The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett - Deliveroo Founder - From £0 to £5 Billion: Will Shu

Episode Date: July 12, 2021

Deliveroo, wow this company is HUGE! I’m sure most of you would have used it but do you know anything about the guy behind it? My guest this week is Will Shu, founder and CEO of Deliveroo. Born in 1979, the son of Taiwanese immigrants, Shu grew up in New Haven, Connecticut, USA. His mother, a scientist, and father, who worked in insurance. He founded Deliveroo in 2013 with childhood friend and software engineer Greg Orlowski. Deliveroo operated in London for the first two years, growing via word of mouth. It now operates in 12 countries and more than 200 cities. Deliveroo is worth £5 billion, becoming Europes fastest growing company with 2,000+ employees. In mid-June 2016, Will and Greg received an award for the Best Startup Founders as part of The Europas Startup Conference and Awards, mainly given to technology companies. The company also received Fastest Rising Startup of the Year and the Europas Grand Prix award. In December 2017, a study by macroeconomic consultancy Capital Economics revealed that Deliveroo had helped create 7,200 jobs across the restaurant sector since it launched in 2013. It also boosted the industry's revenue by £460 million in the year to June 2017. The report also found that Deliveroo had helped add £372 million in value to the UK economy in the same 12-month period, a figure which Capital Economics projects to rise to £1.5 billion in the year to June 2019. By mid 2020, Deliveroo had not benefited from the COVID-19 pandemic, when demand for food delivery from restaurants and takeaways surged. Deliveroo reported to be cutting 367 jobs (and furloughing 50 more) from its workforce of 2,500. Will talks about how hard this decision was at the time in today's podcast. Will is an incredible entrepreneur, one thats a far cry from the usual braggadocios CEO of a multi billion dollar company. He’s a humble person and lives a very modest lifestyle saying his life hasn’t change much at all since the early days of Deliveroo. This is conversation proved to me that you don’t have to be born an entrepreneur.   Follow Will: Twitter - https://twitter.com/willshuroo Follow me: https://beacons.ai/diaryofaceo

Quick one. Just wanted to say a big thank you to three people very quickly. First people I want to say thank you to is all of you that listen to the show. Never in my wildest dreams is all I can say. Never in my wildest dreams did I think I'd start a podcast in my kitchen and that it would expand all over the world as it has done. And we've now opened our first studio in America, thanks to my very helpful team led by Jack on the production side of things. So thank you to Jack and the team for building out the new American studio. And thirdly to to Amazon Music, who when they heard that we were expanding to the United States, and I'd be recording a lot more over in the States, they put a massive billboard in Times Square for the show. So thank you so much, Amazon Music. Thank you to our team. And

thank you to all of you that listened to this show. Let's continue. I just knew this city needed something better than the classic takeaways. That's how I got the idea for Deliveroo. 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.

COVID 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 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 otherwise they're not being honest we're about to get all this money in the company and then suddenly it was just gone right i don't

know big number 600 million something like that and i was like holy shit you know what do we do 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. 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. And 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 Bartlett, and this is is the diary of a 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 as i said I said to you before we started recording, I've been, I think actually in 2015, I was Delivery's biggest customer. So I'd like you to confirm that and reward me accordingly. But I think I was, 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 it 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 inside delivery company i mean yeah i was always obsessed obsessed with Sally's and Pepe's and Modern and all that. But yeah, look, my parents are immigrants.

So, you know, I would say growing up, like, I guess we didn't, probably didn't spend very much money is 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 did they do professionally my mom uh my mom's

scientist she works at yale um 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 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. right 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 but you knew you could make money and you knew that other you know successful people ambitious people kind of went down that path so So how did you end up in London? I ended up in London because

I worked for three years in New York. My third year, they said, I got another job at a different place. And they asked me, hey, do you want to check out a different office? And I'd never lived outside the US. I wanted to do something different. I just took a chance literally on London. So I remember it really well. I 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 fuck it I'm gonna come I'm gonna come for a year and then I ended up just basically staying and how old were you when you came over here for the first time it's 24 24 yeah I think it's so crazy. So many of my American friends, they've not left the US.

