Video URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Mk8Yq6ptxI
i just knew this city needed something better than the classic takeaways that's how i got the idea for delivery i definitely know what it was like to walk in their shoes i did that job for a long time i did you know five deliveries last night and that's why you know treating riders with respect and making sure their voices are heard is so important to me we're running low on money because we couldn't get money in for whatever 14 months hov it kicks off our users were disappearing because there are no restaurants left on the platform so we see this plummeting growth i had to do the hardest thing i've ever had to do i had to lay off you know a significant number of people at the company i'm so proud of what we built and i'm so excited about the future but it is a hard hard job and anyone that tells you otherwise are not being honest we're about to get all this money in the company and then suddenly it was just gone right big number 600 million something like that and i was like holy [ __ ] you know what do we do [Music] delivery one of the fastest growing technology companies in europe you probably know the company you've probably used it but you probably don't know where it came from you probably don't know the founder and his story his unconventional very very humble journey delivery went from an idea that one guy had in london while working in the city to becoming a multi-billion dollar company in record time but the crazy thing about my conversation today with will is he is not your typical founder he's not your typical ceo he doesn't feel like your typical entrepreneur this was really his first business and the really puzzling thing about my conversation with will is he doesn't fit the typical stereotype of what you expect an entrepreneur to be and i think that is amazing because it just goes to show that
entrepreneurs don't all share the same fundamental characteristics they're not all these big braggadocious characters with huge egos and you can achieve great success with great humility will is an anomaly i think you'll feel that today he is incredibly humble he isn't that introspective doesn't analyze himself that much and he feels like a very simple straightforward character but what he's achieved wasn't simple it was excruciatingly difficult and as he'll tell you today it still is without further ado i'm stephen butler and this is the director ceo i hope nobody's listening but if you are then please keep this to yourself well i am sometimes when i have guests on this podcast i don't really know where to start but with you it's slightly different um as i was reading about your story and i've you know as i said you before we started recording i've been i think actually in 2015 i was delivered delivery's biggest customer so i'd like you to confirm that and reward me accordingly but i think i was um and i've watched the journey over the years and been absolutely blown away by it because of the disruption you caused to such a big incumbent industry however when i read into your story i kept seeing this phrase that you'd say and it really boggled my mind because it's so atypical of the guests i have on this podcast and it's that every time you're asked about your childhood or whatever else you'd always respond with i'm just a normal guy and when i think about what you've achieved you built what is now you know at least it was at one point europe's fastest growing company you couldn't possibly be just a normal guy i i don't know i mean i think i am you know when you're a kid i don't think you think anything is abnormal just sort of is what it is um so i grew up in a place called new haven connecticut uh it's a small city um about 130 000 people probably 10 square
miles so it's pretty small um it's where uh yale university is oh yeah yeah so we're known for that and we're known for pizza those are probably the two things we're known for best pizza in the u.s that explains why you went and started delivery companies i mean yeah i was always obsessed with sally's and pepe's and modern and all that um but yeah look my my parents are immigrants um so you know i would say growing up like uh i guess we didn't probably spend very much money it's probably the best way to put it but when you're a kid you don't you don't think about that it's just kind of what you your daily existence you know your parents what do they do professionally my mom my mom's scientist she works at yale my dad uh was an actuary he retired so they they were you know well-educated sort of professional people yeah and you and that brought you over here to london no no so so my story is i i yeah i grew up in new haven um i went to university in in chicago i went to a college called northwestern um and then my first job out of college i worked on wall street in new york because this was 2001. and i took this job on i mean i did really well in in school both in university and in high school um it was just one of these jobs you did when you kind of didn't know what else you wanted to really do you knew you could make money and you knew that other you know successful people ambitious people kind of went down that path so how did you end up in london i ended up in london because i worked for three years in new york uh my third year they said i got another job at a different place and they asked me hey do you want to you know check out a different office and i never lived outside the u.s i wanted to do something different i just took a chance literally on london so i remember really well it
came out in april 04. never been europe never been to london never been been here and so i showed up and i had such a great time i met you know the people on the team and i'm like [ __ ] it i'm gonna come i'm gonna come for a year and then it ended up just basically staying and how old were you when you when you came over here for the first time was 24 24. yeah i think it's so crazy so many of my american friends they've not left the us and i i was reading something yesterday about the i was i think it was in i think it's a page in the new york times it was talking about how important it is to leave the us to understand the world but then also to appreciate the country that you have i couldn't agree more i mean today is july 5th right yeah exactly yeah july 4th yesterday and you appreciate the us so much more once once you leave right because everyone in the us is always like waving flags and stuff they don't i mean they don't know anything else right um but when you leave and you you understand different societies you can appreciate the good and the bad of the us i'd say yeah i don't want to go into it but when i i i you know we grew up in the uk and i think europe and pretty much the world idolizing so much about the us because of films and movies yeah the one thing that upon moving to the us when i was 24 to run my business to new york i couldn't get my head around was the healthcare system yeah the idea that i could get sick and be bankrupt yeah because there's nothing you can do about it yeah that's the only well there's a couple other things with guns which we weren't going to either but that's the bits where i'm like oh my god this isn't the so you were in new york kind of the same age i moved to london then yes and you moved to you you were the williams sorry then yeah straight to williamsburg our office was in manhattan so but so you're you're working in canary wolf i'm guessing if you're in
finance yes i was a morgan stanley um and i remember my first day i showed up for work because in new york you got 25 dinner allowance you can order whatever you want actually funny story my first kind of day at work in 2001 i was pretty cheap right so i was like 25 i can get i can do whatever so i actually ordered 25 whoppers because burger king had this dollar whopper special and everyone's like what are you doing and by like day three the sort of novelty wore off i'm like i gotta work 100 hours a week it's not you know this isn't that much fun but no the first day i got to london i asked people we're working late i'm like what are we doing for dinner everyone's like oh just i don't know we go to the tesco and i'm like what's tesco so we go in the supermarket and everyone's like we're getting these microwave meals and i'm like wait a minute i'm like this is not you're working like 100 hours a week you try to aspire for something a little bit better so first day that's how i got the idea for delivery first day i moved here one of those tesco meals just didn't cut it i mean it was all right i mean they're but but i mean there's just london's like one of the culinary capitals of the world like why wouldn't you want better food delivered what's that i mean so many people have ideas right so many people have ideas for big grandiose businesses but it's almost like and i'd hate to say this because it sounds super pessimistic but the odds are you're gonna fail so how dare you how do you try and build that you know that massive logistical operation that is delivery you know honestly um it's a really good point right because you you're aware that there's the possibility of failure i don't know when i went into this when i started it i just said i'm not hedging myself in any which way i'm not doing side projects i'm just gonna focus on this because i
really really believe it not so much to start a business i believe in it as a consumer right so i always thought about it as you know i'm building this business for myself as a consumer and hopefully other people also you know kind of think similarly to me and i was convinced that enough people did and so i'm not one of these people that was like oh i need to start a business i'm like i need to solve this problem which i think is pretty different in my mind and i think people should start businesses because they want to solve a problem or they they're in an industry that they know super well they've identified some inefficiency that's my view at least i i complete you know over the last three years i've heard this narrative that like it's much easier to start a business solving a problem that you and your best friend care about yeah right yeah otherwise like you're gonna get bored yeah you know you i i told this story before it's totally true i had a friend from business school super smart guy and he he was he had like a thousand ideas he'd write them all down but his ideas were all predicated on some financial outcome right and he started this thing it was the etsy for pets pet accessories or whatever and i was like okay this sounds okay sounds okay i read his deck and i'm like wow this is like like a great idea so he's like i'm gonna go do this and then like nine months later i'm like okay how's it going he's like you know what i just really don't like dogs and cats very much and so i just couldn't do it right that's true you can't do something that you're not actually fully invested in so many entrepreneurs will say that they'll say oh no not even entrepreneurs so many people that are aspiring to start a business will say that phrase they'll say i really want to be an entrepreneur i
