The Ledger
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Villig: VCs refused to invest in Bolt at $25M ARR
“We probably got to the point of doing about twenty-five million ARR, growing multiple hundred percent a year, and still no VCs wanted to invest.”
Villig: US ride-hailing rivals became bloated due to excess VC capital
“Specifically you look at some of our US competitors who raised thirty billion dollars. I mean, these companies obviously started off with having so much excess cash that they got very bloated. It was never a problem for them that they had to optimize for costs…”
Villig: Gross bookings is the only North Star metric that matters
“So my view is that it's the only thing that matters. And if you ask me what's our retention, what's our activation rate, what's our CAC, I couldn't tell you really any of those things because I don't think they're real, like they're completely irrelevant. So t…”
Villig: Being number two like Lyft is unsustainable without lean operations
“If I look at some of our competitors like Lyft in the US, I don't think that being a number two is sustainable. But it is a very profitable business if you're able to run a very lean operation.”
Villig: Lyft won't remain independent in five years under current cost structure
“I think that the, their only way out of this is to optimize their costs. I just generally don't see how they're going to be an independent company five years from now with the current cost structure.”
Markus Villig: VCs Focused on Narrative Over Numbers and Were Wrong
“I think with VCs, it was their way around. So the numbers were great, but they didn't really focus on numbers. They sort of focused on what they thought was sort of the narrative in the industry. And that turned out to be completely wrong. So all these New Yor…”
Villig: US Tech Companies Defeat European Rivals Solely Due to Capital
“And at least in our industry, we've seen that play out many, many times where it's been very clear in the food delivery industry, grocery delivery transport in general, where a lot of these companies from the US just have more funding. And that's the only reas…”
Villig: 80% of VCs offer zero value beyond their capital
“I think there are some VCs who add value, but probably 80% of them just provide capital and that's it.”
Villig: Existing ride-hailing networks are the best go-to-market for autonomous vehicles
“Currently, I think the most contrarian view that I have not seen any investors really buy into so far is that these ride-hailing companies are really gonna be the best way for these self-driving cars to come to market.”
Markus Villig: M&A in Ride-Hailing Is Complete Insanity
“I think all of this M&A in this ride hailing industry is complete insanity. You should not be doing that.”
Markus Villig: Bolt's success was nearly 100% luck from finding key co-founder
“Without Oliver, the company would have never be where it is, so I'd say it's even close to a hundred percent of luck.”
Villig: Marketplaces must expand into new cities sequentially, not in parallel
“And the lesson for us from that era was that you really got to take these expansion cities sequentially and not in parallel.”
Markus Villig: Mobility marketplaces need 25% market share for network effects
“So generally for most these type of work and urban on demand mobility marketplaces the ratio is about 25% market share. So that's a very high bar. So you Really need to subsidize hard oftentimes for a couple of years before you get to that threshold. And that'…”
Villig: First six months of marketplace unit economics reveal nothing
“So marketplaces have this very unique dynamic, which is that in your first six months, the unit economics are always horrible because you don't have enough liquidity in the marketplace. So you constantly need to subsidize the drivers, otherwise they're going t…”
Villig: Second movers in ride-hailing cannot win without unique differentiation
“So the first Player has a huge advantage. They have bigger density. They have therefore better pickup times in terms of the cars. They can therefore offer you a much better customer value proposition. So if you're coming in as a second player, it's generally a…”
VCs rejected Bolt believing ride-hailing is a winner-take-all market
“They just said that this category is a winner take all market. There's not gonna be any room for number two, and therefore it doesn't matter how great your metrics are, we're not gonna invest.”
Markus Villig: Sequoia Capital declined to meet with Bolt during early fundraising
“At Sequoia we actually didn't get the meeting. That was the sad part. So we tried to approach them many times. And then back then I think we weren't an interesting enough company.”
Markus Villig: Reaching critical mass in London costs €100M
“So to get going in a city like London, you need to invest ballpark at least a hundred million euros to reach that critical mass. Otherwise it's just not going to work.”
Markus Villig: Bolt avoided COVID layoffs by cutting all salaries by 20%
“So I remember we had this meeting over a call with the top management, and we decided we're not gonna do any layoffs. We're gonna be the only company in the industry that's gonna retain all of our people. And it's gonna be a huge gamble because we lost 85% of …”
Markus Villig: Central Eastern European talent outperforms Silicon Valley hires in loyalty
“In our experience, what has worked significantly better is, is taking people, especially from central Eastern Europe who are really talented, extremely intelligent, hardworking, good, trustworthy people, but they've just never had the chance to compete at the …”
Villig: Google heavily subsidizes Waymo rides to mask high operational costs
“Yeah, but there's a difference between price and cost. Google is one of the wealthiest companies on the planet. They can keep on subsidizing millions of rights for a long time. That doesn't mean the cost structure is there.”
Villig: Autonomous vehicles are 7+ years away from full regulatory approval
“I hope that we're gonna get to the place where the technology and the costs are sorted out over the next five years, and then it's probably going to be a couple more years after that for the regulation to get sorted.”
