeah, so like kind of knew all these guys, right? Did you have a good Travis story early on? i just remember like meeting him with ml back in like what was it like 17 in london or 16 i don't remember he's just pacing the room like going crazy asking me like so many questions and um but we had a good time we had a good time i don't have any crazy stories uh like like that but but no we had a good time i was like wow this is a legend right totally man yeah yeah at that time you know it's it was the number one he is a fucking he is a legend but i think at that time was like the number one in the world i think absolutely um and tell us about the the whole amazon story man um because that was an important moment i guess yeah the antitrust stuff well i i would say look so so so so you have this growth phase right we raised the series c from from green oaks and then series d from dst that's how i met tom stafford who was on the board the whole time even as a public company which was amazing but i got to meet benny yeah so benny and neil and the C, then Stafford and the D.

1:09:29And then all this shit started happening, right? Because you had Brexit, right? You had more competition. Uber decided to launch London for Eats. And so we're like under all this pressure. And it always felt like we were raising more and more money. And how did Brexit feel? Like what was the direct impact, I guess, for like you? Well, for us, like we were trying to raise money. And then people were like, no. But it was fine in the end. And at the same time, you know, our rider model, the delivery people models, a model of self-employment, flexibility, all this stuff. But like we started being the front page of like every newspaper.

1:10:06Right. Not for reasons we wanted. Right. And that was very important. Yeah. Because like we were like we literally had like 100 people at the company. Right. Like we're not trying to rewrite the future. Like we're just like, OK, this is the model that riders want. They want to log in. locked. They want to work this way, right? And we need to get them on our platform. And so that was, it was a confluence of like those things, Brexit, Uber, employment rights, all this stuff happening at the same time. It felt overwhelming. Because labor lies a big deal in Europe, right? Like it's a huge deal. And a lot of these protections came in at the end of World War II, right?

1:10:45Development of the welfare state, in post-World War II world order. And these are sacrosanct in some countries, right? And I'm not going to comment on whether that's a good or bad thing, but what I can tell you is the riders didn't want that, right? And so that's the model - The drivers, I guess, or - The delivery people, sorry. Yeah, so they want to work flexibly. That's very clear everywhere in the world, right? So that's the model we're going to go after in order to attract them on our platform. The whole point for them is the flexible work, right? They can have a day job and they go at night and they have kids they care like or or literally you this became apparent later but you could log in to amazon to uber to us to whoever and like decide what jobs to take yeah the market kind of decides the market clearing price in a way right but that's not you know obviously what you know so so then we had to spend a lot of time with governments and and and regulators sucked um Um, yeah, well, I don't, yeah, well, um, I, I don't.

1:11:43Just from your perspective as a CEO, that's probably not what you wanted to spend your time on, right? It is existential, right? So you, you, you, you don't have a choice, right? Like this is like do or die shit, right? So in my mind, it doesn't matter what I want to spend time on. I kind of have to spend my time on what's most important. And that was, that was it. So, so, you know, what I, as a point I'm trying to make is you've got all this fundraising stuff happening. The backdrop being Brexit, being Uber Eats in London, being employment stuff. So I made it hard, right? And so we're just raising money, but it was never like that easy, right?

1:12:20And then long story, I'll get to the Amazon thing. And then in 2019, we raised this like giant round from Amazon. And I'd spent like two weeks with these guys. How did that come together? So Alan and company do this conference in Arizona. I think did you ever go there no um and I ended up meeting uh Peter Kay who runs corp dev you know at Amazon now I think he runs an M &A and he's a great guy and like um you know we have this banker Nancy and Omar who worked at Allen Co and they introduced this and you know he was like okay this this could be like pretty interesting and I was like wow you know the the you know the the the sort of dream of kind of working with these guys was pretty cool right and Bezos was running the company like all this stuff and they had to be business what's that did you meet business i'll tell you a story about that the answer is no because the uk government prohibited me from meeting him it's all antitrust like even before the investment it was after so i was supposed to spend a day with him and they prohibited me from doing so um that's annoying yeah like my business hero like not getting to yeah but whatever i'm sure for no good reason i'm sure he's not like oh, didn't get to spend a day with Will.

