Oscar Pierre, Glovo CEO & Founder: Selling 30% for €100K |The McDonald's Deal That Saved Them |E1263

Oscar Pierre 0:00 The first round was valued at 280K pre-money, and we raised 100K. (cash register dings) (laughs)

Harry Stebbings 0:05 Wow.

Oscar Pierre 0:05 Well, I would say all the European VCs, or most of them, passed on us. Nobody believed in our story, you know, a bunch of kids from Barcelona beating the Deliveroos and the Uber Eats of the world. I remember the series B, it was like 25 million. We were going to die. We unlocked the biggest deal of all history for delivery, which was McDonald's.

Harry Stebbings 0:23 Ready to go? (instrumental music plays) Oscar, dude, I am so excited for this. It is such an incredible journey, so I'm very, very excited to unpack it with you. Thank you for joining me today, man.

Oscar Pierre 0:42 Thank you, man. I've been a, a big fan of 20VC. Actually, we started the same year.

Harry Stebbings 0:47 2015?

Oscar Pierre 0:48 Exactly.

Harry Stebbings 0:48 Yeah. I-

Harry Stebbings 0:49 I was chatting to Paul-

Oscar Pierre 0:50 (laughs)

Harry Stebbings 0:50 ... uh, on our team of one, he was like, "You literally same year." Um, you were 22 when you started.

Oscar Pierre 0:55 Yeah.

Harry Stebbings 0:56 Wh- how did you get the idea for Glovo? What was that origin aha?

Oscar Pierre 1:00 So the origins weren't, weren't huge. There wasn't a huge ambition at the beginning. Um, I was in school, I was in aerospace... I was studying for aerospace engineering, and I graduated. Uh, immediately I went to my, my dream company which was Airbus, uh, in, uh, in France. And there I realized really fast that that was a very big corporate company that I didn't want to be in, uh? And that's when I started basically building a, a deck. Um, I got some inspiration, 'cause I finished my studies in Atlanta, and I saw how Uber, uh, launched in Atlanta, and how big, and, uh, how big it scaled, like it was, and the impact it had on, on all the students in the, in the campus. It was, it was massive. So I said, "Why, why don't we build the Uber for errands?" That, that was the first original idea. I was thinking about my mom. My mom was always very busy, uh, you know, doing errands for, for, for my father, for my, for my brothers, for me. Like, I was like, "Why don't we digitize this, no? And why... just build a, a, an app where anyone can just ask for any errand, no? Just go to the store, pick up this, buy this, and bring it to me?" And that was the first idea. Of course, it was a, a very niche and very, like, uh, high-end, uh, service. Um, and then when we launched it, the first aha moment, no, that really, you know, made our ambitions a lot bigger was that we started seeing people ordering, uh, McDonald's. They ordered Big Macs. (laughs) And I was like, "Holy shit. Like, why Big Macs," no? There, there's already an, a, a website called Just Eat where people ordered food. And that was the big aha moment, no? And that's when I understood that food delivery was still to be massively, uh, disrupted. There was a generation one of food delivery, uh, in, in the case of Spain, Barcelona, where we all started the business, it was, uh, Just Eat, that basically had a, a marketplace, um, where they aggregated restaurants that did the delivery themselves. But there wasn't a, a, a marketplace that also offered the delivery, and therefore unlocked all the supply of the city.

Harry Stebbings 3:04 Okay. So going back-

Oscar Pierre 3:06 Yeah.

Harry Stebbings 3:06 ... how long did it take from idea to launch? I think a lot of people don't execute fast enough.

Oscar Pierre 3:12 (laughs)

Harry Stebbings 3:12 And they kind of just let ideas meander. How long was it from, "Hey, I'm gonna do this." To launching first?

Oscar Pierre 3:17 It was pretty fast. I had, uh... Again, I was at Airbus, I had a lot of free time, and I had 10, 10K, 10,000 euros to spend in, in the first app. I was not a computer science, so I couldn't code the first step.

Harry Stebbings 3:29 How did you get it made?

Oscar Pierre 3:31 Um, I, I googled "build an X for Uber app", and I found, uh, a developing company in Russia, in Eastern Russia, that was the cheapest provider I found. And they promised me that they would, they would deliver a, a first version of the app for, for like 8,000 euros.

Harry Stebbings 3:50 How was the first version of the app?

Oscar Pierre 3:51 And I was shitty and didn't work. (laughs)

Harry Stebbings 3:55 (laughs)

Oscar Pierre 3:55 But I had something to start showing to investors, I had some mock-ups. And-

Harry Stebbings 3:58 Okay, so you have something to show... Uh, sorry. Fuck

Harry Stebbings 4:01 the schedule. You have something to start showing to investors. And then what happens? You, you go and raise like a pre-seed, seed round?

Oscar Pierre 4:06 Yeah. Yeah, yeah. I, I was so young. I had, I knew nothing about, of course, VC. And, you- you know, you will find this very funny, but the first round was valued at, uh, 280K, uh, pre-money. And we raised 100K. (laughs)

Harry Stebbings 4:21 Wow.

Oscar Pierre 4:21 And with that, the, the first business plan and the first deck that we had, um, took us to profitability and, and to a sustainable company. (laughs)

Harry Stebbings 4:30 So 100K at 380 post?

Oscar Pierre 4:32 Yeah.

Harry Stebbings 4:32 Wow. That is incredible. Okay, so you raised 100K. What happens then? We build out the app again, but it's much more fully fledged. (laughs) I mean, 100K is not much.

Oscar Pierre 4:43 But yeah, with that, we could hire the first CTO. Uh, of course, we had to s- start th- the app from zero. But we were already serving, no? We were already getting some orders somehow. We also had a website, people just send us, like text messages, like, "Go to this store, pick up this." Uh, now again, we started seeing some orders from McDonald's. So now we launched, and then we started seeing some traction. It took a while, took a year, and that took us to the next round which was uh, like a million and a half.

Harry Stebbings 5:10 When do you think you had product-market fit? You said a year there. When do you think you had product-market fit?

Oscar Pierre 5:16 For very long time, I, I could see we were delivering a service that, uh, that people liked, but we had very negative unit economics, no? And there was a, there was a very... Most of the investor community didn't believe that this new industry would turn into profitability, right? So that's not really product-market fit 'cause you're delivering, uh, a service that people like but, uh, but at the price that people don't want to pay. So it took a while until you started seeing the power of network effects, you know, the fleet of couriers growing, getting, gaining all the efficiencies. And then at some point, which is the key of this business of course, is, is you start moving the revenue stream to the, what we call the, the merchant, no? The partner, no? The, the restaurants, the stores, the groceries. So you, you can start making the service cheaper and cheaper for the customer.

Harry Stebbings 6:03 I do want to kind of go to that-

Oscar Pierre 6:05 Okay.

Harry Stebbings 6:05 ... because you have so many lessons in terms of marketplace dynamics, that you said about network effects and-... kind of the maturation of markets and what it does to the efficiency of the model. What have been your biggest lessons when it comes to marketplace dynamics?

Oscar Pierre 6:17 I mean, it's all about scale. So, in our industry, uh, marketplace dynamics are, work on a, on a city or on a national level, right? So we invest a lot in, in building the brand and the business on a national level. Um, and why the, the country is important is because most of the big partnerships are also country-wide, no? So you negotiate with, with McDonald's, with, uh, I don't know, with Walmart, with big brands that operate in a country, uh, in all the country. Um, and then you also build a brand, no? We use a lot of, uh, channels that are, that are, uh, that apply to all the country. Like, for example, we, we have invested a lot in TV. So you have to win in every country, right? And, and, and the network effects happen inside the country. When you cross the border, it doesn't matter how big and how well-known, uh, your brand is in Spain. You go to Portugal and you start from zero, and, and that's another battle that you have to win, no? And I think what we learned really fast, because as a, as an entrepreneur from, from Barcelona, our natural expansion was, you know, first we launched in Barcelona, then in Madrid, then Valencia, then we said, "Okay, let's try... Let's go international," no? And we picked, uh, Paris and Milan. Um, Milan worked really well. Paris didn't work well. And the main reason was because in Paris we were late, no? We were launching maybe like two or three years after, uh, Deliveroo and Uber Eats launched. So we never gained the scale and, and the, and the leadership to be a sustainable business, right? In our industry, you really need a lot of market share. You need to become-

Harry Stebbings 7:49 Does it work if you're number two?

Oscar Pierre 7:51 It can work, and we have, uh, out of the 23 markets we have, we have very few where we are number two and are profitable. But it's, uh, it's tough. You need to be a very relevant number two.

Harry Stebbings 8:02 When you think about launching in a market, how long do you give it in terms of maturing into a profitable market, or a unit economically sustainable market?

Oscar Pierre 8:12 So, it depends, right? Because we've been launching markets since Day 1. Um, now, uh, like for example, the most recent market we launched I think was Tunisia. Um, and Tunisia has taken maybe like two, between two and three years to, to turn it into, into profit. Now, it all depends on how fast you wanna go. You can turn it into profit in six months, but, uh, you're gonna go a lot, move a lot slower, right? So if you wanna reach a big scale and you want to invest, you only have to invest big in, in, in service, in marketing in the first two years and then you turn it into profit.

Harry Stebbings 8:43 Two to three years?

Oscar Pierre 8:45 Yeah.