And I was reading something yesterday about the, I think it was a page in the New York Times, and 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's 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. I mean, they don't know anything else, right? But when you leave and you understand different societies, you can appreciate the good and the bad of the U.S., I'd say. Yeah. I don't want to go into it, but when I, you know, we grew up in the U.K. and I think Europe and pretty much the world idolizing so much about the U.S. because of films and movies. Yeah.

The one thing that upon moving to the U.S. 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, there's nothing you can do about it. Yeah. That's the only, well, there's a couple of 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 Williamsburg then? Yeah, straight to Williamsburg. Our office was in Manhattan. So you're working in Canary wolf i'm guessing if you're in finance yes i was at 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 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, 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 going to fail. So how dare you, how dare 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? Cause 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're in an industry that they know super well and they've identified some inefficiency that's my view at least i i can i do not 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 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, OK, this sounds OK. Sounds OK. I read his deck and I'm 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 going to 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, or 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 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 bullshit chaos. And I think it was Steve Jobs that said a same person would quit it when you go through that 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 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 i he worked at a big consulting firm and he was mckinsey 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 and you gotta like really go for it. Different people have different sort of attitudes towards that. My view though is you just have to go all in, right? So speaking of going all in, there must've been a day where you handed your notice of resignation. Well, so no, not for Deliveroo,

because my story is, so after Morgan Stanley, I worked kind of 04 to 0 2006 in London for Morgan Stanley. And then I ended up working at a hedge fund for about four years in London. And then I went back to business school in Philadelphia for two years. And I came back in 2012 to start this business. Fine. Fine. So you came back.

So this was the thing 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 to online happening, right? Because remember, so I tried to start Deliveroo in 08, right? And when I was still working in London, and when I looked into it, it was like, all right, I 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 08 iphone 1 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 be you know do what it did but in 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 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 just laying cables under the Atlantic. I mean, all of this stuff, right? To the iPhone, to all the software that was being built on. I mean, just crazy what had to come before. And those changes are always happening because 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 that have been created for entrepreneurs, whether it's blockchain or crypto or whatever it is. 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 Deliveroo thing kind of sucks.

We got to 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, um, you've got this idea, um, talk me through how, you know, as a ground floor opportunity, how that became 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 at Yale. So we would go use the Unix workstations there. And we actually, you know, like we were on these Usenet groups. 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. And so that's how I that's how I knew my co-founder, Greg. We then kind of got out of computers a bit. I don't know know just discovered different things um but he ended up just you know staying well 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 08, 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 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 12. We were building the prototype, the restaurant tablet, the rider app. 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 into all the buttons it wasn't it wasn't even mobile optimized we didn't have an app right so 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 assign up, walking up and down the street in Chelsea. It was him building all the initial technology, me and him making product decisions.

So it was just basically two of us. Then he came out for the launch January 13. We launched in Feb 13. And yeah, it was just me and him for the first, I guess, year. Yeah. yeah it's just me and him for the first i guess year yeah so you were predominantly leading the rider side and they're kind of like on the ground operations 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 yeah which is like pretty incredible i was working with him 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 feb 3rd 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 we do the same yeah so i would deliver the food and then they they'd want to chat and 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 on to 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, I told her to order. It was my friend Annetta. And she was living on Sydney Street in Chelsea. And the restaurant was Rosso Pomodoro. And I was excited because she ordered. So I delivered it.

But I delivered the pizza upside down. Yeah. So it became a calzone. And then I just ate it. And she's like, you ruined my meal. And 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. Only up from there, though.