1:13:34He's doing okay. He's doing all right. He's doing all right. But for me, that would have been pretty cool. Oh, yeah, 100%. Right? Yeah, so anyway, April 19, intense due diligence, sign this deal. Real validation of what the company has built up to this point in time. And what was the deal terms back in the time? I don't even remember. I just remember it was like$600 million or something. At some valuation. I just don't remember what at this point. there's been so many it's like a serious fucking g or something at this point i don't even know um and i'm like okay this is gonna be great man like i'm like fine because it was intense and these guys were smart and what was the strategic rationale for them i think for them it's sort of like let us understand this space right like they had maybe tried it in the u.s but it didn't really work um you know and they knew these guys just care about like user engagement right and they're like your engagement with people buying stuff is excellent, right?

1:14:32Like we want to sort of understand that a bit, right? And I think these guys wanted optionality to figure it out, right? So anyways, a lot of money. I think it was a decent valuation. I don't remember exactly what it was. And then companies celebrating, because we were like getting, you know, we're running out of money, but we needed money, right? Because all our competitors are going nuts. And then boom, the CMA, the UK antitrust authority says, we're putting this to phase one review. And what that means is it's like a three month review process. But we didn't even expect that because we're like, these guys have a 14 % stake.

1:15:05They don't run a competing business. Like, what are you investigating for? No special rights, one board seat. And then that basically kicked off this 18 month that's insane man 18 months where we couldn't take in the money right so so we're in the situation where we can't take in the money other people don't really want to fund you because they're like what the fuck's going on with this thing right yeah and so we got in it was the shittiest experience of my professional career i would say and what you know tell us like a little bit of the how did it feel like who were the competitors what were they investing in you know It was, you know, I mean, the usual suspects, right?

1:15:49So you had Just Eat the incumbent. And I don't remember at that point. Actually, at that point, Yitzay from Takeaway had just bought Just Eat. So that was kind of happening, right? Then you had Uber just continuing to invest. You had Delivery Hero that had gone public, as I recall at that point. Because Just Eat was already, Takeaway was already public. And so was Just Eat, actually. So you had these like public companies kind of investing. And then at this point, they were investing in driver benefits. Usually it's consumer subsidies. Consumer subsidies. Some exclusive deals with merchants. But I would say mostly on the consumer side.

1:16:28And you felt that if you didn't keep investing to that amount, you're going to lose share and that's going to be bad for the business. Yeah. Yeah, but dude, it got to the point where we couldn't actually meet payroll. It wasn't like use or subsidies. I mean, so we're in the situation where – Because, okay, just to give you a little history. So April 19, 18-month process. Remember, COVID kicks off Feb 2020. And initially, no, no, no. But what happened were the restaurants were shut for everything initially. So we had zero revenue coming in. For how long that happened? That was about six weeks. So we had zero revenue coming in.

1:17:06We had no cash. And we're like, what do we do? So we pulled every single working capital maneuver you've known to man, like not always proud of what we had to do, but we had to do it. Right. And then we had to fire 30 % of the company. Right. So it just was terrible. We had, we had appointed liquidators. We had, we had all this shit. What was the worst point? Board meetings like every day, you know? and you know to be fair it's sort of like the board's kind of like all right well it's not really like we need to get through this investigation right it wasn't like you you know no one anticipated this but still sucked right did you think the company's gonna go under at some point i didn't know man but that those were dark dark days right and then what happened was COVID then unlocked.

1:18:02Restaurants started opening. Our business is flying, obviously. Everyone is doing delivery, everything. Everything. You did, no choice, right? And so we had a very loyal user base. And, you know, we were... So in the orders, I remember this, the order sizes were very large because everyone was sitting at home together. And for whatever reason, initially the fast food chains were closed. So the independents were on and their commissions were really high. So we had this thing where the unit economics got really good really, really quickly. And is the working capital cycle of the business positive, meaning like you get the money before you pay the merchant?

