YouSaid · the spoken record

Rafael Ilishayev

lines on the record: 37
first: 2021-06-14
most recent: 2021-06-14
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“You know, Harry, this is like a generational opportunity for us. We were saying that in 2013, we had, I think, all the opportunities in the world to exit this business along the years. That's not been something that we frankly entertained or considered. Our TAM globally is massive, right? It's over 10 trillion right now, and growing, right? We're expanding into multiple categories. That's not only great for the customer, but also increasing our TAM exponentially. And I think this business over the next five years, the multi-100 billion dollar business and got a long way to go and a lot to build, but we're really pressing on the accelerator and moving in a very aggressive fashion as a byproduct.”
2021-06-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: GoPuff's Rafael Ilishayev on How GoPuff Has Been EBITDA Profitable From Day 1; The Unit Economics Behind GoPuff, With Intense Competition What Happens To The Food Delivery Space & What It Takes To Launch, Grow and Maintain New Markets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“All over the world, right? Launching Europe and Asia and everything else, too. I'm going to go back to a lot of craziness and a lot of really hyper growth. And it really depends on the human being, right? Trying to put a circle into a square peg just, it doesn't work. So make sure the values of the human are right and then kind of sales and everything else goes into place. If you're just kind of going off resume and tenure and everything else and four or five values align or three out of five values of line recipe for disaster, right? Probably not going to work out. Hire that person, definitely not going to work out long term.”
2021-06-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: GoPuff's Rafael Ilishayev on How GoPuff Has Been EBITDA Profitable From Day 1; The Unit Economics Behind GoPuff, With Intense Competition What Happens To The Food Delivery Space & What It Takes To Launch, Grow and Maintain New Markets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We call it like a team oriented super athlete on anyone that's joining or especially in our leadership team, right? And the super athlete trait is like table stakes, right? You're not the best at what you do. Triple digit, year over year growth, especially a consistent one, probably not the right environment for you. But this team-oriented trait is actually even more important, right? It's when we're deciding between candidates, that's the tiebreaker, especially, right? It's a 5149 split. If you're not making everyone around you the best version of themselves is that kind of elevating the overall average, it's not going to move the needle far enough. So we're kind of looking at talent through that kind of lens, through that T-Morridge. It's how we developed our core values and everything else. But it just starts getting people that are just slightly crazy, right? Like, you know, it takes a lot for someone to go through a very established, a very large environment. I'll give you an example a few months ago, we hired Tim Collins. He's the former head of global operations at Amazon. One of the best operators on the planet. And it goes a lot to go from, hey, 23 years at Amazon building something incredible.”
2021-06-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: GoPuff's Rafael Ilishayev on How GoPuff Has Been EBITDA Profitable From Day 1; The Unit Economics Behind GoPuff, With Intense Competition What Happens To The Food Delivery Space & What It Takes To Launch, Grow and Maintain New Markets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Kind of the other thing I mentioned, it's humility. My parents in the Cura's parents, why we, we're best friends and we work so well together, like raised in different parts, not knowing each other until college, but like almost an identity.”
2021-06-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: GoPuff's Rafael Ilishayev on How GoPuff Has Been EBITDA Profitable From Day 1; The Unit Economics Behind GoPuff, With Intense Competition What Happens To The Food Delivery Space & What It Takes To Launch, Grow and Maintain New Markets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's probably like persistence. It's like it's so easy to give up. It's so easy to just be like, why am I still living in a warehouse? Why am I still doing this? But eight years in, we're still 15 hours a day, seven days a week. Persistence, I think a huge amount in building something really, really great along with humility and everything else. But I think that's definitely a trait that's high up there.”
2021-06-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: GoPuff's Rafael Ilishayev on How GoPuff Has Been EBITDA Profitable From Day 1; The Unit Economics Behind GoPuff, With Intense Competition What Happens To The Food Delivery Space & What It Takes To Launch, Grow and Maintain New Markets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I love trillion dollar coach about Bill Campbell. Just kind of a reminder for everyone that you need a rock star coach to build something truly generational. And I think Bill Campbell was that for so many folks, you know, we were fortunate enough to have some of those as well.”
