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23:19So how do we then figure out how do we do Latvia or Lithuania or Poland and just take the closest geographic countries to us and figure them out one by one, figure out the launch model. And then once we've done that, then let's go and actually raise around and replicate it. So we did it the other way around, we were too optimistic. So what did you cut down to? So you expand 10 at the same time. And you go, shit, this isn't working. Cut back. What do you cut back to? So I think we were left with about 15 employees, most of whom were then related to the Estonian operation, which was the only piece of the business that was actually working well and growing organically.

23:53So that was a self -funding business. And then we had a couple of people that we could afford to actually work on the international expansion. How do you respond to people who say, well, when you expand in new markets, it's always be lost making markets and you have to subsidize the lost making markets with the profitable Estonian markets and that's the nature of the beast, the maturation of the market will come. Is that right or like no, we can have unid economic efficient markets from day one? For marketplaces such as ours, there is no way you can have positive unit economics from day one. And the reason for it is very simple.

24:24This is a very strong network effect business, which means that you do need to overcome this initial chicken and egg problem. You need to get the drivers online, you need to get the customers online, and at first you need economics or deeply negative. You actually have to subsidize both sides on the market pace to get the liquidity up. And then once you cross a certain threshold, then it becomes self -sustaining. You hit critical mass and then it becomes a massively profitable business. What have been your lessons on what that threshold is? For most, these type of work and urban non -demand mobility marketplaces, the ratio is about 25 % market share.

24:55So that's a very high bar. So you really need to subsidize hard, oftentimes for a couple of years before you get to that threshold. And that's when the network effects kick in. We talked about that kind of launch playbook. How did the development of that launch playbook go? We're back now to 15. We've got Estonia working well, but we've had 10 that didn't go so well. How did we go about that playbook creation? It was a very iterative process. So, and very humble beginning. So my brother Martin, we designated him to launch the first Latvia and market. So, he literally went there, rented a small apartment, which then also turned out to be our office after a couple of months and then it just basically slept there and then hired a few young students to help him.

25:37And that's how we set it up. So he was going to meet the taxi companies, meet the individual taxi drivers, organically start to figure out how do we get demand into the marketplace by giving out business cards and leafletting and all of that. So very humble beginnings. What have been your biggest lessons on what works for drivers supply and what doesn't? At the end of the day, about 80 % of the volume is driven organically from word of mouth. So nothing can beat that, even today. And all the paid channels make up about 20 % in a mature phase. However, once you start in a market, of course, it's different because nobody's heard of your product.

26:10So the question really is, how do you get the first couple of hundred drivers and the first couple of hundred customers in board? And generally, we see the most effective for both sides is a combination of PR. So you always got to get some first launch media and you get some exposure from that. And then the other thing is just paid online ads and for us generally the most effective turned out to be Instagram and Facebook ads. So that's how you get the first couple hundred people excited and then after that Your product needs to be great because if it's not then all your cohorts will fall to zero If you actually have a fantastic value proposition then the other way around your key factor is gonna be positive You're gonna be exponentially growing.

26:43Listen, I'm an investor. We get shoved catch to LTV ratios the whole time by founders And the question that I always kind of oscillate on is, the cacks go down with time as you increase a bird of mouth and brand, or do they go up as you saturate your core ICP in the cool target market? How do you advise me? So marketplaces have this very unique dynamic, which is that in your first six months, the only economics are always horrible, because you don't have enough liquidity in the marketplaces. You constantly need to subsidize the drivers, otherwise they're going to drop off. You constantly need to subsidize the customers, otherwise they're going to go away.

27:15So your first six months of unit economics will tell you effectively absolutely nothing So they always look bad and then you just got to have faith in the model that as long as you keep on investing long enough Then you will hit some threshold and then it's gonna fit into profitability And there is almost impossible for any financial person normally to understand and then that was where it was very difficult for us to raise funding initially as well Totally get you there any other lessons on driver supply that will I wish we'd done this I wish we hadn't done this So one trick we did that really helped us get going in some of the first markets was actually to go to the market with a sauce product and then convert it into a marketplace afterwards.

27:52So there's a good saying that people might join you for the tools and stay for the network and that's effectively the logic we did. So in some of these countries we had no money, so we couldn't do our nowadays playbook of going in and then paying the drivers to stay online for certain number of hours. We just didn't have the budget for it. So instead, what we thought is maybe let's go to this local Taxi companies and give them great tools instead. So we give them fleet management software We give them this patching software They really have a huge productivity lift from that because otherwise they were running an old -school radios and writing stuff down in notebooks So they really loved it.

28:26So we were able to get the first companies onboard with that and then they added all their supply into the ecosystem So we suddenly had hundreds of drivers online that was what was sort of what sold the supply site for us And then we then took the next six months to build up to consumer platform without worrying about this chicken and egg problem because the drivers were there anyway And then of course what happened over the next couple of years was that these taxi companies at some point realized that hey We don't even need this dispatching software any longer like we can just actually drop our call centers And we're just gonna get all of our demand from this application So it was a very sort of natural go -to market that I think actually all of these market -based founders often times missed, that's a great opportunity.

29:02What market was the biggest surprise, good or bad, and why? I think the biggest surprise I've had to this day was how successful we were in Africa. So we raised this first million, we tried to launch in a bunch of markets, that failed, then we took a step back and started doing this iterative approach of launching incrementally one country after another. And I think we had about four or five countries working nicely in Europe and we were quite happy with that. And when you say working nicely, what revenue are we on there? So probably each of those was doing maybe 10 million euros of crossbookings in terms of how much people were spending on the fairs.

29:37And then our commission of that was to pick around 15%. So it was like 1 .5 million AORR per country. Okay, this is real volume. Yeah, so it was decent. We could hire a decent team to run the country. They were growing nicely. But when you then zoomed out and thought about where is this business going to go over the next couple of years, it was clear that we need more geographies. we can't just operate in these small central eastern European countries and that was never the ambition for us. Then what we did was we just made an excel list of the top 200 cities in the world. We ranked them by about seven criteria.

30:07On purpose we kept these models very simple rather than complex. There was things like population, regulation, number of drivers, what's the corona ship rate in the country, metrics like that. We then ranked a table and we tried to take all or bias away from it and just look at what does the table say. And all the African cities were ranking top of the list. And we had no clue about Africa. I had never even been there. So the top one city on the list was Johannesburg. And none of us had been there. We had no idea what's going on. And we didn't want to replicate their earlier mistake of prematurely hiring people into countries before we knew whether they're going to work out and we didn't really have the budget to do that anyway.

30:45way. So we thought back then in 2015, is there a more cost -effective way to launch these markets? And then a trick I still don't understand when more companies don't do is that we just then set up online ads to customers and to drivers saying that Palt is now live in Johannesburg. Without having nothing, so we just put like a couple hundred euros budget, start running the ads. In a bunch of these cities, in dozens of these cities that we had identified. And then the whole idea was that let's run it for a couple of weeks. See how many customers signed up, what is the CAC ratios in all those places?