1:18:40Yeah, I'm not actually talking about that stuff. We didn't mess around with that, but like we were - But you didn't need cash to grow from that perspective. We didn't need cash to grow from that perspective, but what we did is we stopped. So the way our business works is Stripe will pay us whatever, same day i think or t plus one i don't remember exactly what it is and we pay out i don't remember all the details now but at the time i think we paid out merchants on a on a bi-weekly basis and riders on a weekly basis yeah so those were the working capital dynamics but i'm actually talking about like just not paying your bills yeah right like you're like vat i'm not like fuck it man let's let's see what happens no no but the reason i ask is because when covet kind of came back even though the investigation wasn't done yeah you didn't need capital to grow so the growth was positive yeah yeah from that perspective but like then quickly thereafter the investigation resolved itself right so it was in august of 2020 18 months so then you got 600 million then we got the money in and then you know it's kind of there was a sigh of relief i think Like the business blew up at that point, right?

1:19:51Yeah, it did. It did. But man, like that whole thing was so shitty. And because I would meet these regulators and they, it's a very official process. And they would, every meeting began with, you know, Mr. Shewanna reminds you of your criminal liability of an XYZ thing, statute. I literally said to the guy, I go like, why are you treating me like a criminal? like i am i'm building a company that's going to help this economy and you guys are just i like lost it on them you know their lawyers probably didn't like that fuck it like these guys really really really pissed me why do you think they did it because because they were so anti-big tech it wasn't about us it was about amazon they're just like your collateral damage it's like okay yeah but we're also a british company right and you're the british regulator yeah like you just i remember just meeting these guys and they're just like, so they're like professors, you know, they're not real world people.

1:20:50Right. You know, and they're just like, well, oh, I remember they kept talking about this. They said, we've looked at the dynamic counterfactual. So I stopped them there and I said, what, what, what is this word dynamic counterfactual even means? And then you, well, I kind of know what it means from an abstract perspective. It just means they can say whatever they want. Counterfactual could be anything. Dynamic means it's shifting, right? So they can just say whatever they want. Right. And then, and I'm like, so you're basing this decision on some hypothetical like thing that like these guys aren't in this business, right?

1:21:24They, they, they control 14 % of the company of no special rights. And you're going to tell me like, we're controlled by these guys. And like, it was insane. That's crazy. That was so bad. That was the really bad part. That's insane, man. And looking back, you know, what do you think that made Amazon not succeed in food delivery? I think, I think, dude, it's just doing a lot of things, right? They're doing a lot of things, right? And I think their business at the core is predicated on a traveling salesman problem, right? So I've got a van of 30 packages. What's the most efficient way to kind of deliver those, right?

1:22:01At the end of the day, a lot of what they built was based on that yeah and obviously it's probably trivial for them in the abstract to like do what we do but when your company culture and process and systems is predicated on one thing and you try to do something very different point-to-point delivery i think it's hard yeah right and also like they're doing music and they're doing movies and they're doing you know and this is not on the top of the list of things for them to do right totally but they were awesome though i have to say amazon was awesome like they stuck with us you know they were great partners the whole way what did you learn from working with them i didn't learn that much simply because we weren't allowed to speak to them frankly until days you might so even after days you know but then then it's sort of like you get pretty cautious right yeah what i learned from them is they do what they say right and and and if they say something they're going to do something they they have your back and i also learned they're tough tough negotiators right but but i uh respect them a lot um so then 2021 came around yeah and everything is worth you know a trillion dollars yeah how did that experience happen for you well we we ipo'd in 21 um and uh i think we're quite famous and at least the british media for having the worst ipo in um in british history Yeah, so we...