Harry Stebbings 8:45 That's a long time. How much does it cost-

Oscar Pierre 8:48 But it's-

Harry Stebbings 8:48 ... to launch a market? Average.

Oscar Pierre 8:51 Yeah. So in the case of Tunisia, maybe I'd say between 5 and 10 million.

Harry Stebbings 8:57 Oof.

Oscar Pierre 8:58 But then these businesses get a lot of scale. Like, the, the beautiful thing about this, this industry is, is the scale. Like, we, we're in some markets where our GMV, our, you know, gross merchandise value, is getting to close to 1% of the GDP of the country, right? It's a service that people use so frequently and for so many things, right? It's, it's not only restaurant, it's groceries, it's pharmacy, it's, uh, shops, that it, it gets to a lot of scale, right? So it's, that's why there was so much money poured into it, right? Because I think all VCs understood at some point that this model was here to stay, no? And would become this massive scale platforms in every country. But you had to win, right? And that's why the 2018 to 2022, uh, I think it was probably the, the m- the bloodiest VC bat- you know, uh, battle of pr- maybe of all consumer history.

Harry Stebbings 9:50 You said about like, scale being so important there. Can you just help me understand specifically how scale impacts unit economics most significantly?

Oscar Pierre 9:59 I mean, it helps everywhere in the marketplace, right? On one end, um, on one end it's logistics, right? Like, the, like, we very fast, we become the, the largest logistics fleet in any city where we operate. Um, that means that we have the, the cheapest cost to, to serve, uh, to move something from point A to point B. It's, it's like Uber, right? You generate an order now in, in Glovo in, in Barcelona, you will probably find a courier available, um, a few meters away, no? From the pickup point. Then there's all the data, right? So all the data you generate with, uh, with the restaurants, right? Delivering food is so complex, right? Because you can... It's, it's a, it's a business where, where every single second matters a lot, right? You cannot send the courier late to pick up the order, because the food is gonna get cold. You cannot send it very early, because that's seconds that you're gonna have to be paying the courier, right? So it's a, it's a, it's a business about seconds and, and the more data you have about, okay, how long is this restaurant gonna take, um, to prepare a pizza? Or how long is it gonna take that same restaurant if instead of preparing a pizza, it's preparing, uh, a paella, right? Which is gonna take... So this is all data that you keep training the models. And then I would say that the last one is-

Harry Stebbings 11:08 Can you train models on ambiguous, uh, externalities? And what I mean by that is like, yes, traditionally speaking, it takes 15 minutes to cook a pizza at Pronto Pizza.

Oscar Pierre 11:18 Uh-

Harry Stebbings 11:18 But they've got a new person this week and they're 10 minutes late because they're new.

Oscar Pierre 11:23 (laughs)

Harry Stebbings 11:23 That's the, that's the challenge of real world, right?

Oscar Pierre 11:25 Yeah.

Harry Stebbings 11:25 Or it's raining, and so it takes longer for the driver to get there because it's raining. And so they're gonna be five minutes late to pick up.

Oscar Pierre 11:33 Yeah.

Harry Stebbings 11:33 Do, does data actually help in a highly ambiguous world?

Oscar Pierre 11:37 I mean, on the rain, yes, you can train, uh, on weather, and we have a lot of, uh, data, uh, live data-

Harry Stebbings 11:42 Mm-hmm.

Oscar Pierre 11:42 ... on, on, you know, on the weather of every single city where we operate. Um, we al- you also build a lot of products so that the restaurant can tell you if there's any externality, right? "Hey, uh, my store is busy. I, I need some rest," right? "I need, uh, 20 minutes off." Or, "This order is really big. Uh, I need to add it." And also all of those inputs, you have to build a lot of product that is very easy to use for the restaurant, um, in, in saturation times, right? It's very high tension moments for the restaurant usually, uh, because they have people to serve in the restaurant and also the couriers to serve.

Harry Stebbings 12:15 One area for me that's like so optimized is when you can actually like stack orders with a driver, and one can take six.

Oscar Pierre 12:22 Yeah.

Harry Stebbings 12:22 How do you think about like, increasing unit economic, like, unit efficiency or whatever you want to call it?

Oscar Pierre 12:28 Mm-hmm.

Harry Stebbings 12:28 Unit economics, improving them, whatever-... but actually, a slight deterioration in customer experience. They're going to wait a little bit longer because the driver is doing five orders.

Oscar Pierre 12:37 Yeah, it's an optimization, uh, game. Like, it's, it's all about lifetime value and understanding very well how every minute of delay is going to impact the lifetime value or the retention of that customer for the next order. Um, we try to measure this all the time. It's, it's the, it's the nature of our business.

Harry Stebbings 12:52 When we were chatting before, you said about speeding up market expansion to capture time. What did you mean by that?

Oscar Pierre 13:00 So look, going back to our history, right? So we, we cracked Spain. Um, and we cracked it, and I can tell you the story later because we, we, we, we unlocked the biggest deal of all history of food delivery, which was McDonald's. So this is back in 2018, the CEO of McDonald's in Chicago, uh, sends, uh, a message to all the countries, uh, and says, "Hey, we, we have to go into delivery, and we have one exclusive partner, which is Uber Eats." That was in 2018. Back then, we were competing against three players in Spain: Uber, Deliveroo, and, and Just Eat. And when we read the news, we were like, you know, "We're screwed." Like, if, if Uber gets this deal and can start delivering McDonald's for one or two-year delivery, we, like, we shut down the company for sure. So we, we found who the decision-maker, decision-maker was. It was a lady called Suzette. And, and we went to Madrid. At least, I traveled there, like, 40 times to, to see her. And we convinced her to, to break the global exclusivity and give us a test. For some reason, she, she, she trusted us more than... above Uber Eats. And, and she gave us that test, and that was a huge inflection point.

Harry Stebbings 14:12 What was the test?

Oscar Pierre 14:14 A, a test is, "Well, you know, we're going to launch with you. We're going to launch in Madrid. Um, you guys look like a bunch of kids," because we were.

Harry Stebbings 14:21 Because you were a bunch of kids. (laughs)

Oscar Pierre 14:23 We were. (laughs) We were in a garage. The... Maybe the team was only 20 people, but everybody knew in the, in the team that that was, uh, life or death. So we, we were all in. Like, we were... We had all the engineers building things that McDonald's wanted, putting the, the, you know, the McDonald's logo everywhere, and any request that they asked us, we said... It was all yes. And, and that's... You know, Uber from San Francisco couldn't compete, the, the local team in Spain. So we won that deal. And, and it was, it was massive. Like, the, the, the power of that brand, how many new customers it brings, uh, it was huge, you know? And that started the, the spinning-the-wheel effect of, uh, of, of us growing a lot, and then we replicated the same strategy in Italy, um-

Harry Stebbings 15:07 With McDonald's?

Oscar Pierre 15:08 Yeah, with McDonald's, because the, the CEO of Italy McDonald's was like, "Wow," you know? "You're doing pretty well. Who are you doing this with?" And, and, you know, with global. And, uh, and, and they also gave us the exclusivity for three years.

Harry Stebbings 15:20 So, a lot of founders are told early on when they meet a big customer, like a McDonald's, say, actually, like, "Don't let it influence your product strategy. Don't be too, uh, concentrated in your customer-"

Oscar Pierre 15:32 Mm.

Harry Stebbings 15:32 "... dominance," whatever you want to call it. Would you say that's wrong advice?

Oscar Pierre 15:38 I guess like all advices, it depends on the context. So, uh, in our case, scale is, is fundamental, right? You have to win in every market to make it a sustainable business. And this mega large brands like McDonald's is what, is what brings... It was... It's what brings all the new customers, right? At some point, it was very scary because 70% of our volume in Spain was McDonald's. But I was okay because I knew this was just... it was just part of the, the customer flow now. So customers went there, they ordered McDonald's, but then you could see in the cohorts how they started ordering more and more things. So it was just a matter of time that that 70% decreased to, to what is something, to, I don't know, to the levels which is between 10 and 20

Oscar Pierre 16:19 in most countries.

Harry Stebbings 16:20 Okay, so we get this big contract from McDonald's in Spain, and then it expands to Italy. Where are we in our funding then? We've got 20 people or so at that point. Where, when did we, like, actually raise our first multiple millions?

Oscar Pierre 16:33 Look, our, our fundraising story is really tough, so we've been at the edge of dying, yeah, like at least three times. And you look at the, at the cap table we had when we sold, and it looked like a, like a Frankenstein-

Harry Stebbings 16:46 (laughs)

Oscar Pierre 16:46 ... cap table. Like, there was-

Harry Stebbings 16:48 Why? It was just so many? It was so fragmented? What was it?

Oscar Pierre 16:51 It was so many, and there were so many names that you would not know. So all the, all the typical VCs, or I would say all the European VCs, or most of them, passed on us. Nobody believed in our story, you know? A bunch of kids from Barcelona beating the Deliveroos and the Uber Eats of the world who were always, like, one step ahead in fundraising, right? So, um, I remember the series B, which was the first, like, large round. It was like 25 million. We were going to die because we had like, uh... No, no, we had... I had visited... I still have the list, 120 VCs that passed, not, not, not an email, but an actual call or, or a, or a meeting. And I just had no more VCs to pitch. Like, I, I Googled, and there were no more in Europe, right?

