YouSaid · the spoken record

Niklas Östberg

lines on the record: 68
first: 2025-03-27
most recent: 2025-03-27
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“For me, it's even more exciting when things where I can drive things forward. And of course, all AI space will make us more efficient, will make us better, will dramatically. So I'm very excited to see that panning out.”
2025-03-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Insane Story of DeliveryHero: Losing $200M on a Gorillas Investment | Winning the Emerging Markets Delivery War with 35 Acquisitions | Competing with Uber and Doordash in a Capital Arms Race with Niklas Östberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Conversation honesty, understanding, forgiveness. Try to take your ego out and win every discussion and every argument is probably a good start and also try to see from every perspective. And I think there's a challenge we have overall that we have our point of view and we are not standing enough that other people might have different point of views and both being okay.”
2025-03-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Insane Story of DeliveryHero: Losing $200M on a Gorillas Investment | Winning the Emerging Markets Delivery War with 35 Acquisitions | Competing with Uber and Doordash in a Capital Arms Race with Niklas Östberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I've never been thinking about it. I think having purpose and being in a team, having a shared experience that makes it happy. I've never been thinking about it really.”
2025-03-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Insane Story of DeliveryHero: Losing $200M on a Gorillas Investment | Winning the Emerging Markets Delivery War with 35 Acquisitions | Competing with Uber and Doordash in a Capital Arms Race with Niklas Östberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so of course the shadows with drones is that it's hard to do in the city center of cities because of noise and regulation and a place to land on and take off from. It's a little bit harder to do that in city centers and so on. The robotics you can do in small cities, big cities, city centers, you can do it everywhere. It's a little bit slower than drones. So if you look at an average drone delivery, it's happening like three minutes plus loading offloading. Robots have, they cannot do the shortest way. They have to actually take the road. They have to wait for stop sign and so on. And they cannot drive in the same pace as you have a drone. So they are slower, but they can get you almost anywhere. That will probably be large, much faster.”
2025-03-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Insane Story of DeliveryHero: Losing $200M on a Gorillas Investment | Winning the Emerging Markets Delivery War with 35 Acquisitions | Competing with Uber and Doordash in a Capital Arms Race with Niklas Östberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It already reached a point where you can actually make it work economically. In some places, regulation is also a part of it. It will take time to scale it. But over time, on a 25% of delivery or so could be done by drones, but it might be 10 years something to actually build out that network to be there. So we are moving in that direction, but it's going to take a long time. I would say robotics will be faster and probably be able to cover a larger portion of business.”
2025-03-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Insane Story of DeliveryHero: Losing $200M on a Gorillas Investment | Winning the Emerging Markets Delivery War with 35 Acquisitions | Competing with Uber and Doordash in a Capital Arms Race with Niklas Östberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That many you have Mark Zuckerberg, and for having the bravery that he has had over the years has been criticized many times, but he stood by his beliefs. Jansen, of course, with Nvidia, has been taking bold decision and been right many times.”
2025-03-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Insane Story of DeliveryHero: Losing $200M on a Gorillas Investment | Winning the Emerging Markets Delivery War with 35 Acquisitions | Competing with Uber and Doordash in a Capital Arms Race with Niklas Östberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We are a brave company that do what we believe in, so I do not think that we're holding back too much. Of course, I mentioned before, we are big believers in the whole Quick Commerce, grocery shopping type of thing. Other verticals that we're expanding into as well, health and beauty and so on. I mentioned before, I think that's easily more than 50% of our business long term. Today is only a small portion, a small fraction. So that's something we are doubling down on. But I don't think we're too afraid of taking risk. We are willing to take risk as long as we have good data behind it.”
2025-03-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Insane Story of DeliveryHero: Losing $200M on a Gorillas Investment | Winning the Emerging Markets Delivery War with 35 Acquisitions | Competing with Uber and Doordash in a Capital Arms Race with Niklas Östberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I like the philosophy of thinking 10 years and hold because I think it sets the right direction of what are the companies that cannot be disrupted over 10 years. And I was always a big fan of Amazon and so on. I'm still a big fan of Amazon. But of course the valuation of those companies have gone up a lot. So you cannot count on multiple expansions. So the growth in those stocks will only be or the value growth of those stocks would basically only be the growth that it can generate. That's still probably going to be a fair month. So maybe I'll stick with Amazon.”
