The Exchanges

Q Why did you sell your home market? It's a massive market in terms of population. It's not got the volatility that emerging markets do have. It seems from the outset, bluntly, a very contrarian decision.

A And back then, so this was 2017, and I felt that the market is not as big as it, as it looks. Um, it has a strong comparator there, and there will be no way of consolidate that market later on, given the regulation around M&A and so on. So I think, I thought this is going to be value maximizing. And then I, I did believe that We could use that money to actually double down the markets, which I consider to be much larger. And I think it turned out to be larger markets outside of Germany. I also believed in a different thing, which is I felt we would be a stronger operator internationally if you're not getting distracted by our home market, because back then everything we did, as soon as something happened in Germany, we would drop the ball on everything else because it's so close to our heart where we sit. Uh, so I felt we were very mediocre executed outside of our home market because of that. And once we sold Germany, there was no excuse for not delivering outside of like in the rest of the world. So I think we became much stronger in our execution operations, uh, outside of Germany once we sold Germany.

AI assessment note: “I felt that the market is not as big as it, as it looks.”

Q What are the big lessons? I'm so sorry to interrupt you, Niklas. What are those big lessons from those cohort data behavioral trends?

A Cohorts are incredibly strong. They don't change. If anything, they get better with the only one exception. When you screw up, when you start not looking at the customers or when you start missing a trend. So I mentioned logistics. So you've done a couple of mistakes, but we're not fast enough with our logistic implementing our own delivery fleet. And then someone else comes, but of course our cohort will deteriorate, um, or multi vertical. We have built out a very good multivertical offering to give further value to our customers. But, but we didn't do that fast enough in, in Colombia, as a good example, and we get disrupted by Rappi. So then the cohorts deteriorated big time. Or if we acquired a lot of customer based on vouchers, discounts, promotions, then of course, we also see a deterioration in cohort, uh, once we start pulling that out of the system. But if you look at, at, Uh, where we operate, um, and, and where we do things right and where we care for the customers and where the, the course, the strength of the course are not coming from, from vouchers and discounts. We, we have enormous amount of predictability. So if you take the example of global, it was very easy for us to see how this business is going to grow over the next 10 years. Uh, and we are only a couple of years down the line here. So we still have many, many years of that growth trajectory. And we know …

AI assessment note: “Cohorts are incredibly strong. They don't change. If anything, they get better”

Q Was that predicated on a heavy discounting strategy?

A Discount, yeah, you, you drove, it was very cheap to order food in, in Thailand, uh, with us. We didn't care for that customer experience enough. It was just about price. And of course, when you, you tried to move to sustainability, most of those orders would fall off. And I would say, The value of our Thailand business is not very high. It's, it's, so you can scale very fast in our business. You can grow to 400,000 daily orders in this case, but it's not worth anything unless you're being sustainable. So when we see other competitors do that, we really don't mind that much. We know what it does over time. Uh, we saw the same in Turkey. We saw the same in a few other places. Those customers come back to us as soon as they, they just stopped giving the vouchers and discounts.

AI assessment note: “Discount, yeah, you, you drove, it was very cheap to order food”

Q Now, I heard from some of your friends that you are the most resilient person they've ever met, and I heard stories of spraining ankles and cycling a hundred kilometers the next day. I think that a lot goes back to our earlier years. Where do you get this unwavering determination and resilience from, do you think?

A I think some of it comes back to my, my childhood. I was a cross country skier, uh, and for anyone who's not the cross country skier, it's, it's exhausting. You, you, you train every day, you go out in the dark two hours interval training in the dark forest of Sweden. That's kind of how a regular days look like. And I think you build some resilience there. Uh, it's, it's, so I think that came from there, but I think the other thing that also builds resilience is if you feel like you have a purpose and you actually do something where you add value. Um, and I think over the years I've also learned to focus on what I can impact. Rather than all other things. And I, I know that is hard, but I, I really try to stop caring for what other people think or pleasing others. Uh, so that helps. And then I would say, yeah, having a team around that, that is supportive, um, that, that also helps a lot, but, but it probably comes down to those things, but the scheme definitely makes a difference.

AI assessment note: “I think some of it comes back to my, my childhood. I was a cross country skier”

Q Why did you sell your home market? It's a massive market in terms of population. It's not got the volatility that emerging markets do have. It seems from the outset, bluntly, a very contrarian decision.