2021-06-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: GoPuff's Rafael Ilishayev on How GoPuff Has Been EBITDA Profitable From Day 1; The Unit Economics Behind GoPuff, With Intense Competition What Happens To The Food Delivery Space & What It Takes To Launch, Grow and Maintain New Markets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But a lot of learnings. Listen, I'm not by nature. Kira and I are both of us. We're not like grudgy people, right? We learned through all of this. We established learnings from every experience and ultimately, I think became better leaders as a byproduct.”
2021-06-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: GoPuff's Rafael Ilishayev on How GoPuff Has Been EBITDA Profitable From Day 1; The Unit Economics Behind GoPuff, With Intense Competition What Happens To The Food Delivery Space & What It Takes To Launch, Grow and Maintain New Markets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That are most customer obsessed. Amazon's taught us anything, right? It's that are the businesses that are going to win. And this is the model that most customers have to jet, take a bet on us in the Series B, Valer, take a bet on us in the Series C. And as a byproduct, as the business started developing more and more, it started becoming more and more evident this model is going to win. So by the time we got to 2019, a whole bunch of people are really interested in the business and love kind of the scale. That was not really the case in 2015, 2016, where vertical integration was just a scary thought and idea.”
2021-06-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: GoPuff's Rafael Ilishayev on How GoPuff Has Been EBITDA Profitable From Day 1; The Unit Economics Behind GoPuff, With Intense Competition What Happens To The Food Delivery Space & What It Takes To Launch, Grow and Maintain New Markets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Learned that generally humans operate on pattern recognition. And we're talking about 2013, we launched this business. 2015, we started raising money. The pattern recognition at the time was we are not Uber or Airbnb's model. So that means this does not going to work, right? What do you mean you're going to own inventory? You're going to have hard assets on your balance. This doesn't make sense. You're never going to be able to scale. You're never going to be able to open up more than 20 or 25 or 30 buildings a year. And I think we just took it as a lesson. We took all the feedback that people got as a lesson and we had investors on board that were bold and visionary enough to say like that model that people have scaled with right now might be a good model in the industry or in some regards and maybe is not even a good model in that industry that they're expanding in but for delivery specifically this is probably the model that's going to win right because it's the model that makes yes it's harder to scale yes it's harder to figure out the technology yes you have so many more complexities but it's ultimately the right thing for the customer and it's ultimately the right thing for unexamples and i just believe the business”
2021-06-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: GoPuff's Rafael Ilishayev on How GoPuff Has Been EBITDA Profitable From Day 1; The Unit Economics Behind GoPuff, With Intense Competition What Happens To The Food Delivery Space & What It Takes To Launch, Grow and Maintain New Markets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We have this mindset that we have to outexecute everyone in our way. We should traditionally figure it out so many things in this business, how to scale infrastructure, how do we scale the regulatory environment within the US and globally? How do we figure out the technology to powered these things? Operational excellence, the supply chain and logistics portion of this business to get the items to the microful fulfillment centers. It's now just really out executing everyone in our way.”
2021-06-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: GoPuff's Rafael Ilishayev on How GoPuff Has Been EBITDA Profitable From Day 1; The Unit Economics Behind GoPuff, With Intense Competition What Happens To The Food Delivery Space & What It Takes To Launch, Grow and Maintain New Markets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Making moves is like an early rally cry that we had, right? It's like just a bias for action. Instead of focusing on all the problems, and there were many, right, and there still are, being really solution-oriented and focusing on fixing those problems, something that's just really important in the business that seems pretty simple, right? Like delivering things from point A to point B, but is extremely complicated at scale. So we kind of now call it make strategic moves, right? Make moves that make sense for a lot of scale, but especially really early on and now, quite frankly, they're needed to be a bias for action. There needed to be how do we really, again, go back to nailing this business model, nailing the unit economics, and then ultimately scaling and scaling very fast after we got it right. So a lot of our folks that have joined a team from all kind of walks of life have this innate thought within them is like, we need to figure out how to move and move faster than anyone else. The thing that was going to ultimately cause us to fail so early is if we've got to out execute. And even today,”
2021-06-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: GoPuff's Rafael Ilishayev on How GoPuff Has Been EBITDA Profitable From Day 1; The Unit Economics Behind GoPuff, With Intense Competition What Happens To The Food Delivery Space & What It Takes To Launch, Grow and Maintain New Markets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, the number one thing is humility, right? Leaving your ego at the door and realizing like you know so little compared to what it needs to take to kind of build a business like this. And I'll tell you we're really, really fortunate, right? Over the years, we had a number of coaches that have come in and helped you here. So like if the business is 3xing year over year, Kir and I need a 10x year over year. If we don't do that, then we're really screwed. We're in a position where the business won't be able to scale because Euro and I am not able to scale. And we're fortunate to have really, really great people around us. Really amazing folks that have come and joined a team and believed that this crazy vision and took a massive bet and you currently started with a lot of humility, right? Really understanding that you don't know so much and you have to learn, but you have to learn fast and you have to outpace the business's growth, right? So if you're just on par with how fast the business growing and how you're developing, it's a disaster. So it's really just surrounding yourself with the best outside talent, right? Your coaches that are helping you scale mentally and think through problems and avoid landmines.”