2025-03-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Insane Story of DeliveryHero: Losing $200M on a Gorillas Investment | Winning the Emerging Markets Delivery War with 35 Acquisitions | Competing with Uber and Doordash in a Capital Arms Race with Niklas Östberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, but I feel pressure of making sure that we leverage AI to get more efficient, working really hard on that. If you have a story or not, that's a little bit cosmetics. I don't care for that cosmetics so much. I care for actually leveraging and truly make our business”
2025-03-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Insane Story of DeliveryHero: Losing $200M on a Gorillas Investment | Winning the Emerging Markets Delivery War with 35 Acquisitions | Competing with Uber and Doordash in a Capital Arms Race with Niklas Östberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think Jen AI or the largest beneficiary of AI is going to be the average company deploying it and not necessarily the MAG 7, the ones who are building it. I think that is probably contrarian, at least if I look at the stock market, we see they have done tremendously well, but other companies haven't. I do believe that the biggest beneficiary as the company leveraging AI versus those building.”
2025-03-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Insane Story of DeliveryHero: Losing $200M on a Gorillas Investment | Winning the Emerging Markets Delivery War with 35 Acquisitions | Competing with Uber and Doordash in a Capital Arms Race with Niklas Östberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Generally, the principle of delivery here is that we are in the details and we are in the tranches in the details. So I will not step there and just not been helpful and not knowing the details. I'll be in the details and the same thing I expect Oscar to be in the details. Of course, we collectively try to find the best path forward and how we can solve it and be supportive and making sure we take the right decisions and operate in a good way. But in the end, we can only do so much. In the end, I cannot blame Oscar for challenges that he is not responsible for that has affected him. But where we have collectively taken decisions that we think are right, then of course we also take shared responsibility on those topics.”
2025-03-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Insane Story of DeliveryHero: Losing $200M on a Gorillas Investment | Winning the Emerging Markets Delivery War with 35 Acquisitions | Competing with Uber and Doordash in a Capital Arms Race with Niklas Östberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I do think that sometimes we are harder on European companies and European companies more scrutiny on us. There's a lot of regulation that is circumvented or ignored by Chinese and US companies. I do think that we have to truly level the playing field in many ways. I think a lot of US players also leverage the dominance. Yeah, we have to make sure the US and Chinese companies cannot circumvent regulation. We have to make sure that we are not going after European companies more than US companies just because it's easier to approach us and reach us. There are a few things I think that we have to also work on to making a level playing field and I hope that I will also happen.”
2025-03-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Insane Story of DeliveryHero: Losing $200M on a Gorillas Investment | Winning the Emerging Markets Delivery War with 35 Acquisitions | Competing with Uber and Doordash in a Capital Arms Race with Niklas Östberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, make it easier, faster to get talent into Europe, reduce some of the bureaucracy or certain regulation that can sometimes be a little bit overwhelming for a lot of companies. And we speak about GDPR, sustainability reporting, pay transparency directive, accessibility act, and so on. And they all make sense and they have good intention. But collectively, it's just a big burden on those European companies. And I think a little bit unfairly that they are not the same criteria for other companies competing in Europe. So I think this is proportionally adding to European companies. So if we can do that, then...”
2025-03-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Insane Story of DeliveryHero: Losing $200M on a Gorillas Investment | Winning the Emerging Markets Delivery War with 35 Acquisitions | Competing with Uber and Doordash in a Capital Arms Race with Niklas Östberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's some fair bashing things that we surely could have done better and that I hope that we will do better. But in the end, I'm an entrepreneur. I'm an optimist. I believe we can do stuff. I believe we can build an amazing companies out of Europe. And I think there's a lot of strength in Europe as well. We are highly educated people, good infrastructure, welfare system, functioning democracy. We are a talent hub, a decent balance sheet and all of that. So there's a lot of strength of Europe. There are also a lot of weaknesses of Europe. And I hope we can address those. And if we can, I think Europe will be an amazing place for startup and companies.”
