Wolt CEO and Slush chair Marianne Vikkula on building a superapp, leadership lessons and Slush’s secret sauce

0:00Hello, dear listeners, Amy here. Just a note before we get into today's podcast, we are currently between studios, which means our sound might not be quite as pristine as usual. So our apologies for that. Hello, as usual, it's your host, Amy Lewin. Joining me today from Helsinki is Marianne Vikkula, head of Delivery Unicorn, Walt. Marianne joined Walt, one of Europe's only super, only eight years ago. And last October, took over as head of the company when co-founder and former CEO Miki Kusi took on a new role as CEO of Deliveroo, which was, like Walt, acquired by the American delivery giant DoorDash.

0:39But that's not all she has on her plate. She's also the chair of Slush, the iconic European startup conference, and a board member at Finnish design company Marimeko, which for anyone who's watching the podcast, you'll notice she is repping some clothing today. So Marianne, welcome to the Sifted Podcast. Happy to be here. So Walt began life delivering restaurant food to customers in Helsinki and over time has expanded into delivering groceries, medicine, electronics and offering services like revenue based financing. What is next? we're obviously very excited about what we are building if we think about what are we actually focusing on it's very largely been going beyond the restaurants building the shopping mall in your pocket so technically think about your city where you live in anything local commerce be it your local grocery store local pharmacist local florist we want to help these very commonly smbs to sell online and not just through our own platform, but offering all kinds of tools for these entrepreneurs and merchants to reach a wider audience, which also means helping them build their own channels, as an example.

1:56And then the other major focus area for us for growth has been subscription. So offering a loyalty program to our consumers across the 30 markets that we operate in and offering savings to them. So do they pay to be WALT Plus members or how does that kind of subscription work and how do you see that evolving over time? To simplify, yes. The program has a monthly fee that depends on the market or the country where you live in. But then through different kinds of partnerships, you might also receive this program free of charge as part of your membership. to, for example, a credit card you have, like Revolut, or another telecom membership.

2:42Interesting. And so you just mentioned Revolut, and you also earlier mentioned your plan to kind of help small businesses with services they might need, as well as helping them reach new customers via the delivery platform. I mentioned revenue-based financing in the intro, But what are some of the other aspects there? Would you go into banking? Would you go into having your own phone contracts? You know, what's the limits for Walt when it comes to this shopping mall in your pocket vision? So effectively anything that is local commerce on the long run is interesting for us. Right now, we've been focused on, as I said earlier, building tools for merchants to have a, you could almost call it a 360 operating system.

3:35And that includes, for example, us building storefronts. So tools for restaurants or grocery stores or florists to set up their own online shops for orders and also getting access to delivery. And then you have reference to capital. So offering our merchants access to financing to, for example, open a new location. And then obviously something you didn't mention that we're also exploring is autonomy, especially in logistics. So how do we then deliver things? We've been testing drones. Our U.S. parent has a lab where we also invest our own autonomous vehicles. And that's very exciting. so we could see walt delivery robots on the streets sometime soon actually we have been testing for some plan already here in finland where i'm based in a few cities and if you would walk by the streets of helsinki you'd actually fairly likely see a blue wall colored free robot where where else might the robots come next i imagine there are some markets that are more complicated to launch them in than others?

4:51Well, we've been building these technologies together with our partners. And I would say we've been happy to start from a market like Finland that, for example, in the winter had very snowy conditions. And they're definitely not the easiest of markets to make logistics like this work. So I'm quite confident that if we're able to make this work in northern parts of Europe, This will also work out in southern parts or central parts of the Europe. Interesting. I know you're not live in London, but I'd be intrigued to see if a little delivery robot got vandalized here or not. And you're also moving into some micromobility partnerships, aren't you?

5:35Why does that make sense as part of the offering? Yes. So we talked earlier about our subscription program, WorldPlus, that offers benefit savings for our customers. What we're seeing is that people are looking for convenience into their everyday lives. And we want to build our programs also be lifestyle programs. And hence, we're going to look beyond just offering affordability on our platform to offering affordability on different kinds of use cases. And obviously, urban mobility is very close to the USK world originally, and it makes sense for us to work together. So hence, we're now launching a partnership with Jot across multiple markets where users can get a free trial for them on our platform.

6:22So I'm super excited about the simple, practical benefit that hopefully gives both savings, but then also just joy to everyday lives. So is that both scooters and e-bikes that people will get as part of that partnership? Okay. And how does it work in terms of, so there you're obviously partnering with another company. In other instances, you build technologies or you add new services in-house. How do you figure out when to build in sales versus work with others versus perhaps actually acquire another company that would add sort of a new element to the world offering? We obviously assess what's happening both in our industry, but also adjacent industries all the time.