31:16Where do we see the best or wise? And that's going to be a immensely valuable signal to then figure out which are actually going to be the places we're going to launch. And this was such an effective hack. So in just a couple of weeks we identified that, hey, here's the top seven cities that have the best numbers. So let's now go to those and the only higher people in those cities. And some of them were very unintuitive. So many of the cities from the regional list dropped off. Okay, so what was the top one to? So exactly the first one was Johannesburg and top two was Lagos in Nigeria. Johannesburg and Lagos, you are still respectfully a kid from Estonia, from Tallinn, and you've never been there.

31:49How do you launch in Johannesburg and Lagos? That was the thing that also differentiated us from most companies was that we really always look extremely pragmatically at everything, and we always try to calculate the rise of everything and we sort of go from first principles. So the logic for us then was that, okay, what do you really need to get the service off the ground? So effectively, you need hundreds of drivers in the ecosystem. But what do you need for that? So we just started running these online ads for drivers and we saw that hundreds of them were signing up because unemployment rates in some of these countries were huge, like 30%.

32:21So you had a lot of people who wanted to make extra income. And then we thought, okay, what's next? We just put up an online ad for hiring the first employee and some young kids from a university signed up as a sort of part -time job And then we had the Skype interview with him back in like 2016 when nobody was hiring remotely and we told this kid over a video call Hey, we're gonna figure out a way how to send you a card so you can pay for utilities So you go and you find an office space and then you start calling all these drivers and start training them And that's what we did so this young kid just trusted us over a video call Got the first office space we sent him a list of drivers He called them and got them into the office and trained them up and that's how we prepared to launch So that happened for a couple of months We had enough drivers and then one day we just clicked a switch and turned on the service for customers.

33:07Eventually of course we realized that the market became huge. It started doing hundreds of millions of dollars of cross -bookings, tens of millions of revenue. We were never here in a media class. So the bizarre thing was that we started it as an experiment. And we thought if these are going to be turning out as good of a market as let's say Latvia, then we're going to be happy. But he said what happened was in six months Johannesburg went from being zero to being more than half the business Just from scratch with one local student running the whole operation. How many other cities did you have in play at that time?

33:39It was probably 15 cities live in us in Europe at the moment and it was more than half the business It was incredible. So why was that was that frequency of trips number of actual kind of customers? So how we measure success in the company has always been by one metric from day one of the company which is cross -boggings. So it's how much actual monetary volume of transactions is happening on the platform. And it was incredible to us that the number of trips was immense. We went very quickly from zero to millions, but the monetary value of the trips was so high we didn't really expect it that South African trips are going to be almost the same price as some of these trips in Eastern Europe.

34:14Why gross bookings? It doesn't necessarily determine user happiness. So like frequency of trips would suggest actually that I love it and I just can't get enough of it, but they may not be very much. It may be just quickly around the corner or a mile. Why is Gross Bookings the focus? My view is that it's the only thing that matters. If you ask me, what's our retention, what's our activation rate, what's our cake? I couldn't tell you really any of those things because I don't think they're completely relevant. The only thing that at the end of the day matters is what's your GMB or cross bookings.

34:44And I think it encapsulates everything that is either going good or going bad in the business. And the reason for it is that if you have great retention, then consumers will keep on returning to the platform, they will keep on doing GMV. If they like it, they're going to be increasing your frequency over time, which means they will do even more GMV. And they will also get their friends to the platform, which will bring even more GMV. So again, that's the only North Star metric we've focused on. And of course, there are some teams who look at CAC, who look at acquisition rates, who look at the retention rates.

35:17But that's a clear secondary priority for us. That's never been the north side of the business. Okay, so we have Johanna's boat now and we have logos now and we're looking at this going, huh, maybe we underestimated the potential of this business in different parts of the world. Do we have a strategic discussion now in management and say, something's changed? Absolutely. So we were just monitoring these dashboards every few hours. we couldn't believe what was going on because just the consumer signing up or by the thousands every day We had this thousands of drivers signing up when it all get on the platform So very quickly had to update our sort of priors and be like, okay, like this is actually going to be fantastically This this might be the entire company six months from now and that's exactly what happened So we created this what team of people in Thailand who identified Okay, what are the next 15 countries in the world?

36:04We could replicate the same thing So we just continued with this original exercise of then taking the next cities from the list, running ads in those places, figuring out which ones have the best traction and just launching there. And we went very quickly from having no presence outside Europe into suddenly being live in about 15 countries. So we launched all the major African economies. We even launched in places like Mexico without having no presence there, not flying anybody there just full remote launches. And almost all of these launches turned out to be fantastically successful. What did you do that made you successful with these launches first?

36:39So now what this worth to mention is that we weren't the first to market in those places. And that's what really makes Paul the unique company. Because as I described already, this is a very heavy network effect business. So the first player has a huge advantage. They have bigger density, they have therefore better pickup times in terms of the cars. They can therefore offer you a much better customer value proposition. So if you're coming in as a second player, it's generally almost impossible to ever catch up to that. Unless you have something very unique that the other player isn't doing. So what we did, there was a couple of different shaders.

37:12First of all, we localized much better. What was clear was that especially these American players in these markets completely neglected the local needs. So how did they neglect local needs? One trivial example, they were operating in Kenya only allowing you to book a ride if you had a credit card attached. You know how many people in Kenya have a credit card? Less than 2%. So they were just completely missing 98 % of the market to even couldn't use the service. So we were, wow, there's effectively a complete opening for us, sort of a empty market we can go into. And the other thing was that we really optimized for being the most cost efficient right -hailing operator in the world.

37:50So we took a very small cut. And what that enabled us to do was that we were able to pass on much better rates for the customers. So generally, we're paying 10 % less and we were also able to pay the drivers 5 to 10 % better as well So actually both sides of the marketplace are the very clear financial reason why to flip over to us and then That was enough to overcome this initial critical mess. This is a bit of a direct one I mentioned it to you before I spoke to Dara at Uber before the show and he said Essentially you are often second or third in a market. How do you feel about that and is that an okay strategy?

38:25Well, I'm a Facts and Numbers -based guy, so let's look at that. Today we operate in about 50 countries around the world, and Bolt is the number one most popular platform in more than 20 of them. So we're feeling pretty happy about where we are, and when we look at the trend of most of those other 30 -world operate, we are continuously taking share for the reasons I mentioned earlier. We offer a better value proposition to the customer, offer a better value proposition to the driver, and in a lot of those places we're confident at over time, even though We're a second mover. We've done that before.

38:57I think we can catch up and actually become the most popular platform. Is it still a good business if you are second? Depends on whether you're a frugal company. I'd say that if I look at some of our competitors like Lyft in the US I don't think that being a number two is sustainable, but it is a very profitable business if you're able to run a very lean operation. I'm sorry for the spicy request. What happens to live from here? You mentioned them. There are only way out of this is to optimize their costs. I just generally don't see how they're going to be an independent company five years from now with the current cost structure.

