YouSaid · the spoken record

Miki Kuusi

lines on the record: 65
first: 2022-11-28
most recent: 2022-11-28
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Thank you for having me. I'm really honored to be on the podcast. I've been listening to stuff for years, so honored to be finally on myself.”
2022-11-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Wolt CEO, Miki Kuusi on Leadership Lessons Scaling to a Reported $8.1BN Exit to Doordash, Building Teams not Families, The Difference Between Trust and Safety Within Companies, How To Use Compensation to Create Culture & Why You Should Not Be Lookin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Thought of this restaurant food delivery companies. Similarly to how we a little bit smile if we think about Amazon starting as a book reseller online. I think with companies like Oscar can become as true everyday applications and services for all of local commerce, all of local retail, all of local services. I think this has only started. The future of e-commerce is movable. The future of logistics and delivery is not next day, not even same day, not even next two hours, next 10, 20, 30 minutes. We're building a platform that's very strong in both of those categories. I'm very excited about where all of this is going. The well is very fucked up right now. We have to deal with that. And that's how it is. But I'm excited about where all of this is going. Eventually, we're going to come back from this recession or whatever is going on right now. And I like how we're headed there.”
2022-11-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Wolt CEO, Miki Kuusi on Leadership Lessons Scaling to a Reported $8.1BN Exit to Doordash, Building Teams not Families, The Difference Between Trust and Safety Within Companies, How To Use Compensation to Create Culture & Why You Should Not Be Lookin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I have absolutely no idea, especially in the current well, I'm hoping third world war, I'm hoping no pandemic that kills half the population. I'm hoping the currency system doesn't collapse and we spill can buy stuff with money in the future and not have to trade stuff. There's a lot of things in the world right now that don't make me very happy about trying to give a prediction for the future. A lot of people have asked me, especially as of late, when is your next thing? This is my next thing. Man, I'm on the executive team of a stock listed US company. I'm learning so much every day. I'm beginning to see like an inside view into Silicon Valley and into building one of these companies what it is like to build or to run one of the biggest food delivery businesses in the world that is expanding to so many other categories. I'm 33 years old, but this is my next thing. I'm not one of those people that is accounting today to be able to start my next company. I could leave tomorrow. If I wanted to, I'm here because I like what I do. And I think it's still very much early that instruments what we can build. I have to give a five-year view. I think people are going to laugh and smile that companies like DoorDash and Walt and others.”
2022-11-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Wolt CEO, Miki Kuusi on Leadership Lessons Scaling to a Reported $8.1BN Exit to Doordash, Building Teams not Families, The Difference Between Trust and Safety Within Companies, How To Use Compensation to Create Culture & Why You Should Not Be Lookin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I have no idea No idea. If it hasn't been Renia KPI, I would be following. What I'm most proud about with Slush is all the people that worked with me in slush or after me in Slush or Unslush that I never met and all the things those people have done. This influence and impact you can have on individuals through the things that you do, through companies you found and so forth, that's the most meaningful thing in life. Yeah, money is a part of it if they're able to buy a house or support their family and so forth or start new companies, but it's also about the learnings they make, the experiences they have, the colleagues and the friends and the new companies they found and the new places they go and create an impact. If you think about companies like PayPal and Skype and so forth, I would argue the biggest impact of those companies was of the services they created. It's the people that they touched.”
2022-11-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Wolt CEO, Miki Kuusi on Leadership Lessons Scaling to a Reported $8.1BN Exit to Doordash, Building Teams not Families, The Difference Between Trust and Safety Within Companies, How To Use Compensation to Create Culture & Why You Should Not Be Lookin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Regulation is a fair one. Do you think the issue in Europe is having this kind of old-fashioned regulation? Starting with we have to physically sign something, which in the 21st century is the stupidest thing to put in your law. You should probably immediately take it out. So there's stuff like that. But there's also the fact that every regulation is different. Every country has their own thing of doing X and Y and Z. And so we operate 17 European countries ourselves. So we've seen on fair share. But you can deal with it. It's not a walk in the park, but you can deal with it. I think in Europe, the bigger issue has been that we haven't had this ecosystem for companies, founders supporting founders experienced their own insurance, investing back, helping domestic venture funds, international venture funds, proof points of you can build these companies. We have that increasingly. I think we just need time to give to the scene to produce more and bigger outcomes.”
2022-11-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Wolt CEO, Miki Kuusi on Leadership Lessons Scaling to a Reported $8.1BN Exit to Doordash, Building Teams not Families, The Difference Between Trust and Safety Within Companies, How To Use Compensation to Create Culture & Why You Should Not Be Lookin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would like more companies out of Europe. That's one thing I'm passionate about because the world is being redefined right now. There's an industrial revolution going on and I don't want this world to only happen in like US and China. We to have companies that are working on things for the 21st century coming from everywhere. So that's one thing I'm passionate about. I'm passionate about helping Europe step up as a continent of new things. Alongside that, I think we have a lot of very difficult problems to solve as humanity, as a planet right now. That's something I also want to contribute towards, but those are incredibly difficult problems to solve.”