just need an idea and then you'll see them kind of like go and write down a list of things that they could maybe do and whenever i see that and i this i just 100 stand by this i always think they're going to fail because of the reasons you described there because you know they're going to go through that absolute [ __ ] chaos yeah and i think it was steve jobs that said the same person would quit it when you go through the absolute chaos so you have to love it and really understand it it can't be because i think i'll make because you probably won't make money either right no you won't right or you you can't go in with the assumption you will quickly quickly as well right yeah and you know and i had this other guy i knew who he was like you know what i i he worked at a big consulting firm and he was mckenzie or something like that and he's like in my spare time i've started these three businesses and i'm like i'm like no man you can't do that like you pick one thing you gotta like really go for it different people have different sort of attitudes towards that my view though is you you just have to go all in right so speaking of going all in there must have been a day where you hand in your notice of resignation well so so no not not for delivery because my story is um so after morgan stanley i worked uh kind of 0406 in london for morgan sailing and then i ended up working at a hedge fund for about uh four years in london and then i went back to business school in in philadelphia for two years and it came back in 2012. oh let's start this business fine yeah fine so you came back so this was the thing i i i wanted to do after business school okay so you finished business school and you came straight to london to start yeah because what was cool about business school was i saw offline online happening right because remember i so i tried to start the live room 08 right and when i was still working in london and when i
looked into it it was like all right i'd have to put a laptop in each restaurant i'd have to build some sort of handheld device for our rider network and it was just too complicated but you know steve jobs then invented this thing that completely changed everything right phones tablets all of that and so that was the prerequisite step of course for any of these well any business today really to operate right because in oh eight iphone one came out sdk i think the ios sdk came out in 08 so this app ecosystem hadn't really developed yet and so had to wait for that i didn't know obviously that the iphone would you know do what it did but in business school i was just super excited about it it goes to show how critical timing can be in terms of these macro factors with technology to enable ideas like that because you're right you could never have started this business in 2008. that would have just been impossible and you think i think the same about things like spotify all of these macro factors of handheld devices and 5g streaming and 4g streaming whatever all had to come together for you even to have that conversation with the record labels totally the infrastructure you know i mean you think back to to just laying cables under the atlantic i mean all of this stuff right to to to the to the iphone to all the software that was being built on i mean just crazy what had to come before and and those changes are always happening because the of the rate of evolution of technology so it goes to show that right now because of what's happened over the last x amount of months there are new opportunities being that have been created for entrepreneurs whether it's blockchain or crypto or so i think even as an entrepreneur you always think all the good ideas are taken
and you know for us we're obsessed about continual innovation of course because we know competitors come for us right we know that there's going to be someone sitting around going man this delivery thing kind of sucks we gotta like we can do better than that right and so we're paranoid about that all the time right that's how we think about it we always think we can get a lot better we have to so so when you first started out in london so you've moved from business school you've you've got this idea um talk me through how you know as a ground floor opportunity how that became a a conceptual like a business yeah so um it was me and my co-founder greg so greg and i grew up in new haven together we've been friends since i think we're like 12. wow right yeah and so we were into computers like when we were 12. i mean this is before i'm trying to think here because my mom worked yale so we would go use the um the unix workstations there and we we actually you know like we were on these use net groups um you know we were using ftp this is all before there was really a true graphical representation of the internet and so we got and we got pretty into computer games and stuff like that so we were we were pretty into that stuff um and and so that's how i that's how i knew my co-founder greg um we then kind of got out of computers a bit i don't know just discovered different things um but he ended up just you know staying well he he studied history then worked as a car mechanic just kind of randomly because he liked cars so he just decided to do that and then he started becoming a software developer again and so him and i we would discuss ideas like all the time and so in oh wait i talked to him about this idea right deliveroo and he was like we thought about it he was like this is really complicated for all the reasons we just talked about but we stayed in very close touch so throughout business school i was always like hey man what do you think about you know this thing again i think it's
like possible and so i convinced him to quit his job and you know kind of start this thing with me but i moved to london he stayed in the states so it was kind of like this weird thing right but i would say so i moved back here on october 12th um we were building the prototype uh the restaurant tablet um the rider app um we didn't actually launch with a consumer app we literally just had a website and so you had to kind of if you had a phone you had to kind of zoom in to all the buttons it wasn't even mobile optimized we didn't meant them an app right so and and so yeah because there's two of us right and so um i'd say the first few months before launch it was like me trying to set up restaurants i signed up restaurants walking up and down the street in chelsea it was him building all the initial technology me and him making product decisions so it's just just basically two of us then he came out for the launch january 13 and we launched in feb 13 and um yeah it was just me and him for the first i guess year yeah so you were predominantly leading the rider side in the kind of like on the ground operation i mean there's two of us so there's literally not like i mean greg was building all the technology yeah he did it himself which is like pretty incredible i was working with them on the product decisions and then i was running the business but the business was me signing up restaurants me you know getting getting the rider side of the marketplace going um and obviously you know attracting consumers but the funny thing is you know initially when we launched in february obviously no one knew who we were so i would actually just ask my friends to order all the time and you know they just get annoyed at me like why are you like bothering me like what and um a number of my friends would
would order i know for the sole purpose of watching me deliver the food to them right and i know that for sure and they they just thought it was like funny they would do the same yeah so i would deliver the food and then they they'd want to chat i'm like sorry guys i gotta go do my next delivery um but then i realized one thing after a while they kept ordering even if i didn't deliver the food and so that's when i kind of realized we were onto something do you remember the first order that wasn't your friend oh um no i i honestly don't but i can tell you the first order though the first first order ever i mean i told her to order it was it was my friend anetta and she was living on sydney street in chelsea and the restaurant was rosso pomodoro and i and you know i was like excited because she ordered so i delivered it but i delivered the pizza upside down yeah so it was it became a calzone um and then i then i just ate it and she's like you ruined my meal and you ate the food this is like the worst experience of all time yeah only up from there though so it's good i mean the writer ate the order yeah yeah not only you delivered it terribly and then ate the food but but still charged her i'm guessing i might have given her a refund i think i don't know for any kind of video but no that was that was what happened right it was like my friends were ordering and then it was just word of mouth right and and people got you know the bunch of people started just showing up never i didn't know their names i had no idea what's going on and i heard you you didn't do marketing for the first couple years a couple years yeah yeah well i did one thing i had to i used to wear this kangaroo costume around um yeah yeah um i didn't really enjoy doing that but um i i would wear a kangaroo costume and hand