39:30Do you think they sell? I can't really think who would be an actual acquireer. It's not an easy company to turn around. So we have this massive market expansion and we are now in Africa, we're in Kenya, we're in Johannesburg. What was the first and most important things that broke in this global expansion? Because this just sounds like too good to be true. So of course what was going on behind the scenes was complete mayhem. Right. So we were running all of this with a tiny team of about five people from Estonia. None of us had been to these markets before. So we had to figure out everything. How do you localize the product?

40:06How do you collect payments? It was a complete mess, but it was also the most fantastic, the most fun part of the business. Because we were all young kids just figuring stuff out on the go. Now, I'd say that actually nothing major broke, but I think the one area that we neglected for too long was how intensely we focused on especially on the regulatory bit. So I think we started off as a small company, we didn't have to worry about it because, again, oftentimes we were the second mover into these countries. So by the time we came in, the regulation was already sorted. But there were a couple of instances where, for example, in Poland or in Czech or in the Baltics, we were the ones who defined the category.

40:43And the regulators were then coming to us and were asking us for input, like how should we regulate this thing? There hasn't been a platform such as yours here before. And I think we neglected it for too long before we actually realized that I think we should set up a public policy team and actually give these regulators what they need. I mean, give them input of what we think are the best practices how to regulate this thing. And of course, that doesn't come naturally to most tech companies, especially ones growing at that hyper speed. So I think we probably could have done that more over a year or two earlier of just engaging with the public and sort of trying to influence where this goes.

41:13His speed, the single most important thing in startup growth and development. Speed is absolutely the most important thing. If you can execute it with high quality, because I do see a lot of companies that execute fast, but I think they're just cutting corners and launching it off. They shouldn't be launching and then at the end of the day it's a lot of momentum, but really no progress. So, what thing did you do very fast that you should have done more slowly? I think we could have actually been more deliberate about which markets we choose to expand into. So I think that as I mentioned, we had this first wave where we just expanded with wrong model and looking back if we hadn't done that and we would have done this better model that we stumbled into a couple of years later.

41:55I think we could have just accelerated the whole evolution of the company by that period. Okay, so we've now got this like exploded market map of bolt adoption and very successful markets, where we had enough fundraising life at this moment. Still, the same where we were back in 2014. You've only raised a million at this point. So by that point we had raised this one million seed grounds and then our metrics were just going through the roof. We were probably at that moment among top 2 % tile in terms of startups, maybe in the world, but for sure in Europe. What do you have growing? At that point we were easily crossing 10 million ARR probably growing 500 % the year.

42:31And doing that with a shield budget of 1 million. Well, what year was this? I'm shining on the Santa Fe with this. So that was back in 2015 to 2016. Just a start of my investing, right? It wasn't, never made. So, okay, so we've just raised this million. When do we go shit? We need to raise a lot more money. So it was clear to us all the time that we need to raise more money because we were operating with always having a month or two or cash in the bank. So it was always a huge risk for me to even make next month's salaries. Seriously. It was a complete disaster. So we tried to raise every way we could.

43:04So I met all the VCs around Europe I could get my hands on. I get to these meetings, show them the metrics, tell them the story. It was one of those cases where they were like, this seems like a great team. I always left fantastic metrics, but we just don't believe in the category. Like we think that you guys are going to get wiped out. No matter how many of these meetings I took and it was dozens, maybe even hundred, they all told us no. Did all the big brands say no? Every single one. What was that most common reason? The discount agreement is a winner take all market. There's not gonna be any room for number two and therefore it doesn't matter how great your metrics are We're not gonna invest which was the best meeting that you didn't get I think that we actually didn't get the meeting with Sequoia back in those days and that's another story of how then later They later came back to the business four years later.

43:47Who's that meeting with? At Sequoia, I actually didn't get the meeting that was the sad part So we we tried to approach them many times and then back then I think we weren't an interesting enough company. Wow. Did you get a response? Yeah, we just got a response that said, like, thanks, but, you know, we are not interested in the category at the moment. Wow. Okay. So what was the series A? So we took a very unconventional approach. So first of all, we realized we had to raise some money. We saw that all the sophisticated leases didn't want to invest. So we had to swallow or pride and be like, okay, we need to raise money.

44:21Our was the company's going bust and we need the money to continue this fantastic expansion. So I contacted anybody I knew who had any sort of money. So I remember this one meeting was with a local real estate company in Estonia. So I go there, probably back then like a 22 year old kid, and they'd never, you know, heard of a startup. They'd never heard of a tech company, and then impeaching them about how metrics are doing, what the story is gonna be. And then I remember at the end of the meeting, they were like, we've never invested in anything like this. We're never even done any investment outside of real estate.

44:48But you seem like a good guy. So we're gonna invest half a million dollars in the company. And looking back, it was complete insane that they did that. But I mean, they invested a valuation of about 15 million. So by now, they made like, easily more than 100x return on that investment. And the only reason they did was because they'd never even heard of any of our competitors. So they just look at it on the merits of the business. And that turned out to be much smarter than all the sophisticated VCs who turned us down. Oh my god, that's insane. So you turned 500K into 50 million. Yes, even more.

45:19That is insane. And so what did you raise in that kind of interim round you cobbled together? Yeah, so we cobbled together half a million from this real estate company similarly couple a hundred thousand from a local railway operator Couple a hundred thousand from a local telecoms guy So it was just this tiny all together. Maybe one million bucks, and that was enough Well, we had to survive with that We had no other choice because nobody else wanted to back the company back then So when did big cash come in? So, then after that, the metrics were doing fantastic, probably got to the point of doing about 25 millionaire or growing multiple hundred percent a year and still novices won it to invest.

45:56So, this is just so fucking sick. I was just, I just got so frustrated with the lease industry I was telling like, I'm never going to talk to any VCs ever again. And then what happened was the experience bad. I think the experience was actually nice in a sense that they took the meetings, they and they were like, yeah, you seem like a good guy. They tried to give me some advice, but at the end of the day, I didn't need advice. What I needed was money. And none of them were willing to invest in the company at the time. So, and then it all changed very bizarrely when one day Mercedes or Dymler, the group approached us out of the blue.

46:28And the interesting bit was that all these OEMs at the time were trying to figure out what is their strategy gonna be. So they all realized that mobility is changing maybe one day everybody's gonna be ordering cars from these apps and that's gonna completely kill their existing business. Mercedes was the one who had a big fund set aside. They wanted to buy as many of these companies as they could. They approached us and they tried to buy the business back then for maybe 100 million euros, which obviously is a young kid. It would have been a fantastic outcome. We discussed it with the founders, but my view was immediate that we don't want to sell the business.

47:02We're onto something special. This is going to be an amazing business, so we're going to turn it down. How much is the business that you have at that stage? probably 45%. So you did mean 45 million dollars say add 20 to yeah and we had a big debate about it with the other founders like what what do you want to do and I was completely clear that I want to build a business and they got lucky that Oliver and Martin were both very supportive so they were like okay it's your call you started the business if you want to go for it go for it so we turned it down in a day we didn't even think about it.

