What-if certainty 3/5 debate potential 2/5

HelloFresh would never have started if founders knew the operational complexities

Dominik Richter · Dominik Richter: You Only Have Two Options With VC Funding | E1089 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings · Dec 1, 2023 · at 5:53

Dominik Richter, founder and CEO of HelloFresh, reflects on the early days of starting the meal kit company and how operational naivety enabled them to begin.

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“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 have told you how complex it is to ship perishables, how complex it actually is to run fulfillment, to run a supply chain at scale, to get growth marketing right. So all of the things that we didn't know, I think were actually very, very good. We didn't know them because otherwise we would have never started that business.”

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