2025-03-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Insane Story of DeliveryHero: Losing $200M on a Gorillas Investment | Winning the Emerging Markets Delivery War with 35 Acquisitions | Competing with Uber and Doordash in a Capital Arms Race with Niklas Östberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think we have all of them because we bought them all very early, and I look at a Padu Shia from Latin, what I mentioned before, there were maybe 50,000, 60,000 horses a month. That business will be huge. Look at Talibat. It was a little bit more expensive, but we were doing 70,000 to 80,000 monthly orders. And now that is the 10 billion business. So that is a hundred tons return or so. We have a lot of 100 tons returns or even thousands return, but most of them were small businesses. So of course, there's a high return on a small amount. Then if you take a business like Global might have an absolute long-term equally large. But on a multiple basis, of course, it's less given that it was still a larger acquisition.”
2025-03-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Insane Story of DeliveryHero: Losing $200M on a Gorillas Investment | Winning the Emerging Markets Delivery War with 35 Acquisitions | Competing with Uber and Doordash in a Capital Arms Race with Niklas Östberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it depends a little bit if you're building a business to sell it, then of course you will have to look at the multiple and how market's evaluating it and so on. If you're building a business because you want to drive shareholder return over time and driving cash flow and so on, then you might not care so much what investors think it's worth at a point in time. You would rather care for what is the value of the business that you're building. That's the difference between price and value. We try to be focused more on driving value than driving price.”
2025-03-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Insane Story of DeliveryHero: Losing $200M on a Gorillas Investment | Winning the Emerging Markets Delivery War with 35 Acquisitions | Competing with Uber and Doordash in a Capital Arms Race with Niklas Östberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Doesn't really matter where they sit. If they sit in a developer markets and merger markets, for us it will be no big difference.”
2025-03-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Insane Story of DeliveryHero: Losing $200M on a Gorillas Investment | Winning the Emerging Markets Delivery War with 35 Acquisitions | Competing with Uber and Doordash in a Capital Arms Race with Niklas Östberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For us, it's not such a big difference. We would rather see do we have a return when investing this customer regardless where they sit? And in some markets, you can just scale it in a certain way. You cannot scale it fast. And coming back to the point what I tried to make before, you can make this business break even after a year or maybe two in a country. But then you're going to not invest a lot of money and you're just going to gradually scale it in a small percentage every year. And then it kind of run on break-even for 10 years. And I did that during the early days. I was part of starting also online pizza. It was completely bootstrap. No investors at all. So we were breaking almost on the first day of business. But of course, then it takes a very long time and you're not maximizing your business. If you have a good return on your customers, well, you want to buy as many customers as you can at the price at which you have a good return.”
2025-03-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Insane Story of DeliveryHero: Losing $200M on a Gorillas Investment | Winning the Emerging Markets Delivery War with 35 Acquisitions | Competing with Uber and Doordash in a Capital Arms Race with Niklas Östberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think you need to see the fundament of the business works. Coming back to that cohort, are the cores good enough? Can we see enough lifetime value in this? And can we see that the acquisition cost is getting to a place where we can actually scale it? So you need to get that to work maybe in a year or so. And if you get it to work, then of course you're going to spend money over the next couple of years because when you get it to work and you want to scale it, if you don't get it to work, well, then it's not going to cost a lot because why would you invest in a business that has a bad lifetime value return? So in the end, sometimes it could be that the best markets are the ones that are going to cost a lot of money for a number of years because you want to invest to grow it. So it's not necessarily that the best market will be fastest to break even. It could be that the worst market are fastest to break even, but then they never get them.”
2025-03-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Insane Story of DeliveryHero: Losing $200M on a Gorillas Investment | Winning the Emerging Markets Delivery War with 35 Acquisitions | Competing with Uber and Doordash in a Capital Arms Race with Niklas Östberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it's always hard in the beginning to get that product market fit. But I don't think it's about a market. I think every market in the world will probably work with this. It's just a matter of getting that product market fit right. And secondly, is it worthwhile having another country, another set of regulation, another set of, so a lot of markets might not make sense because it's not enough return. But I think they can all work.”
2025-03-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Insane Story of DeliveryHero: Losing $200M on a Gorillas Investment | Winning the Emerging Markets Delivery War with 35 Acquisitions | Competing with Uber and Doordash in a Capital Arms Race with Niklas Östberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Discount, yeah, you drove, it was very cheap sort of food in Thailand with us. We didn't care for that customer experience enough. It was just about price. And of course, when you tried to move to sustainability, most of those orders will fall off. And I would say the value of our Thailand business is not very high. So you can scale very fast in our business. You can grow to 400,000 daily orders in this case, but it's not worth anything unless you have been sustainable. So when we see other comparisons do that, we really don't mind that much. We know what it does over time. We saw the same in Turkey. We saw the same in a few other places. Those customers come back to us as soon as they stopped giving the varches and discounts.”