A And back then, so this was 2017, and I felt that the market is not as big as it, as it looks. Um, it has a strong comparator there, and there will be no way of consolidate that market later on, given the regulation around M&A and so on. So I think, I thought this is going to be value maximizing. And then I, I did believe that We could use that money to actually double down the markets, which I consider to be much larger. And I think it turned out to be larger markets outside of Germany. I also believed in a different thing, which is I felt we would be a stronger operator internationally if you're not getting distracted by our home market, because back then everything we did, as soon as something happened in Germany, we would drop the ball on everything else because it's so close to our heart where we sit. Uh, so I felt we were very mediocre executed outside of our home market because of that. And once we sold Germany, there was no excuse for not delivering outside of like in the rest of the world. So I think we became much stronger in our execution operations, uh, outside of Germany once we sold Germany.

AI assessment note: “I felt that the market is not as big as it, as it looks”

Q Was there ever a time when your feet did get off the ground or, you know, we call it getting too big a head? I remember when I was like, 21 and I raised my first fund. I thought I was hot shit and Niklas, I was not hot shit. Did you ever have a time and how did that go?

A Uh, yeah, probably all said many times. I, I remember back in the nineties, I was investing in the stock market. I thought it was amazing. Uh, I made a lot of money. I, I lost it very quickly and realized that maybe I'm not that great after all. Uh, I think I had a dozen in business. I think we all thought that we were better than, than we are back in the COVID pandemic. Business was going through the roof. Um, Probably also time the result that we were better than we actually were. Uh, so I think you, you constantly get reminders that maybe you have to like stay on the ground. You, you, you, you're not as good as you think you are in the good times and probably not as bad as you think in the bad times. So, uh, yeah, yeah. I had many times.

AI assessment note: “I remember back in the nineties, I was investing in the stock market.”

Q Can I ask on that? Raising debt is not something that's spoken about a lot, but a lot do it. What's your biggest lessons or advice on, on raising DAT and using DAT as an instrument instead of equity?

A Yeah, I think that the learning for me is that you have to be careful with it. Uh, coming back to the point before, we thought that we were unbeatable, unstoppable. Um, and therefore we felt there was a clear path to being a hundred billion companies. So why would we want to dilute on thirty billion? We get greedy. And, and didn't want to dilute those couple of percentages that would have cost us to raise a billion or two. And we were about to do it, but then stock fell five percent. They felt, well, now it's too late. Then the stock dropped another 10 or 15%. And we felt now it's definitely too late. And then shortly after the stock fell more than 50%. And then it was truly too late. So, so I think it's easy to get greedy in those times. You feel like you're on top of it and Yeah, you have to be careful. It's, it's better to dilute and not, not think too much about it.

AI assessment note: “the learning for me is that you have to be careful with it”

Q What are the big lessons? I'm so sorry to interrupt you, Niklas. What are those big lessons from those cohort data behavioral trends?

A Cohorts are incredibly strong. They don't change. If anything, they get better with the only one exception. When you screw up, when you start not looking at the customers or when you start missing a trend. So I mentioned logistics. So you've done a couple of mistakes, but we're not fast enough with our logistic implementing our own delivery fleet. And then someone else comes, but of course our cohort will deteriorate, um, or multi vertical. We have built out a very good multivertical offering to give further value to our customers. But, but we didn't do that fast enough in, in Colombia, as a good example, and we get disrupted by Rappi. So then the cohorts deteriorated big time. Or if we acquired a lot of customer based on vouchers, discounts, promotions, then of course, we also see a deterioration in cohort, uh, once we start pulling that out of the system. But if you look at, at, Uh, where we operate, um, and, and where we do things right and where we care for the customers and where the, the course, the strength of the course are not coming from, from vouchers and discounts. We, we have enormous amount of predictability. So if you take the example of global, it was very easy for us to see how this business is going to grow over the next 10 years. Uh, and we are only a couple of years down the line here. So we still have many, many years of that growth trajectory. And we know …

AI assessment note: “Cohorts are incredibly strong. They don't change. If anything, they get better”

Q When have you felt most inauthentic in your leadership and what caused that realization that it was not who you are?