1:23:21Why? So first, why did you pick LSE? Because our business is a UK business at the end of it, right? We're 55 % UK or something like that, right? And so in my mind, you know, I didn't think about it that hard. It was kind of like UK business, London Stock Exchange. London Stock Exchange is still one of the top few exchanges in the world, right? In retrospect, was that the right move? Probably not, right? But like, well, I think in the US, I think you're given much more opportunities to like to demonstrate like, hey, I'm going to invest in here. Here's what I, you know, here's what I anticipate to return on that, to sort of return on that investment.

1:24:05I think the LLC is much more old school and like how they think, right? Like you have a shorter amount of time to prove yourself. And in technology, in a highly competitive business, sometimes you need a little bit more time. Yeah. And so it's a market share business and a scale business, right? I think so. I think so. But that doesn't like, I don't think like, it's not like on the LSE, I think things would have been like dramatically different, right? I think there's ups and downs, right? Just like anything else. I mean, a lot of tech stocks went down 80 % in 21 on the NASDAQ. Everything went down in 22, yeah.

1:24:39But I also think like, you know, you're given a different opportunity. And I know this because our investor base was heavily American, right? And like when you talk to them, they just thought about things very differently than, say, the British investors we spoke to. And why was your IPO the worst in UK history? I still don't know. Well, I mean, just I think numerically that's what happened. You mean because it traded down? Yeah, yeah. Traded down big time. I don't remember how much. The day of the IPO traded down? Yeah, day one traded down. Wow. I never heard of that. Oh, you can Google it, man.

1:25:10I mean, that's all the British media likes to write about. But like who's – I can't even imagine how that would happen. Like if you just bought an IPO, who's selling? Yeah, I don't know what happened. Did you have a lockup on everyone? We had a lockup, yeah, six-month lockup on the large institutionals, yeah. So, look, I don't know is the short answer. But you know what? That really didn't bother me that much because like at the end of the day, I was kind of like, we raised a billion dollars in the IPO, something like that, or maybe a little less. I don't remember exactly what the number was. I'm like, we're well capitalized.

1:25:46Let's get to work. Right. That's how I thought about it. Yeah. You know, but the world, I can tell you, like investors, like yelling, screaming, I'm kind of like, dude, I don't know. Like, what do you want? What do you want me to do? What do you want me to do about it? One guy, I remember this. so back in 21 do you remember this there were people that just invested in ipos as an asset class like not even like they didn't even know what the company did like they're just like we're buying ipos and there's this guy um he had bought i don't know how much stock but like we had an investor call with him i never even heard i don't know who this guy is i just remember this very strong new york accent and he's like will here's what you're gonna do you're gonna put out a press release saying the company's doing great he's just saying like crazy shit to me and i'm like what what do you want me to do and he's like yeah a press release like you got to do it right away because like you know this thing's spiraling out of control and i'm like i don't have to do that i'm like company's fine i'm like what are you what are you talking about so you crazy people came out of the woodwork yeah right remember this is like boom times people like get i don't even know how they got my cell phone you know just like did you get super involved in the IPO allocation or no you kind of let the bank do it I was involved I was involved um I was involved but I don't I don't know what happened is the short of it yeah I really don't and did you think at that time by the way traded up above the IPO price like three months later oh really yeah yeah so like I don't know what happened so like you know the newspapers always every interview I ever do with a journalist is like you've had the worst IPO in London history and I'm like look dude that was like five years ago a right but secondly like you know we raised a bunch of money that was good and thirdly like it traded above ipo price so like i don't you know really know what to tell you you know like stocks go up and down buddy like i don't know why i went down ipo day but you can go ask someone in the capital markets don't ask me yeah you're probably pissed at the bank though at least you know yeah i wasn't so happy but yeah um and but i guess like you know in 21 right like what was the subject the subjective feeling was like oh my god we're not like in this anti-trust thing like you know i'm like let's just get to work right and like at this point you know we had we'd hired a few people in 2020 and 21 to bolster the exact team there was a bit of change on that and i felt really good about you know the people we i felt good about the people you know that left too but like felt good about the team um you know the business was growing quickly um because of because obviously COVID tailwinds and stuff like that.