7:14I said earlier, we're basically interested in anything that's local commerce. But then we also acknowledge that we shouldn't build everything ourselves. And when we look at other kind of super apps around the world, I know there's a few in Asia that are kind of looked to as the world leaders. What do they do that you don't, that might make sense to be on your roadmap in the future? Our industry is quite competitive and there is a lot of companies across the world offering different kinds of services. I think trends that I described earlier on going to be a restaurant, building subscription programs, very common amongst everyone.

7:54But then especially if you go to Asia, you'll see that companies like ours have gone much beyond and many of us have gone in Europe. You can take examples from travel. You could take examples of personal banking. You could take examples of even medicine, where some companies like ours have built solutions. Right now, we're not building in this front. Could it be someday? Let's see. But it would definitely clear in Europe, the consumer offering on platforms like ours is not developed where it is, for example, in China. Yeah. And so when a company is as sort of big as well and has, you know, such a sort of deep market share as you do, you're in 30 different countries and you're the leader, correct me if I'm wrong, in quite a lot of them.

8:48What are the main things that could trip you up at this point? Like what are the main risks to a business like yours? i often talk internally about the fact that we keep up with velocity the reality is that the bigger you become the easier it is to slow down and fighting this internal friction of your scale and continue to obsess about the customer obsessed about doing things rather today than tomorrow and continuously raising the bar because the reality is that consumer expectations never go down they only go up so honestly speaking i think us continuing to be very hungry operating like a startup no matter what scale we have is the biggest thing to focus and so how do you do that well then i guess we enter the leaders of the leader's picture of a company like ours we've really tried to emphasize first of all the importance of people people who come and build the next stage who are hungry who want to move fast who are also able to bring focus and there's a lot of people out there I feel like who think that when you're building something you're working on something you have to choose between velocity, quality and then cost compromise on either front but I think what I've seen is that and you have the right people in place, you can get it all at the same time.

10:24You just need to be very clear on what you're focusing on. And then you can build really world-class, very fast, and it can be also fairly affordable for you. The job of a leader is to make it crystal clear where the focus is. And how do you, you know, Walt's over 10 years old. You've presumably got some people who've worked there for a very long time. How do you manage that? How do you kind of continually, I don't know, assess people, make sure they're still the right person to be in the role they're in do you have any i i remember interviewing the ceo of bending spoons there a big italian company and he i don't know how much this is a gimmick but every every year he invites people to apply for his role um and he says that if anyone was sort of you know seemed like a better candidate to him he would happily hand it which sounds like a little bit scary, but also got quite a good thought process, I would say, that anyone, I think it's anyone in the leadership team, could be replaced if someone better came along.

11:24Do you have any kind of things like that internally that sort of really help keep standards high and keep people always pushing themselves? Well, I think that's first of all a fantastic question. And we try and bring this largely, throughout people by growing our people and i'm actually very proud if you look at um the team of world today we've been really a talent writer there's so many people grown with the company taken a lot more important responsibility grown with the company and managed probably get for much further than they ever thought i guess including myself i've never worked at a company that would be bigger than a world.

12:13So it's learning every day. And that's what we're really also looking out for. We're looking for people who have this genius working mind that want to learn. Because the reality is that we are all learning every day. One practice I could also share that I think has been a good learning for us has been that no matter what role we have, we always give it out for internal and external hiring. so we look for talent internally and give people opportunities but at the same time also benchmark what kind of talent would be external and that gives a really good idea of kind of where's the bar for the problems we're solving right now and is the better path not bring new talent or give further opportunity to who we have already today interesting and so you yourself are seven months into your new role because you were chief previously world's chief operating officer what's been the biggest challenge stepping into the the top top spot in some ways my everyday life hasn't drastically changed it was already before responsible for world's business across the work as far as we operate in and a lot of the day-to-day cadences from are we hitting the plan what we should do next are pretty similar to what they used to be What's been added on top, though, is a lot of media, some public affairs, and a lot of ambiguity, I would say.

13:41What I mean by ambiguity is when you look at business and you do A-B tests, it's often quite easy to make decisions. This is the budget. This is the learning we have from the test. If they scale this test, this is how much it costs us. But then on the CEO table, you get more and more decisions that include risks, where it's not clear what's the ultimate decision that we take. You have to take some risks. There's a PR or a policy element related to it. And the way to copy your noise is more often just a juggling call, where you need to have both, pick it out of a skin, know how much risk you can take and when it's the right time not to take a risk.

14:21and one thing we often say here is you need to know as a leader whether the decision you're painting is a one-way door or a two-way door and what we mean by that is that most of the decisions are two-way doors if it's a bad decision you could reverse it if the decision is a decision you should rather make as many decisions as possible and test and if it didn't make sense if it didn't work out reverse but then the decisions that are one-way doors really hard to reverse you very carefully weigh in uh before you make final calls and who who's your sounding board who do you go to to maybe if it's a if it's a one-way door decision more of a judgment call or less you know you know which way is the right one based on data who do you go to is it is it mickey the the previous ceo is it do you have do you have your own network of peers like how how How are you learning that more ambiguous sort of skillset?

