How Did Deliveroo Become Worth £2.9Bn?

0:03I was the delivery guy for like a year. And I remember this, so this must have been kind of a month in, right? So we're talking March 13th. I remember it being really cold then. It was like negative two. It was unseasonably cold. And I'm doing deliveries. And at this point, it's still me and Greg, right? And it's not like we built any visualization of our backend system. So I didn't really understand what was happening on any order. So I would be on the, I'd be on the scooter. Greg would be like talking to me, right? And he was in Chicago. So he's like remote. And I'd be answering customer service calls at the same time.

0:43So I'm on the scooter delivering food, answering customer service calls, talking to Greg. And remember, at some point, Greg just goes, hey, he's like, dude, you know, this order is going to be late. You got to like pick this up and like hurry up. And because nothing was super automated at that point. But I was like, I just was like, I remember being really pissed off. I was like, hey, hey, I'm on the street delivering food. Okay. I'm also answering customer service calls. I don't know what you're doing, right? And so I like, you know, we had a little bit of an argument. And I get home and I'm just really pissed off.

1:16And picture this. So I have this scooter helmet on, right? I'm wearing a ton of clothes because it's cold. I get in, I'm cold. And it's just me in there. It's this little flat I had with my flatmate. And for some reason, the scooter helmet, I don't know why. I couldn't take it off. It's like stuck on my head. I just remember sitting there being like, what am I doing? I remember that because I just graduated from, you know, one of the best, you know, business schools in the U.S. called Wharton. You know, I was delivering food every day. Right. And so Forrest, my flatmate, he worked at this big investment fund.

1:54And so he just said, like, what are you doing exactly? Right. But I never had self-doubt. I had frustration. Never had self-doubt. Are you seeing the bigger picture, though? Are you seeing a day when tens of thousands of people a day are ordering with delivery? No. That was never in your head? No. Comes later. Not at that point. Not at that point. It was never sort of like, look, like the way I'm motivated was like, I want everyone's experience to go well. It was never about, can I sort of like envision a giant business? It was all about the consumer, right? It's all about the merchants, all about the revenue.

2:30How do I make this thing work? that's that's that's all i cared about you know i actually remember this so so i i have a very close friend of mine he was visiting me that first few months and he's a finance guy patrick great guy and he goes so what's your exit strategy and i'm like what right at the beginning yeah because that's how finance guys think right he's like all right if you exit at this price in three years then this is the kind of you know thought i'm like i don't think about that at all i'm like I'm like, if I create a good business, then hopefully the options will be out there. But like, all I'm thinking about is, do we have the best selection?

3:10Are the deliveries fast? Right? What does our UI look like? Right? Like how, you know, are people motivated at work? You know, those things, you know, that's what I think about. But I really, really fundamentally always think about everything through the lens of the consumer. That's what, and I'm not saying that's right or wrong. It's just how I do it. The other thing I've learned over 12 years is there's many different ways to approach a problem and there's definitely not one right answer why why does why does that resonate because it's sort of like there was a real there was a lot of emotion there right there was a lot of been in in this for a month and a half yeah utter frustration almost helplessness sense of suffocating both physical and and metaphorically right and and just being like ah Did you start crying?

3:55No, no. But I was frustrated. And then I was just like lying there. Just like, what am I doing? Or it was that kind of sense. Like, what am I doing with myself? So why didn't you at that point think, I'm done with this? Just not, don't have it in me, you know? Like, not built that way, I guess. And just motivated by like, okay, like I can make it better, right? the experiences people had today they can be better tomorrow right and how when you're in that state did you get yourself out of it i lied there for a while then i'm pretty sure i went to the pub with my fly with a helmet on still he cut it off still couldn't figure out what was it was it the strap i don't know man but that thing was not cool like i couldn't get it off so he cut the he cut the strap off.