A I think I had in the early days, uh, I, I, I was, I was still young and the organization got very large, very fast. Um, I probably had a view that I was too young for being CEO. I didn't have the experience, the wisdom of being a CEO of that size. Probably felt I had to be something I'm not. So I probably at some point in those early days kind of pretended to know more than I knew, pretended to be someone I'm potentially not. And I think it was a little bit of a aha moment the day that I, I somehow gave up on that. And I was here are my weaknesses. Here are my strengths. Take it or leave it. That's who I am. And, and somehow it's met with such a positive response. And, and yeah, I, I, I felt once I started getting authentic, the followership grew way larger. Um, so, and I realized the weaknesses were maybe not that big after all, because you can always be compensated with someone else having that as a strength. So I think, I think, uh, for me, it was, uh, the day I realized that authenticity is, is, is the core for, for, for leadership. This was probably one of those moments.

AI assessment note: “pretended to know more than I knew, pretended to be someone I'm potentially not”

Q Speaking of long-term sustainable, what do you do? You mentioned Rappi in Columbia there. What do you do when you have competitors who suddenly raise or have a lot of money and that could impact your cohorts?

A It doesn't impact our cohorts so much. And often the impact on, on the business, maybe profitability is rather that you, you get nervous. And you start spending a lot of money and you start copying what they do. But, uh, our learning is that as long as we keep delivering good experience for our customers, um, we keep pushing the boundaries for how we can make, I don't know, economics on every single order. If someone is willing to make a loss per order, uh, without that trajectory for getting profits, They might get some of the discount hunters and, and hunters, and And the low value customer base might go to that competitor, but it, but it's not sustainable. So eventually they will have to take away those vouchers, those discounts, and those customers will go to any platform then. So I think the core is to making sure that we, we have a service where our good customers are loyal. And that's what we see. Regardless what someone invests, we see that our customers are, are, are exceptionally loyal.

AI assessment note: “It doesn't impact our cohorts so much.”

Q Was that predicated on a heavy discounting strategy?

A Discount, yeah, you, you drove, it was very cheap to order food in, in Thailand, uh, with us. We didn't care for that customer experience enough. It was just about price. And of course, when you, you tried to move to sustainability, most of those orders would fall off. And I would say, The value of our Thailand business is not very high. It's, it's, so you can scale very fast in our business. You can grow to 400,000 daily orders in this case, but it's not worth anything unless you're being sustainable. So when we see other competitors do that, we really don't mind that much. We know what it does over time. Uh, we saw the same in Turkey. We saw the same in a few other places. Those customers come back to us as soon as they, they just stopped giving the vouchers and discounts.

AI assessment note: “Discount, yeah, you, you drove, it was very cheap to order food in”

Q Was there ever a time when your feet did get off the ground or, you know, we call it getting too big a head? I remember when I was like, 21 and I raised my first fund. I thought I was hot shit and Niklas, I was not hot shit. Did you ever have a time and how did that go?

A Uh, yeah, probably all said many times. I, I remember back in the nineties, I was investing in the stock market. I thought it was amazing. Uh, I made a lot of money. I, I lost it very quickly and realized that maybe I'm not that great after all. Uh, I think I had a dozen in business. I think we all thought that we were better than, than we are back in the COVID pandemic. Business was going through the roof. Um, Probably also time the result that we were better than we actually were. Uh, so I think you, you constantly get reminders that maybe you have to like stay on the ground. You, you, you, you're not as good as you think you are in the good times and probably not as bad as you think in the bad times. So, uh, yeah, yeah. I had many times.

AI assessment note: “I remember back in the nineties, I was investing in the stock market.”

Q Speaking of long-term sustainable, what do you do? You mentioned Rappi in Columbia there. What do you do when you have competitors who suddenly raise or have a lot of money and that could impact your cohorts?

A It doesn't impact our cohorts so much. And often the impact on, on the business, maybe profitability is rather that you, you get nervous. And you start spending a lot of money and you start copying what they do. But, uh, our learning is that as long as we keep delivering good experience for our customers, um, we keep pushing the boundaries for how we can make, I don't know, economics on every single order. If someone is willing to make a loss per order, uh, without that trajectory for getting profits, They might get some of the discount hunters and, and hunters, and And the low value customer base might go to that competitor, but it, but it's not sustainable. So eventually they will have to take away those vouchers, those discounts, and those customers will go to any platform then. So I think the core is to making sure that we, we have a service where our good customers are loyal. And that's what we see. Regardless what someone invests, we see that our customers are, are, are exceptionally loyal.

