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The Twenty Minute VCMiki Kuusi: How I Scaled Wolt to $8B; Why I Sold to DoorDash | 20VC #953
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At a glance
WHAT IT’S REALLY ABOUT
Miki Kuusi on ruthless focus, Wolt’s near-death, and $8B exit
- Miki Kuusi, founder and CEO of Wolt, walks through Wolt’s evolution from a broad ‘everything local’ vision to a tightly focused restaurant delivery business that ultimately sold to DoorDash for $8B.
- He explains how real product‑market fit only arrived when Wolt shifted from digital ordering to full-stack logistics—bringing restaurants to customers rather than customers to restaurants.
- A major portion of the conversation centers on leadership: extreme focus, hiring for potential over logos, building high‑performance cultures grounded in ownership and trust (but not job safety), and learning to delegate big problems despite inevitable mistakes.
- Kuusi also reflects on personal tradeoffs, his identity as a founder, why he sold to DoorDash, and his long-term belief that local commerce will compress into near-instant logistics powered from the smartphone ‘remote control’ in everyone’s pocket.
IDEAS WORTH REMEMBERING
5 ideasRelentless focus beats early diversification.
Wolt began with a broad ‘everything local’ vision but only took off when it focused almost exclusively on restaurant delivery for its first five years, cutting other categories until the core worked with strong unit economics.
Product-market fit is obvious when you truly have it.
Kuusi notes that if you’re unsure whether you have product‑market fit, you don’t; with delivery, demand, retention, and customer pull became unmistakable compared to the earlier pickup-only product.
Ownership culture requires both equity and real responsibility.
He argues that if you want people to act like owners, you must make them owners (stock/options for everyone, even support) and give them end‑to‑end responsibility over meaningful areas, not just small delegated tasks.
Trust employees deeply, but be ruthless about the team’s performance bar.
Trust means fairness, transparency, and supporting people through tough times—not guaranteeing safety or lifetime employment. When trust that someone can own an area disappears, you must act, even if they’re loyal or likeable.
Hire for trajectory and potential, not logos and ‘done it before’.
Kuusi cites Case from Booking.com: few people repeat the same success twice, so you should look for who they were *before* their big win, then hire people at that stage and grow them with the company.
WORDS WORTH SAVING
5 quotesIf you don’t know that you have product‑market fit, you don’t have product‑market fit.
— Miki Kuusi
Focus means making difficult decisions to put all of your effort in the smallest possible subset of things.
— Miki Kuusi
The easiest way to make someone act like an owner is to make them an owner.
— Miki Kuusi
Your biggest KPI as a CEO is: if you die tomorrow, is the company still going to succeed?
— Miki Kuusi
The difference between good and great companies is that both know what needs to be done, but only the great ones execute on the truly difficult things.
— Miki Kuusi (quoting advice from Ilkka Paananen)
High quality AI-generated summary created from speaker-labeled transcript.
