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

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

Wow.

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.

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.

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

2015?

Exactly.

Yeah. I- I was chatting to Paul-

(laughs)

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

Yeah.

Wh- how did you get the idea for Glovo? What was that origin aha?

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.