The writer ate the order. Yeah, yeah. Not only, you delivered it terribly and then ate the food. But still charged her, I'm guessing. I might have given her a refund, I think. I don't know. Very kind of you. But no, that was what happened, right? It was like my friends were ordering and then it was just word of mouth right and and and people got you know the bunch of people started just showing up and

i didn't know their names i had no idea what was going on and i heard you you didn't do marketing for the first couple years couple years yeah yeah well i did one thing i had to i used to wear this kangaroo costume around. Yeah. Yeah. I didn't really enjoy doing that, but I would wear a kangaroo costume and hand out these, you know, whatever, like this is the liveroo. Flies, whatever. Yeah. Well, why, why, why London and not America? I guess America is 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. Just eat. Wow. Whatever. You don't have to say it.

I'll say it. Just eat. It's fucking awful. Well, you know, I don't. Back in the, you don't have to say it. I'll say it. When I was a student getting the cold, st stodgy, awful, 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 to you off camera, a company that I was working with, the CEO turned around to me and said, you can now order from top class restaurants and it comes in a nice packaging. And I thought there's no possible fucking way. And then I tried it and I never went back. Well, the reality is, look, I tried, you know,

Just Eat back in 07, 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 order i don't know when the food's gonna show up and it was all sort of look i like kebabs right i like fried cheese 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 very there's a battle there's some good places there's 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 you know i read about there was a couple of riders so there was you and and the three or four others yeah um there was mirza there was saeed there was hanif um saeed and hanif and mirza still work with us um matlub doesn't. There's about four of us. Yeah. And they're still riders? 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. 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? Yeah? Yeah. So a little bit of traction in one neighborhoodsea 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 all in the fulham road and the king's 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 it 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. But Steven, we didn't have money.

This wasn't Silicon Valley. I'm going to raise a $30 million seed. 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 raised 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 think I actually do. I think having too much money can be problematic. 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 got to 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 6,000 pounds marketing budget and it was, it wasn't until we'd blown it all on all the conventional shit, flyers, posters, some inflatable balloon, which you roll 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 millions of people? Yeah. How do we do it? And that led us to discover this thing called social media yeah 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 it 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 2013, 12, we started building Facebook pages.

We got to a hundred million followers. We're doing 7 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 to ignore convention. And so I came up with, I think I love this idea.. I'm like, this is like my proudest idea. So we were like, okay, how do we reach people? We could do the flyer. 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 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. Smart. And you're stood there in your kangaroo outfit trying to convince the police you're not a burglar. Yeah, basically. 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, there's like four of us there.

So you're 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 then sort of subhuman is probably, you know, the, the, the worst word I could use, but it was like that. Like we're just taking up space in this thing. We're 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 riders with respect and making sure their voices are heard is so important to me because of, you know, that one of those incidents. And those three guys were from Pakistani descent.

Yeah. So one could assume that the reason why the- Well, I'm going to definitely assume that. Yeah, 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

these these people are going to 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 because it happened to them all the time yeah

because they experienced that type of prejudice and discrimination all the time 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 where the, the train attendant walks right down the aisle past everybody else and goes, this is first class, mate. And you're like, yeah, didn't, didn't mention that to anyone else yeah just felt the need to come up to me in my snapback because i'm wearing this cap in this hoodie and tell me assumptively that this this is this is first class mate 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, hopefully this wouldn't be the case. But were you kind of like numb to it or were you kind of angry? Angry. Angry, but for me, it's like this small little heat inside. It's not like I'm going to be rude to you, but it's like you presume something about me. 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, 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 is what it is.

Well, I guess for me though, what it also highlighted to me like was how lucky i was relative to you know some of these guys that they they can't they come from backgrounds of you know extreme poverty grown 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 shit 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 cure 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 gonna try it do

you like drink this in lieu of a meal three times a day so you just stopped eating hey deliveroo man no no no you know do you know what actually it's crazy because that is that has been a pretty yeah caught him out no but 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 it at 7 30 this morning and then when i'm busy throughout the day where i'll and i'm moving this. But do you enjoy food? You enjoy food? Yes. Okay, but.