out these um you know whatever like this is the living room yeah well why why london and not america i guess america's way more competitive and the design of the country is slightly different but why london well i mean i'm a londoner right i lived here for six years before going back to business school i just knew this city needed something better than than the classic takeaways wow whatever you don't have to say i'll say it just you it's [ __ ] awful what you know i don't know back in the you don't have to say i'll say it um when i was a student getting the cold stodgy awful rest not even restaurants awful corner shop takeaways and styrofoam boxes that was cold was just awful and there was no yeah and so my first experience with delivery was when i think i said you off camera um a company that i was working with turned the ceo turned around to me and said you can now order from top class restaurants and it comes in a nice pack nice packaging and i thought there's no possible [ __ ] way and then i tried it and i never went back well the reality is look i tried you know um just eat back in 0.7 right i was really excited about it i was like this is going to be like new york and i tried it i'm like oh wait i can't track my order i don't know when the food's going to show up and it was all sort of look i like kabobs right i like fractures nothing wrong with that but if that's the only choice yeah i'm kind of like you know i like kebabs but my intestines don't so like it's a very there's a battle there's some good places there's something no that's true there is there is there's a couple of slightly healthier options for kebabs around this around this area um but then so you get to the point where there's i read about there was a couple of riders so there was you and the three or four others yeah um there was mirza there there's saeed there's hanif um sayed and hanif and mirza still work with us um doesn't uh there's about four of us
yeah and they're still writers three of them are one of them actually works in our office in dubai now oh wow he does like rider support in dubai he wanted to move to dubai so amazing yeah awesome and so you guys were this was when the business was starting to get a little bit of traction within chelsea i'm guessing exactly yeah yeah so a little bit of traction in one neighborhood yeah we we launched only in one neighborhood right the first you know a few restaurants were on the fulham road in the kings road and one of the restaurants was was my landlord's restaurant i used to live above it so he i convinced him to sign up for just because he was like i saw him every day right it's so funny because when you hear about the lean you know when you read books like the lean startup and you hear about how entrepreneurs should be starting businesses you seem to have done a lot of things accidentally right like even your your idea of launching in a small area whether you can establish network effects and not necessarily doing marketing advertising to your friends stephen we didn't have money yeah this wasn't silicon valley i'm gonna raise a 30 million dollar seat i was funding the business myself so it wasn't like i had a choice right and so i'm kind of like okay i don't want to like burn all my cash you know and so that's kind of how i was running the business until we actually raise money there's something important about that isn't there when teams don't have huge budgets they seem to make better decisions i think so i i think i actually do i think having too much money can be problematic um and there's a lot of money now but yeah when you're when you're it's just me and greg four riders like 10 restaurants you know you don't have any money yeah you gotta like just work on the most important things and try to be as efficient as possible
i resonate with that because i when i started my first business we had six thousand pounds marketing budget and it was it wasn't until we'd blown it all on all the conventional [ __ ] flyers posters some inflatable balloon which we rolled down a road and we had no money that we sat there the three of us and and said um if we have no money how do we get a million people yeah how do we do it and that led us to discover this thing called social media yep and then um we were like well this well this is facebook page that has 8 000 students on it and the owner says we can buy off him for 50 quid i've got 50 quid let's go meet him bought it posted about my website on this facebook page more traffic than we've ever had so we were like let's just build facebook pages for free and so in 2013-12 we started building facebook pages we got to 100 million followers we're doing seven billion video views a month and the business grew to be worth 300 million and it would never have happened if we didn't run out of money because we were forced to think in real first principles exactly to ignore convention and um so i i came up with i i think i i love this idea i i'm like that's like my proudest idea so um we we were like okay look how do we reach people we could do the flyers i was sick of walking around with this kangaroo costume right and so i was like hmm and i was staying in a hotel and i was like oh they have these do not disturb signs that you can hang on the door right you know when you're in a hotel like do not disturb and i'm like you know what we should just say deliveroo and then list a number of the restaurants in the local neighborhood because no one knew you could actually get deliveries from there and we just hung them on people's doors and that worked so no discounts nothing just letting people know about it it cost you what 20p for one of these things right funny thing is the police got real mad because they we didn't think about this at the time
the police called us and they're like what is this delivery thing we're like well we're a food delivery company they're like how do we know you're not a burglary ring and a robbery ring and i'm like what are you talking about they're like well you could just leave those on people's doors and see who doesn't take them off and if they're if they're still on the houses are vacant so you could burglarize them and i'm like i didn't really think about it that way but pretty genius idea actually yeah and you're sitting there in your kangaroo outfit trying to convince the police you're not a burglar basically do you want to come in and watch this podcast live from behind the scenes if you do all you have to do is hit the subscribe button and now that the world has opened up you'll be behind the scenes as many of our subscribers have been i can't wait to meet you so i you know you've got four or five of you um the riders riders yeah and you're i hear that you're hanging out in a starbucks often and you're just sitting there chilling waiting for someone to yeah we're just talking i mean you know you know there's like four of us there yeah do you the founder of the company and three others the three riders yeah just waiting for the phone to ping yeah it was the three of us and it was the same guy would come to us and he'd be like all right you guys got to leave we're like but we we bought something you know he's like kick us out every every time you know and why was he kicking you out i don't know to be honest i don't think he liked the look of us if i'm honest with you um yeah you know like like uh i i think um you know and one day i went to him and i go what is your problem like you know and he's just like get out right and it was the way that he looked at us the way he looked at me was almost like we were not people right we're kind of like
anonymous is probably the best word i could use and then sort of sub human is probably you know the the worst word i could use but it was like that like we're just taking up space in this thing or making his coffee shop look kind of crappy right and i remember talking to the three other guys about it they like they're just like whatever just let it go like like who cares but i realized that that must be how a lot of people look at them all the time right because they're used to it right and for me i wasn't really used to it so i was like really really mad about it but you know it i definitely know what it was like to walk in their shoes you know for a day well for i guess a whole year because i did that job for a long time and that's why you know treating writers with respect and making sure their voices are heard is so important to me because of you know that one of those incidents and then those three those three guys were from pakistani descent yeah so one would one could assume that the the reason why the gonna definitely assume that yeah yeah i was assuming just to be completely clear i was assuming and yeah and asserting yeah well they're just like the way you know they're looking at us like uh these these people are gonna make my store look shitty you know you could tell right and so yeah that that was a kind of seminal moment i think for me and and just talking to these guys but they were just so sort of like either jaded or kind of numb to it they're like wow like whatever it seems to happen in them all the time yeah because they experience that type of prejudice and discrimination all the time i i mean i've i've been there right so very early and that's why that particular story resonates with me a lot is because i remember very early on when i was launching my business i have a tendency to to wear snapback caps and hoodies even today and obviously my net worth is
significant now and so when i get into like the first class part of the train i'll never forget the day whether the train attendant walks right down the aisle past everybody else and goes this is first class mate you're like yeah didn't didn't mention that to anyone else yeah just felt they need to come up to me and my snap back because i'm wearing this cap in this hoodie and tell me some assumptively that this this is this is first classmate i'm just looking at him thinking yes i know yeah you know what i mean and it's funny because i wrote it in my diary this is how i still remember this incident i wrote in my diary that one day you know i'll you know i hopefully this wouldn't be the case that people were you kind of like numb to it or were you kind of angry angry yeah angry but for me it's like this small little heat inside it's not like i'm gonna be rude to you yeah but it's like you presume something about me and and to be honest there's a bit of me that actually it's in some ways a compliment that he couldn't possibly think someone like me could afford to sit there and for me that there's some kind of compliment in there because of the underestimation that a black kid that's young can't sit in first class you know not that it's a right thing but it's it is what it is well i guess for me though what it also highlighted to me like was how lucky i was relative to some of these guys that they they cam they come from backgrounds of you know extreme poverty growing up in in in in pakistan they came here to build a better life they're super hard working like super dedicated and someone's just treating them like [ __ ] it's like it's pretty bad yeah it's an experience you i think few would understand if they hadn't been through it themselves so at some point in this podcast i usually do a break to talk about huel who are the sponsor of this podcast