2022-11-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Wolt CEO, Miki Kuusi on Leadership Lessons Scaling to a Reported $8.1BN Exit to Doordash, Building Teams not Families, The Difference Between Trust and Safety Within Companies, How To Use Compensation to Create Culture & Why You Should Not Be Lookin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I've met a lot of my heroes over the years, and some of them are still my heroes, and I've made new heroes along the way. You meet people we overtime realize that these are people you want to look up to, these are people you want to learn from. Oftentimes they're not the same people that you look up to from the outside. I think the reality is one of my co-founders said it really well, that the greatest strengths of any individual room and the sources of their greatest weaknesses. If you have great energy, you're also maybe going to be a bit disruptive of the organization. My strengths and one of my weaknesses as an example. And that means that the heroes, you only see the strengths, you don't see the weaknesses. When you get to know them, you see the weaknesses, and they might not be quite the kind of people that you thought they would be.”
2022-11-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Wolt CEO, Miki Kuusi on Leadership Lessons Scaling to a Reported $8.1BN Exit to Doordash, Building Teams not Families, The Difference Between Trust and Safety Within Companies, How To Use Compensation to Create Culture & Why You Should Not Be Lookin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“patient. You get surprised that I've been surprised over the years how much time change these things, how much things develop. I remember looking up to people being, oh my God, how has that person done all these things that they've done in their lives and they're so smart than achieved and everything? Then you realize over time that everyone is the same. Some people got lucky. Everyone was hardworking and smart that you have to be lucky on top of it. And you realize that people are not that different. And the biggest surprise to me has been that there's not really Dalai Lama as sage is and whatnot that are chuffing a whole new level of sentience to the rest of us. Ultimately everyone is just similar people.”
2022-11-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Wolt CEO, Miki Kuusi on Leadership Lessons Scaling to a Reported $8.1BN Exit to Doordash, Building Teams not Families, The Difference Between Trust and Safety Within Companies, How To Use Compensation to Create Culture & Why You Should Not Be Lookin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The one thing I'm most grateful for in my life is that I was able to venture onto this path that is not pre described. That is not a uni, you go to intern in this place, you build up a CV, and then you graduate, and you go to this place and that place and you get promoted to this and that and so forth. I was on that track and then I somehow got mistrected into this world of startups and so forth. And I'm incredibly grateful for it because I think that my life as a result has been way more interesting than it would have been otherwise. My goal for my kids is that they can do whatever it may be, something that's off the beaten track, something that's a little bit more risk-taking, something that they're going to find enjoyment and joy in. That's my hope. And if that truck for them is becoming a lawyer and working their ass off a decade to become a partner, that's fine. My hope is that they're not going to do it because of their dad or any other expectation, but because they want to do it.”
2022-11-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Wolt CEO, Miki Kuusi on Leadership Lessons Scaling to a Reported $8.1BN Exit to Doordash, Building Teams not Families, The Difference Between Trust and Safety Within Companies, How To Use Compensation to Create Culture & Why You Should Not Be Lookin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Fortnite. I'm a gamer by background, so I spent my growing up years like being shit ton of games Doda, I grew up with that game. My first leadership experience was starting a Doda clan on Worker 3, the battle net, and we had 60 people, and I was the chieftain of the clan. That's the first time I fired someone. I still remember firing a person. I was Vietnam, the other guy is 15, and you're not like making it work for the clan anymore. Sorry you have to go. So I'm a gamer. I hadn't played games for a very long time. You can notice I have a gaming rig on because this gaming rig I bought myself as a present in January 2020. And you know what happened to this game rig in March 2020 when COVID started. But Fortnite, I picked up with some friends. When COVID started, when you couldn't go out and do stuff, and we kept on doing it since. about stuff, maybe drinking a beer. It's a really nice pastime.”
2022-11-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Wolt CEO, Miki Kuusi on Leadership Lessons Scaling to a Reported $8.1BN Exit to Doordash, Building Teams not Families, The Difference Between Trust and Safety Within Companies, How To Use Compensation to Create Culture & Why You Should Not Be Lookin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I had actually a personal blocking right to any M&A M&A transaction fault. This is a blockade for allowing the company to be sold. It's called Managing Director Consent. It's a stupid thing we negotiated as part of one of our rounds. But the point is that I wouldn't have gone for this if it didn't feel like the right decision, not just for the shareholders and the employees and the company, but also from a personal growth perspective. Sony is a leader that I look up to, is a leader that I've already learned tremendously from and I recognize that when we have spent time together, he's an incredibly thoughtful leader and he's great at articulating culture. DoorDash is a magical place when it comes to how culture is embedded in language, in the kind of things that people say that are like DoorDash type things to say. We have similar things in Waltz, but for DoorDash usage of language and culture internally was on a whole another level. That's a very individual good example, and it's oftentimes just with Tony as my culture tends to start from.”
2022-11-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Wolt CEO, Miki Kuusi on Leadership Lessons Scaling to a Reported $8.1BN Exit to Doordash, Building Teams not Families, The Difference Between Trust and Safety Within Companies, How To Use Compensation to Create Culture & Why You Should Not Be Lookin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If there is a book I spend the most time on professionally, that's that book. I read the parakoff, the struggle maybe like 20 times in my career. The paragraph about how to fire as an executive several times when I've had to do it, how to promote a loyal friend several times when I have to do it. Wartime CEO, peacetime CEO several times would have been in a fucked up competitive situation. So that's me, the only book that has really given me solace because there's a lot of these management books that tell you how to be an amazing leader. And you're like, how are you an amazing leader when you're running out of money or competition is killing you? you're not sure that you're going to be able to keep everyone that's working in the team. You're not sure the technology is going to work out. The product is going to work out. You're doing the right decisions. How did you make great decisions to be a great leader in that instance? That book I'd love for that reason that it gives you solace.”
