Nov 28, 2022 · 1h 15m · news
Miki Kuusi: How I Scaled Wolt to $8B; Why I Sold to DoorDash | 20VC #953 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
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gold bands on the timeline = statements, start to end. Hover to read, click to jump. CC turns on captions
In this interview, Wolt co-founder Miki Kuusi shares his journey scaling the company to an $8 billion acquisition by DoorDash, offering critical insights into product-market fit, disciplined execution, and the psychological realities of high-stakes startup leadership.
How this conversation actually went
Every chapter scored 0–10 on four independent dynamics. Hover any point for the reasoning behind the score. Harry holds 16% of the talking time here. How this is scored →
Harry as informed peer 3.9 Guest teaching 5.2 Guest disagreement 2.9 Harry pushing back 3.8
speaking balance: gold is Harry, purple is the guest (3 minute bins)
Sharpest disagreement ▶ 21:11 Miki rejects psychological safety premise
Miki directly rejects Harry's framing on employee safety, stating 'You're confusing two concepts... safety, no' and forcefully asserting that high-performance environments cannot prioritize safety over winning.
Hardest push from Harry ▶ 20:38 Harry challenges team performance focus with psychological safety theoryHarry refuses to passively accept Miki's team-first focus, bringing up managerial studies on lifetime employment and psychological safety to challenge the guest's core philosophy.
Biggest teaching moment ▶ 21:11 Miki clarifies the difference between trust and safetyMiki sharply educates the host by dismantling the confusion between trust and safety, explaining that trust means fair treatment during hardship while safety undermines high performance.
Harry holds his own ▶ 59:39 Harry counters Sequoia momentum thesis with personal investment lossesHarry uses his own domain expertise as an active VC investor in Clubhouse and Hopin to directly challenge Sequoia's research claim that momentum is difficult to lose.
the scores for every segment, with the reasoning behind each
| Chapter | Topic | Harry as informed peer | Guest teaching | Guest disagreement | Harry pushing back | Why |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Finding Product-Market Fit: Pickup to Delivery | 2 | 4 | 1 | 1 | Harry asks standard exploratory questions about finding product-market fit and evolving customer expectations. Miki explains the shift from pickup to delivery and how customer expectations continually tighten. | |
| Leadership, High Performance, and Supercell's Focus Lesson | 2 | 5 | 1 | 1 | Harry asks for Miki's definition of high performance in leadership. Miki provides a masterclass on focus using Supercell's decision to delay Android expansion as a primary lesson. | |
| When to Expand and the Hyper-Focused CEO | 6 | 4 | 3 | 6 | Harry interrupts and pushes back when Miki expresses guilt over doing public interviews, arguing that podcast appearances attract top talent like VPs. Miki defends his hyper-focused allocation while acknowledging serendipity. | |
| Fostering ownership and the Team vs Family Philosophy | 3 | 6 | 3 | 4 | Harry opens up about personal management frustration regarding employees not caring enough. Miki educates him on true ownership, equity distribution, and the distinction between a winning sports team and a family. | |
| The Dichotomy of Trust, Safety, and Founder Identity | 6 | 8 | 7 | 7 | Harry pushes back on Miki's team performance stance by citing studies on psychological safety and lifetime employment. Miki firmly rejects the premise, stating 'You're confusing two concepts... safety, no' and schooling Harry on the difference between trust and safety. | |
| CEO Loneliness, Kees Koolen's Hiring Rules, and Recruiting Hacks | 5 | 6 | 4 | 5 | Harry directly challenges Miki's decision to keep funding rounds unannounced, arguing founders should always announce. Miki details why couriers and merchants don't care about international tech press and shares recruiting growth hacks. | |
| The Reality of Scaling Teams and Fair Employee Compensation | 4 | 6 | 5 | 4 | Harry questions whether tech companies overhire and asks if Miki agrees with 'hire fast, fire fast'. Miki rejects 'hire fast, fire fast' forcefully, arguing hiring is a two-way commitment of trust. | |
| The Near-Death of Wolt: Layoffs, Rejections, and the Series B Savior | 2 | 5 | 1 | 2 | Miki recounts Wolt's near-death experience in 2017, conducting 1-on-1 layoffs for one-third of the team, and being saved by 83North. Harry asks probing questions about the emotional burden of firing people. | |
| exit Strategies, Sequoia's Momentum Research, and Money Relationships | 6 | 5 | 3 | 6 | When Miki cites Sequoia research claiming startup momentum is rarely lost once achieved, Harry hits back with his own VC experience, pointing out portfolio failures like Clubhouse and Hopin where momentum evaporated quickly. | |
| The Endless Mountain Climb and the Quick-Fire Round | 2 | 4 | 1 | 1 | A warm quick-fire section where Miki shares lessons from Tony Xu, his favorite book Hard Things About Hard Things, and his background managing Dota clans as a teenager. | |
| Building Europe's Startup Ecosystem and Wolt's Future Legacy | 5 | 4 | 3 | 5 | Harry challenges Miki's optimism about Europe by highlighting severe regulatory friction in France, Germany, and Belgium. Miki acknowledges regulation but argues ecosystem maturity and patience are the core factors. |
Statements from this episode (26)
Kuusi: Economic downturns and tech layoffs are ideal times to build startups
“When the world looks, you know, as fucked it is right now, that's a really good place to be starting something new. Because there's going to be a lot of things that get cleaned up from the economy. You know, right now you can see like a lot of tech tech compan…”
Miki Kuusi: Every e-commerce company is as much logistics as consumer brand
“The biggest realization was that, you know, every e-commerce company is as much of a consumer facing brand as they are a logistics company, because, you know, there's a coupling of. Things going online and people wanting things to come to them.”