2021-06-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: GoPuff's Rafael Ilishayev on How GoPuff Has Been EBITDA Profitable From Day 1; The Unit Economics Behind GoPuff, With Intense Competition What Happens To The Food Delivery Space & What It Takes To Launch, Grow and Maintain New Markets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Between hypergrowth and sustainable growth. And usually it's very tough for a business to have that balance. And quite frankly, it was tough in the early years. You know, in year eight, it's become a lot easier because you have so many markets that have been established for so many years that are just producing massive amount of cash flow. So our scale and the fact that we've been around for so long has really helped us kind of be able to continue to make pretty aggressive investment.”
2021-06-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: GoPuff's Rafael Ilishayev on How GoPuff Has Been EBITDA Profitable From Day 1; The Unit Economics Behind GoPuff, With Intense Competition What Happens To The Food Delivery Space & What It Takes To Launch, Grow and Maintain New Markets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's important, Harry, to understand how Kieran I grew up. Kier and I grew up in this first generation immigrant small business parents kind of upbringing, right? We didn't really have much of an early childhood, right? All of our childhood for myself and ECUR, all we can remember is working, right? Working with our parents, delivering everything they can for a customer and building a profitable business because that was just the way that our parents survived and gave us a better life in America. I think for us, we treat this business the same way, right? Like the most important thing is the customer, right? We do everything that it takes for the customer. That shouldn't contradict an ability to build a profitable, sustainable, long-term business. So I think for us, and I'll never say we never kind of made an investment into decreasing UNI economics for growth, but we'll never do it in a way that makes the aggregate or the cop markets unprofitable. Never is that black and white. I usually don't like to kind of have black and white approaches to these kind of things. But I think what's important to understand is we have a really, really strong balance.”
2021-06-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: GoPuff's Rafael Ilishayev on How GoPuff Has Been EBITDA Profitable From Day 1; The Unit Economics Behind GoPuff, With Intense Competition What Happens To The Food Delivery Space & What It Takes To Launch, Grow and Maintain New Markets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But to imagine that this could be solved in a year or six months is crazy. We're eight years in the making with hundreds and hundreds of engineers and we're just getting started”
2021-06-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: GoPuff's Rafael Ilishayev on How GoPuff Has Been EBITDA Profitable From Day 1; The Unit Economics Behind GoPuff, With Intense Competition What Happens To The Food Delivery Space & What It Takes To Launch, Grow and Maintain New Markets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Let's start like we built our entire WMS from scratch, our entire warehouse management software that's 99% of the time, right? You buy off the shelf, right? There's nothing available off the shelf to fix this solution. We had to build entirely from scratch, from moment that a product is open for ordered from a distributor or coming from our own larger fulfillment center to when it hits the dock, the microfulfillment center, what receive and stowaway looks like random stow inside of our facilities. I'm not going to go too deep into how the inside of the four walls operate. And then to pick and pack ultimately been in batch and en route. All of that is entirely proprietary and built in-house and took years to develop. And by no means are we done, right? This is going to take years and years of more duration to get better and more efficient, right? We're listening to our drivers on what's happening on the go drive world. Go drive is our driver application that all of our driver partners use and the innovation that's happening there. But this is not an easy problem to solve. And by no means have we solved it completely, right? We have a long way to go.”