1:28:20And I was just like, all right, like we're, we're set. Like the, the IPO price thing didn't bother me. Like I was like kind of annoyed, right? I don't, you know, you're the laughing stock of the entire country for like a week, but like, whatever, didn't bother me. Yeah. Yeah. Totally. Totally. And then looking back, you know, at the story, um, is there anything that, you know, big that comes to mind that obviously there's always the small things, but is there anything strategically big that you would have done differently looking back? Not strategically, but I tell you, like, I would have always hoped we could have moved faster, right?

1:28:58Like, that's, if there's one thing that I like tell people, like, what could you do differently? It's just move faster. And people like, on what? I'm like, everything, right? But is there something that you think you guys were below average?

1:29:15I don't think like, yeah, there's plenty of stuff that I don't think we were, I don't know, I don't know what below average means. There's plenty of things that I think, you know, we could have been better at. And there's plenty of things that I think we're really good at. Yeah. I'm curious, like, where do you think you were like at the, let's call it like top 10 %? And is there anything you think you guys were at the bottom 25 %? Hard for me to quantify that, but I do think we're really good at logistics, right? Both in terms of customer satisfaction as well as efficiency. Yeah. Right? And I think we were really good at that.

1:29:46And if there's one thing you want to be really good at in this business, it's probably that. Right? I would say what we were not good at, a lot of the marketing efforts, I don't think we really understood very well. Right? Kind of the more performance or the more brand part? I would say both. Right? Right. And I think, you know, sometimes you meet these investors and they're like, you know, company XYZ has this perfect model. And I'm like, do they like really like can you really measure the impact of that brand campaign like that? Well, but I don't think we were good at that. Right. And it's still a big item on the P &L.

1:30:24Right. Yeah. So I would say that. And I think, you know, and I think the sort of. The link between finance and analytics is something we could have done better, too. And I think those things are tied together. And now that, you know, part of DoorDash, what do you think are the things that, you know, you guys can learn from DoorDash and what DoorDash can learn from you? Look, it's a hyper local business, right? So every market's really different. And I think the US obviously is like so big and so many things. But the reality is like, I think Tony and I actually disagree on this. I think like if you're living in Texas, let's say, right, and you're comparing that to someone living in Florida or Atlanta, the difference is not as big as someone living in London versus like Germany or Paris, right?

1:31:14Like Europe is a place of enormously different histories, enormously different cultures, enormously different mindsets. And then at the sort of practical level, enormously different sort of governments. Right. And so kind of and Mickey from Vault obviously knows this. Right. But but I think that the sort of like learnings of every market, I think, in our business is almost more important than than having that large. I don't want to say the U.S. is a mono market. I don't want to say China is a mono market. But compared to Europe, they definitely are more. Right. Do you think you could have should have done more M &A or no?

1:31:56No, I don't think it's in our culture as much. Right. I think everything we built was was pretty organic. That being said, if something's cheap enough and appealing enough, sure. But I don't know that I – it wasn't like we spent a lot of time evaluating those things. Makes sense. You know. Makes sense. There wasn't like, oh, wow, like I look back and maybe we could have got into this market by buying someone or something like that. And, you know, some – our competitors all – like, I mean, if you think about Just Eat Takeaway is – I mean, they owned – so Takeaway bought Just Eat, bought Grubhub.

1:32:28they had iFood as part of the Just Eat portfolio. So that's like an M &A story. Nicholas from Delivery Hero is a great M &A guy, right? He kind of put together all these things. I would say Uber didn't do much. That's not true. They did a bunch when Dara took over, I guess, right? Yep. But they did the Postmates thing. DoorDash really didn't do much, right? Just Voltan. Just Voltan. That's us. And now the seven rooms, I think. Oh, that's a bit different. um but no i wouldn't i wouldn't say we were like an m &a driven organization makes sense um what do you think that you know when investors looked at the rounds b c d were the questions they were asking like the right ones or you think that like the concerns that people have turned out not to be the concerns that were true i think one of the things that investors vc investors and i I don't think this will ever change because I see it happening now.