Supercell delayed the Android launch of Clash of Clans by two years
“Supercell launched Clash of Clans very famously only two years later on Android.”
Kuusi: High performance requires focusing on the smallest possible subset of priorities
“Like focus means making difficult decisions to put all of your effort in the smallest possible subset of things. And if I now think about performance, performance is the ability to decide what exactly are the things that you need to get right and getting that …”
Wolt cut all non-restaurant offerings for five years to focus on delivery
“And for the five first years of our existence, restaurant, food, delivery. When we saw that it worked, we were like cut everything else. This is really difficult to do. We're only going to focus on doing this with great, quick, consistent customer experience a…”
Founders who personally interview their first 1,000 hires show lack of trust
“The methodology of the founder or the, like the, all powerful CEO, it's almost like creating this picture of someone that, you know, like, you know, hires everyone up until a thousand employees, which to me tells that, oh, you don't trust your people to hire p…”
Wolt granted stock options to every employee, including customer support staff
“In vault up until very late stages, every single employee, even in customer support was a stockholder of vault or shareholder or an option holder of vault.”
Kuusi: Delegating big responsibilities drives employee attention to minor details
“I think how you get people to care about the small things is that you give them ownership over the big things. And when people are responsible for the big things, they start to care about the small things that contribute to those big things.”
Kuusi: Biggest founder sacrifice is personal mental bandwidth and freedom
“So someone once asked me a bit out of the blue that what has been the biggest thing you've had to sacrifice to build, you know, do these things and to build your company and your career. And after, you know, thinking about it for a while, I came to the conclus…”
Hire high-potential candidates before they achieve major scaling milestones
“One mistake people make in hiring is that they're looking for the person that has already done you know, what you need. And you're like, we need to hire that person. He's done this before. He's going to do it for us. And it's going to be amazing. But what peop…”
Kuusi: Growth companies are glorified recruiting operations
“What are growth companies? Growth companies are glorified recruiting operations. And every single senior person in a growth company has to become a great recruiter.”
Wolt maintained a three-year PR blackout despite raising Series A and B
“We've raised our series A, it was ten million euros in January of 2016. The next round we've raised was in January 2018, two years later, that was our twenty seven million euro series B, and then we raised our series C in April of 2019, which we announced in J…”
Kuusi: Cross-time-zone expansion severely stresses small engineering teams
“The reason we stick to stuck to Europe in the early years was that time zones are expensive. Like longer flights are more expensive. If you need to support like, you know, customers six hours times away, it means there's going to be engineers up every night pr…”
Kees Koolen: A startup's first recruiter is its most important early hire
“One of the things he said to me was that, Miki, the most important hire you're going to make next is that you need a great recruiter. That's the most important hire, your first recruiter.”
Wolt had only six months of runway left after its Series B
“We raised our series B. We're like, we're running out of money in six months. We need to raise a growth round.”
Kuusi: Wolt avoided layoffs by maintaining a conservative spending strategy
“We haven't had to go through any layoffs, God forbid, like in the current landscape, at least so far. And the reason is that we were just always very careful. Because we were always like running out of money.”
Kuusi: Twitter adds very little value to building a company
“I've noticed Twitter adds very little value in company building, unfortunately.”
Wolt laid off one-third of its staff in summer 2017
“We had to part ways with one third of our you know, staff in the summer of 2017.”
Wolt received an acquisition offer at 3x its Series B valuation
“We even had an acquisition offer at three extra valuation that we raised money at.”
Kuusi rejected Wolt's first acquisition offer in 2015 despite being personally broke
“When we got our first acquisition offer. This was 2015. We're a one year old as a company and we get an acquisition offer, which had like cash or stock involved. And I was like, you know, 2015. I was 26. It was a big amount of money. Like when I started Walt, …”
Sequoia research shows startup momentum is statistically difficult to lose once achieved
“Out of looking at 400 entrepreneurs, if you have achieved momentum, that momentum is statistically so incredibly difficult to lose.”
Harry Stebbings notes losing momentum as an investor in Clubhouse and Hopin
“As an investor in Clubhouse and Hopin, I have felt momentum go the other way, my friend.”
Kuusi: Advice from successful founders suffers from extreme survivorship bias
“Every advice you hear from an entrepreneur, Always be mindful about that, because like, you know, first of all, entrepreneurs, they're successful telling advice. It's like a lottery millionaire telling that, you know, keep on betting. You're gonna eventually w…”
Kuusi Held Personal Veto Power Over Any Wolt Acquisition
“So I had actually a personal blocking right to any M&A transaction of vault. So vault was not possible to get acquired by another company without, I actually have a placate. This is a placate for Allowing the company to be sold.”
Kuusi: A tech company's biggest impact is its talent ecosystem, not its product
“Like if you think about like, you know companies like PayPal and Skype and so forth, like, you know, these companies, I would argue the biggest impact of those companies wasn't the services they created. It's the people that they touched and what those people …”