I will never give up hard food. Try it. Let me know what you think. All right, so let's see here. We got the whole bottle is 400 calories, 32 carbs, 20 grams of protein. Let's try it out. Low fat, gluten-free, soy.

It's not Nesquik, okay? This actually tastes pretty good it is listen and it will it will leave you feeling energized and full and and honestly we get addicted around here so jack um who directs the podcast when we put in a heel fridge downstairs he hadn't had it before tries one and now he actually lives off it if i drink drink this, am I going to want to eat food as well? No. Okay. No chance. So it's a good way to like lose weight and all that kind of stuff.

Yes. No chance. I wonder if I can buy this on Deliveroo, maybe. You talk about the very early days of Deliveroo. One of the things that founders struggle with a lot, and I did as well, is the name of the company. And I heard, I was reading about that. Oh, no. 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 um i think one was uh but 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 is a food kind of transports um food not 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 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 Zoe 7. It's called booze food, which really allowed you to order food at like 3 a.m.

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, fucking hell, this is someone that's actually developed their thinking oh it's just iterating right yeah you know um but the booze food idea so there's there's another funny part of that because when when delivered so booze food was a separate thing but then when my buddy tried to live 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. It was pretty funny idea. Interesting. Talking about co-founders another sort of integral part of success in business how um how did things go with greg 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, you know, he's one of the smartest, hardest working people I know. We grew up together.

He's one of my best friends. We've been friends since we were 12. I think for Greg, he wouldn't move to the UK. 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, his wife was in a, she was getting her MD degree in the US. And so it was like hard for him to come over here. And ultimately, you know, at some point. So he built a engineering team in Chicago where he was living. But at some point I was like, no, this is this business real. Like we got to we we gotta have the team all together and so you know made a decision and he he left the business in late 15 early 16 or so um but i mean i have a great relationship with them 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 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 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? Yeah, and I think it was, yeah, you know 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 i didn't see all the stuff on the ground

for him it was an app 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 um but i mean look i i think i think it would have been great if he if he stuck around but i but I also think that people make certain decisions and he decided to prioritize another thing, which is 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 has very much changed now because of COVID. And we have distributed teams all around the world in startups now. And this was pre, way pre-CO pre-covid 2015 before zoom probably even you know had taken off so i 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 really problematic in my mind. Because ours is not just a pure digital product, right? We're a digital and a physical product. A relationships business. That's what it is, right? And so it's different than 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. 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 the 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 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, six 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. 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 flatmate, he went to business school with me, Forrest. And he kind of looks at me. He's a good friend of mine, right?

He says, 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 got to, who else is going to do it? And he was just like, he kind of looked at me and it's 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 going to 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 going to go? And then I just was like, you know, fuck it. room, like, what am I doing? Right. Am I, where is this going to go? And then I just was like, you know, fuck 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. Never. Greg did though. Yeah. Greg did. I never did. I'm not lying. I just wouldn't.

I wouldn't let that happen. Why? I don't know, man. I just feel like I have such responsibility to the people I work with, the restaurants and the writers. I don't know. You just start. 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 gonna start with books. Books are easy to transport. I'm going to move on to all these other things.

It's grand plan in their mind. I'm not like that at all. But what I did see was I saw success that feels 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 well is that you are you okay he's Italian right he's from Naples and I'm like like who the fuck is this I'm like oh it's John Luca I'm like hey uh I'm like hey John Luca and he's like is everything 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 he 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 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 bit 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... 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 goals and ambitions. Because as we say, embarrassment and 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 that work at deliver now they don't they always tell me that's not true but it it's 100% true. I hired the initial people from Gumtree, and I was just writing random job descriptions. And we ended up getting an office. By office, I mean probably the size of this room, I would say.