Villig: AV developers like Waymo will not operate ride-hailing fleets long-term
“My view is that most of these companies Like Waymo over the longterm don't want to operate a car network. It's just too much hassle. So I think that these companies can build what they're fantastic at, which is building the software. And then there's going to …”
Villig: Listening to external advice in 2019 slowed Bolt's global expansion
“Probably we should have been even more aggressive in our expansion. So if I look back at this period that we had from 2015 to 19, where we launched all of these markets remotely, it was a fantastic time. I think what we did back in 2019 was that we started rai…”
Villig: Ride-Hailing Is Fundamentally a Duopoly Industry
“This is fundamentally a duopoly industry. This is an industry that at the end of the day, stable state is going to be two players splitting the market one way or another.”
Markus Villig: Bolt has reached $2 billion in annual recurring revenue
“And then we went from that to now we have two billion ARR in sort of the next few years.”
Markus Villig launched Bolt using $5,000 saved for his university fund
“My parents and I was like, hey, we really need some budget to get this thing off the ground. And we came from a very modest means in Estonia, especially back then, wasn't a rich country. So they said, yeah, we'll put aside 5000 bucks for your university fund. …”
Villig: Supply is always the primary bottleneck for mobility platforms
“The hard part from us from 11 years ago until today has always been the supply side. So our mantra every single time we have our internal all hands meetings for 11 years, it always ends with one slide, which is add supply.”
Marketplace strategy: Launch SaaS tools first, then convert to marketplace
“So one trick we did that really helped us get going in some of the first markets was actually to go to the market with the SaaS product and then convert it into a marketplace afterwards.”
Villig: Johannesburg became over half of Bolt's business in six months
“In six months, Johannesburg went from being zero to being more than half the business just from scratch. With one local student running the whole operation.”
Markus Villig rejected a €100 million acquisition offer from Daimler
“So they approached us and they tried to buy the business back then for maybe a hundred million euros, which obviously as a young kid would have been a fantastic outcome. So we discussed it with the founders, but my view was immediate. We don't want to sell the…”
Bolt doubled or tripled its market share coming out of COVID
“So, so we effectively came out of it with market shares that were twice or three times higher than the ones going in.”
Villig: Bolt remains Sequoia Capital's largest check in Europe
“Still to this day, Bolt is the largest ticket Sequoia has ever done into Europe.”
Markus Villig fired seven of Bolt's first ten employees
“Out of the first 10 people I hired, I had to fire seven of them.”
Villig: Intelligence matters more than long hours when making decisions
“I'm still in the camp of intelligence, so I would rather get somebody who's very smart. It's fine if they work a bit less hours, but they make the right decisions. At least for our business you cannot compensate with hard work if you don't make the right decis…”
Villig: Finding European tech leaders who scaled thousand-person companies is hard
“If so, I'd say that it's very hard to find strong people leaders in Europe who actually understand tech companies and who have actually built organizations of thousands of people that I agree with. There's just almost no tech companies of that size in Europe.”
Villig: European VCs demand startup profitability prematurely before reaching scale
“From what I've seen, many of these investors are just demanding profitability way too early before these companies actually get to a massive scale.”
Villig: Bolt employs over 1,000 people on vertically integrated scooter operations
“We today are one of the few players that's fully vertically integrated, so we have our own hardware team, so we design our own squatters, we have our own team in China where we manufacture them, we then ship them to Europe, we have hundreds of warehouses, we t…”
Villig: Bolt is Europe's largest micromobility operator by fleet size
“We became overnight from being, having almost no presence in that sector to becoming the largest micro-mobile to operate in Europe. Still to this day, nobody operates with such a big fleet in so many cities.”
Villig: Bolt raised $1.5B while competitors raised up to $30B
“There's about seven companies left. What they've been doing better than us is raising money. They've just all raised multitudes of how much we have raised. Many of them have raised five billion. Some of them have raised 15, even thirty billion. Well, we have r…”
Villig: Bolt will reinvest cashflow into expansion for next decade
“So our priority for sure is still growth. A hundred percent. So there's no intention for us anytime soon to become a profitable company that would be paying dividends or anything like that. Absolutely the focus is growth. However we have a set of markets where…”
Villig: Bolt plans to launch dining scan-to-pay payments next
“So the one I'm currently bullish about is dining payments. So in many parts of Europe and the world, it's actually not a common thing that you can scan the QR code, you see the menu, you can order and pay from that. And you can integrate it with everything els…”
Villig: Bolt makes bad business models profitable via superior cost efficiency
“How do we turn these bad businesses into actually good businesses through just a level of cost efficiency that none of these other companies can match?”
Markus Villig: People have largely forgotten about the war in Ukraine
“I think that there's a lot of things going on well in the world of technology, but I think it's absolutely insane that we have war going on in Europe. Russia attacking Ukraine, killing people, and everybody's just basically forgotten about it.”
Villig: No New Traditional Competitors Will Enter Ride-Hailing
“I don't really think that there's going to be new competitors entering the market in a traditional sense.”
Villig: Future mobility disruption will come from new innovations, not incumbents
“Either it's going to be something new like electric scooters, or it's going to be self-driving cars, but I think it's going to be a completely different thing that's going to shake up the market, not the existing company.”