47:31Wow that is incredible. Was there anyone who did want to sell it. Well, there was obviously some of these angel investors who are like, wow, we're going to get a great return of whatever 10x in a year. And this is going to be fantastic for us. But actually, they all were of the same opinion that you started the business. This is your call if you want to go for it. Take the risk. OK. So we say no. And they then invest in the business. Yeah. And that was then the bizarre thing. So then a year went by and our numbers just kept on growing. So we probably quadrupled the business in the next year. And then we went back to them.

48:02And then they realized that we're gonna be the winner in this category in most of these markets. So then we managed to convince them that they invested more than a hundred million at the billion dollar valuation So it went in a year from being an acquisition to being an investment and that's turned out to be fantastic for them You've gone from raising a million from you know real estate company, local telecoms people Not the standard to a hundred million from Daimler That kind of fucks with your mind a little bit, no? Well, it was a huge transition. So we were also in the interim had this interesting debate with the team internally that what are we going to do with the money?

48:40Because we were doing already really well and we didn't really need to fundraise. But what we saw was that if we do this fundraise and we were able to deploy it even nearly as efficiently as the past money, then we're going to be able to just quadruple the business very quickly. So it was clear to us that in order for a long term to have success in this category, we need to raise the money. That is insane that it was like one, one and a half and then a hundred. Absolutely. I had no idea about that. Yeah, it was a huge transition. When you get the hundred, what did you spend on that you look back now and you're like, why did I spend that?

49:14Honestly, I don't think we really did anything wrong with the money. I think we generally spent it all really well. So, so, so, so, so, so, we had this super, super clear moment. I remember when we raised this round and then we ended up then there was some add -on So it ended up being a hundred and seventy million dollar round. So a hundred of that from from Daimler And then a few other investors joined in and I went to team. I was like, hey, we're not gonna be changing the culture So you can imagine an effective like we haven't raised any money So we're gonna keep on operating just as we have yes, we're gonna be hiring a bit more people But it's not like we're gonna be bumping everybody salaries massively or everybody will get huge teams now We're gonna retain that similar cost efficiency ethos we've had from day one and And given that all these people had been in the tough period for many years, it wasn't a tough sale.

49:59They were all like, yeah, this would make it special. This way we're winning. We're not going to mess it up just because we raised it around. But you now have 170 million. It just in times of your execution from there. What changed? So what that mainly enabled us through was just launch, first of all, significantly more markets at the same time. Exactly, it was necessary to overcome this initial chicken and egg problem. Because again the setup costs in some of these cities can be absolutely massive. To get going in a city like London, you need to invest ballpark at least 100 million euros to reach that critical mass.

50:31Otherwise, it's just not going to work. What was the cheapest city to launch? What was the most expensive? The cheapest city to launch were the ones we first did in the Baltics because they were tiny. It was half a million people very little competition back in the day. So you could probably get them, I mean, Estonia, we got going with 5 ,000 bucks. So, and then contrast that with some of the biggest cities in the world where you need to invest tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions. Did the growth, okay, so we then are in, we're doing multiple cities same time, we've got 170 million, did the growth then just continue?

51:02Absolutely, so we then went from doing that 25 million AORR to very quickly getting to 100 million, 200 million, 400 million AORR in just a matter of a couple of years. When you look at the growth profile of the business, I was brought up on this, travel, travel, double, double. What was yours? Was it like one to five to 25 to 100? How did that growth profile? Just so I get an idea. So looking back, it was probably we went from zero to two million ARR in about 18 months. And then from there we went to about 10 million ARR in the next 18 months. So we five X. And then we went from that to a hundred million ARR in less than two years.

51:44And then we went from that to now we have two billion ARR in sort of the next few years So it was extremely rapid exponentially go throughout this whole business You're two billion in ARR. Yes. Wow fuck me. That's a lot. That's more than I thought when you get to that stage People really start to take notice of you when did people really start to take notice of you? Do you feel so there was a couple of changes that that happened with the company at the same time? So first we were just growing really well. So the numbers were so good and we got so large that these investors couldn't ignore us anymore.

52:19So we then started to also appeal to the financial crowd. So actually the first financial investors who came to the business were huge top tier New York investors. So we raised money from the likes of D1 and Tarsana and some great New York funds. And it was just take me to like you've only raised from Daimner and some Telecoms and Where does it? When like, you know, Dan Zahnheim and D1 coming with a, hey, you know, Marcus would love to chat. Was that a very natural, normal process? How did that go? Actually what I really liked about these New York investors was that they were very numbers oriented.

52:53So they really did very deep, very sophisticated analysis about the numbers, the market shares, the trends, and they really liked the story on top of that, but they were mainly invested based on numbers. I think with the VCs, it was that way where we're on. So the numbers were great, but they didn't really focus numbers. They sort of focused on what they thought was sort of the narrative in the industry And that turned out to be completely wrong. So all these New York guys who bet based on the numbers were the ones who now made a killing on this So you raised from them. How much you raised from them?

53:20So in aggregate we will now raise 1 .5 billion So it's been a mix of maybe 10 % of that from strategic investors and then most of that from then European and then US based investors So the emails that didn't get meetings from Sequoia when did the core come back into the fray? So then, mid -2021, the company was doing extremely well and we really had this explosive growth during COVID. So what happened was that the whole mobility industry shut down. And so COVID hit and in four weeks, we went from just massive, like, about 200 million of revenue to losing 85 % of that. And what do you do at this time, Rich?

54:02That is unprecedented. The last time with Spanish fucking influencer in 1917, what do you do? So, COVID was this fascinating episode for us. So we were doing probably 200 million of ARR. It dropped 85%. Every other company in this industry started laying off people. They laid off 30%, 50%. Whatever they thought was needed for the company to survive. So remember we had this meeting over a call with the top management that we cited. We're not going to do any layers. We're going to be the only company in the industry that's going to retain all of our people and it's going to be a huge gamble because we lost 85 % of our revenue and Instead what we're going to do we will do a salary reduction to everybody for 20 % and then we're just going to bet the company that in six months This is going to go by and because we're the only company that's keeping our team intact We're going to accelerate out of this fast than anybody and we gamble the company on that that turned out to be fantastic So actually the team morale we got from doing zero layoffs while everybody else did was to such a massive morale boost that People like were even opting in that some people did for 30 40 percent salary reductions to get us through those next six months What did you do in those six months?

55:09I mean we all remember nothing happened So we did a couple of things so first of all we Optimized every single thing we could in the business. We're already frugal going into COVID but that really made us like question every single line of the PNL and we squeezed everything we could to make the business more efficient. The other thing we did was we really started preparing how do we come out of this much stronger than going into it. So we actually launched the number of markets. So we were setting them up and it was great timing because all these drivers were low utilized. They obviously didn't get trips.

