Miki Kuusi
Head of DoorDash International, DoorDash. On 1 show, 1 appearance. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
founderexecutiveoperatorinvestor@mikikuusi ↗LinkedIn ↗wolt.com ↗
He co-founded and served as CEO of the delivery platform Wolt, leading it to an acquisition by DoorDash in 2022. Earlier, he served as the founding CEO and main organizer of the European startup and technology conference Slush.
1shows
1appearances
25statements
2resolved
0supported
1contradicted
0%fully supported
8said about them ↓ Everything Miki Kuusi said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Founders who personally interview their first 1,000 hires show lack of trust
“The methodology of the founder or the, like the, all powerful CEO, it's almost like creating this picture of someone that, you know, like, you know, hires everyone up until a thousand employees, which to me tells that, oh, you don't trust your people to hire p…”
Hire high-potential candidates before they achieve major scaling milestones
“One mistake people make in hiring is that they're looking for the person that has already done you know, what you need. And you're like, we need to hire that person. He's done this before. He's going to do it for us. And it's going to be amazing. But what peop…”
Kees Koolen: A startup's first recruiter is its most important early hire
“One of the things he said to me was that, Miki, the most important hire you're going to make next is that you need a great recruiter. That's the most important hire, your first recruiter.”
Wolt received an acquisition offer at 3x its Series B valuation
“We even had an acquisition offer at three extra valuation that we raised money at.”
Sequoia research shows startup momentum is statistically difficult to lose once achieved
“Out of looking at 400 entrepreneurs, if you have achieved momentum, that momentum is statistically so incredibly difficult to lose.”
Kuusi: Advice from successful founders suffers from extreme survivorship bias
“Every advice you hear from an entrepreneur, Always be mindful about that, because like, you know, first of all, entrepreneurs, they're successful telling advice. It's like a lottery millionaire telling that, you know, keep on betting. You're gonna eventually w…”
Kuusi predicts future e-commerce delivery standard will be 10 to 30 minutes
“Like, you know, the future of e-commerce is mobile. The future of logistics and delivery is like, you know, not next day not, you know, even same day, not even next two hours, you know, next 10, 20, 30 minutes.”
Wolt granted stock options to every employee, including customer support staff
“In vault up until very late stages, every single employee, even in customer support was a stockholder of vault or shareholder or an option holder of vault.”
Wolt maintained a three-year PR blackout despite raising Series A and B
“We've raised our series A, it was ten million euros in January of 2016. The next round we've raised was in January 2018, two years later, that was our twenty seven million euro series B, and then we raised our series C in April of 2019, which we announced in J…”
Kuusi: Twitter adds very little value to building a company
“I've noticed Twitter adds very little value in company building, unfortunately.”
Kuusi rejected Wolt's first acquisition offer in 2015 despite being personally broke
“When we got our first acquisition offer. This was 2015. We're a one year old as a company and we get an acquisition offer, which had like cash or stock involved. And I was like, you know, 2015. I was 26. It was a big amount of money. Like when I started Walt, …”
Kuusi Held Personal Veto Power Over Any Wolt Acquisition
“So I had actually a personal blocking right to any M&A transaction of vault. So vault was not possible to get acquired by another company without, I actually have a placate. This is a placate for Allowing the company to be sold.”
Kuusi: Economic downturns and tech layoffs are ideal times to build startups
“When the world looks, you know, as fucked it is right now, that's a really good place to be starting something new. Because there's going to be a lot of things that get cleaned up from the economy. You know, right now you can see like a lot of tech tech compan…”
Miki Kuusi: Every e-commerce company is as much logistics as consumer brand
“The biggest realization was that, you know, every e-commerce company is as much of a consumer facing brand as they are a logistics company, because, you know, there's a coupling of. Things going online and people wanting things to come to them.”
Kuusi: High performance requires focusing on the smallest possible subset of priorities
“Like focus means making difficult decisions to put all of your effort in the smallest possible subset of things. And if I now think about performance, performance is the ability to decide what exactly are the things that you need to get right and getting that …”
Wolt cut all non-restaurant offerings for five years to focus on delivery
“And for the five first years of our existence, restaurant, food, delivery. When we saw that it worked, we were like cut everything else. This is really difficult to do. We're only going to focus on doing this with great, quick, consistent customer experience a…”
Kuusi: Delegating big responsibilities drives employee attention to minor details
“I think how you get people to care about the small things is that you give them ownership over the big things. And when people are responsible for the big things, they start to care about the small things that contribute to those big things.”
Kuusi: Growth companies are glorified recruiting operations
“What are growth companies? Growth companies are glorified recruiting operations. And every single senior person in a growth company has to become a great recruiter.”
Kuusi: Cross-time-zone expansion severely stresses small engineering teams
“The reason we stick to stuck to Europe in the early years was that time zones are expensive. Like longer flights are more expensive. If you need to support like, you know, customers six hours times away, it means there's going to be engineers up every night pr…”
Kuusi: Wolt avoided layoffs by maintaining a conservative spending strategy
“We haven't had to go through any layoffs, God forbid, like in the current landscape, at least so far. And the reason is that we were just always very careful. Because we were always like running out of money.”
Wolt laid off one-third of its staff in summer 2017
“We had to part ways with one third of our you know, staff in the summer of 2017.”
Kuusi: A tech company's biggest impact is its talent ecosystem, not its product
“Like if you think about like, you know companies like PayPal and Skype and so forth, like, you know, these companies, I would argue the biggest impact of those companies wasn't the services they created. It's the people that they touched and what those people …”
Supercell delayed the Android launch of Clash of Clans by two years
“Supercell launched Clash of Clans very famously only two years later on Android.”
Kuusi: Biggest founder sacrifice is personal mental bandwidth and freedom
“So someone once asked me a bit out of the blue that what has been the biggest thing you've had to sacrifice to build, you know, do these things and to build your company and your career. And after, you know, thinking about it for a while, I came to the conclus…”
The other half of the tape: Miki Kuusi's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 7 times in 5 episodes across the shows. 1 statement on the record names them. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Harry Stebbings 3Oscar Pierre 2Rob Lacher 1Johannes Reck 1
Statements about Miki Kuusi, by other people (1)
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
20VC 7
2025 3 mentions in 2 episodes 2 per episode
2023 2 mentions in 2 episodes 1 per episode
2022 2 mentions in 1 episode
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Miki's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 20VCLEDGER | Head of DoorDash International, DoorDash | 1 | 25 | 0% 0/2 | full record on 20VC → |