2022-11-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Wolt CEO, Miki Kuusi on Leadership Lessons Scaling to a Reported $8.1BN Exit to Doordash, Building Teams not Families, The Difference Between Trust and Safety Within Companies, How To Use Compensation to Create Culture & Why You Should Not Be Lookin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't have time to read books seriously. I read 200 pages of internal documents a day. Welcome to 20,000 person company, my friend. My favorite book, though, it's actually very clear from a professional point of view. That would be hard things about hard things by Ben Horby.”
2022-11-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Wolt CEO, Miki Kuusi on Leadership Lessons Scaling to a Reported $8.1BN Exit to Doordash, Building Teams not Families, The Difference Between Trust and Safety Within Companies, How To Use Compensation to Create Culture & Why You Should Not Be Lookin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's never going to be a mountain top that you reach, and you're looking back at where you came from and you're looking down the other side of the mountain and you're like, we made it. You're just going to come there and you're going to be, oh, I didn't see that peak before. That's a lot higher. It's a lot steeper. Man, we can't stay here for too long because we have to keep on going. That's what it's like. You never really get to the point. People ask me how to feel you've made it. I've never felt I've made it. I've always felt we're still in the way somewhere and it's a lot more difficult than the previous thing and I'm not sure we're going to make it to the level of our ambition. But we're going to work our asses off to get there.”
2022-11-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Wolt CEO, Miki Kuusi on Leadership Lessons Scaling to a Reported $8.1BN Exit to Doordash, Building Teams not Families, The Difference Between Trust and Safety Within Companies, How To Use Compensation to Create Culture & Why You Should Not Be Lookin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I remember when I was a young student at the university doubling in the world of startups and I ran into this older student that had started a gaming startup and they raised two and a half million from index and they had this penthouse office 15 employees, their own sauna with a terrace with a view of the city in Helsinki. This is 2011 or something. And I was mad these people are cool. They have their own company at their own office and millions of financing their building games. And it's the coolest thing ever. I was like, you've made it when you make there. But you raised two million round of financing or seed extension round back in 2015. I was like, fuck, we're so underfunded. We need to get more financing. And we raised the 10 million round of financing. Still so underfunded. We raised 100 million. We raised half a million. You get cities profitable. You get countries profitable. You sell secondary. You exit the company to door nash. There's just always the next mountain. I've learned over the years that if you're one of these personalities that just wants to build something, you're never going to be satisfied.”
2022-11-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Wolt CEO, Miki Kuusi on Leadership Lessons Scaling to a Reported $8.1BN Exit to Doordash, Building Teams not Families, The Difference Between Trust and Safety Within Companies, How To Use Compensation to Create Culture & Why You Should Not Be Lookin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was twenty five when I found a walt you're very, very young. I'm thirty three and I feel like super old when I'm talking with you right now.”
2022-11-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Wolt CEO, Miki Kuusi on Leadership Lessons Scaling to a Reported $8.1BN Exit to Doordash, Building Teams not Families, The Difference Between Trust and Safety Within Companies, How To Use Compensation to Create Culture & Why You Should Not Be Lookin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Different kinds of places, but I think there's also these 70% of the time this might apply. And you might be in the 30% that it doesn't help you. But at least for me it's helped.”
2022-11-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Wolt CEO, Miki Kuusi on Leadership Lessons Scaling to a Reported $8.1BN Exit to Doordash, Building Teams not Families, The Difference Between Trust and Safety Within Companies, How To Use Compensation to Create Culture & Why You Should Not Be Lookin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That momentum is not gonna go away. And you have to manage your mentality as a founder and switch that we need to see where this goes. This is why I think secondary and later rounds is important because secondary a little bit relieves the pressure. It relieves the pressure of everything being in one basket. If we don't make it, I'm going to be out on the street. My wife is going to leave me. I'm not going to have any money. I need to find a job because I don't have money to live. So you take off that with secondary, you can be a little bit more rational. But the thing that helped me was this kind of realization that maybe I just have to trust what we've built and that it's going to carry on longer than right now. Every advice you hear from an entrepreneur, always be mindful about that because first of all, entrepreneurs, there are successful filling advice is like a lottery millionaire telling that keep on betting you're going to eventually win. It's one in fifteen million. Keep on going. The point is that you have to take every piece of advice with a grain of salt, these different occasions, different kind of stories people go through, different kind of things working.”
2022-11-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Wolt CEO, Miki Kuusi on Leadership Lessons Scaling to a Reported $8.1BN Exit to Doordash, Building Teams not Families, The Difference Between Trust and Safety Within Companies, How To Use Compensation to Create Culture & Why You Should Not Be Lookin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So there's a good piece of advice, Petri, our chairman of the board in later years said from lifelong ventures that he's once booked with someone from Sequoia, and they said that out of their research of I think like a four hundred companies or something. One thing they noticed was that as a founder you are paranoid and fearful about losing that momentum. What if it stops? It's this competitor, that regulatory thing, this money running out, this economic change, you're so afraid of losing that thing because it was so difficult to get it that you're almost always mentally trying to run for the exit. Let's side this off as a success before it's too late before people see that we're in reality a fraud and none of this was real and people just thought we were better than we were. And the Sequoia thing was that out of looking at four hundred entrepreneurs, if you have achieved momentum, that momentum is statistically so incredibly difficult to lose. Of course there's going to be the cases FTX and so forth when things go horribly wrong, but those are the edge cases mostly when you get more”
2022-11-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Wolt CEO, Miki Kuusi on Leadership Lessons Scaling to a Reported $8.1BN Exit to Doordash, Building Teams not Families, The Difference Between Trust and Safety Within Companies, How To Use Compensation to Create Culture & Why You Should Not Be Lookin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To build something, and I wouldn't see what comes out of it. To be frank with DoorDash, I'd sold secondary over the years so I'd made money in the later years. So it was not really about money. It was about can we build something bigger together than what we could build on our own. For me, it's always been about building, first and foremost, but I can say that it's not about money because I've literally said no to money and struggle for years after that position. That's when you realize whether that's actually true or not.”