2025-03-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Insane Story of DeliveryHero: Losing $200M on a Gorillas Investment | Winning the Emerging Markets Delivery War with 35 Acquisitions | Competing with Uber and Doordash in a Capital Arms Race with Niklas Östberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Thailand business, we scaled from a couple of thousand orders a day up to 400,000 orders a day in less than a year. This is fascinating, I think I've seen anyone scale a business, but it was not sustainable. The business is now back to doing way less. It's doing 25% of that today.”
2025-03-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Insane Story of DeliveryHero: Losing $200M on a Gorillas Investment | Winning the Emerging Markets Delivery War with 35 Acquisitions | Competing with Uber and Doordash in a Capital Arms Race with Niklas Östberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That comes back to the thing when you do something that's not sustainable and you get customers to order because you get 20 bucks for free. Of course, you're not building a sustainable business as soon as you pull that 20 bucks back. You will lose a lot of customers. So it's a very expensive way of growing. The same doing a lot of discount and vouchers. It can be good to do a discount for someone who's a good customer in getting them to try, but most customers order a discount, it's overproportionally coming to very cost sensitive customer. Customers are always looking for finding a deal. It's always going to drive a lot of fraud as well. So when you do too much of a voucher strategy discount strategy, you are going to attract a bad customer base. It's going to be expensive and it's going to drive very little value. And I don't think the tier is the only one. Let's speak about our mistakes. If you take our”
2025-03-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Insane Story of DeliveryHero: Losing $200M on a Gorillas Investment | Winning the Emerging Markets Delivery War with 35 Acquisitions | Competing with Uber and Doordash in a Capital Arms Race with Niklas Östberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not really coming back to the point around competition. I think it's 80% about what we deliver and maybe 20% about the competitor does. And every single time when I see here we haven't grown fast enough, it was not because of competition. It was because we didn't deliver a good service. We were not moving fast enough. So I think it's 80% us and 20% competition. I don't think that the balance sheet matters in the end. That is not what limits any compared to spend money. It's going to be the return that is going to limit comparatively spend money. So it's going to be hard for a DoorDash or Uber or somewhat sustainably make bad investments because they can, I don't think it's about balance sheet, but all profitable entities. You can argue who is going to move that profitability up faster or slower. It's not going to be the balance sheet. It's probably more than what cost can you have a good return.”
2025-03-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Insane Story of DeliveryHero: Losing $200M on a Gorillas Investment | Winning the Emerging Markets Delivery War with 35 Acquisitions | Competing with Uber and Doordash in a Capital Arms Race with Niklas Östberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't think it moved the industry forward that much. I think it just drove some non-sustainable behavior. Same here. If you look at the cohorts, we clearly saw a bump in the cord up. We thought that we would maybe maintain it at that bump, that higher level. But it turned out it went back to the trend line. So if we have a trend line of this, it went up temporarily, but then it went back to trend line. So it really didn't move much in the industry. It just created a little bit of a bubble where we spent unnecessary money. So I think effectively in the end, COVID was not a good thing for us.”