55:40There was no traffic going on. So it was very easy for us to get into these countries and sign up the drivers. They had no other alternative. And then what we did was that these markets, so how are you actually doing that? Because you're not going into these markets in a travel ban zone signing up drivers. How did you get drivers who are low -utilized? So during Covid actually only ads worked really effectively. So we were just running a lot of ads signing up drivers. Then once they signed up we started calling them and then they heard about the idea. They saw that this is a great platform much better than the ones they've been using before and the word just spread organically.

56:13So we suddenly signed up hundreds of thousands of drivers all across Europe, all across Africa. And so we have these expansion moments. It lasted longer than six months. But not everywhere. So what was the key distinction was that some of these markets started opening up very quickly. So for example, some of these Eastern European countries already free four months later by the summer of 2020. They were already up and we saw volume started to rebound. And then in other places like London, of course, it took significant longer. But then what we did was we had this war room where effectively almost every day we came together and we looked at Okay, what which are the cities which are opening up which are the cities not and then immediately when we saw a city open up We had a blast of just investing marketing dollars and discount dollars into that So we really accelerated out of all these lockdowns and I think that's what every competitor missed so so we Effectively came out of it with with market shares that were twice or three times higher than the ones going in how long did it take to get that 85 % loss in revenue back?

57:12It actually happened very quickly. It was probably five or six months before we were fully back. And then we already started hitting new records after that. Wow. So going back to the sequoia. And so then what Andrew Reedlight drops you at DM? So we actually had the sequoia team reach out. I think it was the European team. And what was completely different from every other VC meeting I've had before that was that they had done all their homework before. So we were just in the middle of raising a new round. They approached us, they said, hey, we've done all the homework on the company. We're not going to be a burden.

57:44Share some of the metrics. We'll come back to you in 48 hours. And remember, it was literally me having two calls with them. And a few days later, they come back, hey, we're interested. We're joining the round. So they really lived up to their reputation. It was just fantastic execution from their side. How much did they write? Still to this day, Bolt is the largest ticket Sequoia has ever done into Europe. That's an amazing, amazing thing. And they did it in 48 hours. Yeah, so the decision -making process was incredibly quick. So from the moment I had the call with them to them getting back to me, it was 48 hours where we're joining the round.

58:14And what price round was that? So that was me 2021, so it was probably four and a half billion valuation. Wow. Okay, so we have that round. That's a very significant moment in terms of brand and validation for the company. does having secure as an investor change the shape of a company. I'd say that we were already doing so well that we didn't need any particular investor to help us accelerate the growth. We had a great model, we just had to replicate that in more places around the world. I think the unique bit that Sequoia brought to the table was especially the brand in terms of in place. So specifically in Europe I think there was a lot of people who suddenly saw the validation that yeah we've heard Paul is doing well, but after Sequoia and some of these other great funds invested it really put us on a map where some of these talented people finally made the decision to join.

59:02How do you respond people who say, if people join because of a fund, they're the wrong people to join? You can have wrong people join for any reason. I mean, wrong people might join because you're paying them too much or they might join because an investor in sort of came on board. I think you just need to have a great process for leading out toward the people with the right values. Do you think you were good at hiring? I was horrible at hiring the first few years. So the story goes that out of the first 10 people I hired, I had to look fire seven of them. So they almost killed the company. What did you do wrong?

59:34I was way too optimistic about people. Growing up, I just always tried to see the best in people and I was thinking everybody is who's going to join. It's going to be equally excited about the business. They will spend all their weight and hours thinking about how to optimize it. Turns out that wasn't the case at all. And then what were they? respectfully, not as hard working, not as intelligent, not as ambitious. I think it came down to all of those things to some extent. Just we hired people without the proper vetting process in the first year. I was 19 years old, so I had no clue what I was doing.

1:00:05So many of these people joined with completely different expectations of what they had as a CEO. Looking back, I think it was actually a great exercise because I learned from that of which are the patterns you really want to find in people, which are the patterns you don't. And after that, I think we codified the hiring process to be much more specific. And then we had a lot of success with hiring in the years following that. If you could only have one quality in a candidate, what would that quality be? I'm still in the camp of intelligence. So I would rather get somebody who's very smart. It's fine if they work a bit less hours, but they make the right decisions.

1:00:36At least for our business, you cannot compensate with hard work if you don't make the right decisions. Everyone says in Europe, the trouble is that we don't have people who've seen gross like the US before. Is that true? And why have you seen that if so? I'd say that it's very hard to find strong leaders in Europe who actually understand tech companies and who actually build organizations of thousands of people that I agree with. There's just almost no tech companies of that size in Europe. However, when you think about all these other things, whether it's how do you do sophisticated marketing or how do you build large scale engineering systems, those things you can find plenty of talent in Europe.

1:01:13I think that either you can get people who worked in the US and come back here or you can just learn about how the best companies do it, a lot of their best practices are public. So I don't really agree that you cannot figure out how to the world class marketing or engineering from here. Today, would you rather hire great people in Europe who haven't seen it before or bring people in from the US and then face that challenge of assimilation, culture, moving people? In our experience, what has worked significantly better is it's taking people, especially from Central East and Europe who are really talented.

1:01:44Extreme intelligence, hardworking, good trustworthy people, but they've just never had the chance to compete at a well -scaled before. They've always wanted to, but there was never a company in the region that they could join. And those are the people who really built the company. And they're very loyal, they were on with the company, they know everything they've been here for years, and they think it's just complete different mentality. Then hiring people into Silicon Valley, for example, who oftentimes might move on to the next two years later. So we don't have that kind of culture. Do you think the European funding environment is poor quality?

1:02:14I think that it used to be very bad 10 years ago and it's significantly better now, but there's a lot of catching up to do to the US. In what ways could it catch up? First of all, we're just limited by funding. So one of the problems is that if you look at where is the money coming from into the US VC industry, there's so many more LPs, the big pension funds are putting money in, and the university in the elements of putting money in. And that's not really the case in Europe, so there's just, I think, four less capital available. Do you actually show successful now, because I do argue back a little bit?

1:02:45I would argue completely the opposite. There is way too much money in Europe, and there are way too few opportunities. And the result of that is you see this concentration of capital into the few obviously good ones. And the prices are just fucking nuts. And I mean, the amount of mediocre to poor large funds is insane in Europe. I'd say that for sure there's a self -fulfilling prophecy in that as well. That again, if you have enough capital available, then these companies can raise the money they need to actually compete with their US counterparts. And if the money is not available, then they're just going to get out -compete it, not because in any way there would otherwise be a worse company, but just because they don't have access to the funding.

1:03:23And at least in our industry, we've seen that play out many, many times, where it's been very clear in the food delivery industry, closer delivery, transport in general, Well, a lot of these companies from the US just are more funding and that's the only reason they win. What would you most change about European funding then? Other than more. I'd say that they also need to be more ambitious and be able to tolerate that some of these businesses take a long time to get to profitability. From what I've seen, many of these investors are just demanding profitability way too early before these companies actually get to a massive scale.