4:46This was literally 12 years ago today. So yeah, so let me think here. Yeah, 12 years ago today, Greg and I, we'd been setting up Deliveroo sort of, you know, onboarding restaurants, you know, building all the technology for probably two to three months before that. Well, really, we incorporated the company in August 12. But then we had about, yeah, call it a five month, you know, setup. But for the last month, we were testing, you know, the technology, onboarding restaurants, trying to make sure all of this worked. And then we got the, got the first order. Now I knew who actually placed the order.

5:23Cause obviously we didn't have any customers. So it was a friend of mine, um, Aneta. Right. Yeah. And the restaurant, Rosso Pomodoro on the Fulham road, still there, uh, Neapolitan pizza place. And, um, you know, so we were kind of like camped out there waiting for this thing to happen. She placed it, you know, with her credit card on her laptop, heard the noise. And I don't know if you guys ever hear the Deliveroo kind of, I can't even do it. It's a very distinct noise when an order comes in. We hear it. Like what? Do-ding! Like, I fucking started the company. I can't even do it. But something like that, right?

5:59So where are you standing at this point? I'm standing outside the restaurant and the staff are like anticipating it. So if you said to them, like, this is a big moment, like we're together, we're launching something here. We didn't think about it as a big moment. We were just like, let's get this, you know, let's get this thing started. But the restaurant, it's super tiny. It's got this giant Neapolitan oven that's like super hot, right? Piles all over it, counter and everyone's from Naples in there, right? So I got to know them pretty well over the course last month. And so, you know, joke and stuff like that.

6:30But I was outside and then these guys were like, you know, get in here. So we hear the noise. They press accept, starts printing out the order. And I was like, wow, this is our first order. So I am obviously working at the company, but I'm also the delivery guy, right? So I've got my scooter outside. So I learned how to ride a scooter for, you know, a couple days before. Bought a scooter, 600 pounds. You know, got the box on it. And, yeah, there we go. So we're like, you know, here this thing. They make two pizzas. What was the order? Yeah, so it was definitely a margarita. I remember that. And I think there was some sort of like arancini, something like that.

7:15Yeah. So I get the pizzas and the arancini. I put it in the box. And that used to live on Sydney Street in Chelsea. So I just quickly went over there, got it out. Now, it turns out I made a big mistake. I had so embarrassing I put the pizza in like like this way so pizza sideways in the scooter yeah like like a record like an LP you know I wonder whether you were overcome with excitement or nerves at this point because that's not like that's quite an unusual thing to do with the pizza um unfortunately it happens more than you'd think and it's one of the banes of our pizza existence you know pizzas being yes it was done you set the tone i set the tone embarrassingly so really funny so we get this thing she's hungry i'm like hey annette and she's still a great friend of mine today and she we're you know we chat about this we go in my co-founder greg is like with me i think was he on the scooter with me oh i probably shouldn't have done that yeah but but i think he was you know those one one two five cc scooters they can sit two people but then if you have the cardboard box in the back you shouldn't sit but he just kind of like got on greg hopped on i just i think so i'm pretty sure that's what happened yeah and then we just drove over to annette's house right and then so we bring this thing in open it up she's like i'm not eating this she's like this is uh did you turn this on its side so we made a margarita pizza into a calzone basically so i ended up eating it because she didn't want to eat it um so i delivered it she placed the order.

8:51I ate the food. That was it. That was our first order. As you're munching down on a margarita that's become a calzone, what are you thinking about your business? Are you full of excitement or nerves or? Yo, I mean, like the only thing I was really thinking about is how do we get more customers at that point, right? I'm like, okay, so the tech works. Like, how do we get this thing going, right? There was very little sort of reflecting upon that. It was sort of like, I've got a lot of friends here in this neighborhood. How am I to convince them all to order? And then I was chatting to Annette about this and she's like, well, Will, to be fair, you delivered something completely upside down.