No windows, no heating. It was definitely illegal. It was on Cleveland Street, 121D Cleveland Street. And 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 love that part. That was so much fun. Um, so I I'd say in the, like the first year was super hard. I would say years two and three and four were hard, but like exciting. Cause 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 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 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 um how all the pieces fit together everyone 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 3000 people, it's similar to when you have a hundred, but when you have a hundred, I think it's the best. You know, everybody's name and everyone's

name. You guys are all sort of kind of friends. You know, you go to the pub together, you know, that's fun. When did you consider yourself to be an entrepreneur? Uh, I don't know. I don't know if I ever thought about it like that. Was there a, even when,

after you raised that money, did you, did you think I'm a businessman? No, 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 you know so many people have it the other way around I think so and it's almost become quite i know sexy and instagrammable to be like be your own boss i'm a ceo bitch 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 problem so so intriguing that seems to be really similar pattern with the people that sit here that have built great businesses they didn didn't, they had no interest in being an entrepreneur. They just got sucked into a problem they thought they could solve. 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. What was your mental health journey from that point until now? Look, I'd say this. I don't know about other people. I don't think I'm a very up and down person. 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 bad 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 inappropriately 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 if it if 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 going to 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 at the chewing glass for like years, then probably not. Right. It all, it all depends, but it,

it's like hard to a 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, 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.

All times, you can't escape it. Talk me through the specific details of those moments, though, one example of an issue. So one of them was we were, so back in 2017, holy shit, I guess, four years ago now, yeah, we were, you know, we'd raised a bunch of money from our kind of investors. So that was Index, Accel, Green Oaks, DST, businesses sort of flying.

And then we were going to raise money from 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 fine so so anyway so we were we were about to do that um we just term sheet 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 we work it was related to uber i think okay 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 shit 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 loss 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, you know, Fidelity and T. Rowe Price.

So we got in terrific investors. So at the end of the day, if you look back on it, it was like, oh, that's 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, I mean, this year's COVID-19 was an example of that.

Just unexpected, unpredictable, unanticipated, crippling bullshit 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 covid actually it actually predates covid a bit so we raised the next round of capital um so 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 with Amazon. They decided to invest. You know, we

negotiated the deal all normal and they were great. And the due diligence process, I was like, wow, these guys really know what they're doing. Right. So it was really it was really great. So we announced the deal. And again, you know, we're loss making making so we need the money right and again this was 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 you know we compete against the likes of Uber and Just Eat that are well-funded? They're kind of like, it's not really our problem. We're like, well, we're a British company trying to build a big tech business here.

And so that whole process was excruciating because it was 18 months long. Fuck, no. 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 investors, right? They had one board seat. Everything was normal. And these guys just literally kind of went after this 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 covid 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, COVID kicks off. And COVID, what it did to us initially was our restaurant partners were shutting down for delivery and dine-in, 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 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 akato 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 antitrust process, hoping to get a lot of money in our businesses plummeting. That was really bad, really bad. I mean, worse for people that lost their jobs, obviously, but really bad. Sleepless nights. I always sleep. But yeah, the days are hard days are 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 want it 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. You're totally not in control. Oh, man. And when it lasts for that long. And the issue is, you're a tech company. You can't not compete hard for 14, 16 months, right?

That's not the way the world works. It's not like 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 had to do now luckily for us these restaurants re-established 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 dominoes 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 my i mean, just it's fucking terrible, right? I don't know what else to say. 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 is really hard. These are their friends, colleagues, lost a lot of really great people. It's definitely the hardest thing we've ever had to do. Those are the days when it sucks to be a CEO, right?

Look, the job is like, 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 is either having an exceptional experience or they're not being honest right i also think it's different when you're the founder when 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 riders, the consumers. Did you have anxiety at that point? Did you ever suffer with anxiety? I mean, I certainly think so. I must have. Yeah. Yeah, for sure. 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 resonate with, was uncertainty. Uncertainty, because it's sort of like, it's not in your control. And you don't know how long, 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 didn't have a timeline when we were dealing with the CMA.