2022-11-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Wolt CEO, Miki Kuusi on Leadership Lessons Scaling to a Reported $8.1BN Exit to Doordash, Building Teams not Families, The Difference Between Trust and Safety Within Companies, How To Use Compensation to Create Culture & Why You Should Not Be Lookin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For me this has genuinely never been about money. The moment I realized that this is not just something you say to investors to make them feel like you're in it for the long term and you don't just want to run when someone gives you a check or offers you a check. The moment I realized that was when we got our first acquisition off. This was 2015 where one-year-old is a company and we get an acquisition offer which had cash stock involved. 2015 I was 26. It was a big amount of money. When I started Vault, my credit card was maxed out. I was zero euros in my bag of card. I was literally living from hand to mouth. I wasn't one of these people that had money to go around or whatever. And I remember contemplating on it for quite a few nights and same with my co-founders. I just ultimately came to the conclusion that I want to see what comes out of this. I do this same thing the next acquisition offer we got was the same thing. Sure there was a lot of money that you could have made in the moment, but we are not done. I realized over that time that for me it was never about the money. It was about the fact that we get this maybe once in a lifetime opportunity.”
2022-11-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Wolt CEO, Miki Kuusi on Leadership Lessons Scaling to a Reported $8.1BN Exit to Doordash, Building Teams not Families, The Difference Between Trust and Safety Within Companies, How To Use Compensation to Create Culture & Why You Should Not Be Lookin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It doesn't get easier on a personal level. Conversation of telling someone who fought hard for the company, this is not the right thing anymore. We're not going to be able to continue with you. It doesn't get easier if you're a small company or a big company. Actually, it's a little bit easier even if you're a small company because you have a more credible way of saying that we have to do this. In a 700,000 person company, sure, we have to do this. You individually can't be here anymore. I don't think Mark Zuckerberg is going to go through 11,000 people personally. So sure, it's going to be easier than having to lay off 20 people where you do it one-on-one. I'm sure Mark does like a lot of these one-on-one and so forth, but the point is that it's more difficult when you do things in person. If you have a big company, you can rely on your management and your kind of structures you have in place and you might be so far away from people that are impacted by some of these decisions that for you it's a financial decision. We need to cut this line by that much. But I don't think it gets easier. It's just that for companies that are big, they might not have to deal with it in a similar fashion than a small company. It's harsh.”
2022-11-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Wolt CEO, Miki Kuusi on Leadership Lessons Scaling to a Reported $8.1BN Exit to Doordash, Building Teams not Families, The Difference Between Trust and Safety Within Companies, How To Use Compensation to Create Culture & Why You Should Not Be Lookin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A saying that rings with me from that time is, again, actually supercell founder COVID has been a good friend and a mentor and he was on our board for many years up until the Dordens transaction. He told me that Mickey, the difficulties between bad and good companies is that bad companies don't know what to do, good companies do know what they need to do. The difference between good and great companies is that both know what needs to be done. Only the great ones execute on the truly difficult things. And when you have to lay off one third of your people because you know that it's the right decision for you to be able to succeed, that's a difficult decision to go through with.”
2022-11-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Wolt CEO, Miki Kuusi on Leadership Lessons Scaling to a Reported $8.1BN Exit to Doordash, Building Teams not Families, The Difference Between Trust and Safety Within Companies, How To Use Compensation to Create Culture & Why You Should Not Be Lookin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My most painful day in the world was twenty seventeen we were running out of our series. It was a horrible year of our industry. No one believed in delivery anymore. Nuber is going to kill everyone anyway and no one could raise money. And when we tried to raise our series B, everyone said no. Every single investor we spoke with said no. So we had to part ways with one-third of our staff in the summer of 2017. On a personal level, going through the day of the conversations, 101, I wanted to do each and every one of them one-on-one and I one-on-one told one third of our entire company around 30 people back then that I'm sorry I fucked up. We can't continue with any of you anymore. It's a very tight spot. I hope we're going to be able to make it, but we need to be able to operate with the bare minimum. That was the saddest, most difficult day I've had at work in my entire life. Ultimately, we came out of it stronger. We were able to have a little bit more runway. Every investor said no until we found one that said yes. And our journey continued. And yeah, we are today.”
2022-11-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Wolt CEO, Miki Kuusi on Leadership Lessons Scaling to a Reported $8.1BN Exit to Doordash, Building Teams not Families, The Difference Between Trust and Safety Within Companies, How To Use Compensation to Create Culture & Why You Should Not Be Lookin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Accept this that at every stage you're going to be hiring the best people that you can get and you're going to get different profiles of people at different stages and that's fine. Also that the first person you hire to do recruiting in your company is probably not the person that runs a hundred person recruiting organization where you're way bigger. Also accepting that people change along the journey, that's fine. Some stay with the company and they're fantastic what they do. There might be ICs, there might be team leads and you hire above them. Some people are going to have to leave the company. Some people are going to grow with the company and that's fine. But for me, the biggest learning is that the company in reality is a journey. And in this journey, you have to optimize for each moment in the journey. And then you accept that things are going to change. You learn new things. You change things. And that's how it goes.”