9:27So this isn't really going to work unless you figure out a way not to do that. But that was all that was in my head. Like, how do we get more restaurants on? How do we get more customers? I want you to take us into the restaurant the moment that your order comes in, right? What is your emotion at that point? I'm feeling excited, right? Because like this is the first, it's like, okay, so we've done a bunch of test orders. They're all fine. This is a live customer that actually wants our product, right? Which is different than testing things. And I'm like, okay, I'm really excited. The restaurant is really excited.

10:04So there's like six dudes, like six Neapolitan guys, like, you know, making pizzas. And they're all like, oh, I remember. They thought this whole thing was magic, right? Because they were like, wait a minute. So someone does something on a laptop and then this tablet magically beeps. Remember, this is 2013, right? So tablets, smartphones, all these things hadn't really reached vast adoption yet. But the fact these devices were connected to each other, like they thought I was a magician. Really. They were like, oh wait, so I do this and then the tablet rings and this thing magically prints out.

10:42Yeah. So it was excitement. It was sort of wonder. It was real sort of like a sense of like, this is real, right? We got a real customer here. And I just remember feeling this, I feel every day, like a sense of responsibility, right? Like we're in it. We're not letting people down, right? Of course, I then delivered it completely upside down, but that was it, right? That's how I felt. So as you and Greg are standing there, and at this point, how long have you two been in the planning, in the process, dreaming of this moment, getting ready for this moment? You know, in a way, our whole lives, right?

11:18We've been friends since we were 10, right? So we've been like, we discovered computers together, right? We're talking 2400, you know, dial-up modem. We're talking, you know, BBSs for those people that know what that is. You use net groups that the sort of, we were online before the visualization of the internet, before Netscape. Yeah, we've been discussing business ideas for a really, really long time. And so in a way, it's kind of like that was this was it. And do you remember what you were talking about as you waited for that order to come in? I think he was like laughing and being like, OK, I really hope this works because this is pretty important.

11:58And he just kept telling me, he's like, just, you know, just don't mess up the delivery. Right. And I remember he was very anxious that that the rest of the day, restaurant staff would do exactly what they were supposed to, because, you know, at that point, it was pretty rudimentary. So it was like, okay, it's going to come into the tablet, it's going to print out approximately 10 minutes before you think the order's ready, press this button, and a rider should get there, right? So there was, it was more manual back then. And so that whole, he was pretty obsessed with that process, right? But look, at that point, none of us were thinking, is this a big business?

12:33Is this going to be successful? We were like, let's get this to work, and focus really on the short term. It's one of those strange things where when you're the person that didn't come up with the idea, once it's happened, you think, how did I not come up with the idea? Could you take us to the moment that you... Because I always remember looking at a local fish and chip shop thinking it'd be cool for that to be delivered to my house, but there's literally no way that can ever be made possible. Yeah. You found the answer. Yeah. Yeah, so for me, I've been obsessed about this idea since about 2004.

13:07And the reason is, so out of college, I worked in New York on Wall Street. And I had to order every meal to the office, basically. So I was just constantly working. And in New York, you can actually get anything you want delivered, whether it's high end, low end. It doesn't matter. And the reason actually really has nothing to do with technology back then. It was just the fact New York City is so dense, right? So it was very easy for someone to deliver stuff. So everyone in New York before the internet used to order delivery. and they still do, right? You just call up. I used to live above a bodega, six floors up.

13:42I'd call them up, be like, can you bring up a chopped cheese or like, you know, like a chicken parm hero? That's just what you did in New York, right? I moved here in 04 and I'm working in Canary Wharf and I'm asking the team like, hey, what are we doing for dinner, right? Because I'm working late. Everyone just went to the Tesco and the Canary Wharf mall and they would get the microwave meals. And I remember day three, I was like, come on. Like London's a great restaurant city. Why are you guys eating microwave ready meals? Right. And so that's when I was like obsessed about the idea because I had experienced convenience and then it was taken away from me.