2025-03-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Insane Story of DeliveryHero: Losing $200M on a Gorillas Investment | Winning the Emerging Markets Delivery War with 35 Acquisitions | Competing with Uber and Doordash in a Capital Arms Race with Niklas Östberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“thing is that it doesn't impact our course so much and often the impact on the business made profitability is rather that you get nervous and you start spending a lot of money and you start copying what they do but I think our learning is that as long as we keep delivering good experience for our customers keep pushing the boundaries for how we can make economics on every single order if someone is willing to make a loss per order without that trajectory for getting profits they might get some of the discount hunters the low value customer base might go to that comparator but it's not sustainable so eventually they will have to take away those vouchers those discounts and those customers will go to any platform then so i think the core is to making sure that we we have a service where our good customers are loyal that's what we see regardless what someone invests we see that our customers are exceptionally loyal”
2025-03-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Insane Story of DeliveryHero: Losing $200M on a Gorillas Investment | Winning the Emerging Markets Delivery War with 35 Acquisitions | Competing with Uber and Doordash in a Capital Arms Race with Niklas Östberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, in the end, you want to cater for customers being able to order as often as possible and as convenient as possible. If you set the basket, the minimum basket size such that you need to have two thrends every time you order, well, that will take away a lot of occasions for you because sometimes you're alone or you cannot afford. So we have to find ways how can we drive economics also for small baskets and make that work. However, if you do something that is not long-term sustainable, then of course the core shows not going to be sustainable because the day I then on a move from being able to do a five-year order and that's not economically obviously today. And suddenly you can all order if you order for 15 euro, then you will start reducing your order behavior and therefore the cores on the sustainable. So whatever we do and we always have to build on sustainable economics, even if it's in”
2025-03-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Insane Story of DeliveryHero: Losing $200M on a Gorillas Investment | Winning the Emerging Markets Delivery War with 35 Acquisitions | Competing with Uber and Doordash in a Capital Arms Race with Niklas Östberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We picked this stock, so in the end, I think effectively, since our stock fell with 75%, that we didn't dilute that much. The delivery here was more like 30 billion. So the dilution for delivery here was more like 5, 6% maybe. So I think that was an incredible acquisition. Only diluting a few percent less than a 10% for a business that is clearly going to outgrow the rest of the business.”
2025-03-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Insane Story of DeliveryHero: Losing $200M on a Gorillas Investment | Winning the Emerging Markets Delivery War with 35 Acquisitions | Competing with Uber and Doordash in a Capital Arms Race with Niklas Östberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Acquisition. For an investor, they don't see that data. The only thing they see is where's the top line and what is the bottom line? And what the growth rate is. And of course, when we acquired Global, and that was a bad timing probably, it was end of 2021 before the whole market collapsed where everything is about profitability. And Global lost 330 million when we acquired it. So of course, adding negative 330 million, getting into 2022 was not very pleasant. But in the end, that was painful. But I think everyone started realizing how much value Glovo is going to be worth and how much is already worth if we extrapolate where we stand now.”
2025-03-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Insane Story of DeliveryHero: Losing $200M on a Gorillas Investment | Winning the Emerging Markets Delivery War with 35 Acquisitions | Competing with Uber and Doordash in a Capital Arms Race with Niklas Östberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And we care for the customers and where the strength of the cores are not coming from vouchers and discounts. We have enormous amount of predictability. So if you take the example of Globo, it was very easy for us to see how this business is going to grow over the next 10 years. And we are only a couple of years down the line here. So we still have many, many years of that growth trajectory. And we know how much margin we're going to make in an order. That's also very predictable for us because we set the price. So in the end, we know that the margin on the business is going to grow to 10 to 13% over time. So based on that, you can very quickly calculate your gross profit and you know your base cost, the marketing as well as the overhead that you have to have in order to run a certain size organization. So if you take global, it's incredibly easy to see how profitable that business is going to be over the next 10 years. And for us, there was therefore clearly a good.”
2025-03-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Insane Story of DeliveryHero: Losing $200M on a Gorillas Investment | Winning the Emerging Markets Delivery War with 35 Acquisitions | Competing with Uber and Doordash in a Capital Arms Race with Niklas Östberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Cohorts are incredibly strong. They don't change. If anything, they get better. With the only one exception, when you screw up, when you start not looking at the customers, or when you start missing a trend. So I mentioned logistics. So you've done a couple of mistakes, but we're not fast enough with our logistic implementing our own delivery fleet. And then someone else comes, then of course our cohort will deteriorate or multi-vertical. We have built out a very good multivertical offering to give further value to our customers. But we didn't do that fast enough in Colombia as a good example. And we got distracted by RAPI. So then the cohorts deteriorated big time. Or if we acquired a lot of customer based on Varsha's discounts promotions, then of course we also see a deterioration in cohort once we start pulling that out of the system. But if you look at where we operate, where we do things right.”
2025-03-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Insane Story of DeliveryHero: Losing $200M on a Gorillas Investment | Winning the Emerging Markets Delivery War with 35 Acquisitions | Competing with Uber and Doordash in a Capital Arms Race with Niklas Östberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I do, but the benefit we have here is that we also owner of assets in Belivery Hero with more than 20 years of cohort development, where we have enormous amount of predictability from 70 different markets. And we haven't seen in every single market, not a single exception where it has deviated over time.”
