HelloFresh

“I remember pounding my fist to invest in HelloFresh and still not too shabby at a ten billion dollar market cap, right? It was a lot more six months ago, but nonetheless, it's company and it was space that was still nascent.”

“Look, I think the main difference, if you look at visionaries, is that on, on our investor side, we only have successful entrepreneurs. On the one hand side, we have 30 unicorn founders that have built great digital companies, like the founders of Miro, UiPath…”

“And I think if you had talked to industry experts, whether that's industry experts in a CPG company, In a direct to consumer company, even though that concept didn't really exist back then, or at a supermarket, at a, at another food company, they all would hav…”

“I think back in those days Was very much expected of everybody to stay in the office till 10 PM.”

“I think we're today one of the largest direct to consumer companies outside of China. I don't really know any direct to consumer company that is Much larger than we are”

“And since we have started generating cash flow, I think about three years post IPO, we had our cash flow break even.”

“In the rear view mirror, one of our share buybacks was at much higher levels than where the share price is trading today. So if I'm looking at the IRR of that investment, that was probably not a great investment.”

“One of the first buckets where people start saving is they're going less to restaurants. That's definitely what you have seen in previous recessions is That the share of out of home food has actually declined, whereas the share of food that you consume inside …”

“At the moment with Factor, we have two of the three biggest cooking facilities in North America. Guess what the other one is? The one that we're not owning of the top three cooking facilities in the U.S. Disney World Orlando.”

“So I think in the early days, there were one or two occasions where we were literally like three to five days before kind of like thinking about filing for chapter 11, which I guess is the right term, at least in, in US terms, but very, very close because in t…”

“We never had any structure. We never had any ratchets.”

“Now, if I look at that from the outside, it would be absolute insanity to launch a competitor to us as of today, given that for 10 years we worked through a lot of these complex problems.”

“Six months after launch, we were at 10, fifteen million dollar run rate with a small brand that we launched, but the meals were terrible. Like we got really bad recipe ratings. Customers didn't stick around. It was basically a leaky bucket because the meals we…”

“Over the last four years, we've generated about 1.5 billion in cash flow from operations. Of those 1.5 billion that we generated, we allocated roughly nine hundred million Into making our own operations better. So in our fulfillment network, in our last mile l…”

“So in my view, competition is, is a constant source of innovation and inspiration. I think it's extremely arrogant to not pay super close attention to competition. And I'm not only talking about your direct competitors. I'm also talking about in our case, all …”

“I believe for my seed round and for my series A round, I've been asked about providing business plans for the next five years, which were obviously all made up, et cetera.”

“That at certain points in time, we felt that really going from five wholesale suppliers to integrating with 1500 suppliers all over the US directly to capture that margin upside, to get much better freshness and quality, that this is something that drives a lo…”

“We're running 42 different fulfillment centers with heavy automation in those fulfillment centers around the world.”

“I think the way that our category traded would have not allowed us to IPO the business at any other point in time.”

“I remember one very vividly, which was, I think we had a new record week. We had to source, I don't know the number any longer, but something like 10,000 potatoes. And you actually source 10,000 potatoes, which is like two big truckloads. And then the trucks a…”

“But the best capital allocation decision nonetheless was probably one of the M&A deals that we did. We bought a company called Factor. That's a ready meal company in the US, which has been growing very nicely since we actually applied a lot of the muscles that…”

“Up to IPO, we raised around about three hundred million. And that was the sort of like we had a cumulative cash burn of about three hundred million before we actually started generating cash flow.”

“We also never said we want to outsource anything that has to do with performance marketing, for example, because as a direct to consumer company, right? That's one of the biggest sensitivity on your LTV to CACs is your CAC. So I really want to understand that …”

“Not only two billion dollar business lines like we have today with our meal kits and our ready meals”