Harry Stebbings 17:36 (laughs)

Oscar Pierre 17:38 And that round, it was-

Harry Stebbings 17:40 So just go back to that. Like, respectfully, what did they miss or what did you do wrong?

Oscar Pierre 17:45 So, I think I wasn't the best at fundraising. Maybe I was too transparent, too humble. Yeah, maybe I lacked some more, like, big ambition or, or aggressiveness. And I think what they missed is the power of, um, of, uh, of, uh, of working really hard with less money, right? What, what, where can you go... how far you can go, uh, with less money but really, really good execution. Even if you're really inexperienced and very young. I think what no other competitor can beat us at is, is, you know, the culture of working really hard. And that's what allows us to, for example, win the deal of McDonald's or to beat big competitors in any single market. I don't think any large competitor is now bigger than us in, in any of the markets where we operate. And it is just daily local execution and, and a mega obsession on details.

Harry Stebbings 18:41 Can I be blunt? What do you think of the European VC product at the early stage?

Oscar Pierre 18:46 Yeah, no, I struggled.I struggled a lot. Um, most of the people that I found had never built things, right? So it was really hard to connect. Even the, the ones that invested in us. Building a company is such a rollercoaster, right? That if you don't have people that are used to this rollercoaster, um, they add so much pressure, right? You get a lot of pressure from the com- from the business, because there's always bad news coming. And, but if you also get pressure from the VCs, it's like, "Look, I ... It's too much."

Harry Stebbings 19:15 I always say to founders, actually, it's one of the benefits of, another benefit of working with, like, the owner of a firm or the principal of a firm-

Oscar Pierre 19:21 Mm.

Harry Stebbings 19:21 ... is that no one's gonna fire me if I do a bad deal. In another firm, you do feel the pressure if you have not done great deals, and-

Oscar Pierre 19:29 Exactly.

Harry Stebbings 19:29 ... people do get let go. And so they bring that animosity and concern to you, the founder, because Glovo's not doing well, and now my other partners are looking at me going, "Glovo's not doing well, and we put in 10 million," and that is not helpful to you.

Oscar Pierre 19:40 Exactly. I felt that a lot. Yeah.

Harry Stebbings 19:42 Do you think that European founders are aggressive enough? You know, you are wonderfully talented, okay? (laughs)

Oscar Pierre 19:49 (laughs)

Harry Stebbings 19:49 But you're also very, um, humble.

Oscar Pierre 19:54 (laughs)

Harry Stebbings 19:54 And you are not a sales guy, no offense-

Oscar Pierre 19:56 Yeah.

Harry Stebbings 19:56 ... I mean, like, aggressively sales guy.

Oscar Pierre 19:58 No.

Harry Stebbings 19:58 Do you think Europeans lack that in the way that Americans are fucking amazing at it?

Oscar Pierre 20:02 I'd say on average, yes. Yeah, yeah, when you speak to not only Americans, also, I don't know, you go to Tel Aviv, you also feel that, um, that, that, that you just feel smaller, right? Um, and then you look at the business you have, and, and they, they have noth- nothing to envy.

Harry Stebbings 20:17 You mentioned some of the other competitors. You mentioned your Deliveroos of the world, who raise a lot more money. If your other competitors are raising a lot of money, do you have to raise a lot of money?

Oscar Pierre 20:27 We raised as much money as we, as we could. We, in the, in the seven years of, uh, of fundraising, I could never choose. I, I never said no to an investor. That's how little optionality I had. (laughs)

Harry Stebbings 20:41 (laughs)

Oscar Pierre 20:41 And back to that round that I was telling before, the series A, when there were no VCs left to pitch to, Glovo was saved because I was in a, I was in an event of the FCB, like, uh, Futbol Club Barcelona, whose sponsor back then was Rakuten. Rakuten is the Amazon of Japan.

Harry Stebbings 20:58 Hm.

Oscar Pierre 20:59 And Mikitani was, which is the founder, he was there in the party and, uh, in the event, and, and he met me, and for some reason he liked the company. He had seen the backpacks in the streets of the couriers, and, and he decided to lead the round. (laughs) So it's, it's, you can work really-

Harry Stebbings 21:15 How much did he put in?

Oscar Pierre 21:16 I think he did like 15 million.

Harry Stebbings 21:18 Wow, I'm glad you went to that event. (laughs)

Oscar Pierre 21:20 Yeah. (laughs) Me too.

Harry Stebbings 21:22 Did you get VCs after that, be like, "Oh, we've heard about the round, and, you know, hey ..."

Oscar Pierre 21:27 Well, in that round, it was a typical round that I had a lot of money, uh, pending to have a lead investor. (laughs) So there, it was a, at the end it was a, a, three leads, two, uh, European VCs and one, and, and Rakuten. The story doesn't end there. It, it got even worse, because we're about to sign the contract with McDonald's. We're already operating with McDonald's, but we had to, to sign the contract for, like, the n- the next two years. And, you know, ICs had been already approved, everything, all the docs were ready. And I get, I get this call from, from one of the lead investors, uh, from Paris. He's like, "Look, we had another IC." I was like, "But you already had an IC."

Harry Stebbings 22:07 (laughs)

Oscar Pierre 22:07 "No, but there was another IC, and they're fine moving forward, but we need the, the contract with McDonald's signed." I was like, "No way, man. Like, these contracts take time, and I have three weeks left of cash." So I was, I was there, like, negotiating with McDonald's. At some point I had to tell McDonald's, like, "Hey, look, w- we need this contract. Otherwise, like, our, our, we- we're gonna have to shut down the, the operation then." And finally we got the, the contract signed.

Harry Stebbings 22:29 Wow, so you got the contract signed to meet the investor timelines.

Oscar Pierre 22:32 Yeah. Yeah, yeah. It was very stressful. (laughs)

Harry Stebbings 22:34 Was that the most stressful moment of the company?

Oscar Pierre 22:37 There were two more.

Harry Stebbings 22:38 Go on.

Oscar Pierre 22:38 Series B, series C. Uh, well, I mean, there was, uh, I think it was our series C. Again, two months left of cash. We, we, we ... So for seven years, we raised a round every nine months.

Harry Stebbings 22:49 With respect, it's commonly done to raise one every 18 months.

Oscar Pierre 22:53 Yeah.

Harry Stebbings 22:54 Is that just 'cause you, you couldn't raise a round that would give you 18 months?

Oscar Pierre 22:57 (clears throat)

Harry Stebbings 22:57 Wh- why did you raise for nine months? That feels far too fast.

Oscar Pierre 23:00 Because the stakes kept getting higher. So the industry kept getting more and more irrational, more and more growth, um, we were still at y- negative unit economics. So, things were, were going really well, but the burn kept scaling. So when we, when we finally closed the round, um, every single time, we were like, "Fuck, like, we, we either over-invest and we shorten our, you know, uh, our runway, or Uber Eats and Deliveroo will kill us in all of our markets." So it, it was a life or death decision all the time, and we had to overspend every single time. And in one of those, again, we had, it was December. We had to sign th- uh, the round by, I think, the first week of January. End of January, we, we, we were running out of money.

Harry Stebbings 23:47 (exhales) .

Oscar Pierre 23:47 And, uh, on December 23rd, I get a call from the lead investor saying that they're passing. (laughs)

Harry Stebbings 23:54 Oh.

Oscar Pierre 23:54 Two days before Christmas. And yeah, uh, that was a really bad Christmas. (laughs)

Harry Stebbings 24:01 (laughs) Sorry, I didn't mean to laugh.

Oscar Pierre 24:03 (laughs)

Harry Stebbings 24:03 What do you do then, like, it's just like, it's such a gut punch. What happened then? You had the lead investor fall out.

Oscar Pierre 24:10 Uh, so in that case, I think we had to do, like, a small internal round, and then it gave us another three months to, uh, to find another lead.

Harry Stebbings 24:18 Was there ever a cash tap that did turn on? Like, you continuously had a lot of constraints. Was there ever a moment when, in the series D or E or whatever it was, someone was like, "Here you go, you know, Oscar, here's 200 million"?

Oscar Pierre 24:32 So we, we did get a round of 200 million. Um, but it was in a moment where we were burning 30 million a month, so it, it was (laughs) it was ...

Harry Stebbings 24:43 (laughs) Well, I was like, "Oh, thank God." Uh, oh. (laughs)

Oscar Pierre 24:45 Yeah. No, no, it was scary.

Oscar Pierre 24:47 Look, the, the ... So after Spain and Italy-... when we realized we, we, we had cracked the model, we got super ambitious and we said, "Hey, uh," because Paris we failed. And we understood why we failed, because we were late.

Harry Stebbings 25:02 It- was it that simple?

Oscar Pierre 25:03 Yeah.

Harry Stebbings 25:03 We were late and we couldn't afford to outspend them?

Oscar Pierre 25:05 Exactly. We were late and we could not acquire customers cheaply and retain them cheaply because there were already two competitors doing it well. But when we got that, we were like, "Okay, let's look at the map of the world. There's so many countries out there where nobody has disrupted them yet," right? So we, as a sp- as, you know, as Spaniards, we looked to LATAM. I think Spaniards, uh, entrepreneurs, it's, it's a small secret we have there, but it's, it's actually pretty natural for us to expand into LATAM, which is a ma- a massive market, right? There's a cultural and, and language, um, thing there, right? So we, we, we started with LATAM and we went to Peru, uh, Chile and Argentina, and, and that was a big inflection point. When I saw when we launched, uh, Lima, and I saw the first week, it, it was flying. I was like, "Whoa."