2025-03-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Insane Story of DeliveryHero: Losing $200M on a Gorillas Investment | Winning the Emerging Markets Delivery War with 35 Acquisitions | Competing with Uber and Doordash in a Capital Arms Race with Niklas Östberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's very simple. As I said, we see the course. We see what is the repeat rate of our customers and then how many customers are required per month and how is that. So how do the existing base evolve over time and how many do we add to that? And that would very clearly give you a certain growth directory”
2025-03-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Insane Story of DeliveryHero: Losing $200M on a Gorillas Investment | Winning the Emerging Markets Delivery War with 35 Acquisitions | Competing with Uber and Doordash in a Capital Arms Race with Niklas Östberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think we can see the cohort. We can see the acquisition growth. We can see the customer experience. We can see all the data in the world to know if this is a good acquisition or not. If we take low as an example, it was very clear from us from the very first day that this would be an unbelievably profitable company.”
2025-03-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Insane Story of DeliveryHero: Losing $200M on a Gorillas Investment | Winning the Emerging Markets Delivery War with 35 Acquisitions | Competing with Uber and Doordash in a Capital Arms Race with Niklas Östberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you buy ourselves another three, four, five percent business and size, if that distracts us with two, three, four percent, then effectively we didn't achieve anything and we only spend money on it. So in order for us to buy it really needs to be something where we feel here we have a very strong team and we can plug it into a machine and it will make rest of delivery here a better too.”
2025-03-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Insane Story of DeliveryHero: Losing $200M on a Gorillas Investment | Winning the Emerging Markets Delivery War with 35 Acquisitions | Competing with Uber and Doordash in a Capital Arms Race with Niklas Östberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think in the past we knew that we had to build scale very fast and probably wrongly so we looked at just eat back then there was this huge company when we started had been operating for 10 15 years we had another company called takeaway that is now one company just the takeaway but that was the gorilla back then and we felt we will not stand a chance unless we scale fast in order to scale fast we just have to buy and we have to build and we have to do that in aggregate i think over times the industry changed logistic came uber and others entered the market and proved that you can start this business way later than we did but we believe that the only way to build scale fast enough was to buy back then i think if you look at things right now we probably prefer to build the main logic for that is buying something now will be well at the time will be extraordinarily expensive given that we we still consider delivery to be undervalued but also even”
2025-03-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Insane Story of DeliveryHero: Losing $200M on a Gorillas Investment | Winning the Emerging Markets Delivery War with 35 Acquisitions | Competing with Uber and Doordash in a Capital Arms Race with Niklas Östberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think for most companies, it's harder to buy a company and be successful there. I think the hard part is not buying a company. The hard part is to make something good out of that company. That's probably something Delivery has been very good at. We've been good at fostering this entrepreneurship and getting them on board. And that's probably a success.”
2025-03-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Insane Story of DeliveryHero: Losing $200M on a Gorillas Investment | Winning the Emerging Markets Delivery War with 35 Acquisitions | Competing with Uber and Doordash in a Capital Arms Race with Niklas Östberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Those local entrepreneurs that we can plug into. And I think that has been a big success at Delivery Hero. But we rarely made big M&A. That's been one or two big M&A like Lovo. But most M&A have been rather small and rather being like you're acquiring a team and you require yourself one year of head start.”
