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

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“Think one thing that I realize over the time is the importance of simplicity. I think in the past it was a tendency I wanted to do more than what the organization can actually handle. And I think focus on a few things and really doubling down on those makes a world of difference. So complexity is a killer of speed.”
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 you get a strong lead. But then once you get scale, it doesn't really matter if someone else also has scale. It's not that if a comparator is half our size or double our size, doesn't make it smaller. It doesn't make our economics worse if they're bigger or smaller. So it's more relevant that we have scale and that we deliver a good service. I think in the past I saw it more as 80% competition, 20% our own execution. What I've learned over the years is 80% our own execution that is going to matter for how big we get and how much money we make and maybe 20% driven by competition. It's not vice versa. So yeah, as long as you get scale, you will make money regardless if you're number two or number one. Of course, if you're number two, you will have less scale. You will make less money, but you will still be able to make money.”
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
“Is a clear advantage. So, the big advantage is being large. If your large customers stay incredibly loyal to your product, they are not as price sensitive as people think. So we don't see that customers move because they get a five-year voucher somewhere or 10 year of voucher. They might do it one order, but then they go back to where they usually order and what is top of mind for them. Therefore, I do think there's a strong lock in on customers as long as you deliver a good service. The day you don't deliver a good service, yeah, well, then it can be disrupted fast. And we have disrupted a lot of companies in Spain, Italy, Poland, Norway. We entered as a number two and number three, number four player in those markets, and we are now the largest. There are occasions when the leader is not delivering good quality. But if they do, it's incredibly hard to gain the customer base of someone else. I think there is important in the early stage.”
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 can already have Deliver is correctly valued today. I would argue they are too low value today. It's a profitable business that's growing and will continue to grow and we'll make more money. clear value in that business. You can argue would be even more valued if it would be possible to consolidate. Now I don't think that there is it's possible to consolidate UK and a few other markets due to antitrust reasons. So you can probably not consult that delivery and just eat the Uber and deliver and so on. So anyone who would buy Deliveroo, they will still have a three market market in UK. And so it wouldn't really resolve, it wouldn't really change anything.”
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
“Destiny them. Just the deliverou and uber eats, and they all make money in UK, I would say, decently. So same with France. I think both de Liveroux and Uber is making money there. And Delivery also operate a few markets where we have two or three players making money in that market.”
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 don't think it's when it takes oil market. I probably changed my view there. Proven wrong, frankly. I know you've seen US that there are two players making a lot of money. Look at UK. There are three players making a lot of money, all of them. France, two players making good money.”
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
“Outset of our home market because of that. And once we sold Germany, there was no excuse for not delivering outside of like in the rest of the world. So I think we became much stronger in our execution operations outside of Germany once we sold Germany.”
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 on a back then, so this was 2017. And I felt that the market is not as big as it looks. It has a strong comparator there. And there would be no way of consolidate that market later on, given a regulation around M&A and so on. So I think I thought this is going to be value maximizing. And then I did believe that we could use that money to actually double down in markets, which I consider to be much larger. And I think it turned out to be larger markets outside of Germany. I also believed in a different thing, which is I felt we would be a stronger operator internationally if we are not getting distracted by our home market. Back then, everything we did, as soon as something happened in Germany, we will drop the ball on everything else because it's so close to our heart where we sit. We were very mediocre executor.”
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
“A few that come to mind as big differences around logistics. No one believed in logistics back then. This was back in 2015 and we doubled down on logistics. The first initiative we did, we lost 6 million. It looked terrible. And most people have probably given up there, but we shut down that company and rebuilt it again and invested tens and hundreds of million in logistics. And I think everyone say now that there is a better customer experience. It's clearly better for customers and had a strong belief that we used to have to figure out how to make the economics to work. The same selling our home market was clearly a contrarian decision. Maybe some investors thought it was okay, but I think in the company that was a very contrarian view to sell your home market.”
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
“Great leaders that follow their beliefs. And when they do, people follow them. That also means that they will be contrary. They will do occasions when they go against a stream. And if they have a good judgment and great leaders have good judgments, then they are usually coming out very strong afterwards. And every time they succeed there, they will build the follow base and trust. And I think it's very dangerous when leaders don't follow their belief. It drives skepticism organization. I think usually will not be getting the respect. It will be inconsistent. The leadership will not be consistent when they don't do what they think and what they believe 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
“I think depends how you see it. I think what public market often, what it does is that it values things one or two or forward. And of course, it compares with other companies. And I think, yeah, we were definitely overvalued if you just look at it from a couple of years down the line fast forward. For anyone who rather think of it as DCF cost of capital over X number of years, maybe we were not that overvalued back then and we are probably undervalued today. Maybe truth is a little in between. I definitely think that we're undervalued today though.”
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 it wasn't that hard in the beginning because I think everyone thought that it was just temporarily and it would come back and all the numbers, all KPIs were good. I think we took fairly fast action as well. Back in end of 2021, we felt a little bit worried about the market. We shut down Germany and Japan. We cut 100, 200 million out of our budget before the year even started. We actually came in and I think things crashed down in January, February, March. So a few months later after we did that. So I'm lucky we did that. But I think the moral of the company was that still very good. They felt it was temporary. They felt they had taken the action we should have taken already before ahead of time. I think the hard part was to not grow valuation for another three years. And we're almost where we were three years.”
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 that the learning for me is that you have to be careful with it. Coming back to the point before, we thought that we were unbeatable, unstoppable. And therefore, we felt it was a clear path to being 100 billion companies. So why would we want to dilute on 30 billion? We great.”
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 hard to say. Of course, it's easy to say we benefit from hindsight because it's not only that COVID ended, it was also that the whole capital market and the interest rate and many other things that happen when COVID died out that all came together at one point. And that, of course, put a lot of pressure into companies to cut cost and so on. If we would have known that, we would have cut cost faster earlier. We would have probably taken down risk a little bit. We would have saved as much money as we can. We probably would have raised equity instead of debt during the time when we thought that we should be worth hundreds of billions and we felt we were undervalued back then when we were at 35. So of course it would have helped if we had taken on equity instead of debt.”
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 also had many times. I remember back in the 99s, I was investing in the stock market. I thought it was amazing. I made a lot of money. I lost it very quickly and realized that maybe I'm not that great after all. I think we all thought that we were better than we were back in the COVID pandemic. Business was going through the roof, probably also a time where we felt that we were better than we actually were. You constantly get reminders that maybe you have to stay on the ground. You're not as good as you think you are in the good times and probably not as bad as you think in the bad 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
“Probably. It probably builds a certain confidence that what you're doing is right. And you have to be careful that it doesn't take you off the ground. But I do think that some level of success is probably helpful as well.”
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 some of it comes back to my childhood. I was a cross-country skier. And for anyone who is not a cross country skier, it's exhausting. You train every day, you go out in the dark, two hours interval training in the dark forest of Sweden. That's kind of how a regular days look like. And I think you build some resilience there that came from there. But I think the other thing that also builds resilience is if you feel like you have a purpose and you actually do something where you add value. And I think over the years, I've also learned to focus on what I can impact rather than all other things. And I know that is hard, but I really try to stop caring for what other people think or piecing others. So that helps.”
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
“What I've learned over the years is 80% our own execution that is going to matter for how big we get and how much money we make and maybe 20% driven by competition. Yeah, we put in close to $200 million. Most of that was lost. In the end, when you look at cohorts user requisitions and the data in depth, it's almost like gravity. It always works. Cohorts are incredibly strong. They don't change. If anything, they get better. With the only one exception, when you screw up.”
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