but me and will spent so long talking about the product i thought i'd just show you this clip instead you know what i will try this you're going to try it do you like drink this in lieu of a meal three times a day so you just stopped eating hey deliveroo man do you know what actually it's crazy because that is that has been a pretty exciting yeah no well i i think i i had delivery this no i did i had delivery this morning okay in fact the wrap the package is over there so i got at 7 30 this morning and then when i'm busy throughout the day where i'll and i'm moving this but you enjoy food you enjoy yes okay but i know we'll never give up hard food try it let me know all right so let's see here we got the whole bottle is 400 calories 32 carbs 20 grams of protein man let's try it out low fat gluten-free sawyer it's it's not nest quick okay it's cool this actually tastes pretty good it is listen and it will leave you feeling energized and full and honestly we get addicted around here so jack um who directs the podcast when we put in a huel fridge downstairs he hadn't had it before tries one and now he actually lives off it if i drink this am i gonna want to eat food as well no okay no chance so so it's a good way to like yes lose weight and all that kind of stuff yes oh no chance i wonder if i can buy this on delivery maybe um you talk about the very early days of delivery one of the things that founders struggle with a lot and i did as well is is the name of the company and i heard i was reading about that oh no yeah but i love this story because i think it highlights how crappy some decisions are at the start i heard you were going to call delivery something else yeah there were there were a few different um permutations one was a food pony because i didn't read about that because i was thinking of these animals and food i think one was um i think it was i'm trying to think
here it was like uh yeah it was food mule was was another one because you know a mule's uh transports um food not so good right what about booze food did you forget that one yeah i didn't think you'd mention it um so the original idea for deliveroo even this is before 08 right so you know you this so in new york you go out on a big night first of all everything's open like really late right so you can actually go out past 11. if you get home at like five in the morning you can still order something to eat like you can do that and what my experience in in london was you go out late and you just can't actually eat anything and i just like couldn't understand that and so initially the idea for delivery was something called the zo7 it's called booze food which you know really allowed you to order food at like 3am when you really wanted it so that is actually true yeah it's funny because when people look at successful founders there's this like weird assumption that all of the decisions you made were right and that you're super smart and that you got everything right and it's not until you go back into those early moments and dig through some of the thinking the marketing ideas you think [ __ ] hell this is someone that's actually developed their thinking oh it's just iterating right yeah you know um but the boost food idea so there's there's another funny part of that because when when delivered so boost food was a separate thing but then when my buddy tried to liver for the first time he was like oh yeah this is great like you've got busaba you've got rosso pomodoro you've got all these great restaurants in chelsea but he's like really what you need to do is have a cheat code so when you're really drunk you can put in some cheat code and then it's like literally like all the bad stuff for you so that maybe we'll implement that at some point i don't know you chose to ignore him that's pretty funny idea
interesting um talking about co-founders another sort of integral part of success in business how um how did things go with greg i i know that he's no longer in the business but he at some point he departed yeah yeah no i mean look without greg the business wouldn't exist right no no question about it i think um you know he's one of the smartest uh hardest working people i know we grew up together he's one of my best friends we've been friends since we were 12. um i think um for greg he he wouldn't move to the uk um ever he just wouldn't do it never yeah i guess he didn't you know he's too american i don't know but no he he his wife was in a um she was getting a remd degree in the u.s and so it was like hard for him to like come over here and ultimately you know at some point so he built a um engineering team in chicago where he was living but at some point i was like no this this business real like we gotta we gotta have the team all together and so you know made a decision and he he he left a business in late 15 early 16 or so um but i mean i have a great relationship with him we were just chatting last night but yeah founders go through hell together yeah yeah i mean my founder co-founder did yeah we went we went through a lot but you know it was tough when he left right because i didn't have um there's not someone i can talk to on that same level right yeah you've got your you know your your southern sort of other execs and you've got you know a board of directors but it's different it's it's really different than having that did that hurt you when he left did it hurt me yeah a bit right because i was kind of like kind of wanted to build this thing you know with him but i also wasn't willing to just have half of the company be based in the states i just didn't think that was the right thing to do for the business right um yeah and i think it was um
yeah you know it was uh yeah it was tough right it was tough do you think that situation could have been handled differently in hindsight i think i think maybe i could have convinced him a little bit more to to move out here i just think because he wasn't here he didn't actually understand the momentum of the business but he didn't see all the stuff on the ground for him it was an abs it was an abstract idea i mean you can see the metrics you can see all that but that's really different than seeing a bunch of you know delivery riders the backpack on and sort of people talking about it in the uk right but i mean look i i think i think would have been great if he if he stuck around but i also think that you know people make certain decisions and he he decided to prioritize an another thing which is you know totally totally fine i find that really interesting as well and the reason i asked that question about do you think it could have been resolved differently is because the world is very much changed now because of covid and we have distributed teams all around the world in startups now yeah and this was pre way pre-coverage 2015 before zoom probably even you know had taken off so just i just wonder if now in the world we live in now a relationship where the tech team is remote could have i i think i i do think and by the way much of our tech team today is remote but the difference is we still have a very big core of people that kind of have seen the journey up front and center and so when you layer on top of that remote people i think that works really well i think to have a product team and a technology team that literally never uses the product because they're in the states is a really problematic in my mind because ours is not a just a pure digital product right we're we're a digital and a physical product a relationships business that's what it is right and so it's it's
different than you know something that's purely your experience in chicago and london is the same on certain types of businesses for us it's very different true very true talking about going through hell with founders and co-founders and just generally the hell of starting startups um one of the real reasons i founded this podcast was because and it's kind of clued in the name is because i didn't feel like the full journey of a founder is ever really told specifically the hard parts um and i i know that in your journey to build the business you did you've confronted all kinds of awful challenges yeah right talk to me about some of those awful challenges especially at the start it doesn't get easier i'll tell you that right so i mean the business is really you know significantly sized business now but i wouldn't say it gets easier they're just different right so you're one i would say the big challenge is no money you know me and greg running around right um i think my biggest challenge was at some point so i think i was lucky in the sense the business momentum sort of did take it wasn't like super it wasn't like this but there were new customers and we we knew this thing was working but i didn't know how big it was it would be and at some point because i was delivering food every single night right and at some point i remember my my flatmate he went to business school with me faris and he he kind of looks at me and he's a good friend of mine right he says he's like what are you doing and i'm like what do you mean he's like you just deliver food for five hours every night that's like what you do and i'm like yeah because i gotta who else is gonna do it and he was just like he kind of looked at me and just like all right you know and then i kind of like because because i you know i worked in these jobs that you can you know make a lot of money before i i had this summer internship at wharton that was like the one everyone wanted
and i just decided to do something else and um no he was kind of like he thought i was like losing my mind right and then i thought of it because i'm not a very like i don't even think i'm that introspective to be honest so i don't i'm kind of like i got stuff to do i'm gonna like do it and so he was like hey man you should like think about what you're doing right and i did and i was kind of like freaking out a bit just like sitting in my in my small room like what am i doing right am i where is this gonna go and then i just was like you know [ __ ] it like i think this is going great so i'm gonna i'm gonna stick to it so that was hard um i would say um did you come close to quitting at that stage no i never did really never greg did though yeah greg did i never did i'm not like i just i just wouldn't you know i wouldn't let that happen why i don't know man they just i just feel like i have such responsibility to the people i i work with the restaurants and the writers and i don't know you just start like i'll tell you what i'm not i'm not one of these people you know you read about bezos like hey i'm going to start with books books are easy to transport i'm going to move on and all these other things it's grand plan in their mind not like that at all but what i did see was i saw success that fuels more ambition you get into the circular path and so i was i was on it like that and i just also have this just immense sense of responsibility to people right similar to that story you told about your friend there i read that you one day knocked on a door to deliver some food and it was one of your former colleagues from yeah from a hedge fund yeah yeah i find this fascinating because people don't often talk about embarrassment as being one of the real key barrier to entries to start businesses and to