1:03:54Marcus, I'm a 19 year old European entrepreneur. I know. Look a little bit older. You're advising me. I've started this business and I'm really excited about it. We're a million in an era. Should I raise from from European VCs or should I just go straight to the US? What do you advise me? Now in 2024 there are good European VCs available. So I would think that it's easier to raise from Europe and these people can also help you through talent in Europe. However, if you want to go and do your target market this in the US, then I would probably raise from US investors because they will help you with connections and talent there.

1:04:27Do you really think VCs are that valid? I think there are some VCs who had value, but probably 80 % of them just provide capital and that's it. When you look back now, what would you have done differently about fundraising? I would have likely gone to these New York funds much earlier. I think that actually I at first just didn't even think that they would be willing to invest in private companies such as ours, but actually the moment we got to first meetings with them and they saw the numbers, they were really excited. and I think they could have invested in the business a year or two earlier.

1:04:59You've expanded well beyond the core category now. Talk to me about the decision to expand to other categories and how you thought about that. We always had ambition to build a replacement to your private car. And we knew that ridehailing alone is not going to do that. Ridehailing is going to be a huge business, but there needs to be other modes of transport we're going to offer on the platform as well. But the first five years, we were just having no recesses whatsoever. So right -hailing consumed all of our attention, all of our money and then probably in 2018 We for the first time realized that we actually have enough budget that we can take on one new bet And then we debated internally long what is that gonna be and then we Took gamble on micro -mability So we decided we're gonna be the first right -hailing company in the world to launch electric scooters on the platform as well And that was actually quite a controversial decision both from the employee point of view But also from some investors because they were thinking that first of all is a hardware business So it's very difficult and second you're gonna be cannibalizing your own very profitable right -hailing trips because There's a big overlap about 40 % of its right -hailing trips in a lot of these countries are Listed in four kilometers long.

1:06:05So you're gonna be cannibalizing that and pushing people instead of taking right -hailing car to taking a squatter instead And you will have much worse margins there But our view has always been Significant in a more long term. We've always been thinking that it's great for us to cannibalize ourselves rather than let somebody else do it. It was very clear to me that this is gonna be the future. These electric squatters and bikes are gonna be everywhere. So I do, we can build that category and define it based on our rules or somebody else is gonna come and they will steal our customers. And I think long term, if you build for the customer, you innovate on their behalf, you give them better options.

1:06:36I think they will reward you with royalty. That's always been our philosophy. Did you choose specific cities to launch micromanability in first? Oh wow, that was a horrible experience. So we first launched it in Paris and the logic there was that it's a big city. People have high incomes, so it should be a great place to try it out. It was a disaster. Honestly, my crumbly in Paris is probably one of the worst places in the world to do it. Why? Because the rate of vandalism was like nothing we've ever seen. At some point, we were losing 3 % of the vehicles every week because people were just stealing them, throwing them in the river, were trashing them, it was absolutely horrible.

1:07:14So there was no way the unit economics were ever gonna work there. What do you, just pull from Paris? Yes, so actually it's, it's a funny thing. Also the competition, I remember this kind of, I didn't find it six years ago, it was insane when there was, I mean, there was Dott, there was Uber, there was you, there was, I was like, oh my gosh. Exactly, so we saw the similar thing happening in micro -nbility as we had seen in right -hailing a few years before, which was that suddenly the sector went from non -existent to suddenly becoming 10 companies, is everybody raised tens of millions of dollars, huge competition.

1:07:44So it was a big line grab. But what we saw was that, all right, France wasn't working. We were thinking, we have these quarters, we were already bought. Let's give it a shot, try it out somewhere else. And then for while we're thinking, maybe let's try another relatively higher income city, but then at the end of the day we're like, okay, let's try it out in a Sonya. It's our home market. Let's see what's going to happen. And then it just took off really well. It took off way better than it ever did in Paris. Consumer utilization was better. Why do you think that was? I think what actually what we underestimated was that micro -mobility is just a category that will work in almost Every city in Europe and I think back then we're skeptical and thinking that maybe people don't have money They're not gonna be willing to pay for the convenience Absolutely the where even in place like Estonia people were happily spending a couple of bucks to get a Where they needed a bit faster?

1:08:30Okay, so we have it working in Estonia Then we slowly expand out with micro -mobility. Yeah, so that actually was then the first city where we saw that due to the economics really made sense And then we were trying to get a unit economic worse for micro mobility than they were the core writing Because just fundamentally the pricing per kilometer was significantly lower and on top of that the margin At least saw in the early days was much lower as well. What is the margin on it? So in good markets you are maybe able to get to 20 % contribution margins, but in bad markets it can be negative So it's not a easy business to make it work And you've got a lot of logistics around charging and supplies, no?

1:09:05So we today are one of the few players that's fully vertically integrated. So we have our own hardware team. So we design our own squatters. We have our own team in China where we manufacture them. We then ship them to Europe. We have a hundred of warehouses. We then need to charge them, maintain them, put them on the streets, find the ones that they're missing, the ones that they're installing. So it's a huge operation. There's more than 1 ,000 people working at it. But you say this so casually. I presume you hadn't been to China before giving you hadn't been to Africa. And so how do you get a team in China making scooters for you?

1:09:37Like what is that story? So we actually got extremely lucky with that. So once we had this first section in Estonia, and it was clear that this is gonna be a category when I do seriously. So that first one you just bought a lot of scooters from somewhere? Exactly. So we bought these nine bought scooters off the shelf and that turned out to be a disaster. They weren't designed for sharing. So most of them broke down very quickly and that's where all this narrative comes from that these scooters are not sustainable because those weren't. So what we did was we saw this first market work and we had two approaches.

1:10:05Hider, we could buy more of this hardware that was just going to break down. Or we could take long -term view and be like, hey, let's actually design a scooter from scratch that is really built for this. That's going to last long, that's going to be very cost -effective. But we had no idea how to do hardware. We were a writing company, right? So we just tried to hire a team and we got super lucky. So there turned out to be a team of about 10 engineers in Estonia who had built building electric vehicles their own life. So that was their passion. But they didn't really get product market fit. So they were throwing around building the first products, but none of them took off.

1:10:37So we went to them and they were, hey, would you want to join the most successful startup in Australia? We were going to give you a budget. We're going to give you a consumer base. Just build this hardware for us, join the team, and it turned out to be fantastic. So the team joined, they're still all of them with the company now, five, six years later. And they're probably now on the seventh iteration of hardware that they're building for us. So it just turned out to be a massive win -win for both sides. Okay, so they're building a hardware, but dude, you still have to go to China. You still have to get a factory.

1:11:06You still have to get rent, get local employees. I don't know what you have to do. That's like my basic knowledge. How did you do that? So we got lucky that this specific team actually had their connections in China that we've been working with for a decade. So we got this team on board. They told us, hey, we have the connections. We're going to sort all of this out. So just give us the budget. we're going to sort out the designs, we're going to procure the hardware, and this was just a fantastic partnership. So they were... How much money did you allocate to that? Because that's a bit of a gamble.