1:33:25Like for consumer businesses, you know, generally, but also non-consumer businesses, they're of course rightly, rightly obsessed with retention and frequency, right? So user engagement. The thing I always ask them though, because, you know, they would be like, I remember one of our investors used to send me, I think it was the second measure data or Yippit data on Uber ride sharing, like retention data. This is like 17. it was like fucking smiling curves and everything looks great so i said to him i go listen so like i get this but like do you think this is a market clearing price for a ride and at an end state meaning like when they stop giving away stuff for free are the cohorts going to look the same and this guy was like well i don't know but this is what it looks like now which is totally fair answer.

1:34:17And I think one of the things that I think VC investors look at, because remember the whole Gorillaz, Gatir, remember all those guys we met? Like the fast, the 10-minute grocery guys. The GoPuff. GoPuff guys, right? Because in 21, I heard the same thing. Hey, these cohorts are amazing. And I'm like, we're going to investigate this. We're going to understand what's sort of like a great experience versus what is something that is being heavily subsidized, right? Now, I think for VCs, separating out those two things is a critical, critical task. And doing that right is actually very hard, I think.

1:34:53I don't think it's that easy. Yeah, it's hard, right? Like, especially for generalist investors to understand the nuance of all these different businesses that are growing so fast and the rounds are so tight, right? It's kind of like a - But I think with a quick grocery, guys, I think like it was sort of conventional wisdom them that like, hey, man, like, you know, like, this is not that easy a business, right? Like, you need to make a giant leap of faith in order to really understand, to come to a conclusion that this thing can generate a lot of cash flow in the future, right? Yeah, well, look, man, I think, but also now with the AI stuff, right?

1:35:29It's like, I was gonna bring exactly that, like, you know, user growth, retention, frequency, great, great, high engagement. What are the gross margins look like, right? What are you actually paying to the foundational model companies? What are the foundational model companies, you know, spending on, like all of these questions I think like are so interesting, but I think it's like, there's a lot of variance in that, right? Your business model can look really different. And not to mention, you know, if you're not a foundational model company and you're doing a line of business that a foundational model company might get into, it's like, okay, you're running a 200 million AR today growing whatever, 200%.

1:36:08That can be a billion or could be zero in two years. That's a fucking tough game. Yeah, man. And I think what I learned from all this was that, look, in VC land, growth is king. And if you're growing, you can get away with almost anything. You know? And they're not going to ask that many questions either. No, no. And if you're not growing as much, they're going to ask 100 million questions and not invest. Yeah. And so maybe the moral of the story is be a meathead, right? Like just grow fast and hopefully you figure out all the problems later. Yeah. Right? Yeah. Because at least you have a chance.

1:36:44It was Uber's strategy. And it worked. Yeah, it worked. It's 200 billion market company, right? Yeah, 100%. And Dara's done an amazing job running the thing. Great job. 100%. And getting to AI right now, how do you think AI is going to impact your business? Sure. There's the sort of like, okay, we'll build a great recommendation engine and we can tag different groups of users and different experiences and all that. And of course, companies like Decagon and Sierra can sort of transform the day-to-day merchant and sort of user experience. That I all believe. But fundamentally, like on the logistics side, do I see robots going up buildings and pressing elevators?

1:37:29I don't know. I don't know. But also more than that, just on the algo side, it's like, yeah, we're running tons of machine learning models. Does AI kind of change what we do there? I don't think so. right so i think it's a for our business a bit of a a mix of things yes of course we're going to developers will get more productive and you know the same benefits will accrue to to us as other companies on that um recommendation engines will get better for the users but is it like a hundred x step change in how we do things i i don't i don't know makes sense how do you how do you think about it? I don't know.