pursue your your dreams yeah but it's such a tough barrier like humiliation and embarrassment and that look i remember that look fondly of the people i was living with when i was 18 19 and you tell them what you're doing and that kind of like smirky like oh okay yeah that happened i also i mean that story yeah so it's john luca and um really nice guy but so i'd worked with him probably five years before and he hadn't seen me in like five years and so he he ordered something i didn't know it'd be him and i deliver this pizza to him and i got my my scooter helmet on and he's like i'll do his accent it's pretty strong he goes will is that you are you okay he's italian right he's from naples and i'm like i'm like who the [ __ ] is this i'm like oh it's john luke i'm like hey uh i'm like hey john luca and he's like is that anything okay you know he's like he just thought i like lost my mind um so because he didn't really understand that i started the business he oh i just i think he thought i was you know just delivering pizzas right and i'm like well yes i am delivering pizzas but i also that is part of the job but you know i also started this business and he just thought it was totally nuts yeah a lot of my friends did in the beginning though that first year a lot of them did i mean they were supportive but you know i knew what they were kind of saying behind my back a little bit too you know not not in a terrible way just like out of concern why didn't you care too busy too busy man i generally don't care i generally don't care what other people think if i'm honest with you my whole life never really have i don't know why but a bit of a superpower isn't it i don't know could be a good thing could be a bad thing don't know just don't really care that much it's definitely a good thing it's
definitely a good thing especially as it relates to your personal happiness but also pursuing your your um your goals and ambitions because as we say embarrassment and and because public scrutiny seems to be one of the biggest barriers to starting and continuing so when you get past that initial stage what are the next big challenges um so post year one business starts getting some traction maybe business starts getting traction um that part's real exciting right you know you raise your first amount of money that's like super exciting it's like wow someone someone gave i think with us it was index ventures gave us 2.7 million pounds which now you're like that's like the smallest seed thing that ever do but but i was like wow like we've got you know this these really smart guys that want to invest in the business um and now it's about like how do we scale this thing and so it was hard but it was a lot of fun right but i didn't know how to like hire anyone i'd worked in finance and i worked at hedge fund sat in front of a bloomberg machine right so i'm just on gumtree that's how i hired and actually the people people that that work at delivery now they don't they always tell me that's not true but it's 100 true i hired the initial people from gumtree and i was just like writing like random like job descriptions and we ended up um getting an office by office i mean probably the size of this room i would say no windows no heating it's definitely illegal it was on cleveland street 121d cleveland street and um we we found these like tables and chairs in the car park beneath it found a sofa on the street just set it up it was a thousand pounds a month and we got going right but i loved that part that was so much fun um so i'd say in the like the first two were super hard i would say years two and three and four were hard but like exciting
because you're expanding the business you don't really know what you're doing you're kind of figuring it out as you go along right so i love that part your favorite part yeah i'd say my favorite part is definitely when the company's like 20 to 100 people yeah look i'm the i'm i'm the ceo of a large publicly traded company now right it's not gonna be as fun let's be honest like and i'm happy to say that on the record yeah like everyone does everyone talks about the sub hundred um because you know why because everyone's on the same page yeah you don't need to be deliberate about communications you don't need to be deliberate about how all the pieces fit together everyone just kind of knows and obviously to scale a company and do that in a high quality way you need to figure out the systems to do that so that when you have 3 000 people it's similar to when you have a hundred but when you have 100 i think it's the best you know everybody's name and oh everyone's name you guys are all sort of kind of friends you you know you go to the pub together you know that's fun when did you consider yourself to be an entrepreneur ah i don't know i don't know if i ever thought about it like that was there even after you raised that money did you did you think i'm a businessman i always thought about i wanted to build an online food company that's how i always thought about it so whether it's business or entrepreneur i don't know i don't know what the title means but you know it's funny because there's i'm not obsessed with the idea of building a business i'm obsessed with the business i'm building so many people have it the other way around i think so and it's almost become quite i know sexy and instagramable to be like be your own boss i'm ceo [ __ ] like do you know all that stuff like and i think that and again i just bet against those people that are building for the sake of status not for the sake of value right
solving a problem yeah solve a problem so so intriguing that seems to be a really similar pattern with the people that sit here that have built great businesses they didn't they had no interest in being an entrepreneur they just got sucked into a problem they thought they could solve yeah to me that's got to be the way now obviously there's going to be a lot of different people different approaches but for me absolutely that's got to be the way so in that early stage when you just got that office and there's you know a couple of you in that room things are tough right you're talking about you know you're burning cash all startups especially tech ones tend to be burning cash yeah um what was your mental health journey from that point till now look i'd say this um i don't know about other people i i don't think i'm a very up and down person uh so i guess that's probably a good thing but i'm not totally sure could mean i'm just suppressing a lot of stuff i don't really know right but um i don't have like these enormous ups where i'm like going around jumping up and down and i'm not going bananas when things are you know kind of going back that that being said some of my former colleagues in the early days might disagree with me i would absolutely go nuts when i thought an order was handled and appropriately or customer service interaction was um handled inappropriately i think some people probably they can have some memories of that but i kind of got over that and don't don't really do that anymore but i would say a lot of the journey is super super super hard i'm happy to talk about any of those stories with you but there's definitely been long periods of time not just like for hours like long periods of time we're just like man this is this has to get easier or like you know you're just i forget it was elon musk or whoever talks about it the standing on the abyss thing you know you know chewing glass i felt
that like many many many times right that's hard it's really hard if you'd known it would be that hard would you have started thinking about your toughest moments if you'd known you would have had to go through that that chewing glass staring into the abyss would you have started delivering um if on the day where you thought i'm gonna start delivery today i'd come and i'd shown you a tape of those moments yeah but i guess it's a little hard to say because if you told me hey business would be where it is today would i have started it probably yes you told me it wouldn't work out and i'd be having chewing glass for like years then probably not right it all it all depends but it it's like hard to it completely different degree because as the founder you think about it every single hour you think about it you know when you're in bed you know when you're when you're talking to a friend you're it's in you can't escape it right you touched your head there when you said you can't escape it that's where it is right that's where it lives it lives in your head at all times at all times you can't escape talk me through the specific details of those moments though one example of an issue so so one of them was we were um so so back in 2017 holy [ __ ] i guess four years ago now yeah we were um you know we'd raised a bunch of money from our kind of investors so that was index accel green oaks dst you know businesses sort of flying um and then um we were going to raise money from you know the world's biggest fund right i'm not going to name who they are but you can probably guess who they are at some point right um so anyway so we were we're about to do that um we just term sheets signed doing due diligence summer of 17 and um you know big round and um all of a sudden i get a call like oh we three days before we're supposed to
close oh we can't do this no blah blah blah reason i think it was related to wework it was it was related to uber i think okay or something like that right i don't remember exactly the specifics but it doesn't really matter the point is we're about to get all this money in the company and then suddenly it was just gone right a big number big number and i was like holy [ __ ] you know what do we do so how big was this number it's like 600 million something like that it's a lot of money right 700 maybe i don't even remember it's a bad day but then we um and i was like kind of pissed off for like 10 minutes but i got the team together i'm like guys we got a lot of work to do over the next you know month six weeks so we lined up like 25 investor meetings all around the world and we just went we met with all these other funds and we got it done but that was that was really really tough right again because if we didn't get we didn't get the money because we're lost making entity right we were running out of money right so that part was not fun that was a tough one but it was great we ended up you know working with um you know fidelity and t rowe price so we got in terrific investors so at the end of the day you look back on it it was like oh that's a actually a really good outcome but at the time it was really hard but that is so synonymous and typical with building a business just that unix i mean this year's i mean covert 19 was an example of that just unexpected unpredictable unanticipated crippling [ __ ] at any time and this is why i find it almost impossible for founders not to live with some form of anxiety because you know when you wake up on any day there's a high probability you're going to get a text message or an email that something you didn't think about