1:11:33In the grand scheme of how much money we've raised, in general, it's maybe being about 10 % of our total funding. But what it did was that it had this massive transformative effect on rest of the business as well. Because we bought these hundreds of thousands of quarters to the market to hundreds of cities. We became overnight from being almost no presence in that sector, to becoming the largest micro -embellied top or in Europe, still to the state. Nobody operates with such a big fleet in so many cities as you could. How much market share do you have in Europe today? So the market's actually pretty roughly split between the top sort of four or five players.

1:12:05Like each of them has between 15 to 25 percent year. With an eye to the future, when we think about self -driving, you mentioned it earlier, how does self -driving factor into how you think? We're seeing Waymo all over Twitter. I've seen so many friends, wow, this is like the iPhone moment. How do you think about self -driving? So, I remain optimistic that self -driving is completely going to change the world. It's going to be one of the biggest opportunities for companies like us to change how millions of people live, how cities are designed, how we spend our time, is completely going to be transformative.

1:12:38However, I don't think it's going to happen any time soon. So, when you look at these two tech trees that they're currently developing, they're both years out before making a service that's actually commercially viable, that's actually cheap and then a human driver, and one that actually meets regulatory requirements. Why? So first of all, the tech is just really hard. You have these approaches that use N2N neural nets like what Tesla and Wave here in the UK are doing, and they think they're making great progress. But let's be honest, they're still years away from having a reliable service that can truly replace a human driver in terms of safety and then the coverage of areas it can drive in.

1:13:11And then you have the other tech tree, which is what Wave on Cruise have been doing, which is very different. It's much more expensive. you have significant more sensors like more lighters in the vehicle and that sort of is getting to the point now where it starts to work as good as a human with or even better but they're the costs are just so prohibitive the cost are significantly higher than a human with so it's going to take the multiple years for the cost to come down. Help me understand that because I have a lot of friends and some of this go now he said they go to work every day on a whemo and it is the same price for cheaper.

1:13:40Yeah, but there's a difference between price and cost. Google is one of the wealthiest companies on the planet. They can keep on subsidizing millions of rides for a long time. That doesn't mean the cost structure is there. How long will it be, do you think? I hope that we're gonna get to the place where the technology and the costs are sorted out over the next five years. And then it's probably going to be a couple more years after that for the regulation to get sorted, especially in Europe, I think it's gonna take a long time. If Italy hasn't even figured out the ride -hailing regulation in 10 years, I wonder how long it's gonna be for them to update their self -driving laws.

1:14:10What do you do then? You vertically integrate and buy them? You partner. Most of these companies, like Waymo, over the long term don't want to operate a car network. It's just too much hassle. These companies can build what they're a fantastic cat, which is building the software. And then there's going to be companies like us that actually do the real world operations. Because I think most people underestimate how difficult it is to operate a million or five million or ten million vehicles in hundreds of cities, comply with all the local regulations, collect the payments, deal with customer support, clean the cars, charge the cars, etc.

1:14:44I think it's sort of just a scale of complexity, most people can't even fathom and they just hand away and think it's going to be easy. No, it's not. Not to mention the insurance, the financing, the procurement of the cars, etc., etc. Like I think that right -hailing companies like us are absolutely going to be pivotal for these self -driving car companies to actually go to market. What is Uber better than you at today? And what are they worse than you at today? What everybody else in this industry who survives by now, there's about seven companies left. What I've been doing better than us is raising money.

1:15:15They've just all raised multitudes of how much we have raised. Many of them have raised 5 billion, some of them have raised 15 even 30 billion. Well, we have raised 1 .5. Are you profitable today? So our story, as we started with, was that we were both strapping the company in the first four years. Then we raised more than a billion dollars. We invested a big chunk of that over the last five years and now we're returning back to profitability. But now it's our choice. We have a big set of markets that have been profitable for years. Why do you decide to do it now? You can continue to invest, continue to go for growth.

1:15:47What's the rationale for saying, let's go for profitability? So our priority for sure is still growth, 100%. So there's no intention for us anytime soon to become a profitable company that would be paying dividends or anything like that. Absolutely the focuses growth. However, we have a set of markets where we've built out a fantastic category of position. We have millions of customers, the businesses organically growing well, it's very profitable, and we're taking that cash flow and investing that into other parts of the group. So either we're launching in more geographies or we're launching new product lines, and we think we're going to keep on doing that for the next decade.

1:16:19What product lines do you not have that you would like to have? So we already operate five, which is a lot for almost any company. Most companies can't even get one business line to the scale we do. So we do write hailing, we do squatters and electric bikes, we do car rentals, we do restaurant delivery and we do grocery delivery. So it's already a full set of products in dozens of countries. Can I push you? What's the smallest revenue makeup? So the smallest today is still our car rental product. Why do you do it? Because we have a lot of conviction that long term that's going to be a multi -billion dollar category for us.

1:16:53Why? Because she encumbments. She encumbments. So, as most people have interacted with these old -school car rental companies, I don't think anybody is very happy with the experience. And I think that's even the small view. One current segment of the market is that people get out of the airport and need to rent a car for a couple of days. Sure, that's an exciting category and we're looking at ways how do we make that experience better. And similar to ride -hailing, we're not expect we need to operate all of this ourselves. We think we can partner with those companies, give them the tools, give them our operational know -how and improve the experience.

1:17:23So that's one. But the other thing is that I think we need to be way more ambitious than that. And it's like how do you actually create a new version of effectively Zipcar, which is that you can just rent these cars in a city on demand, just walk up to them, open them up with a tap and you can actually get right. So that is a category where we're way more bullish about. And it's already working fantastically in about 10 cities now in Europe and we're just scaling the data. So what are you nodding? Say if you had a say, what would you like to add as a say? Well, we have this wish list of probably 50 ideas that we're looking at every year and thinking about what are we gonna launch next year?

1:17:56So the one I'm currently bullish about is dining payments. In many parts of Europe and the world, it's actually not a common thing that you can scan a QR code, you see the menu, you can order and pay from that, and you can integrate it with everything else we already do in the bolt -foot ecosystem. So you can have a loyalty program there that's all attached to that. So what are you do for delivery or you do the dining experience or any of these sort of food related services? Like they can all tie into a really nice holistic ecosystem. So that's what we want to build next. Oh, it's fucking hard.

1:18:26I've done the scant pay investing before. This is why you hate your families. It's a bad business. And I think that's one of these things that what Paul is good at. How do we turn these bad businesses into actually good businesses? through just the level of cost efficiency that none of these other companies can match. Someone said to me the other day, the heaviest things in life are not iron or gold, but unmade decisions. What's the biggest unmade decision for you that weighs on your mind? Actually, there's probably no single decision that I regret that we haven't done. I think it's rather that there's been multiple decisions that I would do differently if I could.

1:19:02What's the biggest? Probably we should have been even more aggressive in our expansion. So if I look back at this period we had from 2015 to 19 where we launched all of these markets remotely, it was a fantastic time. I think what we did back in 2019 was that we started raising these big rounds and we're getting this external advice that, guys, you need to get more professional. You can't keep on launching markets like this running Facebook cats and hiring people over Skype calls like you need to have more rigor and more process around it. And it was one of those rare times where I actually listened to that advice.