AI assessment note: “It doesn't impact our cohorts so much. And often the impact on, on the business”

Q What did you do in COVID that you wish you hadn't done?

A It's hard to say. Of course, it's easy to say we benefited inside because it was not only that COVID ended, it was also that the whole capital market and the interest rate and many other things that happened when COVID died out, that all came together at one point. And that of course put a lot of pressure into companies to cut costs and so on. If we would have known that we would have cut costs A lot faster earlier. We would have probably taken down risk a little bit. We would have saved as much money as we can. We probably would have raised equity, uh, instead of debt, uh, during the time when we thought that we should be worth hundreds of billions and we felt we were undervalued back then when we were at 35. Uh, so of course it would have helped if we were taking on equity instead of debt.

AI assessment note: “We probably would have raised equity, uh, instead of debt”

Q Why is it not a winner-take-all market? When you think about, like, you know, scale, really providing better, you know, unit econ, the density of drivers, density of customers, it seems to me like a winner-take-all market. Why, why is it not?

A There is a clear advantage. So the big advantage is being large. And if you're large, customers stay incredibly loyal to your product. They are not as price sensitive as people think. So we don't see that customers move because they get a five year voucher somewhere or 10 year voucher. They might do it one order, but then they go back to where they usually order and what is top of mind for them. Therefore, I do think there's a strong lock in on customers as long as you deliver a good service. The day you don't deliver a good service. Yeah. Well, then they can, it can be disrupted fast. And we have been disrupted a lot of companies in Spain, Italy, Poland, Norway. We entered as a number two and number three, number four player in those markets. And we are now the largest. There are occasions when the leader is not delivering good quality, but if they do, it's incredibly hard to gain the customer base of someone else. So I think there is important in the early stage that you get a strong lead, uh, But then once you get scale, it doesn't really matter if someone else also has scale. It's not that if a comparator is half our size or double our size doesn't make it smaller. It doesn't make our economics worse if they're bigger or smaller. So it's more relevant that we have scale and that we deliver a good service. And I think in the past, I saw it more as 80% competition, 20% our ow…

AI assessment note: “once you get scale, it doesn't really matter if someone else also has scale.”

Q bubble of capital going into the space whenever it was, two to four years ago now. When you get to my age, Nicholas, the memory goes, ah, but my question to you is, was that a good bubble, ultimately, that did produce advancements in logistics, consumer education, consumer awareness, or was it a bad bubble that Buntney burnt a lot of investor money and didn't really progress the space forward?

A I don't think it moved industry forward that much. I, I think it just drove some non-sustainable behavior and same here. If you look at the cohorts, uh, we clearly saw a bump in the court up. We thought that we would maybe maintain it at that bump, that higher level, but it turned out they went back to the trend line. So if you have a trend line of this, it went up temporarily, but then it went back to trend line. So it, it really didn't move much in the industry. It just created a little bit of a bubble where we, we, we, we spent unnecessary money. So I think effectively in the end, COVID was not a good thing for us.

AI assessment note: “I don't think it moved industry forward that much.”

Q Do you see DoorDash and do you see Uber Eats as your biggest competitors today? When you look at the capital that they have and the reserves that they have, is that the biggest threat?

A Not really. Coming back to the point around competition, I think it's 80% about what we deliver and maybe 20% what the competitor does. And every single time when I see here we haven't grown fast enough, it was not because of competition. It was because we didn't deliver a good service. We were not moving fast enough. So I think it's 80% us and 20% competition. I don't think that the balance sheet matters. Um, I don't know. In the end, that is not what limits any compared to spend money. It's, it's going to be the return that is going to limit a compared to spend money. So it's going to be hard for a door dash or Uber or, or somewhat sustainably make bad investments, um, because they can. So I don't think it's about balance sheet, but all profitable entities, you can argue who is going to move that profitability up faster or slower. But, uh, it's, it's not gonna be the balance sheet. It's probably more the, uh, at what cost can you have a good return?

AI assessment note: “Not really. Coming back to the point around competition, I think it's 80%”

Q bubble of capital going into the space whenever it was, two to four years ago now. When you get to my age, Nicholas, the memory goes, ah, but my question to you is, was that a good bubble, ultimately, that did produce advancements in logistics, consumer education, consumer awareness, or was it a bad bubble that Buntney burnt a lot of investor money and didn't really progress the space forward?

