Niklas Östberg, Founder @ Delivery Hero: Competing with Uber and Doordash in a Capital Arms Race

If you take our Thailand business, we scaled from couple of thousand orders a day up to 400,000 orders a day in less than a year. But it was not sustainable.

Niklas Rosberg, the CEO and co-founder of Delivery Hero, the largest delivery platform in the world.

We thought that we were unbeatable, unstoppable. Therefore, we felt there was a clear path to being a $100 billion company, so why would we have wanted to dilute on $30 billion? We got greedy. Stock fell 5%, then 10 or 15%, and then shortly after more than 50%. Then it was truly too late. Great leaders follow their beliefs. When they do, people follow them. What public market often does is that it values things one or two year forward. And of course, it compares with other companies. We were definitely overvalued, and we are probably undervalued today.

Do you see DoorDash and Uber Eats as your biggest competitors today? Ready to go? (instrumental music) Niklas, this is such a joy for me to do. I mean, when we look at Delivery Hero today, it is one of the generational defining companies of Europe. So thank you so much for joining me today.

Ah, thank you very much. Very kind of you.

Now, I heard from some of your friends that you are the most resilient person they've ever met, and I heard stories of spraining ankles and cycling 100 kilometers the next day. I think that a lot goes back to our earlier years. Where do you get this unwavering determination and resilience from, do you think?

I think some of it comes back to my, my childhood. I was a cross-country skier. Uh, and for anyone who's not a cross-country skier, it's, it's exhausting. You, you, you train every day. You go out in the dark, two hours interval training in the dark forest of Sweden. That's kind of how a regular day looked like, and I think you build some resilience there. Uh, it's, it's... So I think that came from there. But I think the other thing that also builds resilience is if you feel like you have a purpose and you actually do something where you add value. Um, and I think over the years, I've also learned to focus on what I can impact rather than all the other things. And I, I know that is hard. But I, I really tried to stop caring for what other people think or pleasing others. Uh, so that helps. And then I would say, yeah, having a team around that, that is supportive, um, that, that also helps a lot. But, but it probably comes down to those things. But the skiing definitely makes a difference.

Can I ask? One of my biggest weaknesses is I care far too much about what other people think. Does success help in terms of reducing the importance of others' opinions?

It probably builds a certain confidence that what you're doing i-i-is right, t-that you got something right. It probably also helped that, uh, when you have success, you also get a lot of positive rea- uh, uh, kind of encouragement or people being supportive, and they're... They celebrate success. It's also very easy to, to... And you have to be careful that you don't... that it doesn't, uh, take you off your... I mean, your feet off the ground. Um, but, but I do think that some level of success is probably helpful as well.