14:18I know. Sad story, really. I'm sure people are going to cry about it. Surprise you, left you. Yeah. But the reality is like, you're like, okay, I want this thing. Right. And so I thought about it in 04. Like, why doesn't London have this thing? I didn't realize like why, but the idea was there in my head at that point. And what did Deliveroo look like in your head when you first came up with the idea? Because like we've just said, these days it's an app. It wouldn't have been then. So what was the end goal or what was the vision in your... Yeah, the vision honestly was sort of like, okay, I think this works in London.

14:49I think it's independent restaurants, right? I mean, now we sell... I got a wrench. What do you guys call it? A spanner here? Yeah, a spanner, yeah. Yeah, I got a spanner in seven minutes from Screwfix on Deliveroo the other day because I needed for my son, we needed to assemble his tricycle, right? Got seven minutes. And then, you know, you can get flowers. You know, we do huge amount of groceries today, right? We're bigger than a Cotto on a daily order basis now in the UK, right? So like big businesses, I wouldn't have thought about any of that stuff, right? Wouldn't have thought about any of that stuff.

15:22I certainly wouldn't have predicted all of the sort of like, you know, the stuff around the gig economy, you know, the stuff around the internet competition, like all of these things that happened years later, like no way I would have seen that, right? It was all about, hey, I want some good food. I want it in like 25 minutes. Let's make it happen. That was it. And that was the motivation. It was never about, let me start a company because I want it to be big or let me start a company because I want to be the boss. It was all about the consumer. Hard work and luck. Yeah. I don't believe that anything great it happens without hard work.

15:57And I don't believe that we talk about luck often enough. So at that time, what did hard work look like for you back in February 2013? I mean, look, my whole life I've worked pretty hard. I come from an environment that's really important. Your version of pretty hard might be different to other people's. How would you explain what it looks like for you? You know, it's hard work, but it's enjoyable. It's sort of like utter and complete obsession with one thing for like you know the minute you wake from the minute you go to bed right you can call it hard work but i actually just loved it right it was just one of these things where it's like okay we're building something this is really cool this little thing's getting better day to day so you get quick feedback loops but it was all all consuming all consuming for i mean still is but maybe not at the same extent as it was the early days but Yeah, all concerned.

16:53Every part of you was invested in making this successful. Every part. That's all I thought about. I'd be out with friends and I'd be like monitoring dashboards and, you know, they'd be like, hey, we're at the pub. Why do you have your laptop out? That's really annoying. And I'm like, sorry, I need to figure out what's going on. Right. So just obsession, I'd say. Was there a cost to that hard work around that time? I didn't, you know, my personal life maybe wasn't great, right? I didn't leave the M25 for two years. You were just... I was doing deliveries every day. I was like kind of, you know, doing my thing.

17:32And I wasn't particularly social, right? That's all right. You know, and I am a social person, but now it's a bit different. There's this just great lesson, I think, for a lot of people, though, that a short-term period of sacrifice can actually lead to a huge long tail of... Yeah, delayed gratification and all that. But here's the thing though. Are they really sacrificing anything? Like people that kind of tell you, wow, you know, we have these big sacrifices. It's like, no, you loved what you did. Did you actually sacrifice something? Did you actually just enjoy doing that more than the rest of your life?

18:07And therefore, was it a sacrifice? You know? Do you think you sacrificed anything? At that point, probably not. You know? At that point, probably not. Now, I think in the abstract, you could say, well, you know, you could have had a better social life. You could have been doing X, Y, Z. You could have gone to, done a few trips to, whatever. But, like, if you value what you're doing more than that, then it's not a sacrifice in my mind. Right? But people always, I think business leaders get, you know, they get caught up in this. I gave everything. I gave everything. In retrospect, maybe you feel that way.