1:38:13Look, I do think that it actually makes me more comfortable with the business not knowing how it's going to impact because it feels that the moat is like not going to get disrupted. I just don't see robots going up elevators and giving food to people and back anytime soon. Anytime soon. Or even if we have self-driving cars, you still need a person to kind of go and like, you know, like deliver the thing. And yeah, you know, one of the things we talk a lot about at Deliveroo was like when we were looking at sort of like ground vehicles versus aerial vehicles in terms of autonomous. One of the things you think about is like, OK, so an aerial vehicle will get stuff to you much faster, right?

1:38:58And it can drop it in front of you. But then the payload's really low, right? Right. Because so you can't really do groceries. If you're a ground vehicle, your payload can be high. But again, today we deliver to your door. I'm offering you experience on a ground vehicle where you have to go outside of your house to go get it. Way less comfortable. Way less comfortable. But maybe you get the price low enough where it's it's doable. But what I do think, and I'm curious to see your view on this, is that I think that the gig economy, whatever we call it, will be the definitely default job for people who get displaced by AI.

1:39:35So it feels to me, if I were to make a bet, that the cost of delivery goes down because people are just more supply in the labor market, and therefore the demand increases. That would be my bullish guess, I guess. What do you think? I don't know. um hard to know how governments will respond um you know to to sort of more wealth inequality um and sort of labor market displacement happening you know at an accelerated level i i don't think we can assume that the status quo of government responses will will will persist but assuming no government but i just can't assume that i just can't see a world in which people are gonna i Maybe over like three years, yeah, but like a little bit longer term?

1:40:25I don't know. Yeah, that's fair. I think it's kind of, you know, be interesting. That's fair. That's fair. And to be fair, I would say the level of government intervention in Europe compared to the U.S. is probably also slightly different. It's quite high. Yeah, yeah. It's quite high. Exactly. Have you had European people on yet? No, just started right now, but very recently. You're going to get John in as a guest? You're going to get John Elkin? Yeah. Him and I chatted, we chatted for quite a bit on that Sequoia conference. And like one of the, his argument is like, Europe should just focus on what it's good at.

1:40:59Like healthcare and like renewables and kind of like, it is what it is in the US and China. And I'm kind of like, dude, the Europe's going to miss out again. Missed out on smartphones, missed out on internet, missed out on cloud, missed out on, and going to miss out on AI again. And like the response is, well, okay, let's, let's focus on like healthcare, obviously a giant field. But I think if Europe wants to succeed, they're frankly going to have to be more interventionist in a way that's like anti-capitalist, but like, I don't really see how there's another solution unless you become, you know, a subordinate vassal state to the United States and China.

1:41:41Well, which now I think seeing of all the whole tariff stuff, you can see that it's not a great position to be. It's not a great position to be in, right, if you're Europe, right? And Europe outsourced its mechanism for information dissemination to what they thought was a friendly nation state, right? The US. And I don't think the US is neither friendly or not friendly, but the point is someone's got the leverage, right? And they're going to use it. Yeah, man. It's, you know, it's like, uh, we, we learned this with big marketplaces, right? Like you get scale, scale, scale, and eventually you take the take rate up.

1:42:17That's what it is. That's what it is. Right. And, and he's doing that. Um, and that probably will continue. Right. Yeah. So what do you do? You, you just say, okay, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm going to be a subordinate or you kind of come up with a radically different way of doing things. Right. The problem is that like a lot of the things that you need to do in order to foster real innovation, that's not just protectionism, probably means changing stuff up in the labor laws, which is kind of like a sacred cow. I agree. But let's look at China, for instance, right? Like China said in 2010 or 08, whenever it was, you're not coming in Facebook, Amazon, Google, not in the way.

1:42:56Because we care too much about controlling the message to our people, right? So you will never do that, right? and i think people were like well that's not fair that's not fair well fair or not the innovation coming out of china is ridiculous right so i mean obviously a very different kind of thing 1.4 billion people central you know um command and control but like probably europe is not one country too right and that's the point right that's the point like it's not one country it's a bunch of people who were at killing each other nonstop 90 years ago, 80 years ago, right? And so speak different languages, languages, and just think very differently.