Yeah. We know that it's largely a political setting of precedence. For us, it was, we were the biggestMA. Yeah. We know that it's, it's largely a political setting of precedence. Does it, 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? Ours 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 add sponsored hat 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 it trundled on i think for nine months for those nine months we're not sure whether they're going to shut us down fine find us slap on the wrist. What's going to happen? But it's tough, right? Cause you don't know. You don't know. Right. And it takes a long time. Yeah. That point around anxiety, I think is specifically interesting because 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 storm? I probably don't do a good job with that. You know, I can put a pretty calm face on because I'm not, I'm just not naturally like an up and down person, but I, 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. I got through day six of the 30 day challenge, got a, got a, got a little bored at day seven, but, but I used to read a lot. I used to read a book a week. I now at this point, it's been a while since I read a book, which just 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. Could you talk to me about, without going into specifics about people or whatever, can you talk to me about the challenge of having and sustaining romantic relationships while you're also, you've got this baby and this obsession, which is all consuming? 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 have 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 on 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 obsessive about everything. So I don't really think it's changed, but. When I started my career in business and I was obsessive locking 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 successful, and then everything else, happiness will arrive at that point. Like, not that I wasn't happy, but just my happiness would arrive at that point. Like not, not that I wasn't happy, but just my happiness would 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, doesn't go down, but doesn't really move upwards that much. And then I start reading about the importance of meaningful connections and relationships and all these things. I'm watching this odd Ted talk about how men in relationships over a hundred years study, live longer, are happier, et cetera, et cetera, are more healthy. And I think, fuck, do you know what? I actually think I've, I've, I fucked 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 do you, cause I, I've, I've worried that I might regret it someday that I might've had my priorities wrong this whole fucking time. You're a young man though. Has that ever crossed your mind that you might have missed, you might have put your priorities

in the wrong place? Has it never crossed your mind? To might have missed 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, you know, chewing glass and staring into the abyss, how good were you at maintaining friendships? You know, it's a 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 10. Probably five out of 10. Wouldn't recommend. Probably five out of 10. It's a lonely job, you know, and you're not going to, you don't want to like hang out with your friends and just talk about how tough your day is all the time either, right? So I don't know if you were the same way.

A hundred percent. Awful friend. My friends became the people I worked with pretty much. I had that. I had that. But I think it's really important to separate that. Yeah. It's a solitary

thing right your founder you know it's just kind of especially when greg kind of you know left you know left and so you're just on your own and you got to figure stuff out we make this sound kind of like terrible but i'm just like listen this 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 fucking rich. And he's got, oh, I'd love to. And I think the balance is important. Let me take you up until the IPO.

So you do, company goes public. Our company went public via reverse merger. Things change, it's tough because you now have the scrutiny of the public markets. Talk to me about that whole journey and how you found that. 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 something really exciting. And it was really exciting to take a company public at a big market cap, something coming from an idea.

Obviously, sort of the day one trading 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'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 fucked up or you did this yeah it was tough for a few weeks so 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 people in the company oh like 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 was very hard. And then there's all these stories written,

which we talked about a little bit, but all these stories written about drivers, are they employees, are they contractors? 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 grocer 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.

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 billions and billions

and billions and billions and billions and billions. And you're out last night doing delivery riders. Yeah. Delivery deliveries around Notting Hill. Why? A few reasons. One, 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. 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 show up at the restaurant to collect the pizza or whatever it is with chicken chow mein do they recognize you nah no one recognized the writers recognize me sometimes but no one recognizes i'm not like a celebrity so have you ever had any experience where like a restaurant was rude to you or like yeah last night really yeah i was pretty pissed off about it. Did you fucking, you're fucking off the surface. No, no, no. I don't say a word, but I, 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, yeah, they do this. And I was like, shake the hand at you. Yeah. And I'm like, come on. And then, uh, then I got the food and it was like kind of cold. I'm like, Hey, like, you know, just, 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 man you're different from me no no i would but i want the true experience right i want to understand

what the riders go through it was really funny as they were being rude to me, there's other riders walked up to me. He didn't know what it was. He was just like, oh man, you see, these guys are at it again. Really? Yeah.