A I don't think it moved industry forward that much. I, I think it just drove some non-sustainable behavior and same here. If you look at the cohorts, uh, we clearly saw a bump in the court up. We thought that we would maybe maintain it at that bump, that higher level, but it turned out they went back to the trend line. So if you have a trend line of this, it went up temporarily, but then it went back to trend line. So it, it really didn't move much in the industry. It just created a little bit of a bubble where we, we, we, we spent unnecessary money. So I think effectively in the end, COVID was not a good thing for us.

AI assessment note: “I don't think it moved industry forward that much.”

Q Do you see DoorDash and do you see Uber Eats as your biggest competitors today? When you look at the capital that they have and the reserves that they have, is that the biggest threat?

A Not really. Coming back to the point around competition, I think it's 80% about what we deliver and maybe 20% what the competitor does. And every single time when I see here we haven't grown fast enough, it was not because of competition. It was because we didn't deliver a good service. We were not moving fast enough. So I think it's 80% us and 20% competition. I don't think that the balance sheet matters. Um, I don't know. In the end, that is not what limits any compared to spend money. It's, it's going to be the return that is going to limit a compared to spend money. So it's going to be hard for a door dash or Uber or, or somewhat sustainably make bad investments, um, because they can. So I don't think it's about balance sheet, but all profitable entities, you can argue who is going to move that profitability up faster or slower. But, uh, it's, it's not gonna be the balance sheet. It's probably more the, uh, at what cost can you have a good return?

AI assessment note: “Not really... I don't think that the balance sheet matters.”

Q Now, I have to touch on Europe before we do a quick fire. We both sit in Europe and the world has never been so convicted in their doom around the future of Europe. How do you feel when you look at the negativity and skepticism around Europe today?

A I think there are, there, there's some fair, Bashing there are things that we surely could have done better and that I hope that we will do better. But in the end, I'm, I'm an entrepreneur. I'm an optimist. I believe we can do stuff. I believe we can build an amazing companies out of Europe. Um, and I think there's a lot of strength in Europe as well. Uh, so, so yeah, we are highly educated people, good infrastructure, welfare system, functioning democracy. We are a talent hub, uh, decent balance sheet and all of that. So there's a lot of strength of Europe. There are also a lot of weaknesses in Europe, and I, I hope we can address those, and if we can, I think Europe would be an amazing place for, for, for startup and, and companies.

AI assessment note: “I'm an entrepreneur. I'm an optimist. I believe we can do stuff.”

Q When did you have the strongest belief that most people disagreed with you on?

A I think there are a lot of smaller things. There could be anything around hiring, could be anything around certain small investments, but I think a few that comes to mind as big, uh, differences was around logistics. No one believed in logistics back then. Uh, this was back in And we doubled down in logistics. The first initiative we did, we lost six million. It, it looked terrible. And most people have probably given up there, but we, we shut down that company and rebuilt it again and invested the 1000 of million in logistics. And I think everyone say now that that is a better customer experience. It's, it's clearly better for customers and, and, and had a strong belief that we just have to figure out how to make the economics to work. I think the same selling our home market was, was clearly a contrarian decision. Maybe some investors thought it was okay, but I think in the company there was a very contrarian view to sell your home market. But I think that that made us incredibly strong.

AI assessment note: “a few that comes to mind as big, uh, differences was around logistics.”

Q When have you felt most inauthentic in your leadership and what caused that realization that it was not who you are?

A I think I had in the early days, uh, I, I, I was, I was still young and the organization got very large, very fast. Um, I probably had a view that I was too young for being CEO. I didn't have the experience, the wisdom of being a CEO of that size. Probably felt I had to be something I'm not. So I probably at some point in those early days kind of pretended to know more than I knew, pretended to be someone I'm potentially not. And I think it was a little bit of a aha moment the day that I, I somehow gave up on that. And I was here are my weaknesses. Here are my strengths. Take it or leave it. That's who I am. And, and somehow it's met with such a positive response. And, and yeah, I, I, I felt once I started getting authentic, the followership grew way larger. Um, so, and I realized the weaknesses were maybe not that big after all, because you can always be compensated with someone else having that as a strength. So I think, I think, uh, for me, it was, uh, the day I realized that authenticity is, is, is the core for, for, for leadership. This was probably one of those moments.

