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Miki Kuusi

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2022-11-28
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2022-11-28
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  1. “Confusing three concepts trust and safety. Trust is very important. Trust is that when you're going to treat you fairly, if you're doing badly, having a divorce, burning out, we're going to make sure we take care of you. We're going to make sure that all you need to take time off from work, but you're not feeling so well, okay? That's trust. Trust is also, oh, this is not working out anymore, Harry. You're a great person, but you need to find a better place for you're ambitious of what you're doing, and we need to find the right person in this role. But we're going to straight you fairly. We're not going to leave you on top of nothing. We're not going to do the bare legal minimum, but you're just about to hit your cliff. We're going to give you your cliff. We're going to give you some months of salary so you can take a break and figure out what you want to do next. Trust is important, but safety, no, if you want to build something that is able to be successful, you need to have a high performance environment. And in a high-performance environment, a team knows that they're as strong as the weakest player on ice. And you need to have strong players on ice so that you're able to win matches. Why are we playing?”

    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

  2. “rigorous about setting high bar to hiring people, but also that you are making difficult decisions if something is not working out. So this way you're not creating a culture of micromanagement where because there's someone in the team that is not able to live up to this kind of ownership and responsibility, you're making everyone's lives a lot more managed. But also if you onboard someone to do something new, they're not going to be as good as your day one. So you need to spend time on them. You need to invest them. You need to do things together. Then you let them fly on their own wings. And if it doesn't work out, you accept the fact it's not going to be perfect on day one. And ultimately, you go forward two years in time and you're like, man, this person is a lot better than I ever was in doing this thing. You need to have the patience.”

    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

  3. “The first thing is that you have to have the right people. I joined Supercell as a 20-something year old kid not knowing anything about games and not knowing anything about the gaming industry, free to play games. And Ilco is the founder of CFEL. He's a huge ice hockey fan. He talked about how he wants to build the winning ice hockey team that's going to win the standing club, biggest prize in the NHL. You would ask him, what does this mean? And he's like, a lot of companies say they want to be a family. We want to be a teeth. They share a lot of similar qualities. You support each other in both. You go through the thick and thin. You're going to be there on the rainy day and the sunny day. But the difference between a team and a family is that a team is defined by its capability to win. A team that doesn't win matches is not going to be a team for too long. Winners of family is going to be a family no matter what, whether you like it or not, you're connected by blood. So in team you make difficult decisions. You hire people, you fire people. The team is not working in a fight players on ice plus the goalie. You can't like double the number of players. You need to change players on the ice. The way you can keep responsibility to people is that you are very...”

    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

  4. “On to the next generation. So it's about true ownership. I think how you get people to care about the small things is that you give them ownership over the big things. And when people are responsible for the big things, they start to care about the small things that contribute to those big things. People talk about delegating as if delegating is, I don't want to do something. I'm going to delegate it to you now. You have to do it. But I think the bigger thing is that I'm going to make you the owner of whatever area we're talking about. And if there's small things related to that area, that's your responsibility because you own the area. You know, you're going to make it or break it for us in this thing. Ownership leads people also caring about details. If they feel like owners, they're going to also care about the small things.”

    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

  5. “You're talking about culture. So, how do you create a culture where people actually care? People act like owners. The easiest way to make someone act like an owner is to make them an owner. That's why I'm a big believer in having equity programs and involved up until very late stages. Every single employee was a stockholder or shareholder, an option holder of fault. It starts with compensation. If you don't incentivize people to be there for the company, how can you expect them to be there for the company? But then it goes to culture and the kind of people you hire and ownership is a big part of that. giving ownership over things. You don't need to be an owner in something to feel like an owner. Like slush, when we started building the tech conference out of Helsinki, we set it up as a non-profit. Yet if I look at our team, if I look at the current team of all the teams in between, they have an incredibly high ownership over what they're building. But they don't own it. It's a non-profit. There's a foundation behind it. Why? Because they make the decisions. They are accountable. It's their thing. It's their baby that they're building, that they're molding, that they over sometimes in pass.”

    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

  6. “So I was an earnest CEO of Slush, my previous company, my chairman of the board at the time, an experienced investor told me that Mickey, a CEO, you're like the knight on the white horse. You want to be there at the front with your sword in the air leading to trip.”

    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

  7. “No, it is valuable. The point I'm going for is that I try to have a round, let's call it 80 or 90% of my time on things where I can see a direct correlation to the things that I'm trying to move. I don't do a lot of talks, I don't do a lot of interviews, I don't go to a lot of events. One thing I like to do is help new entrepreneurs and new companies and I try to spend some time on that. But I do spend too much time with people outside of our customers and partners and employees in the company. I try to focus on as CEO my job is to help the team succeed. My job is to make sure we have the right team. I try to focus on that. Then there's always the 10 to 20% that you have to spend on serendipity. You have to take leaps of faith. It's like brand marketing. You don't necessarily know what it's going to do for the company. If people know your name as a company, it's likely to lead to some good things. So how much of your efforts do you put into that? That's a very good question. But if you don't know how valuable it is, probably you're not going to put like 100%.”