Harry Stebbings 25:52 What worked there? What did you see?

Oscar Pierre 25:54 Uh, it was the same as, uh, uh, very similar to, to what we saw in, in Milan and Barcelona and Madrid.

Harry Stebbings 25:59 Which was frequency of orders? It was AOV? It was restaurant sign-ups? It was driver sign-ups? What was it like?

Oscar Pierre 26:04 No, it was the, the three sides of the marketplace, uh, were working. It was easy to convince restaurants. Uh, couriers, there was good availability, uh, but s- but the most important thing was customers, that we were acquiring customers and retaining them. And when we saw that, we were like, "Whoa. It, the platform works really far away from Barcelona. Let's go, let's go here." So, and then we, we s- we roll out, you know, LATAM. We went to countries that, uh-

Harry Stebbings 26:27 Just on LATAM while we're there before we go.

Oscar Pierre 26:29 Yeah.

Harry Stebbings 26:29 D- how do driver acquisition costs vary between Barcelona and Peru?

Oscar Pierre 26:34 Courier position is, is, uh, is now a huge line in the PNL in our business-

Harry Stebbings 26:39 Really?

Oscar Pierre 26:39 ... compared to ride hailing. Yeah, it's, it's, it's fairly cheap.

Harry Stebbings 26:42 Okay.

Oscar Pierre 26:42 Yeah.

Harry Stebbings 26:43 Acquisition strategy the same? Different?

Oscar Pierre 26:45 Uh, for, for customers?

Harry Stebbings 26:47 W- uh, no, for couriers actually.

Oscar Pierre 26:49 Yep.

Harry Stebbings 26:49 Same for couriers.

Oscar Pierre 26:50 Couriers-

Harry Stebbings 26:50 On customer side, was it different in terms of CACs and then channel?

Oscar Pierre 26:54 There were a few differences, but not massive. Um, we, we have a playbook that is, uh, quite scalable. We, we, again, we use a lot, believe it or not, we l- us- use a lot of TV on top of online media. But TV has worked, uh, very well for us to, to drive a lot of downloads and new customers.

Harry Stebbings 27:12 Okay, so we have Peru and we're like, "Wow, this works so well-"

Oscar Pierre 27:15 Mm-hmm.

Harry Stebbings 27:15 "... miles and miles away." What happens then? You were like, "Where else do we go?"

Oscar Pierre 27:18 So, look, I sent, uh, Arnau, Arnau was kind of our co-founder. He was our COO, and, and we sent him there to, to lead all LATAM for the, for the first two years. And we expanded to, I think, 10 or 12 countries. Meanwhile, I hired, um, I hired someone that came from Uber that had been doing expansion there. Uh, and we looked at the rest of the world. And, and where we, uh, places that we liked a lot, um, were, were countries that the investors, you know, I, I, I, I, I had to really convince them or even launch without their approval in countries like, uh, Kenya or, um, I don't know, or Kazakhstan, because f- from the European point of view, it was like, "Who's gonna order food delivery in Kenya?" I was like, "Well, (laughs) there's a lot of people with, with cellphones and, you know, people like food, and they like to, and they like convenience."

Harry Stebbings 28:11 Respectfully, are your AOVs not much reduced there?

Oscar Pierre 28:15 More than the AOVs, it's the ratio between cost of labor and AOVs, which matters a lot.

Harry Stebbings 28:20 That's the most important thing?

Oscar Pierre 28:21 Yeah, 'cause the, the bigger the ratio is, the more affordable you can offer the service and the more demand you will find.

Harry Stebbings 28:26 And for you, the cost of labor is way, way less in these emerging markets?

Oscar Pierre 28:30 In some cases, yeah. For example, uh, we, we seek markets like Morocco, where that, uh, ratio is, is very large. And this allows us to, uh, offer the service, um, much more affordable to, to the

Oscar Pierre 28:43 end customer.

Harry Stebbings 28:44 Which market did you try? You mentioned Paris, which didn't work. Which other market did you try and it didn't work, and what did you learn from that?

Oscar Pierre 28:51 So the, the biggest failure was Brazil. Yeah, Brazil was a, was a big failure. Uh, we lost a lot of money.

Harry Stebbings 28:58 How much money did you lose?

Oscar Pierre 29:00 It was like a black hole. Like, uh, um, probably we lost like 30, 40 million euros. (laughs)

Harry Stebbings 29:10 (laughs)

Oscar Pierre 29:10 And what, uh-

Harry Stebbings 29:11 What did you learn?

Oscar Pierre 29:12 Yeah, that we just did the wrong assessment. So, um, we looked at, uh, what was, what was there in the market. There was a company, very successful, called iFood. Um, and we thought that iFood was very similar to Just Eat, you know? When- whenever we, we saw Just Eat in, in any market, we, we, actually we launched because we knew we, we, we could compete against them and we could, uh, offer a better service. So we saw a lot of similar things, but we just did the wrong analysis. And when we went there, we realized that iFood had all the content, so all restaurants, all brands was, were delivering with iFood. They had a pretty good service. So at the end, these platforms are really sticky, right? So if a high percentage of population is already using iFood, you need to spend a lot of money in vouchers to convince customers to switch to another app. Even if they switch, they will tend to go back to their favorite app, right, unless you, you, you keep vouche ring them, right? And, and vouche ringing in our business is, is horrible because you don't have ... The margins are really thin. Anytime you go into a voucher, you, you go into negative economics.

Harry Stebbings 30:14 (sighs)

Oscar Pierre 30:14 So we had to shut down Brazil.

Harry Stebbings 30:16 How long did you give it?

Oscar Pierre 30:18 That was fast. It was like a year.

Harry Stebbings 30:19 Was that a tough decision to shut down at that year mark?

Oscar Pierre 30:22 Yeah, it was really tough. I think shutting down things is a, is a, is a super important skill for a founder because at the end, it's a, it's an ego thing, um, because you have to go against what you have previously told the board, the investors, the, the employees, right? Uh, one year before launching Brazil, I was selling the Brazil dream. I was telling everyone like, "Hey, this is gonna be massive and, and-"

Harry Stebbings 30:50 Look how many people there are.

Oscar Pierre 30:52 ... like, and even when you launch and you start seeing things, uh, not going super well, you have to keep selling it, right? Because you need to inject that energy into everyone. And one day, you're like, you have to go out there and be like, "Hey, you know, everything that I told you, I was wrong." And I think the, the toughest thing is, is this, the ego when you, you know, when you have to take this decision. Apart from, of course, how tough it is to, to, you know, in Brazil probably, we had 100 employees, we had to let them go. And they were doing things well. It, it just the, the market was too tough.

Harry Stebbings 31:22 Okay. So we go into these emerging markets, Kazakhstan, Kenya. What do we see? Like, all up and to the right?

Oscar Pierre 31:29 Pretty much.

Harry Stebbings 31:30 Why does this journey not get easier on the fundraising side? I'm, I'm confused. Like, we are now having, you know, Peru, Italy, Spain, Kazakhstan, uh, Kenya.

Oscar Pierre 31:40 Yeah. (laughs)

Harry Stebbings 31:40 Um, but who gives a fuck? They're performing great and the unit econ are looking good. We're starting to see the benefits of scale. Why are investors not flocking

Harry Stebbings 31:49 to you at this point?

Oscar Pierre 31:50 So, I think there were two things. Um, one was the burn. The burn was really scary, uh, and it, it kept going up, no?

Harry Stebbings 31:58 (laughs)

Oscar Pierre 31:59 15, 20, 30.

Harry Stebbings 32:02 Did it make you-

Oscar Pierre 32:03 It was-

Harry Stebbings 32:03 Did it make you nervous?

Oscar Pierre 32:04 Yeah. Yeah, of course, 'cause y- you saw, like, I, I, one thing I did during seven years was checking how much cash we had in the bank for seven years, right? And, and, and it keeps going down every single day. And it's, it was crazy how-

Harry Stebbings 32:20 Also, it keeps going down, no offense, a lot.

Oscar Pierre 32:23 A lot.

Harry Stebbings 32:23 Like, uh, if you're doing 30 mil a month, I mean...

Oscar Pierre 32:26 A million a day. When we launched in LATAM, we had a competitor there, uh, very well funded called Rappi.

Harry Stebbings 32:32 Oh, yeah.

Oscar Pierre 32:32 Yeah. They, they would, they raised from, they, they were the, the best fundraisers, they raised from Sequoia, from I think-

Harry Stebbings 32:38 SoftBank?

Oscar Pierre 32:38 ... from DST, SoftBank. And it's crazy, when we went there, it was, we went from saying, "Hey, these guys are crazy, they're so irrational," to doing exactly what they were doing in a matter of three months. League exclusivities are worth a lot.

Harry Stebbings 32:55 Wow, so you pay these restaurants an exclusive, which is like a lump sum, to only be with you?

Oscar Pierre 33:00 Yeah.

Harry Stebbings 33:02 How do you, I mean, you must have, like, a load of McKinsey consultants working out the payback periods on that.

Oscar Pierre 33:06 We do it ourselves. It does pay back.