18:41But at the time, you know, did you? yeah it all comes down to priority as well and i think society makes you think that the most important things is human connection taking holidays not overworking yeah building relationships with people well if the thing that you love more than any of that is building your business then if you're working on 18 hours a day the sacrifice doesn't exist now now i totally agree with you, but I think it depends for how long, right? You do that for a really long time, like 20 years. I don't, that's probably not great. But in the beginning, you're creating something, you know, call it five years or whatever.

19:20You're never going to succeed unless you do that, right? And you have to love what you're doing, I think, as a secondary step. If you hate what you do and you're working nonstop, I don't think you'll succeed. What about the role of luck? People don't like talking about luck because we live in this world where people want to make out that they're the reason for all of their success. And I think luck removes the ownership they have of their success. Yeah, I think it's so important, but it sort of depends like how we talk about luck, right? Because I'm lucky that, you know, I was friends with Greg when we were 10.

19:56I'm lucky that my parents taught me how to work hard, right? I'm lucky because I came to the UK and I randomly thought I'd stay a year and then I'm here. I'm a British citizen and all of that. But I think to me, what it's about is, is luck in and of it's, it's not like someone just drops a bunch of money on you. That that's not really luck. I think for me though, it's sort of like recognizing and seeing opportunities that are fortuitous and making sure your eyes are open to those things. Right. That that's kind of how I think about it. Right. But you, you, before the show started, you were talking to me of how you got, you know, your brinks, right?

20:33I mean, part of that's luck, but you took advantage of those things. I don't mean that in a negative way. I mean that in a very positive way. What could you share with people about the kind of mindset that helps you to make the most of those opportunities? I think curiosity, right? Openness, right? Just being in different, maybe even uncomfortable situations where you're constantly being exposed to new things those are important if you're just in your house by yourself and you never leave that's probably tougher right now the online world's a bit different you can certainly meet a lot of people that way but yeah i think open-mindedness yeah so i i want to delve into this idea that you you know you have to have a a mind that allows you to explore um and be adventurous and be curious because your life now is so different to the life that you were living when you were the guy on the scooter shooting around London in the dark and delivering stuff.

21:27Before we talk about how Deliveroo looks today and some of the, maybe we can go to a much more up-to-date room. Yeah. Do you miss those early days? I do, very much. Why? You know, it's just a few people, right? And you're all just, you have this common goal. It's not like we don't have a common goal now, but you don't have to be very deliberate about kind of explaining it to people, right? You all know, and you're all feeling incredibly sort of tied in together, right? There's 10 of you in a room, right? And you're all friends, right? And, you know, no one has any sort of ulterior motives or anything.

22:06You're all just in it together. And that part is just amazing, right? That part of being a team in those early days. Did you have a freedom then that you don't have now? um hmm

22:24I think so I think I can probably say I probably was more open about what I said you know um I think now I'm I'm I'm almost subconsciously um filtering um more than more than I would have before right because I've learned that you know there's some upside I'm pretty straightforward don't get me wrong but I think there's there's no upside in saying everything, I feel. But the stakes are much higher for you now. Yeah, they are. So I'm interested in what the world looks like. Would you take us into a much more up-to-date room in your Deliveroo career that perhaps required you to lean into some very different skills that way back in 2013, when you're the guy with a helmet stuck in your head, you didn't need to use?

23:05Well, I was going to talk about that CMA thing. Is that okay? Yeah. This is the Amazon antitrust thing. Explain for for people that know very little about this world, let's do it. All right. So 2019, we were raising money. Now, at this point, you know, we're competing against all the big internet companies as we do today, right? And at this point in time, all these companies are losing a lot of money. Everyone's sort of going in the land grab mode. Including you? Including us. So we're no different, right? But we're kind of the UK company. And then you're competing against the Americans and the Chinese, right?

23:38So kind of a different dynamic. And so, you know, we were like, we need to raise some money, right? And then ended up raising money from Amazon. They became a 14 % shareholder or 16 % shareholder. And so I remember Chantel, who's our general counsel, she's like, okay, I'm just going to, you know, we're going to tell the CMA. The CMA is called the Competition and Markets Authority, right? So they're the antitrust regulator in the UK. So when you say Amazon were taking a 14 % stake in the liver root, from a financial perspective, what does that look like? I think it was like$600 billion or something like that.