AI assessment note: “in those early days kind of pretended to know more than I knew”

Q How much money did you put in them? What did you learn from that going south?

A Yeah, we, we put in close to two hundred million dollars. Uh, we got some of it back, a small portion back. Um, but yeah, it was, most of that was, was lost. I think the big learning I've made there, as well as a few occasions before, in the end, when you look at cohorts, user acquisitions, and then the data in, in, in depth, You, it's almost like gravity. It, it, it always works. It's, it's, it always worked, but for some reason they kept acquiring more customers than I thought every month, they kept course coming up every month and therefore also growth coming up faster than I expected. So when I looked at a few months earlier, I felt this makes no sense. They will never make it. And then the outpaced expectation I had and I felt that maybe I was wrong. And, but, but now it's too late. And then they, it happened again and again, and the next month and next month. And at some point I felt maybe I'm wrong. Maybe my models don't work. Maybe the data somehow it, it, it, it seems to work because I've been wrong so many times now that maybe I'm just wrong. And I, I, I, and that's when we made the investment. In the end, it is, as I said, it's almost like gravity in the end. Cohorts model work. Acquisition models work. Prediction there works. Temporarily you can boost it for vouchers, discount and other means. But in the end, it's, it's, you have to look at the core of the business …

AI assessment note: “we put in close to two hundred million dollars”

Q Final one, before we move on to Europe and then a quick fire, what's the single best M&A you've done from an ROI perspective?

A I think we have all of them because we bought them all very early. And I look at it from, from Latin, what I mentioned before, there were maybe 50, 60,000 horse a month. Uh, that business will be huge. Look at Talabat. It was a little bit more expensive, but they were, they were doing, yeah, seven to 8000 monthly orders, and now that is a ten billion business. So that is a hundred times return or so. Um, so, so we, we, we have a lot of hundred times returns or even a thousand times return, but most of them were small businesses. So, of course, there's a high return on a small amount. Then if you take a business like, like, like Glovo might have an absolute term, long term, equally large, but on a multiple basis, of course, it's less given that we're still a larger acquisition.

AI assessment note: “now that is a ten billion business. So that is a hundred times return”

Q How do you maintain morale when you have stock drops as you did?

A I think it wasn't that hard in the beginning because I think everyone thought that it was just temporarily and it would come back and all the numbers, all KPIs were good. Um, I think we took fairly fast action as well. Back in end of 2021, We felt a little bit worried about the market. We shut down Germany and Japan. We cut a 102 hundred million out of our budget before the year even started. So we actually came in and I think things crashed down in January, February, March. So a few months later after we did that. So I'm lucky we did that. But I think the moral of the company was that Still very good. They felt it was temporary. They felt that we have taken the action we should have taken already before ahead of time. I think the hard part was to not grow valuation for another three years, and we're almost where we were I don't know, three years ago, if you look at our stock today, and I think at some point, some people start to lose hope.

AI assessment note: “I think it wasn't that hard in the beginning because I think everyone thought”

Q Final one, before we move on to Europe and then a quick fire, what's the single best M&A you've done from an ROI perspective?

A I think we have all of them because we bought them all very early. And I look at it from, from Latin, what I mentioned before, there were maybe 50, 60,000 horse a month. Uh, that business will be huge. Look at Talabat. It was a little bit more expensive, but they were, they were doing, yeah, seven to 8000 monthly orders, and now that is a ten billion business. So that is a hundred times return or so. Um, so, so we, we, we have a lot of hundred times returns or even a thousand times return, but most of them were small businesses. So, of course, there's a high return on a small amount. Then if you take a business like, like, like Glovo might have an absolute term, long term, equally large, but on a multiple basis, of course, it's less given that we're still a larger acquisition.

AI assessment note: “Look at Talabat... that is a ten billion business. So that is a hundred times return”

Q What would you most like to change? You can change three things.

A Uh, three things. Europe. Um, yeah, make, make it easier, faster to get talent into Europe, reduce some of the, the, um, uh, bureaucracy or, or certain regulation that can sometimes be a little bit overwhelming for a lot of companies. I know you speak about GDPR, sustainability reporting, pay transparency directive, accessibility act, And so on. And they all make sense and they have good intention, but in collectively, it's just a big burden on, on, on those European companies. Uh, and, and I think a little bit unfairly that they are not the same criteria for other companies competing in Europe. So I think this is proportionally adding to European companies. So if you can, if you can do that, then, um, Not that on a European level.