Harry Stebbings 33:09 How long does it take to pay back?

Oscar Pierre 33:11 (laughs)

Harry Stebbings 33:11 I know it depends, but like, what's acceptable payback?

Oscar Pierre 33:14 We usually invest at, uh, three, four years payback.

Harry Stebbings 33:17 Three, four years payback?

Oscar Pierre 33:19 Yeah.

Harry Stebbings 33:20 And then you get the exclus- exclusivity for three to four years?

Oscar Pierre 33:23 Yeah. Well, it depends. It depends.

Harry Stebbings 33:25 Wow. That's astonishing.

Oscar Pierre 33:28 (laughs)

Harry Stebbings 33:28 Three or four year- that's long. Okay. Okay, good. Um,

Harry Stebbings 33:33 okay, right. So one, the burn was very high, that was one reason why I didn't like it. You said there were two.

Oscar Pierre 33:37 Um, yeah, the second was, um, we were, we were getting some scale, right? We were getting to 1 billion, 2 billion top line. But we were still really small against the, the big players. Now, you looked at Uber, they were at least 15, 20 times bigger. Delivery Hero, uh, even Deliveroo back, back then was a lot bigger than us. And when you lack the scale, you're, you're still really exposed, uh, to, to, to them, right? Because they, they have so much scale that they can just go into your home market and destroy your business with, uh, maybe, like, 20, 30 million investment. So I think even though we were big, um, many investors, and I think rightly so, they, they s- they didn't see us as, uh, big enough to fail.

Harry Stebbings 34:25 You mentioned layoffs in Brazil. Super hard thing to

Harry Stebbings 34:28 do. I do wanna talk about talent. Um, building a business is merely a collection of people. Uh, you said some great things before about talent. You said to me before about rewriting values. Everyone might, uh, you know, I speak to mostly Americans and they love mission and values. Um, what are your biggest lessons on rewriting values?

Oscar Pierre 34:48 It's something that I've pushed, uh, in, in my, in my, in the executive team every single year, right? So we block a few hours, we look at the values, and even though 12 months ago we all agreed on every single word on how to define each one of the six values that we have, every time we sit down and we look at them, we're like, "Ugh, this doesn't feel right anymore. We should, we can improve it with this word or changing this, or maybe adding a new value," right? We haven't changed the values so much, but we have proactively worked on them on a yearly basis. I think the problem was when we got to, like, 1000 employees, uh, that's when we messed up the culture. That's when we, and it, it's, it was all my fault, because...

Harry Stebbings 35:35 Yeah, you said you ruined the culture.

Oscar Pierre 35:38 Yeah. (sighs)

Harry Stebbings 35:39 Why, why did you ruin it, and what did you do?

Oscar Pierre 35:41 (laughs)

Harry Stebbings 35:43 (laughs)

Oscar Pierre 35:43 Look, wh- when you are, when you're hyperscaling, uh, it's really easy to have a very aligned culture and everyone working super hard, right? Because it's, everybody's so stretched. You're always behind the business, right? You, uh, like, the, it's, everyone's responsibilities is huge, no? And that, and that, that challenge and that, that, you know, that, it, it just pushes everyone to work really hard. But it's inevitable but, that one day your business starts growing at, at 30%

Oscar Pierre 36:13 year on year. And that coincided when we got to, uh, around 1000 people, and I think I ruined it because I started getting scared of some, uh, part of our team reacting to how I said certain things, no? And I started being a bit of a politician. So what do politicians do? They, they say things in a way that a l- a very large percentage of the population will like it. It always gets to a, that first all hands or Zoom call where you say something, uh, you're talking about values, you're talking about work ethic, you're talking about the importance of working really hard and long hours. And when you finish the call, like, you're gonna get a message from someone, like, "Hey, what you said maybe was a bit too aggressive. Uh, certain people in my team, uh, you know, didn't like it." And as a young founder, you know, when I started got- getting those messages, I, I, I was like, "Oof, yeah, it's true. Maybe I was too aggressive. Maybe I should thi- say things a bit nicer." And that was the beginning of, uh...... uh, not the end because we have, you know, reconducted it.

Harry Stebbings 37:15 How do you think about that? I'd love your help here, because I, I think I, I don't have that at all.

Oscar Pierre 37:19 (laughs)

Harry Stebbings 37:19 Like, I'm very, very bullish and kind of confident in my leadership. But the challenge is some people find that abrasive and bluntly too direct.

Oscar Pierre 37:29 Yeah.

Harry Stebbings 37:29 And part of me listens to this and goes, "Ha ha, I'm right to be this way." Like, brilliant. I'm not affected by kind of bluntly weak people who get offended by it. But then you do have talented people who you want to feel empowered and opinionated and great. How do you think about that balance?

Oscar Pierre 37:45 The day I, I realized I was, uh, I was, uh, uh, ruining the culture was in a, in a Christmas party of, uh, Glovo. And I, I was in a, in a conversation with a few engineers. At that moment, there was a company poaching a lot of our engineers. And that company, I'm not going to name the, who it is, but they, they were, they, they, they worked really hard there. No, they had a very hardworking culture. And I heard one engineer saying, "Yeah, I was also poached, but I, I decided not to go there because they work really hard there." And when I said that, when I heard that, I was like, "Shit." Like, it's not only that the, the, the intensity starts going down of the company, it's that you're losing the hardworking people to another company that is achieving to set and keep that intensity, right? So it's also a network effect-

Harry Stebbings 38:37 Wh-

Oscar Pierre 38:37 ... that you need to keep working on.

Harry Stebbings 38:38 Wh- what did you do then? Like, I didn't know you very well, but I, I, I know you a little bit. That must have been a crushing moment for you.

Oscar Pierre 38:45 (sighs) It was.

Harry Stebbings 38:45 What did you do?

Oscar Pierre 38:47 Start from the top. Start aligning, uh, the top leaders. Um, firing those that were not aligned. Now you realize that, uh, some of them didn't want to go back to the Glovo of the beginnings. And then start saying things as they are. No, I wrote a couple emails to the team that, you know, (laughs) it was like, uh, the company was on fire for a few weeks. Because at the end, if, if you have 20% of the company that is really misaligned, and it wasn't their fault, it was our fault, because we just relaxed, no? And all the messaging, the, the recruiting process, the onboarding process, nobody told them that we wanted that type of work ethics and, and, and a, and a hardworking culture. So if all of a sudden the CEO goes out there and sends a message that, "Hey, we have to go back to the beginnings. We, this is how we like working. This is our culture," a lot of people didn't like it. And then even if it's a 10, 20%, it's very loud, right? So you do get, it's not a week, it's a year of noise, and it's a year of really bad energy, a lot of toxicity. People take time to, to leave or, or get fired, so.

Harry Stebbings 39:54 Respectfully, is it lack of work ethic or is it wokeness?

Oscar Pierre 39:58 I think it's just, um, human nature that, uh, if, uh, nobody, if your leader is not on top of you, you know, raising the standards, pushing for faster deliveries, uh-

Harry Stebbings 40:09 How do you do that as a leader?

Oscar Pierre 40:10 ... you just relax.

Harry Stebbings 40:11 How do you instill that velocity, that unwillingness to relent and just say, "Hey, we are a different organization now. Like, we operate at the highest level and we don't accept anything that's not that." How, how do you do that?

Oscar Pierre 40:24 I wouldn't point to a single thing, but it, it's just everywhere. It's when you recruit people, in that interview, you have to be super transparent about what you expect in terms of, uh, of working hard. And if you feel that he or she doesn't understand what working hard is, you, you explain it. It's like, "Hey, look, most of the days I'm here in the office until 8:00, and I hope you're f- you know, you, you might have to do the same. And on weekends, I connect." The people you fire is, uh, another mega signal. Uh, and then in every single meeting, like I, I, I try, when I walk into a meeting, I try to remind myself, "Okay, my, my mission here is just to add more velocity and to raise the standards." No, nothing that they will present is going to be fine. No, this is the mentality that any leader has to go into because if you go to report and you see the manager, your leader is fine with everything you're presenting, I think it's just human nature that the next time you have to, to, to report, it's going to be a little less quality.

Harry Stebbings 41:19 Do you have any other big management lessons? You've managed now thousands of people for years. Any other big ones?

Oscar Pierre 41:26 Look, I, I've had two, two stages at Glovo. One was hyperscaling. And, and as I said before, I think in hyperscaling things can work with the CEO being away fundraising because there's just so much energy into the business that, that is transmitted. Um, and it, you know, and actually that's what I had to do. I was all day fundraising. No, I was almost until six hours a day fundraising and then I, I worked in the business. Um, and then my new stage was when, you know, after acquisition of Delivery Hero, which coincided when we started growing at, I don't know, 30% year on year. And, and when you're at this growth rates, which, which are good, but it's not hyperscale or hypergrowth, um, that's when you need... you cannot sit back. No, you need to be injecting velocity and energy into what I said before, not into any single meeting where you go.

Harry Stebbings 42:21 Totally agree with you. Uh, I, I think you always fundraise as a CEO, so don't worry about that.

Oscar Pierre 42:26 (laughs)

Harry Stebbings 42:26 Um,

Harry Stebbings 42:27 how were the layoffs? Layoffs suck. If you were to advise founders on giving layoffs, I think there's more coming, what would you advise a founder who is about to give layoffs?