2022-11-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Wolt CEO, Miki Kuusi on Leadership Lessons Scaling to a Reported $8.1BN Exit to Doordash, Building Teams not Families, The Difference Between Trust and Safety Within Companies, How To Use Compensation to Create Culture & Why You Should Not Be Lookin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I look at people we hire today into vault and slide different roles if Mickey founding Walt applied to work at vault today, I would at best work in customer support, at best. I would never qualify for the top 95% of the jobs in the company if I even qualified in the first place. I dropped out from university and I didn't study at Stanford or MIT and I didn't work at McKinsey or Boston Consulting Group and all the biggest of the fastest companies in the world and whatnot. I think the big realization is that as a company you have to take more bets on people in the early days and you also fight people that take a bigger bet on you as a company. And as a result you get this very entrepreneurial type of bunch of people that can go through many very interesting and intriguing paths with the company's growth. And then when you've gone bigger and bigger you're just able to choose more and more merited and smart and driven and motivated and so forth of people from around the world. That's just the way it goes.”
2022-11-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Wolt CEO, Miki Kuusi on Leadership Lessons Scaling to a Reported $8.1BN Exit to Doordash, Building Teams not Families, The Difference Between Trust and Safety Within Companies, How To Use Compensation to Create Culture & Why You Should Not Be Lookin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Whenever some entrepreneur says go through the wall that some entrepreneur who is like don't hit your head against the vault just go around it that's how it goes there's always two different ways to succeed in everything he looks”
2022-11-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Wolt CEO, Miki Kuusi on Leadership Lessons Scaling to a Reported $8.1BN Exit to Doordash, Building Teams not Families, The Difference Between Trust and Safety Within Companies, How To Use Compensation to Create Culture & Why You Should Not Be Lookin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Want to build a company where people are in it for the company, you need to make sure that the company is in it for them.”
2022-11-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Wolt CEO, Miki Kuusi on Leadership Lessons Scaling to a Reported $8.1BN Exit to Doordash, Building Teams not Families, The Difference Between Trust and Safety Within Companies, How To Use Compensation to Create Culture & Why You Should Not Be Lookin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's a way to become a stock option holder in the company. I remember the early insight was in Czech Republic during the week we were launching it and I meet with some of the local folks in the team and I noticed that there's an employee from our Baltic operation and the guys are like a restaurant party manager helping acquire restraints to the platform and he's helping the Czech-EN guy doing the same thing in like a month is why are you doing here? And he's like, yeah, we needed someone to onboard the new guy and they called me and month is can you come to check with me like for a while and teach the new guy the ropes I've realized now doing meetings with this guy for a couple of weeks that it's not that different from where I'm from But the point is if that guy was incentivized based on how many restaurants they acquired in their home city or home country or whatever What's their incentive to really be out for the company? All the companies say everyone is an owner and it's a mission that we're building this thing and so forth but when you look at how they're paying people they're paying people based on doing this then you're expecting people to do that to take ownership and responsibility and fix the small things and take the trash and whatnot if you”
2022-11-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Wolt CEO, Miki Kuusi on Leadership Lessons Scaling to a Reported $8.1BN Exit to Doordash, Building Teams not Families, The Difference Between Trust and Safety Within Companies, How To Use Compensation to Create Culture & Why You Should Not Be Lookin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So my feeling was always that I'd rather be a little bit more generous than a little bit more stingy. That was my guiding principle. It's the same thing about culture. I always earn the side of transparency. If there's something I can share with the company, I always ask, is there a reason I couldn't share it? If there's not, I'm going to share it. If I'm thinking about sharing it to the smaller group and I'm like, is there some reason I couldn't share it to the bigger group? I will default to the bigger group. Is the same thing with compensation? I try to err on the side of training the employees, training the team more fairly than not. I think a lot of companies try to be a little bit too smart around all the terms and how quickly you need to subscribe your shares if you leave the company and the investing periods and whatnot. My kind of thinking has been make it as vanilla, as fear, as possible for the team. Up until we were like hundreds and hundreds of people, every single employee in the company was eligible to get stock options in the company. Even when we were thousands of people and you came to customer support as a part-time employee.”
2022-11-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Wolt CEO, Miki Kuusi on Leadership Lessons Scaling to a Reported $8.1BN Exit to Doordash, Building Teams not Families, The Difference Between Trust and Safety Within Companies, How To Use Compensation to Create Culture & Why You Should Not Be Lookin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, my thinking is that hiring is a commitment when we hire someone we're serious, we are hiring someone because we want to commit to them and we want them to commit to us. We will have failed as a company if we part ways with you. We will still have to make those difficult decisions because we're not going to be a successful company if we don't make the difficult decisions. But companies that are like, oh, we're going to hire 10 people and fire half of them. I don't think that's a great company. I don't think that's a very high level of trustworthiness or integrity that the company is showing. I want to work for a company that I can work my asshole for and the company is going to be there for me even if my fumble”
2022-11-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Wolt CEO, Miki Kuusi on Leadership Lessons Scaling to a Reported $8.1BN Exit to Doordash, Building Teams not Families, The Difference Between Trust and Safety Within Companies, How To Use Compensation to Create Culture & Why You Should Not Be Lookin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's very easy to overhire things are going well. The company is growing like hell. It's very competitive. Everyone is afraid of someone else beating you to the opportunity. So you have to be safe hiring as fast as you can if you can. And then when the market changes, you're a little bit like, what do we actually need? And then it might look very different. And I think different companies have been dealt differently to our benefits. We haven't had to go through any layoffs, God forbid, in the current landscape, at least so far. And the reason is that we were just always very careful because we were always running out of money. We were always on the little bit more conservative side of the spectrum. I think different companies are being built differently, but ultimately the core problem is that it's not easy to right size these things where technically WhatsApp was 20 people when it was acquired by Facebook. And today Meta is like 87,000 people. The right answer to how many people meta needs is probably somewhere between 20 and 87,000 people. Where? It's a very difficult question to answer.”