has just totally gone well i'll tell you i'll tell you a story about covet actually it actually predates covet a bit so we raised the next round of capital um so um from amazon which you you probably know yes the way this happened though was was really crazy so we had um spent a bunch of time um with amazon they decided to invest you know we negotiated the deal all normal and they were great and we the due diligence process i was like wow these guys really know what they're doing right so it's really it was really great so we announced the deal and again you know we're loss making so we need the money right and again this is a big round and the um the cma the antitrust authorities in in the uk they're just like we need to review this but they wouldn't actually let us take the money in right and we're like but how are we supposed to compete when we compete against the likes of uber and justine you know that are well funded they're kind of like it's not really our problem you know we're like well you know we're a british company trying to build you know big tech business here and so that whole process was excruciating because it was 18 months long [ __ ] 16 16 months 18 months long where amazon was a minority shareholder in our company i think a 13 stake 14 stake shareholder same as some of the other like investors right they had one board seat everything was normal says and you know these guys just literally kind of went after you know this um in an unprecedented way but we couldn't get the capital in right so we're just going we're like what do we do and we're at the mercy of some sort of you know institution right it's not like a free market type of thing you can go and like find out you know we're at the mercy of this situation and so they took us through what they call their phase one investigation which lasted like six months and then a phase two investigation lasts another
eight months so that was terrible right utterly terrible because you don't actually have any idea what's going to happen because it's not it's not a logical process right it's sort of like you know it's the whim of someone else right it's not it's not a logical process at the same time what started happening was kovid kicked off in what jan feb of 2020 right so we're running low on money because we couldn't get money in for whatever 14 months whatever it was covet kicks off and covid what it did to us initially was our restaurant partners were shutting down for delivery and dining not just dine in right and so the restaurants on the platform started plummeting you know in europe and the uk now asia was different they handled it very differently but we didn't our users were were disappearing because there were no restaurants left on the platform right i don't know what they were doing i guess they're going to ocado or whatever and so we see this plummeting growth we have to and we had to do the hardest thing i had to do the hardest thing i've ever had to do i had to lay off you know a significant number of people at the company which just was the yeah it was the hardest thing i had to do you know like big layoffs because we we just didn't know what the future was going to be like we were in the middle of an anti-trust process hoping to get a lot of money in our business is plummeting that was really bad really bad i mean the worst for people that lost their jobs obviously but really bad sleepless nights i always sleep um but yeah the days are hard days you cite that moment as being the toughest in your journey at delivery yeah i do i do just that whole because it's it's not like a problem you or i could solve right if it's like hey you know we didn't do this round i can go and raise more capital whatever
we can go figure it out or this feature doesn't work well the way we wanted to we can figure out a way to iterate around that there's an org structure issue well we can figure that out but when you're at the whim of a government institution that's a very different feeling that's a you're totally not in control and when it lasts for that long then the issue is you're a tech company you can't not compete hard for 14 16 months right that's not the world the way the world works it's not like a two grocery chains battling it out right it's just different and so yeah i'd say that was hard it was compounded with the fact that we had to lay off all these people right which is the hardest thing we could do now luckily for us these restaurants reestablish themselves and the business has been on this amazing trajectory that was tough what goes into your thought process when you realize you've got to lay off a significant amount of people you know that it has domino's effect domino effects you know that it's going to be a press story all of these things you know that people are losing their jobs their livelihoods at a time when they you know when they're going when when in a time when the the future is so uncertain yeah what's going through my head like i mean just it's [ __ ] terrible right i don't know what else to say you know but do we have to do it but it's terrible and getting up in front of the company and explaining to people why this is the right thing to do really hard these are their friends colleagues you know lost a lot of really great people you know it's definitely the hardest thing we've ever had to do those are the days when it sucks busy right look the job is like oh i'm so proud of what we built and i'm so excited about the future but like it is a hard hard job and anyone that tells you otherwise is
either having an exceptional experience or or they're not being honest right i also think it's different when you're the founder and the founder ceo right like i built the thing from an idea right and it's a big thing and then i don't care about the press i care about like our employees right i care about the restaurant partners the the riders the consumers did you have anxiety at that point did you ever suffer with anxiety i mean i i certainly think so a must-have yeah yeah for sure i i definitely had anxiety throughout that point running my business as well because we face similar decisions and you're right the key word that you've used there which i resonated with was uncertainty uncertainty because it's sort of like it's not in your control and you don't know how when you i knew the cma i had to deal with them once in 2015. and it's not as you say no timelines we when we didn't have a timeline when we were dealing with the cma yeah um we know that it's it's largely a political yes um setting a presidency you know for us it was we were the biggest in our industry so they were trying to establish a rule by using us as an example did you go through a phase one or what did you go through well i was with the advertising standards association around disclosure of advertising and it was at a time when influencer marketing it wasn't clear whether you had what you had to write on influencer marketing posts whether you ad sponsored whatever i see right and so there was and the the rules and the guidelines were as we were told by someone at the cma purposefully vague so that you could kind of you know interpret and um they ended up using us as an example we had a case uh chundled on i think for nine months for those nine months we're not sure whether they're going to shut us down find us slap on the wrist what's going to happen it's
tough but it's tough right because you don't know i don't know right so it takes a long time yeah that point around anxiety i think is um specifically interesting because um it's i think it's definitely increasing in our generation because of social media and we all have more tabs open than ever before ceos are people that as you've alluded to walk around with all the tabs open all the time what do you do to relax in moments like that when you're in the middle of a the story i probably don't do a good job with that you know i can put a pretty calm face on because i'm just not naturally like an up and down person but you know i try breathing exercises you know i try to really kind of just not think about anything sometimes i tried that calm app yeah i got through day six of the 30 day challenge got got a little bored at day seven but but um i used to read a lot i used to read a book a week i now at this point it's it's it's been a while since i read a book which is makes me a little sad this is like my favorite thing to do that does work or you just kind of go for a walk i go on long walks all the time that really helps me out a lot i have some super exciting news to share with you all i have an amazing new sponsor for the podcast which i'm very excited about called my energy like with all of the sponsors on this podcast i've reached out to them because i truly believe in the transformative work that they're doing and that means that i can talk about them from a place of real authenticity the company was co-founded by the brilliant jordan brompton and lee sutton to give you guys a little bit of info my energy are one of the uk's fastest growing renewable energy companies whose mission is to reduce our dependency on fossil fuels an issue that should be at the forefront of all of our minds and it's been at the forefront of mine since i sold my range rover sport and traded it for an