1:19:33And then I think we slow down a bit on expansion and we double down on existing markets, which had its merits. But I think what it meant was that in some parts of the world we left the vacuum for other competitors to fill in and actually take meaningful share. So looking back, I think we missed out on a great opportunity there If we had continued in that startup mindset for a bit longer. This has been such an amazing story. I want to do a quick fire out with you. So I say a short statement You give me your immediate thoughts. What do you believe that most around you disbelief? I think the most contrary and view that I have not seen any investors really buying to so far is that these right -hailing companies are really going to be the best way for these self -driving cars to come to market.

1:20:14From what I've heard from most people, they think that these companies are going to build their own operations and companies like us are going to get somehow squeezed out of market. I think these people just have no idea about the complexities involved and how difficult it is to scale the right -hailing network such as this. I think when you don't do the work, it's difficult to know how hard it is. We've been building this for 11 years with human drivers and that's already hard. If you add sort of the complexity of managing this autonomous operation and cleaning the cars and charging them and so on, I think it's only going to get more difficult.

1:20:44What's been the most lavish purchase then you spent on? I'm a very frugal guy, I don't even have a driver's license. So the most expensive thing about this probably in my apartment in Thailand. Probably still cheaper than anything you could get in London. does money make you happy? Absolutely not. Well, it's the reflection on relationship to money. You need to have some base level of money to take care of your daily needs. Absolutely. And to that point, I think it makes a big difference to your emotional health. But after a certain point, what I get most of my excitement from is actually seeing the company do well and actually see the people around me do well.

1:21:17So the reason I come to the office every day is because I genuinely think we have a world -class team. And seeing those people who started the company as basically interns and now they're running hundreds of people's organizations. It's just fantastic. So that's what gives me the most joy. What have you changed your mind on in the last 12 months? I was actually at first very skeptical of AI. Why were you skeptical of mine? Did you change your mind? I started using JetGPT when it came out more than a year ago, and there was a lot of buzz about it, and all these CEOs were coming out saying how it's going to transform their companies, and on one hand, big techno optimist.

1:21:54But on the other hand, I tried it out. I asked a bunch of people in the company, tried out see how it can optimize the work, and it came back very negatively. Like nobody really thought this is going to move the needle with the exception of one part of customer support. And that was generally the one part that I was thinking optimistic this is going to move. But now I think in a year, my thinking has switched significantly, both on a personal level and on a company level. So on a personal level, I now use these LLM's basically every day. Tee -eees. Actually, I mix both on tropic and endopentia.

1:22:22Yeah. Popularity? Very little so far, actually. Generally preferred the other two. And then for the team, it's changed as well. Yeah, so for the team as well. So it was clear that customer support, it's going to be great. You can automate the meaning for a percent of work and make the customer experience better. But I think it's also become more obvious to me that you can actually expand that to significantly more use cases. Whether that's something like a CRM. So how do you make your sales reps and marketing people more effective? Or it might be internal tooling. like how do people in the company discover information more easily?

1:22:52How do you, for example, summarize documents and make better decisions so I'm getting more and more optimistic you can actually apply it in those domains as well. What concerns you most in the world today? Clearly war. I think that there's a lot of things going on well in the world of technology, but I think it's absolutely insane that we have war going on in Europe. Russia attacking Ukraine, killing people, and everybody's just basically forgotten about it. It's absolutely crazy. Yeah, I do agree with you. It's amazing how it normalizes so fast. It's awful as that sounds. Exactly. I mean, the war's been going on for two and a half years and you ask most people in London, they don't even think about it.

1:23:26You're a fit dude. I've known you for a while. You're a fit dude. What's the health or diet advice hack that not many people know about and that you think is great? Honestly, I think people should just do the basics. Like that's the most contrary and take care of probably. Like everybody's trying to innovate and buy your hack and whatever. Like most people should just take the basics really seriously. Sleep, eat the horse a day, eat healthy food, exercise a couple of times a week, take a few hours off, enjoy time, read books, chill with friends, whatever works for you. Just most people don't do it.

1:23:57When have you been most out of kilter in the boat journey? Well, are you sleeping like an hour or night and it's just your health is shit. Literally never. Over these last 10 years, I've never sacrificed sleep for the sake of the business. I've always thought that's gonna be a bad idea. I'm just gonna be ill tempered the next day. I will have worse memory, worse decision making, so I've always taken it very seriously. I always sleep well and look at this as a marathon. God, fucking Estonians. I can always so calm and like methodical and what you do. Final one, what question have I not asked that I should have asked?

1:24:31Most people still misunderstand how all of these on -demand marketplaces are going to work out. I think that's been the bizarre thing to me. So I was always been this contrarian in the industry for 11 years, telling everybody that I think all of this M &A in this right -hailing industry is complete insanity. You should not be doing that. And again still to this day I think most people wouldn't agree with that. Why is it in San Francisco? This is fundamentally a doable industry. This is an industry that at the end of day stable state is going to be two players splitting the market one way or another.

1:25:03And whenever the top player pays the other one they buy themselves a couple of years before somebody else comes in and takes that second -payer spot as well. So you're back to square one. And we've seen time and time again how companies make this mistake. They do this merger. They think it's going to be fantastic. They model out these monopoly returns for a long time. And it never pans out. And I don't understand what companies keep on making that mistake. I totally agree and love that. So what is the future of these marketplaces? I think that most of the world has already stabilized. So if you look at this industry, it's very century now or so high, the technology, getting places like London going requires such a massive need of capital that nobody's willing to fund in this new environment.

1:25:42So I don't really think that there's going to be new competitors entering the market in a traditional sense. I think where this innovation is going to come from is new modes of transport. I always going to be something new like electric scooters or it's going to be self -driving cars, but I think it's going to be a completely different thing that's going to shake up the market, not existing companies. Marcus, I do the show for shows like this, which is, I said to you before, I think art and science, the story combined with the lessons. Thank you for being so brilliant because it re -energizes me and my love for what I do by doing shows like this.

1:26:14Awesome. The Bolt Journey is one of the greats. If you want to see the full episode on YouTube, you can check it out by searching for 20 VC's C -Mox in the studio live. Now before we leave you today, I want to share something interesting about the private market. There are many ways to buy and sell private stock today, but Hive is the only platform that provides a one -stop liquidity solution for private companies and their shareholders. It not only provides access to a deep pool of investors, but also allows companies and boards to control elements like buyer approvals, seller eligibility, and even pricing, offering liquidity on their own terms.

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1:28:38I personally have had the immense pleasure of working with the HMC team and can say that they are truly exceptional partners and savvy investors. Whether you're launching your first fund or your Fifth, HMC welcomes the opportunity to partner with both developing and established managers. Have an idea you want to share with the team? Send it over to ventureathmc .harvard .edu. As always, I so appreciate all your support and stay tuned for an incredible 20 growth this coming Friday with the head of growth at Pplexity.