Oscar Pierre 42:37 So we, unfortunately, we've done a few layoffs. Um, what I found is, is that people are, uh, are a lot more mature than when you expect when you're planning the comms and all that. I don't know, we've, we've always put a lot of budget into it to treat people well. It's not only about the people that will be, will be leaving, which, uh, they deserve it. It's not their fault that you have to lay off or do a big layoff. But it's, it's even more important for the people that stay, because those people that you lay off are their friends and the way they exit the company is super important in the post-layoff era, no? So we've...I, I always push 􏰀no􏰀, we always got the, the layoff proposal from the HR department. I always push for more. Let's give them more, 'cause it's, it's, it's ... For sure it's a good investment.

Harry Stebbings 43:23 I always say to people, like, "The way you leave somewhere is often the way

Harry Stebbings 43:26 you're remembered." When we chatted before, you said that you did too much M&A.

Oscar Pierre 43:30 Yeah.

Harry Stebbings 43:31 Wh- what did you mean by that?

Oscar Pierre 43:32 I did a lot of M&A. I think entrepreneurs are, are by nature very optimistic, and, and you think only about the upsides, no? Like, "Well, I'm gonna take this company, I'm just gonna connect it to Glovo." Eventually, we shut down everything, uh, and my conclusion was I was just too optimistic, uh, about the upside, but not looking at how complex it is to integrate different tech stacks, different cultures, different teams. Of course, when you buy a company, that founder will most probably stop thinking about building and, and, and, and leave.

Harry Stebbings 44:06 What was the biggest acquisition you made?

Oscar Pierre 44:08 So we bought a couple Instacart, uh, type of businesses, right? Sort of large baskets, grocery marketplaces. One in Spain and one in Portugal.

Harry Stebbings 44:19 How much did you spend on them?

Oscar Pierre 44:20 Maybe like five million each. I don't remember.

Harry Stebbings 44:23 Five million each? That doesn't feel like, bluntly, a huge amount of money.

Oscar Pierre 44:27 No.

Harry Stebbings 44:27 Like this is not a sink the boat decision.

Oscar Pierre 44:30 No, no. It wasn't huge, but, um, it was also a lot of the focus. I wa- I also got really excited, right? Because it was like, uh, me going back to the beginnings and starting again, and I, I talked a lot about it to the company, so. Now I think about it, I'm like, "Man, you're so stupid. Just our business is about focusing on the small details every single day and making the marketplace better every single day, not about, you know, expanding to other things."

Harry Stebbings 44:56 How do you think about market depth versus breadth, in terms of, like, penetration of ... You know, you could have stayed in Italy and Spain and just gone more services, more services, gone into pharmacy, gone into cash delivery, gone into, um, driver banking and financing. I mean, we could take this-

Oscar Pierre 45:13 Yeah.

Harry Stebbings 45:13 ... a long way. Versus breadth, as you did, of Peru, Kazakhstan, Kenya.

Oscar Pierre 45:19 I think the answer to that is, uh, how time-sensitive it is, uh, and, and, and, and, and when is your right to win, no? So for example, I know I can, I can keep expanding now in, in Italy and in Spain into other delivery services because we have already won the battles, right? We are already by far the largest delivery brand, right? So, um, the opportunity of groceries or pharma, where we're growing very fast, is still there. And we can, and we can crack it and we can invest massively now in 2025. It- the opportunities are still there. If you go to Peru or you go to, I don't know, uh, to, uh, Romania, i- it was now or never decision back in 2018 because you had to be the first mover. Like, getting there first and building the scale, it was a, it was a now or never, no? So, now we know that, you know, our playbook basically is, number one, winning food delivery and restaurant delivery, and number two, expand multi-category. And we think the second will be much larger than the first, but it's just a matter of, of, uh, of the timing

Oscar Pierre 46:21 of, uh 􏰀Can you unpack? What is multi-category? So multi-category is basically groceries, pharma, and then anything else. Anything else is any shop. Uh, electronics, flowers, uh, retail in general, no? Anything that can fit into a rider's, uh, backpack. That said, groceries is massive. Groceries is so big, uh, an example, I- just going to Spain, for example, the, the groceries offline market is 120 billion, um, out of which only 2% is online. 2% of groceries industry is online. We're fully convinced that this 2% will turn into 20, 30%, and the magic of it is that w- we don't see ... Like, delivering groceries on demand with no mistakes, you need so much technology, right? And to make it profitable without overcharging the customer, you need so much technology that we now see all retailers, all grocers, they, they're relying on us to, uh, to, to, to go into the online business because their online businesses is not working. So we ... That's a massive in- uh, that's, that's a massive opportunity. I mean, we, we, uh, we, we know that when this 2% of online penetration turns into 20, we can capture at least half

Oscar Pierre 47:31 of it.

Harry Stebbings 47:31 Before we get to the future of eCommerce, you built a business's scale where acquisition offers start to come, and you decided to take the acquisition offer at one point.

Oscar Pierre 47:41 Yeah.

Harry Stebbings 47:42 Why did you decide to sell? And was it the first acquisition offer?

Oscar Pierre 47:45 No, no, we had multiple offers. Uh, f- ... When we were only in Spain and Italy, we got the first offer.

Harry Stebbings 47:52 How much was it for?

Oscar Pierre 47:54 I think 100 million, and, uh, we had, uh, half of the board was in favor of taking it (laughs) . I guess it made sense for them.

Harry Stebbings 48:03 How much did you have of the business then?

Oscar Pierre 48:05 Maybe 25%, 30%.

Harry Stebbings 48:09 25, 30 million's a lot when you're 25, 26. I mean, it's a lot at any time, but when you're t-

Oscar Pierre 48:14 Yeah.

Harry Stebbings 48:14 Was any part of you tempted?

Oscar Pierre 48:16 Honestly, no, and I don't think it was rational because of course that changes your life already by a lot. But I was just so, so convinced that what we had was working and we could expand to 20 more markets, which is what we've done.

Harry Stebbings 48:30 Okay, so that was the first. And then tell me about the Delivery Hero one. How does that come to be?

Oscar Pierre 48:35 First of all, Delivery Hero invested in Glovo in series B.

Harry Stebbings 48:38 Uh-huh.

Oscar Pierre 48:38 It was part of, you know, those rounds that nobody wanted to invest, so we ended up taking the competitor's money (laughs) . We were competing against Delivery Hero in some markets. Uh, and, and Delivery Hero also did some investments, and, and we, we, we agreed to take their money. Why did we decide to sell? Well, after the series ... I think it was the series F. You know, that moment when you close the round, you go to a notary, you're so happy, but, you know, you go back to the office, you look at the business plan, and you're with your CFO, uh, with Edu, and I was like, "Edu, we, we need to start fundraising for the next one." (laughs)

Harry Stebbings 49:16 (laughs)

Oscar Pierre 49:16 Right? We cannot wait much. And we looked at each other, and we were like, "I- I can't do another one. Like, emotionally, I can't." Because every single round was so stressful. And, and it was rational also not to do it because w-... in every single round, there were high chances of failing and, and, and, and having to shut down the company. So that's when we decided, hey, either we IPO or, or we sell. And we started looking at both options. Um, IPO-ing with, uh, the, we were still burning almost a million a year- uh, a day. A million a day, so 30... (laughs)

Harry Stebbings 49:50 (laughs) When you heard it, was like, "Wow, I think capital efficiency is really taking effect at a million a day." Okay.

Oscar Pierre 49:54 So IPO wasn't very viable. Um...

Harry Stebbings 49:57 And you, and you weren't profitable.

Oscar Pierre 49:58 We were not profitable. We were already at, uh, three billion top line, and then we started looking for a sale, and we talked to, to all the potential buyers and, and Delivery Hero by far was the, the best bidder, not only for, for my investors, but also for the, for the team and for me, right? Because, uh, uh, basically, Delivery Hero operating model is, is, is, uh, is to empower local brands. You know, they have, uh, Talabat in Middle East, which actually recently IPO and they have 80%. They have a PedidosYa in, in South America. They have Glovo now. So they, they, they have a bunch of amazing delivery brands and they empower them with a lot of technology and with, uh, capital when, when we needed it. Um, so this allowed us to keep operating and keep running the business, and it was, uh, it was a great deal for everyone.

Harry Stebbings 50:49 Can I ask, how much did they buy it for?

Oscar Pierre 50:51 It was an all-stock acquisition for 2.3 billion.

Harry Stebbings 50:55 When you sign that deal, how does it feel?

Oscar Pierre 50:58 It was 31st of December. (laughs) We had to do it in 2021. I felt really good. I felt like, you know, part of the mission was completed, uh, which, uh, which was on one end, you know, uh, returning the money, and on the other, making sure that Glovo would keep existing, no? Keep delivering to customers, keep serving, uh, riders and, and restaurants.

Harry Stebbings 51:23 With that, bluntly, on paper, you suddenly have, I don't know, whatever your ownership was, $220 million, $300 million, whatever it was at stock. You don't seem like a guy who really cares that much about money, Oscar.

Oscar Pierre 51:37 (laughs) No.

Harry Stebbings 51:38 How did it change your mindset?