electric bike my energy was founded in 2016 and since then their growth has been absolutely bonkers from a team of just six in the uk to a workforce of over 200 across europe so throughout my podcast going forward i'll be talking about some of their products and showing you how you can make that transition to a more green future thank you so much for being a partner for this podcast my energy and it's our sponsors ultimately that allow us to scale things up and bringing my energy on board is a signal that this podcast is going to get bigger the production's going to get better the guests are going to get bigger the stories are going to get more compelling and i couldn't be more excited to share all of that with you could you could you talk to me about what it without going into specifics about people or whatever can you talk to me about the um challenge of having and sustaining romantic relationships while you're also you've got this baby and this obsession which is all concerning i think it's like yeah i think the brain is capable of kind of filling itself up with certain things and then there's just not room for other things yeah i mean that's how i think about it yeah i don't know if that's fair and you know some people would say that that that i'm i'm certain that other people can can can can fill their brains up with more but i'm like a very obsessive person right i don't know if you i'm the exact same that's why i asked the question because i was hoping you might be able to tell me how to fix it i'm not the right guy to tell you all that so yeah i i've struggled for that same reason just being very uncompromising with time and i hear compromise is an important part to sustaining a healthy relationship i heard that too from all of my ex-girlfriends but i don't know if like um yeah but i don't know if like it's also like
you know we do this because you know i don't know like we're hiding from something else or like you know i don't know that's something i think about sometimes you think about that a little bit right like why am i so obsessive but then i think back and i've always been obsessed about everything i don't really think it's changed but when i started my career in business and i was obsessive looking myself in a room not really seeing my friends either i thought this is the way to live life it's just about get rich get um successful and then everything else happiness will arrive at that point like not it would not that i wasn't happy but just my happiness would it scale to some point like euphoria so this is all it so you get successful you get some money and you realize that your happiness probably for me i'm speaking for myself here doesn't necessarily scale it doesn't go down but doesn't really move upwards that much and then i start reading about um the importance of meaningful connections and relationships and all these things are watching this odd ted talk about how men in relationships over 100 years study live longer are happier et cetera et cetera are more healthy and i think fact you know what i actually think i've i've [ __ ] up i actually think maybe i should have attributed more time to relationships but can you can you just be so intentional about everything i mean i don't know maybe we can i don't know but you must you must understand the importance right according to like the science anyway of having yeah yeah yeah but you know we make the decisions we do i don't know you know it's all it's it there's a difference between an abstraction and actually what happens right hmm but you because i i f worried that i might regret it someday that i might have had my priorities wrong this whole [ __ ] time you're a young man though does that ever
cross your mind that you might have miss you might have put your priorities in the wrong place has it never crossed your mind to be honest no really but i'm not a very retrospective person at all i literally don't think about the past which may not be a good thing either good for certain things not good for others what about friendships then through that through that you know chewing glass and staring into the abyss how good were you at maintaining friendships and social similar thing right it's like you have a limited amount of time and i'd say okay okay yeah you know five out of ten probably five out of ten i wouldn't recommend probably it's a lonely job you know and you're not gonna you don't want to like hang out with your friends and just talk about how tough your day is all all the time either right so i don't know if you were the same way 100 awful friend my friends became the people i worked with pretty much i had that i heard that but i think it's really important to separate that yeah yeah but it's a solitary thing right you're a founder you know you just kind of especially when greg kind of you know left the left and so you're just on your own and you got to figure stuff out we make this sound kind of like terrible though i'm just like listen thing this is this is part of the reason why i wanted to do this podcast because i think there isn't uh there isn't this warning about the sacrifice it's all oh my god look he's [ __ ] rich and he's got oh i'd love to and i think the balance is important let me take you up until the the ipo so you do um company goes public um our company went public via reverse merger things change it's tough um because you now have the scrutiny of the public markets talk to me about that whole journey and how you found that um yeah so i think the whole ipo process
you know was it was a lot of work for about kind of three four months before the ipo i think we were all kind of looking forward to you know something you know really exciting um and it was really exciting to take a company public you know um you know you know at a big market cap um you know something coming from an idea obviously sort of the the day one you know trading was was hard right because i'm not like i don't really like i said i don't really care that much about what people think and i don't really read the media that much or anything like that but when it's that pervasive you know it's like front page of every you know single newspaper you know telling you you know you guys [ __ ] up or you did this yeah it was tough for a few weeks i'll be honest with you it was tough for a few weeks you know because the market cap fell yeah and just like you know there's a lot of you know you you people in the company oh look what's going on and you're on investor calls like what's going on and ultimately the way i sort of think about it is you know so proud of the fact we got here right i'm actually just focused on the business how do we grow the business how do we move the business in the right strategic direction right and i'm super super super optimistic about the future for all the stuff we've been doing for the past few years i'm going to come to fruition you know in the future and all the future facing stuff we're working on now so if i'm very honest with you i don't think about the stock price i actually think about the business but for a few weeks it was like difficult right it's very hard and then there's all these stories we're in which we talked about a little bit but all these stories written about drivers are they employees are they contractors um the unique position you've got is you've actually been a rider and in fact you still are
yeah i did i did you know five deliveries last night you know notting hill and i talk to riders all the time i know what they want we're building a business for our riders for our restaurant grocery partners for our consumers that's their custom they're all customers at the end of the day that's how we think about it right so a model that actually works for them has got to be the most important thing and we know our model can it improve absolutely it can improve we can improve everything but do we think it's the best model for them yeah 100 your company's worth you know billions and billions and billions and billions and billions and billions and you're out last night doing delivery riders yeah delivery deliveries around nottingham why a few reasons one um i want i always test our rider app right so it's a good way to do it secondly decent way to get some exercise and you're just on the road and you're not thinking about anything else i actually find it very relaxing right and then thirdly i can actually kind of see the restaurants in action too because the interaction is usually not with the consumer the consumer doesn't want to talk to you but they just want their food i get it the restaurants you can learn a lot just by spending time there when you shop at the restaurant to collect the pizza or whatever it is with chicken chow mein do they recognize you no no one recognizes the writers recognize me sometimes but no one recognizes i'm not like a celebrity so have you ever had an experience where like a restaurant was rude to you or like uh yeah last night really yeah i was pretty pissed off about did you [ __ ] you're [ __ ] off the sidewalk no no no i don't say a word but i i i make sure to log log into my notes really yeah how rude just like well i was like hey i'm like hey i've been waiting for a while they're like they do this and i was like
shake behind you yeah i'm like come on and then then i got the food and it was like kind of cold i'm like hey like you know just you know this food's kind of cold and they were like yeah just deliver it buddy and i'm like at no point you told them you're this no i would never you're different from me no no but i want the true experience right i want to understand what the writers go through it was really funny as they were being rude to me there's other writers walked up to me he didn't know where i was he was just like oh man you see these guys are at it again really yeah yeah and you take those learnings back to 100 hq and you go we need to fix this yeah while we talk to those restaurants right are you going to speak to that exact restaurant hundred percent i will and what would you say well i waited around for a long time you clearly had made the food was just sitting around like we need better processes we need to figure out a way to get this to work and please tell your staff to not you know be retweeted you know and i get it they're busy too like but you know it's uh just just smile say hey how you doing it makes a big difference in people's days right what have you what's your thinking around competition you're in an incredibly competitive field where you've got these absolute heavyweights yeah and you've had competition emerge and disappear throughout your whole course of building this business and they've and all your competition seems to have had 10 times 100 times the capital that you've had oh i don't know we've had a lot of capital to be fair but i mean uber yeah well they're there they always have a lot and rocket internet in the early days they launched in the uk yeah yeah what was that thing they launched i forget the name but everyone else yeah food i don't know something yeah i think it was look i think competition exists because