2025-03-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Insane Story of DeliveryHero: Losing $200M on a Gorillas Investment | Winning the Emerging Markets Delivery War with 35 Acquisitions | Competing with Uber and Doordash in a Capital Arms Race with Niklas Östberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, we have done a lot, but most of them have been very, very small. And what we believed in is that we believe in those local entrepreneurs who knows the market better than anyone and we can leverage the fact that we know how to scale things and we know how to measure things and we know how to get good returns. So if I give some other examples, Pedido Shia was acquired when the company did 60,000 orders per month. Today it does maybe 20 million orders per month or close to at least. So of course it was very small businesses back then. Otalabat, I don't know Talibat is a IPO company. Back then I think they did 70,000 orders per month. So literally nothing. But we were good at leveraging where we were good at which automate drive efficiency knowing how to invest, taking over, building on scaling that while we felt that we had a big benefit of having”
2025-03-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Insane Story of DeliveryHero: Losing $200M on a Gorillas Investment | Winning the Emerging Markets Delivery War with 35 Acquisitions | Competing with Uber and Doordash in a Capital Arms Race with Niklas Östberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Very tightly aligned to what the people actually do, and the organizations set up such that you have that accountability responsibility on a smaller basis, a smaller buckets. What you see in many companies over time is that they get too big, the goals are too large, it's not divided in, it's very intransparent what everyone does and how they contribute to their goals. And they start getting inwards looking. They don't look at what the actual output that they're driving. They rather look at how much they worked or what they deliver, but it can be for not for consumer customers, but for maintaining the organization. So I think building a culture with output really matters and making sure that you divide organizations such as you have ownership and accountability on very low level.”
2025-03-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Insane Story of DeliveryHero: Losing $200M on a Gorillas Investment | Winning the Emerging Markets Delivery War with 35 Acquisitions | Competing with Uber and Doordash in a Capital Arms Race with Niklas Östberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think you have to divide the organ responsibility and ownership very carefully and making sure that everyone can see their impact very clearly. So the setup we have, for example, we make sure that there's a clear ownership on the country level and making sure that they have that autonomy and that ownership. So for them, they can really make an impact in that country. It's very tangible what they do and the outcome. If we set the goal of driving overall business to a size, then each individual cannot make really that impact and cannot be that visible what they do. So you have to find a way that you can actually divide the goals in a way that is clearly measurable what you do and every part of the organization or every person in that organization and making sure that you drive that accountability and visibility and clarity. And if you do that, I think it's very easy to manage the organization. It's very clear who's a strong performer who's not. If goals are...”
2025-03-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Insane Story of DeliveryHero: Losing $200M on a Gorillas Investment | Winning the Emerging Markets Delivery War with 35 Acquisitions | Competing with Uber and Doordash in a Capital Arms Race with Niklas Östberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. So I do think for an organization itself, speed is really what matters. But the good part is that for most organizations and most decisions are revertible. So you move, you take a decision, you get data, and you change direction. And the faster you can iterate and do that, the faster organization is going to move. And in the end, the reason for saying that that's the only thing that matters is that all the speed and all the things that you're building towards customers or other things that our priorities is compounding. If we can get 25% more of your organization in a year, that feels like, yeah, that's good, but it's not game-changing. If you do that for 10 years, you effectively compounding up a 10 times better product. So I believe in this moving fast and drive an organization fast and kind of compounding that is key. Then there are, of course, those non-reversible doors where you have to be very careful that you think it through and so on.”
2025-03-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Insane Story of DeliveryHero: Losing $200M on a Gorillas Investment | Winning the Emerging Markets Delivery War with 35 Acquisitions | Competing with Uber and Doordash in a Capital Arms Race with Niklas Östberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And of course, coming back to this 200 million mistake also done here that we were at 35 billion companies. So this was back then less than a percent. It was half a percent of our market cap that we felt like we are willing to take this bet on this. Of course, if that valuation falls from 35 billion to 5 or 10 billion, then of course losing 200 million is a lot, especially if you don't have the cash and the balance or have enough cash in the balance sheet. I think that is also part of the learning that you have to take yourself a little bit out of this speed mode and think it through on a more fundamental basis than getting too caught up with your current value or your current growth.”
2025-03-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Insane Story of DeliveryHero: Losing $200M on a Gorillas Investment | Winning the Emerging Markets Delivery War with 35 Acquisitions | Competing with Uber and Doordash in a Capital Arms Race with Niklas Östberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Probably shouldn't. And of course, you have a lot of momentum traders and they make a lot of money by just staying with the momentum. So if you're not part of that momentum, you're also going to lose out. So there are occasions when you also have to play along, when the music is there, you dance, but you got to be careful.”
2025-03-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Insane Story of DeliveryHero: Losing $200M on a Gorillas Investment | Winning the Emerging Markets Delivery War with 35 Acquisitions | Competing with Uber and Doordash in a Capital Arms Race with Niklas Östberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Somehow it seems to work because I've been wrong so many times now that maybe I'm just wrong. And that's when we made investment. In the end, it is, as I said, it's almost like gravity. In the end, cohort model work, acquisition models work, prediction there works, temporarily you can boost it through vouchers, discount, and other means. But in the end, you have to look at the core of the business and see. I've done that mistake many times where also in some markets they have a market in Asia where they beat their plan every month. And at some point, I realized like maybe I'm not a good forecaster. Maybe I'm just wrong. Maybe they are right.”
