The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
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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: 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.”
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: 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.”
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 …”
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.”
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: 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: 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.”
Villig: Bolt grew from zero to $100M ARR in under five years
“We went from zero to two million ARR in about 18 months, and then from there we went to about ten million ARR in the next 18 months, and then we went from that to a hundred million ARR in less than two years.”
Bolt reached thousands of daily trips in year one on $5,000 capital
“We bootstrapped the company completely for about the first year. So we built the product, we got to some thousands of daily trips and we did all of that with 5000 bucks for my parents.”
Bolt scaled to €10M ARR on a €1M seed round
“So we raised about one million of an annual of the first seed fund, and then we built the company to ten million ARR with that.”
Villig: Less than two percent of people in Kenya had credit cards
“They were operating in Kenya only allowing you to book a ride if you had a credit card attached. You know how many people in Kenya have a credit card? Less than two percent.”
Bolt defined ride-hailing category in Poland, Czechia, and Baltics
“In Poland or in Czech or in the Baltics, we were the ones who defined the category and the regulators were then coming to us and were asking us for input.”
Villig: Early real estate investor achieved 100x+ return on Bolt
“They invested at the valuation of about fifteen million. So by now they made like easily more than a hundred X return on that investment.”
Daimler invested over 100 million dollars in Bolt at 1B valuation
“So then we managed to convince them that they invested more than a hundred million at the billion dollar valuation. So it went in a year from being an acquisition to being an investment.”
Bolt lost 85% of its $200M revenue within four weeks during COVID
“So COVID hit, and in four weeks we went from just massive, like, about two hundred million of revenues to losing 85% of that.”
Villig: Sequoia committed to Bolt's funding round within 48 hours
“From the moment I had the call with them to them getting back to me was 48 hours where we're joining the round.”
Villig: Bolt's lead engineer produced work equivalent to ten engineers
“We have a couple of these extremely, extremely intelligent people at Bolt who really defined the company. I'd say Oliver, our lead software engineer has been like that like he was able to do alone, but It took probably 10 average engineers to do the same work,…”
Villig: European VC Lags US Due to Lack of Pension and Endowment LPs
“So one of the problems is that if you look at where's the money coming from into the US VC industry, there's so many more LPs, the big pension funds are putting money in, the university endowments are putting money in, and that's not really the case in Europe.…”
Villig: Scooter contribution margins top out around 20%
“So in good markets, you are maybe able to get to 20% contribution margins, but in bad markets, it can be negative.”
Villig: Car rental will be a multi-billion dollar category for Bolt
“A lot of conviction that long-term that's going to be a multi-billion dollar category for us.”
Markus Villig has never sacrificed sleep for Bolt in ten years
“Literally never. Over these last 10 years, I've never sacrificed sleep for the sake of the business.”
Bolt operates in ~50 countries and leads in over 20
“Today we operate in about 50 countries around the world and Bolt is the number one most popular platform in more than 20 of them.”
Bolt managed early global expansion with only five people in Estonia
“So we were running all of this with a tiny team of About five people from Estonia.”
Villig: Bolt raised $1M bridge round from non-tech local businesses
“So, so we cobbled together half a million from this real estate company. Similarly, a couple of 100,000 from a local railway operator couple of 100,000 from a local telecoms guy. So it was just this tiny, all together, maybe one million bucks.”
Bolt fully recovered its lost COVID revenue within five or six months
“It actually happened very quickly. It was probably five or six months before we were fully back. And then we already started hitting new records after that.”
Villig: Top European micromobility players each hold 15%-25% market share
“So the market's actually pretty roughly split between the top sort of four or five players. Like each of them has between 15 to 25% share.”