this is such a big market right the it's 1.3 trillion pounds in the 12 markets we operate in online penetration is you know call it three to five percent it's early it's big market that's why there's a lot of competition i think look the way we think about the competition is um you know of course we pay attention to it i mean very closely but it's really about what is our consumer value proposition and is it better than the competition is it growing on an absolute basis as well and we fanatically sort of measure that um and we always think about you know what is the consumer the riot or the restaurant the grosser of the future want before they even know right what is the answer to that question what is the future well i think the future is i can't give away all my secrets the future is um look this this this business is super underpenetrated on you look look at travel it's 50 right food is that low why is food difficult well food's difficult because a it's perishable and b it's emotional which means to express food online is hard you you go to a restaurant right restaurant's a 75 gross margin business why low net margin but high growth what because it's an experience right right it's an emotional experience but it's not just about the food it's what was your relationship with the maitre d what was what did the core look like all these things right i know they're amorphous how do you take that same feeling and put it online a really hard thing to do so i think the future is going to be more and more food occasions online they don't just have to be delivery though they could be dine in they could be a whole host of other things private chefs could could be that could be you know cool recipe kits could you know a lot of different things right but how do you marry that with the emotional aspect of this brilliant food industry right and no one does it we don't do it well today you look on our app it's pretty transactional you look at ubers you look at you know any of these other
guys pretty transactional and i think the winner in this space it's a winner i don't know that's that's maybe a poor word but but whoever does really really well in the space is going to nail that emotional side right the restaurant generated content the fmcg generated content the grocery generated content we collect millions and millions of reviews each week on our platform we don't do anything with that great today in my view so how do you marry all that together how do you migrate the experience from a transactional one to more of an emotional one right hmm interesting this is emotional right here sorry okay oh you're gonna drink four of these that's great for this one so we're gonna put that all over facebook ads that's really interesting and so you're talking about creating greater depth from what i heard creating greater depth with that social and emotional interaction with food within the food is social food is emotional right yeah at the core so delivery is becoming a social network for food but i think having aspects of that yeah right we want to be an app you go to not just when you're hungry but when you want to learn about food as well right i hear you because like a chef tells his story in a physical space how do you let that chef tell his or her story online and how does that help you make decisions as to what you want to purchase right i think that's amazing and it's really different than buying like toilet paper on amazon right or buying like which is transactional right it's more transactional now the reason you use amazon is the best most reliable service in the world but i think with food i think it's a little bit different you need that reliability but you also need that emotional connection wow yeah so that's what we're we're spending a lot of time on trying to figure out so as you look so i guess no i've got two questions so my next one is about money
a lot is written when founders go public about how much money they've made bonuses blah blah um i mean elon musk is a great example the amount they've written about him i think it caused him to sell all of his properties and his house in pretty much all of his possessions and he now lives a lot of the time when he's on a spacex in this little small shed but he said in the interviews he did that because the money is so secondary to him he just wanted to disarm people from thinking about that and then obviously when he became the richest man in the world again he is hitting with all the billionaires or evil stuff what relationship do you have with money and what does it mean to you in your life oh man um i don't know i never really thought about it uh [Music] i mean i don't really live very differently than i did you know seven or eight years ago so kind of live in the same place i mean i'd rather more money than less money probably agree to be honest um but uh did it make you happier i don't know i don't haven't really thought about it i i i'm sure there's some i'm sure having more at some point will make you a bit happier mm-hmm right i'm sure as you said there's probably a limit to that though right yeah but i'm not like i don't buy a lot of stuff so i don't know like yeah i just don't buy a lot of stuff so when you look forward into your future then what is it that you're aiming for and and why does that matter [Music] look uh you know um i think part of me would love to figure out myself um uh may sound kind of weird but just when you start this thing you're on this journey and the journey sort of propels it has a life of its own basically it's probably the best way to put it
you start getting a lot of customers you start getting a lot of riders start getting restaurants you get investors and and the things moving and you're moving along with it in many cases in a very deliberate way in many cases you're along for a journey and so this thing has a life of its own and it it it it is pretty interesting to take a step back and think okay is this journey completely everything that i had in mind and i wanted to do or were there just a lot of parts of it that were it's like a wave kind of taking you along and i'd love to figure that out a bit to be honest right i don't that makes any sense yeah so what i heard was you're trying to understand if your own personal journey is completely aligned with the journey of the company as as it grows because the two entities you know especially i'm guessing at the very start they're so interlinked it's your life it's your everything but at some point you have to kind of separate i think not necessarily i'm not saying resign anything but separate your life and your ambitions from that because they're so intertwined and it becomes difficult i'm not even saying separate necessarily but just like having a better understanding of what your role and what will wants from his life and what he's interested in and yeah and i think i i wonder if other people feel that way i don't know maybe you've asked that question i know how you feel everyone's that sits here that's a founder of a big business feels that way because it's just all consuming yeah yeah tom sat there last week he said the same thing did he yeah he's like he was he was he had a red phone in his bedroom he was he had from what he described he had very little life he mean he said his relationships broke down french he said i think his friendships were okay um but he had this red phone
in his bed or bedroom that would ring when there was emergencies he was consumed by it he had a crushing weight every time he woke up in the morning and so now that he's he's left he's now discovering pottery and all of these other sort of personal things that he's doing just for his own personal reasons which were probably impossibly hard to do when he was being dragged well i think yeah yeah i think that's interesting yeah when you start something and it really becomes something it has a gravitational pull of its own and the question is you know are you this thing or you in the orbit right yeah it's a little hard sometimes to to to separate those two things so that's something i'd love to kind of understand how do you go about understanding that i was going to ask you man you're the one that talks oh god a therapist probably and really trying to i think you're just talking about it i think because even as far as i don't think we get much time to talk about these things no we're just being dragged by the emails and the urgent that's what i mean so you have to create space right to i think you have to i think and i think it will help with business as well right to take a step back to to remove yourself and just like think about other stuff and when you step back in that's why i do think going on holiday is really you know you know it's funny it's like i didn't take one for seven eight years just didn't um which is like kind of stupid honestly but maybe in the first few years i could maybe that was fine but just having the ability to step away for a week and do something totally different i think is incredibly important you got any holidays planned for to to do exactly that this whole travel thing is a bit problematic and if you were to go on holiday do you think you could you could relax um it's hard it'll pre it takes me about
three days so i need to go on a holiday longer than four days yeah i think that's what i need to do yeah well listen um when you do figure out those existential uh answers and you've you've had time to meditate and go to the beach and uh figure out that's that point of separation that you describe do come back on the podcast and we'll talk about that then because i'd love to know the answers um but i want to thank you for coming here today and having this conversation with me thanks steven super fascinating thank you um and it's so it's so inspiring and interesting how there's so many similarities with with founders that have gone on that journey doesn't seem like there's many differences however the character that's gone on that journey always seems to be really really different and you are you know remarkably unique so you hear the same things a oh yeah the like fundamentals of the journey and what it does to you and how it feels is always the same but then the the differences and the nuances are in the like the pilot yeah and how he addresses the and how he or she feels about or addresses those that experience and that usually relates to the younger years and where you developed your resilience or your perspective on the world um but yeah super fascinating super inspiring thank you so much for coming today thank you now you're a very very busy guy thank you for the huel it was delicious i'm not even gonna have to plug it you've done it all for me you've done my job thank you just trying to make it easier you're right you've made it really easy thanks thank you appreciate it appreciate you thank you [Music] you