1:43:40But I'm, I really hope I really hope, you know, the UK and Europe figure out maybe a slightly different path, because the path that I think we're on is a tough one. Right. And as we get into the final here, I want to talk a little bit about just personal, right? But like one of the things I think we chatted over the years was the personal toll they're running Deliverer take on you and your personal life and all that. I'm curious on any reflections you had on that. Look, I think when people tell you – one reflection I have is this. When people tell you I've sacrificed so much, I've sacrificed this, I've sacrificed X, Y, Z for the company, I think that's a bit of bullshit in my mind, right?

1:44:21You haven't sacrificed shit. You did it because you wanted to do it. Now, the consequences of you doing what you want may be X, Y, and Z. But you build a company because you love what you do, right? Now, there are days when it sucks and there's years when it sucks maybe even, right? But you're doing it because you love it. And that would be my takeaway on this stuff. The toils, sorry, you said toils, right? The toils, the tiredness that the sort of maybe, you know, diminished relationships or whatever, those are consequences of you doing something you really wanted to do though. And I think that's the part that, you know, founders should remember.

1:45:01And I think that's got to be the case because if you don't love what you do day to day and building, then don't do it. Do you think that if there's a level of balance, let's put it like that, people can say, I think it's hard to be a founder with real work-life balance, but it's a spectrum. It's not a binary thing where you better have or not have it. Do you think that would you change the balance if you had to go back? I think it depends on when. I do not think there should be any balance in the beginning. I don't think it's possible. I don't even think in the first five years there can be any balance.

1:45:38But later on, sure. You know, you hire great people. You figure out what you want to focus on. You're better at communications and management at that point, right? You kind of know what matters and what doesn't. You can make it work. But the beginning, I don't know, man. I don't think there should be any balance. And now - How do you feel? I think it's always like a like for me it always felt like a multiple sprints where there were pockets of like resting if that makes sense yeah like imagine like it's like a merit the way I view it is like it's a marathon where like you're sprinting and resting for a little bit and sprinting and resting sprinting and resting and for me those little moments of recovery helped me kept going, you know, with all the energy.

1:46:29Fair. So I will say something that's controversial on Silicon Valley land, but I took, I think I took three weeks or four weeks of vacation every year. And I thought it was great. I think like, you know, I took four for July week, Thanksgiving, and between Christmas and New Year's, you know, two weeks. And I didn't think it hurt the company at all. It was mostly like closed. But in the beginning though? Yeah, I think since the beginning. Fair enough. And that allowed me to not to work most weekends, you know, kind of throughout the year. And like I said in the beginning, like there are so many different paths to success and failure.

1:47:06And what works for one person may not work for another and vice versa. I mean, that is absolutely the case. If I have one big takeaway, it's probably that too. 100%, man. And this is what I learned kind of interview. I always try to draw patterns. And like the conclusion that I got was that, dude, our at this level of success, it's so rare, you know, that there's, it is already the exception in every single way. Yeah. You know, you can draw some patterns, but like, you know, it's so different how people get to where they are. Does that make sense? Yeah, totally, man. And there's a lot of serendipity in this and you have to be ready to take advantage of luck, right?

1:47:45but i mean there's no question i feel enormously lucky totally totally totally you just closed deal you know you're not ceo deliver anymore i'm not any any thoughts and what's what's ahead for you i'll figure it out um i'm not like a super chill guy so i'm sure i'll come up with something you deserve it and uh you know as i told you make sure it takes some some time off i will man and thank you for doing this this has been a lot of fun and like it's been amazing kind of knowing you for a while too. I feel like our one-on-one conversations are exactly the same as we're doing here. Exactly. It really is the same thing.

1:48:23It is, which makes it fun. So Will, thank you so much for doing this, man. Thanks, man. I appreciate it. Thanks to our friends at Atomic Growth for helping with production and distribution.