HelloFresh came within days of bankruptcy twice during its first two years
Dominik Richter · Dominik Richter: You Only Have Two Options With VC Funding | E1089 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings · Dec 1, 2023 · at 38:17
Dominik Richter is the founder and CEO of HelloFresh. He reflects on the company's early days and how close they came to running out of money while waiting for funding deals to close.
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“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 the end, I mean, you're probably sitting on the other side of the table, but in the end, there's always like, you know, things popping up, gets delayed by two weeks, gets delayed by another month. There is this one document missing, et cetera. And all of a sudden you're like, Hey, my duty is actually when I feel like I cannot be able to do payroll. It's actually my duty to flag that. And they were definitely in the first one or two years, probably the first two years. I think two occasions that I remember very vividly where it was very, very close to getting to that point.”
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