Oscar Pierre 51:39 So one thing I did was I, I started speaking with a lot of people that, uh, that had done an exit. And I think one thing I realized very fast, there's a correlation between unhappiness and people that had stopped working. So those, uh, entrepreneurs that had made a, a big exit and moved into, into a wealth management lifestyle were then happiest. And that to me was very clear. Like, what gives me a lot of happiness is, is going to the office every day, spending time with my team, cracking big problems. Um, of course, that's not all my life, right? I have a lot of life outside of work. But, uh, but yeah, it took... Uh, like, for me, it's very clear, I wanna keep working until, until I die.

Harry Stebbings 52:24 And you're still at Delivery Hero today, right? Still in the role?

Oscar Pierre 52:26 Yeah. Yeah.

Harry Stebbings 52:28 Most leave post-acquisition.

Oscar Pierre 52:30 It's something that I think about. On one hand, I co-founded a, uh, a small VC in, in Europe called Yellow. So it's a 30 million fund we invest in in young entrepreneurs. And, uh, it's, it's a bit of a hobby.

Harry Stebbings 52:42 Why move into VC? I mean it in the nicest way. You're, like, an amazing entrepreneur and you've been through this incredible journey. You've, like, redefined a category. Like, why do a VC?

Oscar Pierre 52:53 (laughs) I mean, in some way, I was already investing a lot as a business angel. I had done, like, four investments, and I loved spending time with, uh, with, uh, with entrepreneurs. And I just, it got too messy. Like, as a business angel, it's really hard to keep things under control. So I just teamed up with, uh, with, uh, with, uh, with Adam, which was, came from Atomico, and, and, uh, and, and gave them all, all my money that I wanted to invest in, in, in, in pre-seed. And I, it... For me, it's like, uh, it's an, like, an important hobby. I spend, uh, a few hours with them every week, and, and I, I like it a lot. I'm learning. But I also, back to your question, I, I realized that I don't want to be an investor full time. I really like operating businesses.

Harry Stebbings 53:34 What have been your biggest lessons from investing as well?

Oscar Pierre 53:38 (laughs) I think when, one thing I realized, as a first-time founder, when I spoke to VCs back then, I thought I was having a one-on-one conversation. Uh, and in reality is like if you are broadcasting to the entire VC community, you know? So the amount of chit-chatting that happens across all the VCs, like they're, they're, they're talking all day, like they're, they're sharing all the deals, they're sharing all the intel. So that, that's an advice for, for all founders, especially first-time founders, like it's a very, very connected community. Anything you're saying to one, don't try to play games, uh, assuming that, that conversations are confidential, because they're not.

Harry Stebbings 54:14 Also, like, don't go out too early. This is often i- not in my interest, but, like, don't go out too early, 'cause they talk so much that if you go and meet one, it will likely go in a associates WhatsApp group that, that you are meeting. Do you see what I mean?

Oscar Pierre 54:29 Yeah.

Harry Stebbings 54:29 And then suddenly, people think you're raising.

Oscar Pierre 54:32 Exactly.

Harry Stebbings 54:32 And su- and then suddenly it's like, "Oh, well, we turned them down." And it gets known as, "Oh, they were turned down by Accel or Index," or whoever it was. And suddenly, like, vicious rumors can start.

Oscar Pierre 54:41 Yeah. Totally. I've seen that. Yeah.

Harry Stebbings 54:43 That's dangerous.

Oscar Pierre 54:44 Yeah.

Harry Stebbings 54:44 So, okay, totally agree. Any others?

Oscar Pierre 54:46 Any others?

Harry Stebbings 54:47 Will you still be at Delivery Hero in five years?

Oscar Pierre 54:50 I think I, I want to operate businesses all my life, right? That's the... Or build things. That's what I like and I enjoy. And every time I think about starting something new, I realize how cool it's, is, is Glovo and, and the platform we're building, how much we're, how much we're growing, how much... Uh, I, I still see Glovo being 10X bigger than today. We're at, getting to seven billion top line. I, I see so much potential. I think I see us as, as Amazon 20 years ago.

Harry Stebbings 55:17 Is Glovo profitable today?

Oscar Pierre 55:19 Yeah.Yeah, we just turned profitable. We just turned 10 years, and, and the last, last, uh, semester was our first, uh, profitable semester.

Harry Stebbings 55:27 Fucking amazing.

Oscar Pierre 55:28 (laughs)

Harry Stebbings 55:28 That must be a special moment.

Oscar Pierre 55:30 Yeah, it was good. It was good.

Harry Stebbings 55:30 Okay, so, so we have that moment, and now we're profitable. One thing I think that's a big needle mover in the industry that was, you know, respectfully the reason why I've invested in the past, (laughs) uh, is because I actually believe that you can subsidize one part of the business with a very effective ads engine on the other side of it.

Oscar Pierre 55:50 Mm-hmm.

Harry Stebbings 55:50 And I don't think we've seen that fully taken advantage of yet.

Oscar Pierre 55:54 Yeah.

Harry Stebbings 55:54 How does advertising and media change the Quick Commerce business?

Oscar Pierre 55:59 Yeah, it's, it's, it's fascinating, the, the ads space, we... And, and it... That's, that's an area where I feel we just started.

Harry Stebbings 56:07 Yeah.

Oscar Pierre 56:07 We believe in our business, out of every 100 euros of GMV, we will be able to generate at least five euros of, of advertising money, which of course are almost full margin, right? We're now at two, now so we're getting, uh, we're halfway more or less, between two and three. It makes so much sense, right? Because every time someone, a customer opens Glovo, they open it with a, with an intention of purchase, right? So for any brand, any restaurant, they, they want to be there, right? It's so efficient advertising, right? If you are a, a, no, a shampoo brand, you want to be there when the, the, the customer is searching for shampoo, and you want to be in the first listing, right?

Harry Stebbings 56:49 So what will drive your revenues from two, to three, to five? Is it purely a traffic?

Oscar Pierre 56:55 So it's more advertising product, uh, and, and, and, and more penetration, no? So we, we still only... We have around a fraction of, uh, all the merchants that we work with and, and all the groceries and brands that we work with using our advertising products. And so it's a, it's a matter of penetration and also improving just the advertising engine.

Harry Stebbings 57:14 Which brand do you not have today? Could be a restaurant brand or other brand. Which do you not have today that you would most like to have?

Oscar Pierre 57:22 In terms of, in terms of merchant, I think the, the number one I would like to have are two Spanish ones. One is, uh, Inditex, uh, so all the Zara's, uh, et cetera, they still don't want to go into the, uh, into the, uh, Quick Commerce.

Harry Stebbings 57:34 Why not? They're in the quick fashion game. (smacks lips) I understand-

Oscar Pierre 57:39 They're not in marketplaces. You will not find them also in Zalando, or, uh, may- maybe a bit in Zalando, but they, they really want to control end-to-end their online experience. And the other one is Mercadona, which is the Walmart of Spain, uh, 40% market share offline, and they also are very, yeah, they also want to control end-to-end their (clears throat) experience.

Harry Stebbings 57:59 What company did you not acquire that you wish you had acquired with the benefit of hindsight?

Oscar Pierre 58:05 We have a very beautiful story with, uh, with, uh, Miki from Wolt, because we started the same month, almost the same month in 2014, end of 2014, and we sold like two months awa- s- uh, away, like... So our story is, is very, very parallel, and we always had, uh, conversations of teaming up and joining forces and building a very large European new delivery company. But you know, we... Our paths, uh, never joined. (laughs)

Harry Stebbings 58:36 I think Miki is one of the great entrepreneurs of Europe, so I'm super happy to

Harry Stebbings 58:40 hear that.

Oscar Pierre 58:40 I agree, yeah.

Harry Stebbings 58:41 One element that I do just have to discuss before we do a quick fire is regulation. Regulation is difficult to implement, and sometimes poorly done.

Oscar Pierre 58:49 Mm-hmm.

Harry Stebbings 58:49 When I look at the market that you operate a lot of time, and it seems like Uber have a lot of freedom to do what they want to do-

Oscar Pierre 58:56 Mm-hmm.

Harry Stebbings 58:56 ... and you maybe don't, is regulation enacted fairly?

Oscar Pierre 59:01 Yeah, first of all, it's, it's, uh, it's... Of course, the gig economy is, is, uh, needs more regulation, right? It's a reality that has hit, uh, has grown everywhere in the world, and operating this business across 23 different markets, with all governments realizing that they need to regulate it somehow, right, because it's growing so much and so many people are working and generating revenues from it, it's been tough. Like, it's been tough. We have to build, uh, public affairs teams in every single country, et cetera. And unfortunately, the, the, yeah, the country where we suffer from regulation the most is Spain. I'm not gonna go into the details, but it's so extreme that I'm now in a, in a criminal process for, uh, uh... So the, the, yeah, the prosecutor, the general attorney accused me with six years of prison for, uh, running with a freelancers model, which is something that has been validated by judges in Spain up to 14 times. Um, it has gotten really political, but, but the reality is that I'm there. I had to go declare, uh, three months ago. I think it's the only country in the world where a, a founder, a CEO of a, of a digital platform, uh, has to be (laughs) declaring with criminal accusations. And, and they-

Harry Stebbings 1:00:14 Does, does that make you very nervous?