24:16I don't remember off the top of my head. But yeah, I mean, they became a big shareholder in the company. But importantly, not a controlling shareholder, right? They were a shareholder like any other shareholder. The whole CMA process, that antitrust process, there were a lot of moments, I would say, when, you know, we thought they would just block the deal. And if they had blocked the deal, we would have been out of money. We would have been bankrupt. And, you know, everything that we had built would have been, I don't know if for not is the right word because you might take away some positive things, but we wouldn't be operating.

24:53We'd be done. You know, we'd be shit out of luck, right? Right. So that that bothered me hugely. Right. The reason why I ask, though, is because this is requiring something whole, wholly new from you, I guess, when the business gets this big, which is the ability to not get overwhelmed by the stakes. Yeah. How did you not get overwhelmed by how how big the risks and the rewards were at this stage? I think really just focusing on the users. Right. Like, how do I create a better experience for the user? You didn't like sit there thinking, man, if this goes wrong, this is so huge now. This is going to cost me everything.

25:31No, I didn't think about that. I'm just like thinking about like how can we create a better experience? That's it. That's it. Like how do we drive the company towards profitability? How do we do this? No, but I'm not thinking about that much. I wonder whether that's a bit of a safety mechanism for you then just to lean back into the thing that made what Deliveroo is today. But you asked me like, okay, so like what's true today versus what's true in the beginning? It is that obsession, right? And I think that maybe it's a safety mechanism, but maybe it's something else too. Was there a moment in this process where you really did have to face up to the reality that this might kill delivery?

26:09Tell me about that. Well, it's just that sense of helplessness, right? Like it's not, I can't influence this, right? I can't do anything. It's a bunch of anonymous people I don't know abstracting about some hypothetical in their head and how that will impact the hundreds of thousands of people that work with us, the millions of customers, the hundreds of thousands of merchants. And then all the work that, you know, we'd put in, I'd put in, would it have been for nothing, right? I think that would have been incredibly hard. Well, about a week later, you know, we get this message from the CMA saying, look, we're going to have to look into this.

26:47deal. And we're like, okay, no big deal. By the way, we didn't get the money yet, right? So this is a pretty key point. And then eventually, they just ended up launching this giant investigation into the company and Amazon's investment into the company, which was really, really kind of nuts to me because the company's not a competitor. They have a 14 % stake. This should have not even been a thing the CMA even looked at, right? So we're in this tailspin now, right, where we thought we had this money. We thought they would be a strategic partner. And the CMA is sort of like, well, you know what?

27:32We're going to review this. Could take 18 months. We don't really know, So, right, and we are competing against the most aggressive companies in the world that are burning cash, right? And so you ask me, what are the skills that I needed to do? Well, A, I needed to be completely calm, knowing that this thing, we could have lost the company over this, right? Because we would have just run out of money. So I needed to be calm. I needed to motivate our employees about everything. And they can read stuff in the media. I needed to be completely silent to people about really what was going on, right?

28:09Because there's no advantage in like some people knowing because you don't want to demotivate them. And for me personally, right, I had to find deep wells of inner strength in this because that, you asked me, do I get down or nervous? I really don't. That was 18 months of just complete, complete sort of jitteriness, right? Real anxiety. And you said that you had to dig into a kind of a reserve that you didn't even realize. Yeah, I just and I don't know if I could even do it again. Right. But like, you know, the fact that every day you're thinking this doesn't go through this sort of singular thing, then we're fucked.

28:49We're fucked. And then I thought very much like all the effort I put in, is it for not all the effort my colleagues put in? Is it for nothing? Right. And our competitors, of course, are loving it. right they're loving it you know they're like ah like you know they yeah you should definitely like shut this thing you know you shut this down and not make it happen and all that right so it was uh just just being calm and sort of going to work every day with this weight on us and it wasn't just me it was you know my colleagues you know Chantelle, Faye, Joe like all of us we you know, really all in it together.

