Will Shu is the founder and CEO of Deliveroo. He shares operational insights into gig worker behavior and multi-homing across competing delivery applications.
Opinion
Will Shu: Investment bankers are only useful for driving competitive tension
“I think, look, at the end of the day, what is a banker good for? I think bankers are great for running processes. They're great for, you know, driving sort of competitive tension.”
Disclosure
Deliveroo CEO Will Shu admits he is not a professional manager
“Practical, tactical elements of management, frankly, are things that you learn at other companies. And we're building this muscle today, but that's one area where I'm like, hey man, there's a million people better at that than me. I'm not a professional CEO, r…”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Will Shu predicts dark kitchens will experience huge growth post-COVID
“Because I do think about just the restaurant industry and what's happened during COVID, and it's very clear that this part of it's going to keep growing hugely, and it's beneficial for restaurants.”
Insight
Will Shu: Food delivery unit economics require hyper-local order density
“What we realized pretty quickly was driving density of orders would actually make the unit economics work pretty quickly, but it's kind of hard to do that all at once, you know, let's say 200 cities, because this is a hyper local marketplace, right?”
Assertion Supported
Will Shu: European online food delivery penetration remains at just 3%
“Online penetration of food is three to five percent still today. Now, I think the US sort of leapfrogged a lot during COVID, but if you look at Europe, It's still in that, you know, one meal out of 21 a week is online. So I think we're super, super early.”
Insight
ML models make delivery platforms far more profitable than greedy solvers
“While a greedy solver can get you maybe initially 70% of the way there, that's fine for a while. Layering on, you know, all of this, you know, additional machinery made it, you know, much more profitable over time.”