2025-03-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Insane Story of DeliveryHero: Losing $200M on a Gorillas Investment | Winning the Emerging Markets Delivery War with 35 Acquisitions | Competing with Uber and Doordash in a Capital Arms Race with Niklas Östberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, we put in close to $200 million. We got some of it back, a small portion back. But yeah, most of that was lost. The big learning I've made there as well as a few occasions before is in the end, when you look at cohorts user acquisitions and the data in depth, it's almost like gravity. It always works. It always works. But for some reason, they kept acquiring more customers than I thought every month. They kept cores coming up every month and therefore also growth coming up faster than I expected. So when I looked at a few months earlier, I felt this makes no sense. They will never make it. And then they outpaced the expectation I had. And I felt, ah, maybe I was wrong. But now it's too late. And then it happened again and again. And the next month and next month. And at some point, I felt maybe I'm wrong. Maybe my modest don't work. Maybe the data.”
2025-03-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Insane Story of DeliveryHero: Losing $200M on a Gorillas Investment | Winning the Emerging Markets Delivery War with 35 Acquisitions | Competing with Uber and Doordash in a Capital Arms Race with Niklas Östberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And potentially certain opportunities in the future. Unfortunately, the business model probably could have worked out and Oscar Gorillas, but the challenge is that the market changed. There was not possible to raise capital anymore for these companies and they burned too much.”
2025-03-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Insane Story of DeliveryHero: Losing $200M on a Gorillas Investment | Winning the Emerging Markets Delivery War with 35 Acquisitions | Competing with Uber and Doordash in a Capital Arms Race with Niklas Östberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think, yeah, quick immerse is an interesting space. I think we have been exceptionally happy with the performance of how we have been able to scale the whole quick commerce side. And that was also a contrarian belief to double down on this. It was not a very popular one. But we felt that if we want to build what the customers really want and what they're asking and demanding, then we have to be able to deliver groceries and other items in a short fashion. Now, that's a big part of our business and long term is going to be more than 50% of our business. So larger than food for sure. So that turned out to be right bet. At the same time, we also did a better in a company called Gorillas because we felt we cannot do quick commerce ourselves in every geography. We can't afford it. It's too expensive to build up. So we rather felt let's take some of the money, put it in another company, and see how we can learn and see how they can secure.”
2025-03-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Insane Story of DeliveryHero: Losing $200M on a Gorillas Investment | Winning the Emerging Markets Delivery War with 35 Acquisitions | Competing with Uber and Doordash in a Capital Arms Race with Niklas Östberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The comes times when there are big decisions where you actually have to make a bet, you don't have the data, you don't have the information, and you just have to make a bet that we're going to go in this direction or that direction. That's what good CEOs have a good feeling. They know their industry. They know their organization, they know the strength of the organization, and they will dare to make sometimes the bold decision.”
2025-03-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Insane Story of DeliveryHero: Losing $200M on a Gorillas Investment | Winning the Emerging Markets Delivery War with 35 Acquisitions | Competing with Uber and Doordash in a Capital Arms Race with Niklas Östberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I do agree that the best CEOs are exceptionally good capital allocators, but I don't think it's the most important part of a CEO's job. I think it is an important job, but by far not the most important. I think more important is to drive the culture, the drive the speed of the organization. You drive the organization in direction of pace and data and direction. And if you do that right, capital allocation will be very easy. And capital education is also decision everyday type of topic. Most decision capital allocation could be if we invest more in these products, if we invest more in this area, should we invest more in this country? And if you have good data and if you have good culture, it will be obvious what is the right investments. You just have to look at the returns and so on. That's probably more important that you drive the organization, the speed of organization and the culture of it is more important allocation itself.”
2025-03-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Insane Story of DeliveryHero: Losing $200M on a Gorillas Investment | Winning the Emerging Markets Delivery War with 35 Acquisitions | Competing with Uber and Doordash in a Capital Arms Race with Niklas Östberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source