AI assessment note: “make it easier, faster to get talent into Europe, reduce some of the, bureaucracy”

Q How do you retain speed at scale? Delivery Hero is a monster of a business with a huge team. How do you make sure that bluntly everyone in the org feels urgency and there is not bluntly a little bit of European apathy and slowness?

A I think you have to divide organ responsibility and ownership very carefully and making sure that Everyone can see their impact very clearly. So, so, so for example, the set that we have, for example, we make sure that there's a clear ownership on the country level and making sure that they have that autonomy and that ownership. Um, so for them, they can really make an impact in that country. It's very tangible what they do and the outcome. If we set the goal of driving overall business to size, Then each individual cannot make really that impact and cannot be that visible what they do. So you have to find a way that you can actually divide the goals in a way that is clearly measurable what you do and every part of the organization, every person in that organization, and making sure that you drive that accountability and visibility and clarity. And if you do that, I think it's, it's very easy to manage the organization. Uh, it, it, it, it's very clear who's a strong performer who's not. If quotes are very tightly aligned to what the people actually do and the organization set up such that you have that accountability responsibility on a smaller basis and smaller buckets. And I think that comes back also into the whole culture, the culture of actually driving an impact. And I think what you see in many companies over time is that they get too big to get the goals are too large. …

AI assessment note: “divide organ responsibility and ownership very carefully and making sure that Everyone can see their impact”

Q How do you retain speed at scale? Delivery Hero is a monster of a business with a huge team. How do you make sure that bluntly everyone in the org feels urgency and there is not bluntly a little bit of European apathy and slowness?

A I think you have to divide organ responsibility and ownership very carefully and making sure that Everyone can see their impact very clearly. So, so, so for example, the set that we have, for example, we make sure that there's a clear ownership on the country level and making sure that they have that autonomy and that ownership. Um, so for them, they can really make an impact in that country. It's very tangible what they do and the outcome. If we set the goal of driving overall business to size, Then each individual cannot make really that impact and cannot be that visible what they do. So you have to find a way that you can actually divide the goals in a way that is clearly measurable what you do and every part of the organization, every person in that organization, and making sure that you drive that accountability and visibility and clarity. And if you do that, I think it's, it's very easy to manage the organization. Uh, it, it, it, it's very clear who's a strong performer who's not. If quotes are very tightly aligned to what the people actually do and the organization set up such that you have that accountability responsibility on a smaller basis and smaller buckets. And I think that comes back also into the whole culture, the culture of actually driving an impact. And I think what you see in many companies over time is that they get too big to get the goals are too large. …

AI assessment note: “divide organ responsibility and ownership very carefully and making sure that Everyone can see their impact”

Q Why is it not a winner-take-all market? When you think about, like, you know, scale, really providing better, you know, unit econ, the density of drivers, density of customers, it seems to me like a winner-take-all market. Why, why is it not?

A There is a clear advantage. So the big advantage is being large. And if you're large, customers stay incredibly loyal to your product. They are not as price sensitive as people think. So we don't see that customers move because they get a five year voucher somewhere or 10 year voucher. They might do it one order, but then they go back to where they usually order and what is top of mind for them. Therefore, I do think there's a strong lock in on customers as long as you deliver a good service. The day you don't deliver a good service. Yeah. Well, then they can, it can be disrupted fast. And we have been disrupted a lot of companies in Spain, Italy, Poland, Norway. We entered as a number two and number three, number four player in those markets. And we are now the largest. There are occasions when the leader is not delivering good quality, but if they do, it's incredibly hard to gain the customer base of someone else. So I think there is important in the early stage that you get a strong lead, uh, But then once you get scale, it doesn't really matter if someone else also has scale. It's not that if a comparator is half our size or double our size doesn't make it smaller. It doesn't make our economics worse if they're bigger or smaller. So it's more relevant that we have scale and that we deliver a good service. And I think in the past, I saw it more as 80% competition, 20% our ow…

AI assessment note: “once you get scale, it doesn't really matter if someone else also has scale.”