And you take those learnings back to HQ and you go, we need to fix this. Well, we talk to those restaurants, right? Are you going to speak to that exact restaurant? A 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 rude to us 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 makes a big difference in people's days, right? What's your thinking around competition?

You're in an incredibly competitive field where you've got these absolute heavyweights and you've had competition emerge and disappear throughout your whole course of building this business. 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 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 has. Food, I don't know, something.

Yeah, I think it was. Look, I think competition exists because this is such a big market, right? It's 1.3 trillion pounds in the 12 markets we operate in. Online penetration is, you know, call it three to 5%. It's early, it's a big market. That's why there's a lot of competition. I think, look, the way we think about the competition is, 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. And we always think about, you know, what is the consumer, the rider, the restaurant, the grocer of the future want before they even know? 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, but the future is, look, this business is super under-penetrated. You 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 go to a restaurant,

right? Restaurant's a 75% gross margin business. Why? Low net margin, but high gross. Why? Because it's an experience, 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 decor look like? All these things, right? I don't 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 be that. Could be, you know, cool recipe kits. 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 Uber's, you look at any of these other guys, pretty transactional. And I think the winner in this space, winner, I don't know, that's maybe a poor word, 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 grocer-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? Interesting. This is emotional right here sorry okay you're gonna drink four of these yeah that's great for this one so we're gonna put that all over facebook ads i'm joking 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 delivery food is social food is emotional right yeah at the core so delivery is becoming a social network for food no i don't know about social network 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 about bonuses 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 and pretty much all of his possessions and he now lives a lot of the time when he's on spacex in this little small shed but and he said in interviews he did that because the money is so secondary to him he just just wanted to disarm people from thinking about that. And then obviously when he became the richest man in the world, again, he's hitting with all the billionaires are 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, I mean, I don't know i never really thought about it uh 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 have more money than less money probably 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. Right.

I'm sure there, 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.

Yeah. I just don't buy a lot of stuff. So it's not. When you look forward into your future, then what is it that you're aiming for and and why does that matter look uh you know um i think part of me would love to figure out myself um it 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 writers, start getting restaurants, you get investors 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 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 know if 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 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 or anything, but separate your life and your ambitions from that of the business. Yeah, 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 you maybe you've asked that question i don't 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 had a red phone in his bedroom.

He was, he had, from what he described, he had very little life. I mean, he said relationships broke down. Friends, he said I think his friendships were okay. But he had this red phone in his 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 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? Are you in the orbit, right? And it's a little hard sometimes 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 just talking about it i think because even as founders 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 this gravitational

so you have to create space right so i think you have to i think and i think it'll help with business as well right to take a step back to i think and i think it'll 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 fun 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 the to do exactly that this whole travel thing was Bit problematic and if you were to go on holiday, do you think you could you could relax? It's hard ill pray. 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 answers and you've you've had time to meditate and go to the beach and uh figure out that 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. But I want to thank you for coming here today and having this conversation with me.

Thanks, Stephen. Super fascinating. Thank you. And it's so inspiring and interesting how there's so many similarities 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. It 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 lot. Yeah. The like fundamentals of the journey and what it does to you and how it feels is always the same. But then the differences and the nuances are in the like the pilot and how he addresses that

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. But yeah, super fascinating, super inspiring. Thank you so much for coming today.

Thank you. No, you're a very, very busy guy. Thank you for the fuel. It was delicious. I'm not even going gonna have to plug it you've done it all for me you've done my job thank you i'm just trying to make it easier

you've made it really easy thanks thank you appreciate it appreciate you thank you Thanks for watching!