2022-11-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Wolt CEO, Miki Kuusi on Leadership Lessons Scaling to a Reported $8.1BN Exit to Doordash, Building Teams not Families, The Difference Between Trust and Safety Within Companies, How To Use Compensation to Create Culture & Why You Should Not Be Lookin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So of right sizing a company is easy in occupations where the relationship with the person's work and the value they're creating is very connected. You're running a restaurant. You either have enough waiters and waitresses serving customers and you have enough chefs or not enough chefs in the kitchen. If you have too many, you probably should have less pay less than you get the efficiency through that. If you have too little, you probably should hire more. And then you find this equilibrium and you're like, great, we were able to make all the dishes, customer experience was great, not too much slack time, the economics look good. So right-sizing this kind of an operation is easier by customer support. But when it comes to engineers, the issue is that there's not this direct correlation. If we have a thousand engineers today, we can build all these beautiful products and everything and it's going to be amazing and so forth. And we only have 50, should we have 100, 200, 150? Should we have it in one year, two years, five years? So the issue is that in these kind of occupations where it's not immediately clear what the value creation of each individual”
2022-11-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Wolt CEO, Miki Kuusi on Leadership Lessons Scaling to a Reported $8.1BN Exit to Doordash, Building Teams not Families, The Difference Between Trust and Safety Within Companies, How To Use Compensation to Create Culture & Why You Should Not Be Lookin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No idea what recruiting is or how it works or what a great recruiter is and mind you I've been doing a lot of recruiting but I have no idea what a recruiter is. Has Dimmer remember how uncomfortable it was for the weeks that followed that I started to pick apart this problem and meet with recruiters and try to figure out what they do and try to figure out what great looks like and ultimately if we hired our first recruiter. Same thing. We raised our series B. We're like, we're running out of money in six months. We need to raise a growth round. We have absolutely no idea how you raise a growth round. Unless we do this, we're going to run out of money. And I remember we're making a dick with my CEO. What does a deck for a growth fraud look like? Absolutely no idea. And we blow up the first couple of investor meetings. Oh, this company doesn't know what they're doing. And you learn and we somehow were able to pull together the round. That turns a hundred. That's what it's like to be a CEO of this kind of a growth company.”
2022-11-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Wolt CEO, Miki Kuusi on Leadership Lessons Scaling to a Reported $8.1BN Exit to Doordash, Building Teams not Families, The Difference Between Trust and Safety Within Companies, How To Use Compensation to Create Culture & Why You Should Not Be Lookin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, like several times I be the CEO of Walt since I had an idea to a founding team to around seven thousand people today. The role has changed quite significantly on the journey and there's been multiple points in time when I felt I'm underwater and I'm going to drown unless I somehow figure out a way to get back on top. There's a vivid experience I remember. The same case Coolin, he lit our series A from EKT Ventures and we had this session in Amsterdam for over eight hours we were talking about the booking story and he was an early investor in Uber and he was very involved in the early days of Uber and he explained the Uber story and so forth and what's there to learn. And one of the things he said to me was that Mickey, the most important hire you're going to make next is that he need a great recruiter. I've never met a recruiter in my life. Never worked at a real company outside of Supercell and Supercell didn't really have full-time recruiters back then. And like what does a recruiter do? What does a great recruiter look like? Man, I have no idea what I'm doing. I remember feeling this uncomfortable feeling of having absolutely”
2022-11-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Wolt CEO, Miki Kuusi on Leadership Lessons Scaling to a Reported $8.1BN Exit to Doordash, Building Teams not Families, The Difference Between Trust and Safety Within Companies, How To Use Compensation to Create Culture & Why You Should Not Be Lookin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that company, and later on you realized that actually you need people that are very capable. They can call me big cargo companies or from other companies.”
2022-11-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Wolt CEO, Miki Kuusi on Leadership Lessons Scaling to a Reported $8.1BN Exit to Doordash, Building Teams not Families, The Difference Between Trust and Safety Within Companies, How To Use Compensation to Create Culture & Why You Should Not Be Lookin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Hiring for Logos, we had another company that was interested in acquiring our company many years ago, I'm not going to mention the year. They had a very impressive team. Their management team came to Helsinki and we spent time with them and we had all these dinners and stuff and so forth and ultimately they gave us an offer in the company that we ultimately said no to. And I remember my co-father, he was talking about the VP of engineering of that other company. It was like, yeah, he's a really impressive CV. He was in this company, Silicon Valley, and that company in Silicon Valley and that company in this role and he's involved in that project we all heard about. Yeah, this is a very similar person to the best people or some of the people we see in Helsinki, but the logos are more well known. And I just remember being like, yeah, that's a really good point. You get dazzled by these logos because there are global services you've heard of. But it doesn't mean that you wouldn't have fantastic people in companies you've never heard of. That's really the art and the skill. And I think my biggest mistakes in hiring, we're going after logos. We're going after this person has done this and that this company.”