Oscar Pierre 1:00:16 I mean, it was big, yeah. It was big, uh, and it also got a lot of noise in the media. And, and the worst thing, you know, now that I think there's a lot of discussions around, you know, uh, bureaucracy in, in Europe, uh, you know, a bit, uh, as a barrier for entrepreneurs building great things, the worst thing is that we were not playing a fair game against our competitors. And also, for some reason, we were the only company, uh, that, uh, the administration went, uh, against in Spain, and, and our competitors who are from, yeah, the US, Uber Eats, uh, they're still not being accused, you know. So we're not only suffering from, I think, aggressive regulation.

Harry Stebbings 1:00:56 Is that lobbying? Is someone paying for that?

Oscar Pierre 1:01:00 No, look, I think it's just that we were by far the largest one, so, um, the most visible, visible one. And as it was very political, I guess the, you know, the administration targeted first the, the larger one. And, and I guess they're gonna go now after the, the second one, you know. But there's a... The timings are, are slow here, you know, so there's, there's gonna be a time difference, uh, that, uh, yeah, that reduces our...... our advantage, maybe.

Harry Stebbings 1:01:28 Do you worry it's going to get worse? If we're just being blunt, eh, EU has hired 1,500 people for AI safety-

Oscar Pierre 1:01:36 (laughs)

Harry Stebbings 1:01:37 ... policing. Do you worry that it's gonna get worse?

Oscar Pierre 1:01:41 Generally, I'm very optimistic in life, but, uh, but I just don't see the incentives so that this trend changes. So in, no, in, in EU and regulations getting easier for the next wave of entrepreneurs, I'm not super optimistic.

Harry Stebbings 1:01:57 Final one before we do a quick fire. When you think about being a young European entrepreneur, and for the thousands that will listen to this show, what would you say to them when they're often told, "Mm, you, you really need to move to the Valley if you want to build a tech company"?

Oscar Pierre 1:02:10 No, I strongly disagree. Um, look, I think from Barcelona where there was very, a very small ecosystem of, uh, of tech and, and tech talent, we were able to build top-notch technology. I don't think our technology had anything to envy our American competitors. So, I fully disagree. I hope, I wish somebody had told me, no, that, uh, to, to have more ambition when I started, um, 'cause I was... for, at least for the first three, four years, I didn't fully believe I could do it. No, there were no big examples in Europe, uh, or at least in Spain, um, so I wish somebody had told me. But, but at the end, we are as smart (laughs) and we can work harder or as hard as, uh, as in any other place.

Harry Stebbings 1:02:58 Do you think it's a fallacy that Europeans don't work as hard?

Oscar Pierre 1:03:01 If you sustain a hardworking culture, you will, you will keep finding it. The talent is there. Young talent that wants to work hard, y- I mean, you don't need to convince, uh, you know, a million people. That's what I told the team, like, when they told me, "No, because now, you know, n- younger talent, they want more l- work/life balance." I'm like, "Look, I only need 1,000. Like," "... I don't need to convince the entire-"

Harry Stebbings 1:03:24 (laughs)

Oscar Pierre 1:03:24 "... young community. I just need 1,000 people that want to work hard, and

Oscar Pierre 1:03:28 you will find them."

Harry Stebbings 1:03:29 Dude, I want to do a quick fire. I could talk to you all day. So, let's start with, what do you believe most that most people around you disbelieve?

Oscar Pierre 1:03:37 I think we're building a platform that most people think of it as only food delivery, and I see it as the future of, uh, of online commerce. Eh, when I see when people have this first experience of ordering, you know, a MacBook charger and getting it in 30 minutes and repeating, uh, I mean, I, I think that's gonna be the future. So, everything will be on demand and everything will be delivered in, in 30 minutes.

Harry Stebbings 1:04:01 Which competitor do you most respect and why?

Oscar Pierre 1:04:05 Uh, Wolt. I like Wolt. I think, uh, we compete against them in five, six markets. In some, we beat them, in some, we don't. But it's always a, a very nice battle. And they do things as we like. We, they do things with high standards. Yeah.

Harry Stebbings 1:04:20 Which market are you number two in that you would most like to be number one in?

Oscar Pierre 1:04:24 I'd say Portugal, but we, but, but we're gonna get there in a year.

Harry Stebbings 1:04:29 (laughs)

Oscar Pierre 1:04:29 Uber Eats is still ahead because we launched too late, but we're gonna get there.

Harry Stebbings 1:04:33 You can take one investor with you to your new company. Which investor do you take?

Oscar Pierre 1:04:39 Bea from Seaya. She was the first, uh, VC that believed in us, and she was in the board all the way until the very last day.

Harry Stebbings 1:04:49 What makes a great board member to you?

Oscar Pierre 1:04:51 What I loved about her is, uh, she always told me, "Hey, Oscar..." Because, you know, most of the conversations with her were, were around fundraising. And she was always like, "Hey, look, I know that if you don't call me, it's that you don't have news." While most of the other investors were l- were like, "How's the term sheet going? Have you received the term sheet? Are they signing it? How, how did that..." And also, this just added so much pressure because they were suffering also. And, and Bea knew that the moment I had good news, I would call her immediately. So, I appreciate it a lot. (laughs)

Harry Stebbings 1:05:26 What about the way that your parents brought you up will you do differently, deliberately with your children?

Oscar Pierre 1:05:33 Look, I was lucky that my, um, my parents had money. So, we've never lacked anything at home. But at the same time, I saw my father working until 2:00 AM every single day. Every single day. And that, I think, marked me a lot. I think that's also the, the other very important reason, uh, to keep working, you know, just to, to, to show the example to your kids. I, I don't... I'm not a father yet, but, uh, but I know that when I am, it's really important that your kids see you suffering every day, or (laughs) not every day, but that they don't see that it's easy life all the time.

Harry Stebbings 1:06:13 One of the most famous CEOs in the world said to me once that if you want to learn to be a good parent, just watch the Discovery Channel or National Geographic and watch the elephants.

Oscar Pierre 1:06:22 (laughs)

Harry Stebbings 1:06:22 Yeah? The little ones learn by watching the big ones. You learn by doing.

Oscar Pierre 1:06:26 Yeah.

Harry Stebbings 1:06:27 And so if you want your kids to work hard, you got to work hard.

Oscar Pierre 1:06:30 Yeah.

Harry Stebbings 1:06:30 Exactly the same.

Oscar Pierre 1:06:31 Exactly.

Harry Stebbings 1:06:32 Can I ask you, did having a bit of a safety net, like, not worrying about money, help you as an entrepreneur? I always kind of say I'm, I'm not an entrepreneur.

Oscar Pierre 1:06:42 Yup.

Harry Stebbings 1:06:42 I started... My family was kind of middle class, but, like, I lived at home in a nice home. Mom paid for food. I was going to be a law scholar. If mine failed, I'd just be, like, a middle-class lawyer. Wasn't that risky?

Oscar Pierre 1:06:57 (laughs) Uh, I think it helped me in, uh, having irrational ambition, um, and, and taking a lot of risks, to the point that we almost shut down the company three times, right? Because I was always pushing to the limit so much because, I guess, back to your point, I guess that I wasn't that scared about death, no? I didn't have kids. I didn't have a house. For the first four years, I was living with my parents. So, I was like, "Look, (huffs) if it, if this..." I mean, I was, I would be terribly sad, but my life didn't depend on it.

Harry Stebbings 1:07:32 You can be CEO of any other company for a day. What would you be CEO of and why?

Oscar Pierre 1:07:37 I think, uh, Vinted. I, I, I think about Vinted a lot, yeah. Because I like, uh, big consumer platforms, and of course, I like the impact they have.

Harry Stebbings 1:07:44 Do you know Thomas?

Oscar Pierre 1:07:46 Nope.

Harry Stebbings 1:07:47 Oh, wow.

Oscar Pierre 1:07:47 I've never met him, but, um-

Harry Stebbings 1:07:49 You should meet him. He's a friend-

Oscar Pierre 1:07:51 Sure.

Harry Stebbings 1:07:51 ... and investor-

Oscar Pierre 1:07:51 Okay.

Harry Stebbings 1:07:51 ... in the fund. He's wonderful, like, really-

Oscar Pierre 1:07:54 I'm sure.

Harry Stebbings 1:07:54 ... one, one of the most fantastic CEOs. Um, what do you know now that you wish you had known when you started Glovo?

Oscar Pierre 1:08:01 Yeah, I think what, what I suffered the most was when the culture started softening a lot. So, what I would tell the Oscar of the beginning is keep speaking with full transparency all the time. It doesn't matter how many people you have in front and doesn't matter if a fraction of them get upset.

Harry Stebbings 1:08:20 Final one for you. I like to end on positivity. I'm an optimist like you are.

Oscar Pierre 1:08:24 Mm-hmm.

Harry Stebbings 1:08:24 What are you most excited for in the world? When you look at all the developments, could be anything that you work around, see. What excites you most when you see it today?

Oscar Pierre 1:08:35 So, in those lines, I guess what, uh, what feels really exciting is how, uh, terrible jobs will disappear very soon now. So those jobs that nobody wants to do, no, like, uh, I don't know, in, in, in hospitality or cleaning or... All of these will get robotized now and this... If you think about the world where nobody has to do shitty jobs, that's a much better world.

Harry Stebbings 1:08:59 Dude, I've so enjoyed doing this. Thank you so much for putting up with my very meandering schedule. You've been fantastic, and I so appreciate it.

Oscar Pierre 1:09:07 Thank you. It's, it's been great.