    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

  8. “I think in hiring what I've learned is that I have to do an on stage session once every year or every two years because whenever I meet candidates for final interviews most of them have watched me on YouTube do some talk and I realize oh actually I have to do these things because people actually do watch this shit for me it's more about”

    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

  9. “First of all, if you think about companies, product market fit, or should you have product market fit. If you don't know that you have product market fit, you don't have product market fit. It's as simple as that. It's something you can feel. It's something everyone can see. It's just drawing you in and it's helping you grow and helping you prioritize things and so forth. If you don't have product market fit, it's incredibly difficult to figure out what are the things that help you get there. But realizing that you don't have it means that you need to change something you need to do something differently. I'm one of these people that tries to be hyper focused on things that matter. I feel guilty about doing stuff like this, for instance. I don't do a lot of interviews because this doesn't help me succeed as a company. It's nice to have visibility and this stuff. That's not what is going to make or break the company if I think about end of this year or next year. So I always feel guilty when I'm doing stuff that is not directly contributing to the fact that how are you going to succeed?”

    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

  10. “We were as accompanied enough. Let's do thing number two. And now we're a 7,000 person company and we can do way more things today. But I think people are just going too wide too early”

    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

  11. “So one of our early investors, Petri from Lifeline Ventures, once told me a story that he had a company that was a small team like 15 people and they figured out they had good product market fit and they were growing and they figured out something that was really really interesting that had also a great product market fit and a huge opportunity and the team came to him and asked them how should we do this should we split the team and part of the team work on this or spit out another company and Petr was like you should probably shouldn't split a race because it's already so small that having half a raise in is not very intelligent. The reality is that I think people just try to do too many things too early. And that's been the case when Wolt started to expand really beyond the restaurant. That was when COVID started. We were not originally meant to go as early and as wide into the grocery space and when COVID started we saw that this is the perfect storm so it's now or never. But the reality is that at that time we had raised close to a quarter a billion in financing the company was five, six, seven, eight hundred people. Think about how sizable”

    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

  12. “We started with this grand vision of the everything up, every local service, everything you can buy in a city and get on our platform. We want to do everything. We want to do restaurant, grocery, we don't want to do clothes, electronics, we want to do services, we want to sell you movie tickets. That's the vision of the company. And for five first years of our existence, restaurant food delivery. When we saw that it worked, cut everything else. This is really difficult to do. We're only going to focus on doing this with great quick, consistent customer experience and efficiency and good internet economics. That was a very difficult decision over years to keep on bringing you people back to the fact that we still want to do these all of these other things. But right now, we need to focus on this.”

    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

  13. “our efforts, split our people, split our focus to try to succeed on two platforms versus putting all into one platform and succeeding on that. What happened was that Supercell launched Clash of Class very famously only two years later on Android. That's what focus means. Focus means making difficult decisions to put all of your effort in the smallest possible subset of things. And if we don't think about performance is the ability to decide what exactly are the things that you need to get right and getting that to the smallest possible area. As an individual, as a team, as in a 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

  14. “So for me high performance is all about focus. There's a word that everyone in our company knows that's going to be focus because there are too many things we can spend time on in the current world. I was at Supercell back in 2012 when the company was working on its first like mobile titles that became like clash of clans and heyday. I remember when we had Clash of Clans testing in North America and Canada and it was only available on the iPhone. We could see the data. It looked like this is going to be a hugely popular game. Every number was off the charts when you looked at what games were back then in terms of numbers. I asked Ilka is the founder and CE of Supercell that we're not working on an Android version. People are going to see what we're doing and they're going to try to outrace us to Android. We should start probably working on an Android version right away. And Ilka was like, yeah, I'd be thinking about this. We're a small company, 35 people back at the time with 10, 15 million in funding. We get one chance. We either get it right or we blow it. And if we blow it, we're not going to get a second chance. Why would we split?”

    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

  15. “I think it's always harder than ever. I think consumer expectations will keep on increasing not just from where we start and where we are today, but also where we're going to be in five or ten years. Consumer experience in our case, we like to think that it's okay, selection, it's what you can order, the platform, it's affordability, it's inexpensive to use, can use it every day. It's a quality, like is it quick, we promise the exit, we deliver on X, what if something goes wrong? All three, the expectation goes up. It has to be cheaper, it has to be better, it has to be more reliable, you need to have better selection, you need to have things available that are not available in the physical world. At the rates to build a company like us is to just be able to continue to improve as consumer expectations also improve. Otherwise, you're out of business.”

    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