2022-11-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Wolt CEO, Miki Kuusi on Leadership Lessons Scaling to a Reported $8.1BN Exit to Doordash, Building Teams not Families, The Difference Between Trust and Safety Within Companies, How To Use Compensation to Create Culture & Why You Should Not Be Lookin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We've looked always at the globe as our kind of home base. The reason we stuck to Europe in the early years was that time zones are expensive. Lumer flights are more expensive. If you need to support customers six times away, it means there's going to be engineers up every night pretty late. And if you have a 20% engineering team, man, that team's going to be under a lot of stress very quickly. So, okay, let's go south because the type zones are going to be similar. But we were always looking at the whole club and we just saw that's an interesting market because it's underpenetrated. It's a very difficult market, but it's an underpenetrated market in our industry. And that's how we've expanded. We've always looked for the places where we can create the most value with the most efficient investment.”
2022-11-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Wolt CEO, Miki Kuusi on Leadership Lessons Scaling to a Reported $8.1BN Exit to Doordash, Building Teams not Families, The Difference Between Trust and Safety Within Companies, How To Use Compensation to Create Culture & Why You Should Not Be Lookin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We raised our serious aim was ten million euros in January of twenty sixteen. The next route we raised was in January 2018, two years later, that was our 27 million euro series B. And then we raised our Series C in April.”
2022-11-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Wolt CEO, Miki Kuusi on Leadership Lessons Scaling to a Reported $8.1BN Exit to Doordash, Building Teams not Families, The Difference Between Trust and Safety Within Companies, How To Use Compensation to Create Culture & Why You Should Not Be Lookin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“recruiters had my LinkedIn password and username so they could write messages as Mickey being like hey you're looking like a really interesting person for this rover thinking and this what we do would you be interested to talk more I'll connect you with the recruiter it's a recruiter writing the message there's a lot of this kind of hacking that we had to do in the early is because like you're literally looking for the people this is like zero cv is coming your way putting an application open zero people applying for it you need to go out and hunt and get people excited at the opportunity and sell the opportunity and then you have the chance to try to figure out is this the right person for the company or not”
2022-11-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Wolt CEO, Miki Kuusi on Leadership Lessons Scaling to a Reported $8.1BN Exit to Doordash, Building Teams not Families, The Difference Between Trust and Safety Within Companies, How To Use Compensation to Create Culture & Why You Should Not Be Lookin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“asking a CEO this question is like asking a developer so how do you write code you have to That's what you do. What are growth companies? Growth companies are a glorified recruiting operations. And every single CR person in a growth company has to become a great recruiter. What is a great recruiter? A great recruiter is someone that can get people as excited about the opportunity as they are. That is the art. There's a lot of things that you could do. I remember when we expanded to new countries as well that no one had ever heard of us and we didn't announce a round of financing for three years. We had raised financing, but we kept a low profile we didn't do any press because we didn't want anyone noticing what we were doing. So we're hiring people and people are like Volt Sanslinger company that's going to go bankrupt because you haven't raised funding in such a long time and so forth. So we just started hacking this thing. We noticed, for instance, that when using MyLinkedIn profile to contact someone for GM position higher in a country where no one's ever heard of us, my profile had better conversion of the people responding back to me. So I started writing these cold messages to people about these roles and then when we started to scale that some of our”
2022-11-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Wolt CEO, Miki Kuusi on Leadership Lessons Scaling to a Reported $8.1BN Exit to Doordash, Building Teams not Families, The Difference Between Trust and Safety Within Companies, How To Use Compensation to Create Culture & Why You Should Not Be Lookin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One of my biggest lessons of hiring came from a guy called K. Coolin. He was the CEO of Booking. com from a Legislature. person company too i think the biggest consumer software company out of your and case told me that one mistake people make in hiring is that they're looking for the person that has already done you know what you need we need to hire that person he's done this before he's going to do it for us and it's going to be amazing but what people don't realize is that very few people do these things twice in their life and actually what you need to be looking for is this person before they did the thing okay in this company there's a person that did the thing that we now need and need to look at what was the person before they started that company you're looking for that person and that's been my biggest learning in hiring is that you ultimately need to be able to grow a lot of people with your company take a lot of bets on people and you need to be able to hire for that potential it's so easy to go to this mode that you're just trying to hire the logos into your company and the past experiences but actually you build a successful company by having a large group of people that do those things for the first time with you”
2022-11-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Wolt CEO, Miki Kuusi on Leadership Lessons Scaling to a Reported $8.1BN Exit to Doordash, Building Teams not Families, The Difference Between Trust and Safety Within Companies, How To Use Compensation to Create Culture & Why You Should Not Be Lookin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Here, they would probably leave the company if they knew all the shit I know. And I have realized that, first of all, that's very heavy. You burn out very easily. If you're making yourself the single point of failure, and secondarily, your team is not going to be able to work with full information to try to succeed. So I decided from the Envy Dancer Wall that everything I know, everything I'm concerned about, every one of my co-founders knows, everyone in our management knows, and my chairman of the board and board know. So I've always acted on full transparency. There's been nothing going on with a company that I wouldn't have shared with these groups of people. And you know what? It's not as lonely. It's not as heavy on your shoulders. I think the team comes up with a lot smarter solutions to these things than you would ever come up on your own.”
