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Miki Kuusi: How I Scaled Wolt to $8B; Why I Sold to DoorDash | 20VC #953

Miki Kuusi is the CEO of Wolt and Head of DoorDash International. In 2014 Miki founded Wolt with a mission to turn the smartphone into a remote controller for life, starting with delivering your favorite restaurant food, to you at home. Today Wolt operates in 23 countries, across several different categories, has over 4,000 employees, and last year, Doordash made the move to join forces with Wolt in a deal worth a reported $8.1BN. Previously, Miki was the CEO of Slush, one of the leading tech and investor events in the world attended by more than 25,000 people annually.----- --------------------------------- Timestamps: 0:00 Found Moment of Wolt 2:44 When did you reach product-market fit? 5:50 Competition in the Market 7:00 How do you think about high performance? 9:49 When is the right time to expand? 11:31 How do you prioritize? 14:40 The Myth of the CEO 16:04 How do you motivate your team? 20:40 Safety vs Trust 24:30 Attachment Between Founder and Company 29:36 Lessons on Recruiting 33:20 Should you announce when you’ve fundraised? 35:26 Expansion Strategy 36:23 Mistakes When Hiring 40:30 Can companies work with fewer people? 44:00 Compensation Builds Culture 47:22 Lessons Learned from Scaling 51:43 Does Leading Get Easier? 53:27 Early Investor in Wolt 55:33 Relationship to Money 57:24 Advice to Founders Thinking of Selling 1:00:17 Do you ever take a break? 1:03:20 Favourite Book 1:04:30 Lessons from Tony Xu DoorDash 1:05:53 Guilty Pleasure 1:07:07 What traits do you want your children to adopt? 1:08:15 What do you know now that you wish you knew when you started Wolt? 1:09:55 What would you like to change about the world of startups? 1:13:15 Where are you five years from now? --------------------------------- In Today’s Discussion with Miki Kuusi: 1.) Founding Slush and Wolt: An Entry into Startups: How did Miki come to found Wolt? What was that a-ha moment? Did Wolt have product-market-fit from Day 1? What was the turning point when they did? What does Miki know now that he wishes he had known when he started Wolt on Day 1? 2.) The Makings of a Truly Great Leader: How does Miki define “high performance” today in leadership? How does Miki think about what focus means in leadership? What is the hardest decision Miki has had to make when it comes to focusing the company? What did he learn from Ilkka @ Supercell? What does Miki believe is the KPI of success as the CEO? How does it change? What does Miki believe is the difference between good vs great leadership? What does Miki believe is the biggest sacrifice he has made as the CEO? 3.) Hiring a Team to Compete on a Global Stage: How does Miki use compensation to create a culture of ownership and accountability? Does Miki start from a position of trust and it is there to be lost or no trust and it is there to be gained? What is the difference between a team and a family in company building? What is the core difference between trust and safety in company building? Why does Miki always want to have trust but not want to have safety? What are the single biggest hiring mistakes that Miki has made? How has he learned from them? Why does Miki believe you do not want to hire people that have done it before but hire the people who have seen those people do it before? Why does Miki believe most companies are merely glorified recruiting operations? Does Miki believe that companies need to be as big as they have grown into, headcount-wise? 4.) Miki Kuusi: The Personal Journey What single day was the hardest day of the Wolt journey for Miki? How did it change him? Why does Miki believe that for their Series B, all-bar one VC turned them down? How does Miki assess his own relationship to risk and money today? Why is Miki an advocate for founders taking secondaries along the journey? What can Europe do to become a powerhouse in tech moving forward? Why did Miki decide to sell the company to Doordash? What is he most excited to learn from Tony Xu, Doordash Founder and CEO? --------------------------------- Subscribe to the Podcast: https://www.thetwentyminutevc.com/miki-kuusi/ Follow Harry Stebbings on Twitter: https://twitter.com/HarryStebbings Follow Kyle Harrison on Twitter: https://twitter.com/mikikuusi Follow 20VC on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/20vc_reels Follow 20VC on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@20vc_tok --------------------------------- #MikiKuusi #Wolt #CEOadvice #HarryStebbings #Founderadvice #doordashing

Harry StebbingshostMiki Kuusiguest
Nov 27, 20221h 15mWatch on YouTube ↗

At a glance

WHAT IT’S REALLY ABOUT

Miki Kuusi on ruthless focus, Wolt’s near-death, and $8B exit

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
  4. 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 ideas

Relentless 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 quotes

If 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)

Founding Wolt and discovering true product-market fit through delivery logisticsThe power of focus: saying no to expansion and the ‘everything app’High‑performance leadership, trust, ownership, and managing teamsHiring philosophy: potential vs. pedigree and the role of great recruitingLayoffs, hard decisions, and the emotional burden of being a CEOCompensation, equity, and using incentives to shape company cultureDeciding when to sell, secondary liquidity, and long‑term ambition

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