15:24So I'm very lucky to indeed continue having me here at Walt and Dordas and believe in it. He's more engaged right now. And on top of that, we've hired a lot of people who are more experienced and better than I am in a lot of different domain, from security to communications, from public affairs to finance. I feel like we actually have a very strong sounding board around that work well together in situations. And so you've also been involved with Slush for over a decade and you've held lots of different roles there from CEO to CFO to board member and now chair. I think a question lots of people always have about Slush is what is its secret sauce?

16:13yeah indeed my first slush was in 2012 so it's two 15 years that i've been engaged one way or the other last 10 years more as a lot of alumni and giving back to the community more than anything else and i think that is actually the secret that the dna of flush is really giving back to the community it's a non-profit student driven movement that's main purpose is to help the world who come forward. And what I've been also really, really proud to see and proud about is, given it's a volunteer movement, there's literally thousands of people every year who volunteer. And what we've seen, at least through my time these 15 years, building slushed is that the culture towards entrepreneurship has completely changed.

17:0815 years ago, not many young people even considered becoming entrepreneurs. A large chunk of young 18-25 year olds, mainly in Finland because the conference is organized, actually consider entrepreneurs as a viable option. Almost half who consider that, so that's exciting. And then the other thing is that the core team of Splat, who actually works year-round building the event, gets tools, skills, the talent needed to go and build their own company. roughly 15 % of Slush alumni have gone to found their old companies. Do you know how many WOL employees were previously involved in Slush? Oh, that's a great question.

17:54I don't have a good number for you, but especially from our early days hires, I mean, people who joined us around the time I didn't, a bunch of people were, including Mickey as a both founder of WOL but also one of the the boundaries of slush and then my predecessor as slush ceo riku also joined waltz we definitely have quite a bit of people and actually it's like the world sounding team large share of them were at least affiliated uh interesting and i think another thing people say about slush is that lots of events sort of lose their relevance after a while how do you think about that at slush how How do you keep it current and keep it an event people want to come to rather than it sort of, you know, it's been going for a long time now, you know, getting past its sell-by date?

18:54The right question is actually a question we talk about with the team every year, all the time. And even with Sloth in the early years, we were a lot about scale and how can we bring more people in. But then down the line, we realized that that's not the right metric. The right metric is not how big you are, but how relevant you are. And we fully shifted focus size to relevancy. And Slush is actually half the size that it wasn't peaked. Just by focusing on being super relevant, of what that has meant for Slush has been raising the level of the people who joined the event. More and more focused on founders every year, bringing in more venture capitalists and other finance institutions to the event, setting up a PE track.

19:47There's so many things to talk about with a local or Slush team on the actual actions they've done to be on that road. But I think the first is just, it was hey relevance the overskate and what about the final question on slashes i feel like there have been criticisms some years that the event has felt too sort of american or you know there's been a real focus on getting investors from over there and founders from over there to this very european event what do you think the right balance is there it's not an easy balance to strike why as we all know Europe still lacks as far as the later stage venture capital and the earlier stage of the Flush Europe even lacked early stage venture capital so the reason for having a bunch of US focused has often been around getting access to capital that's been a big focus and then the other reality has been that there have still been a lot of success stories coming out from the US and we want share those inspiring stories with the European founders.

20:58But on the same plan, I'm also glad to say that you can get this last stages and who's there. There is a lot of European representation across the board, and there's a lot of bubbly wonder European talent that we're super happy to showcase. And final question, because we're out of time, you're a busy lady. What's the next big thing for Walt? Are there some big market expansions coming up? Is it a big new product? What are the next big things on the roadmap? It's really going deeper into the thing that I talked about earlier. Sound, in a way, maybe dull, but at the same time, I'm super excited about it.

21:37Why? I really feel like it's day one for us. So instead of adding the fifth, third, sixth, or the seventh use case right away, doing what we started doing really, really well, Oh, we still have a long way to go. For example, offering a rock glass grocery service, making sure you can get your full CD available for you. All the pharmacists, it's Toy Forest. We're not there yet. Got it. Marianne, thank you so much for joining the show. Thank you. And as always, please rate, review and share the podcast, dear listeners. And if you want to hear more about Walt, grab your ticket for Europe's other greatest event, the Sifted Summit, where world co-founder Nikki Kusey, who I do believe is one of the most eloquent people in Europe's startup scene on company building and leadership, will be speaking.

22:28We'll drop a link in episode description. And this episode was produced by the lovely Maya Durampal-Hornby.