2022-11-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Wolt CEO, Miki Kuusi on Leadership Lessons Scaling to a Reported $8.1BN Exit to Doordash, Building Teams not Families, The Difference Between Trust and Safety Within Companies, How To Use Compensation to Create Culture & Why You Should Not Be Lookin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It is a lonely job to be the CEO of a company because I describe being a CEO as being the single point of failure between two permits, one at the bottom and one at the top connected by their tips. On the top you have your shareholders, you have your investors, you have your former employees, your board, all these other people, and they're looking down and hey, Mickey, you got this. And then you have everyone in the bottom, which is like all of your employees, everyone in your team, your co-founders, everyone everyone is looking up, Mickey, you got it. You're standing in the middle like, why is everyone staring at me? That's oftentimes what it feels like being the CEO. There's a really difficult decision. Everyone has opinions and a good conversation, and then ultimately people look at you as so, what do we do? So it's a very lonely job. One thing that has helped me is that since Founding Walt in my previous company, I realized that we oftentimes in an inexperienced leader, you're trying to protect the team from things you're afraid of, from things that keep you up nice. You're like, I'm going to protect the team from these things, and if they knew all these things, would they be able to work or would they even be?”
2022-11-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Wolt CEO, Miki Kuusi on Leadership Lessons Scaling to a Reported $8.1BN Exit to Doordash, Building Teams not Families, The Difference Between Trust and Safety Within Companies, How To Use Compensation to Create Culture & Why You Should Not Be Lookin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A friend of mine who is an entrepreneur once told me, being an entrepreneur is great, you get to choose when you want to work any 16 hours per day will qualify.”
2022-11-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Wolt CEO, Miki Kuusi on Leadership Lessons Scaling to a Reported $8.1BN Exit to Doordash, Building Teams not Families, The Difference Between Trust and Safety Within Companies, How To Use Compensation to Create Culture & Why You Should Not Be Lookin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I live in like very hyper bloody competitive all the time. And the point is that you can turn this off. It's always going to be with you, so you either learn to live with it or you don't. It's the same today as it was eight years ago. I've just learned to live with it better.”
2022-11-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Wolt CEO, Miki Kuusi on Leadership Lessons Scaling to a Reported $8.1BN Exit to Doordash, Building Teams not Families, The Difference Between Trust and Safety Within Companies, How To Use Compensation to Create Culture & Why You Should Not Be Lookin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Someone once asked me what has been the biggest thing you've had to sacrifice. Do these things have to build your company and your career? I came to the conclusion that it's my mind space. It's my freedom. It's my free time. Because there's none of it. You're always going to be thinking about the next thing that the company has to do, the things that are threatening you. You're always going to be pissed off by the things where someone is trading your company unfairly, writing a news piece, doing something as a competitive thing. Ben Horowitz wrote a fantastic book called Hard Things About Hard Things, one of my favorite books on management because it talks about difficult sign of management. In that book, there's a good chapter called Wartime CEO versus Peacetime CEO. And in this chapter, Ben describes that a peacetime CEO is a CEO who thinks of competition as other ships in the vast blue sea. You might never intercept with them. A poor-time CEO of things of competition as someone trying to break into your house and steal your kits. And that's the kind of industry.”
2022-11-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Wolt CEO, Miki Kuusi on Leadership Lessons Scaling to a Reported $8.1BN Exit to Doordash, Building Teams not Families, The Difference Between Trust and Safety Within Companies, How To Use Compensation to Create Culture & Why You Should Not Be Lookin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I tried to start with an assumption of trust, and that's what we also say within the company. Assume good intentions, assume that people are trying to help the company succeed. That's my starting point. But if I have something that I'm personally very passionate about, something that I've been close to during the history of the company, I'm not going to be very trusting until I see that you got it. The first person to lead product outside of myself involved, the first person to lead brand outside myself involved. These kind of things that are very close to my heart and I have a very strong opinion about those things. I'm not going to let someone take it over and do whatever they can out of it before I see that they get it.”
2022-11-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Wolt CEO, Miki Kuusi on Leadership Lessons Scaling to a Reported $8.1BN Exit to Doordash, Building Teams not Families, The Difference Between Trust and Safety Within Companies, How To Use Compensation to Create Culture & Why You Should Not Be Lookin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't remember pawning ways or firing someone because of mistakes that they would have made, but it's ultimately about trust when trust is violated. I can't trust that this person owning this area, that they're going to do a good job without having to be involved without having to follow what's going on and so forth. So it's not about individual mistakes. Trust is a binary thing. There's either trust or there's no trust. As long as there's that trust, people can make mistakes as long as you understand this why it was done and it was done and good conscious and they tried their best and they learn from it and so forth. Mistakes are more than fine. That's how you learn.”
2022-11-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Wolt CEO, Miki Kuusi on Leadership Lessons Scaling to a Reported $8.1BN Exit to Doordash, Building Teams not Families, The Difference Between Trust and Safety Within Companies, How To Use Compensation to Create Culture & Why You Should Not Be Lookin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Playing this game if we don't want to win. We need to be able to win matches. So I'm not a big believer in safety. I'm a big believer in trust and giving people opportunities, giving people the opportunity to learn, to grow, to make mistakes, and so forth. But at the end of the day, you still have to make difficult decisions about making sure that you have the right people in the right places.”
2022-11-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Wolt CEO, Miki Kuusi on Leadership Lessons Scaling to a Reported $8.1BN Exit to Doordash, Building Teams not Families, The Difference Between Trust and Safety Within Companies, How To Use Compensation to Create Culture & Why You Should Not Be Lookin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source