29:29It was very hard. And how did you not allow yourself to become fearful? Because, you know, you said at the beginning, the whole delivery world was created from you, not seeing how the future looks, but just dealing with the one thing in front of you in that moment, which is the order, the first order, the first delivery. I was fearful, right? At that moment, I was. I was fearful. I was anxious. You know, I'm not someone who ever has trouble sleeping but i'd say in those moments i did i did when you were lying there in bed at night and everything seems worse right in the black of night yeah what was the fear that it was gone right that it'd be all gone right and then all all of that all of these things that we've been trying to do for so many years would just disappear overnight we were it was bankruptcy right that's what i was fearing and are you the kind of person that shares that or do you keep within?

30:24I don't share it. I did share with the friend, you know? So no one related to the business really. Like the people that were with me in the room, they knew, right? We would talk about it a lot, you know? So Joe, Chantel, I guess Adam at that point. So like we would chat about it, but mostly I just kept it in. How did it resolve itself? Well, month 18, they cleared it, right? um 18 months yeah 18 months yeah by the way in internet in technology 18 can you imagine if like you look at open ai or deep seek and anything yeah how quickly these things change 18 months is an eternity an eternity right you're still angry about it yeah yeah definitely definitely i mean i'm not like angry as in like i think about it all the time but you know when people bring it up and obviously you know michelle our comms um colleague outside she's like can you not talk about this thing because a it's you talked about a lot and b you seem kind of angry and that's not great for podcast but yes i'm angry so you know but that's okay right because the world is about sharing the truth with people yeah i think i'm not motivated by anger right um like that's not really like some people i think are hyper motivated by spite or anger i mean that's i don't think it's great but everyone's got their own thing i'm not motivated by it, but it gets me angry.

31:52So as we sit here today and you reflect on the Will who started this business all those years ago, why do you keep going? What is it that excites you now? It's the same thing as in the very beginning, right? I want to just create an incredible customer experience, right? I want, and I just find it so interesting. So there's the sort of curiosity side, right? This market's changing so much. There's so many new things we add every single day. So there's curiosity. That's huge. I think there's competitiveness, right? I want to do better than other people. I just do. There's the sort of ambition, right?

32:29Which is like we started in this category, it's a lot bigger. And, you know, we want to be the best that we can. It's sort of responsibility, right? You know, to my colleagues, you know, to our merchants, to our riders, to our customers, to our investors, right? There's responsibility. And, yeah, like it's fun, right? I mean, that's the other thing we talked about. Like what is the sacrifice you've made in the beginning if you really enjoyed what you were doing more than the other set of opportunities that you could have done in their place? And so, you know, it's fun as well. So it's probably a combination of those two things.

33:08But for me, yeah, when I think about what excites me about people at the company, it is that curiosity, that consumer obsession, that high standards, relentlessness, competitiveness. I value that stuff a lot. I love it. Well, look, for someone that doesn't reflect very often, thank you so much for reflecting, thinking about some of those seminal moments, taking us into not just one room, but numerous rooms where it happened. and I guess most of all reminding everyone that business and life is not a linear curve. Nothing, nothing's linear, you know? So you just gotta, yeah. And if you really believe in something, go for it, you know?

33:47Thanks so much. Thank you. Good man. If you can just take a couple of seconds to subscribe, then of course you can get each episode directly to your inbox. And honestly, for you to subscribe, it makes such a difference to our show. It means we can grow and it means we can attract more incredible guests like George Heaton, Rory Sutherland or Richard Branson to come and join us. And don't forget, you can also check out my Room Where It Happened newsletter. Just track me down on LinkedIn. Thanks for listening. Thanks for watching. And I'll see you next time.