2021-06-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: GoPuff's Rafael Ilishayev on How GoPuff Has Been EBITDA Profitable From Day 1; The Unit Economics Behind GoPuff, With Intense Competition What Happens To The Food Delivery Space & What It Takes To Launch, Grow and Maintain New Markets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think up until two years ago, or maybe even 18 months ago, the idea is still a vertical integration was a scary thought. They're like, oh, there's just this one player in the US, he had a kind of scaling and owning the US. You can't really expand that globally. Doesn't make sense. You need a third-party model. And I think the more time passed, the more people realized that if you don't own and you don't vertically integrate, it's very tough to control the consumer experience totally. And it's really tough to make money. So everyone is realizing that this is the model to expand to. The reality is it's an extremely complicated, very, very difficult to scale business. One of the easiest things is to actually open to buildings, right? Like get them open. But all the technology takes the power to inside of these buildings. It took us years to build.”
2021-06-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: GoPuff's Rafael Ilishayev on How GoPuff Has Been EBITDA Profitable From Day 1; The Unit Economics Behind GoPuff, With Intense Competition What Happens To The Food Delivery Space & What It Takes To Launch, Grow and Maintain New Markets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Started with our acquisition of Fancy in the UK, but we're really just getting started. So we're going to expand to a number of countries and be really, really aggressive there. But again, just following the customer, following what the customer wants, there's a lot of players that have been around for about three or four days all over Europe saying where to go puff of the country that they're from. And it's important, I think, to remind people there's one go puff, right? And we want to make sure we continue to expand to that country and give the customers what they want.”
2021-06-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: GoPuff's Rafael Ilishayev on How GoPuff Has Been EBITDA Profitable From Day 1; The Unit Economics Behind GoPuff, With Intense Competition What Happens To The Food Delivery Space & What It Takes To Launch, Grow and Maintain New Markets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I talked about nailing the business before scaling the business, right? And I think we had all the chances in the world to expand to two years ago or three years ago or even last year. And it was important for us to really make sure that we had a really strong grasp in the US and can expand after that. So after we acquired DevMo in California, we kind of had a total grasp of the California market. I don't remember exactly 60 or 65 percent of California's total population is within an 11 minute drive of OVEMO. So it really gave us the network we needed in California. We're launching in New York in an extremely aggressive way this summer. We're going to have very, very fast deliveries, not just in the island of Manhattan, but all the boroughs. So we have a pretty good grass in the US. We're not going to stop expanding in the U.S. We're actually going to open the tune of 400 buildings in the US just this year. But we feel we have all the operational firepower and the technological firepower to take over Europe as well. So we'll be investing hundreds of millions of dollars in the European market. We have already”
2021-06-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: GoPuff's Rafael Ilishayev on How GoPuff Has Been EBITDA Profitable From Day 1; The Unit Economics Behind GoPuff, With Intense Competition What Happens To The Food Delivery Space & What It Takes To Launch, Grow and Maintain New Markets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Listening to our CPG partners and then innovating ultimately in that regard as well. So really, really great relationships with the kind of Unilever's PNGs, Mars, Nestle's of the world. But we're also working with a lot of the local players that have a $1 million budget instead of a multi-billion dollar budget that said, hey, I'm not big nationally, but I'm an authority in Dallas, Texas. How do I grow my business here? So it's really important to kind of pull both of those levers.”
2021-06-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: GoPuff's Rafael Ilishayev on How GoPuff Has Been EBITDA Profitable From Day 1; The Unit Economics Behind GoPuff, With Intense Competition What Happens To The Food Delivery Space & What It Takes To Launch, Grow and Maintain New Markets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We created a group a few years ago called Gop Marketing Solutions for this exact need, right? Again, we have our consumer products and then our CPG partners, our customers as well. And they were telling us about a breadth of features that they would love to see on GoPub. So we said, how do we productize this whole thing? So we created product teams. We hired really, really great leaders to run the GoPub marketing solutions business and built a number of products that were really, really important for our customers. We actually just launched our self-service platform where brands can go on and create campaigns themselves and obviously more intricate and more detailed campaigns we still have. Someone internally in the GOPO side helping, but whether it's shelf space product placement, sampling, we created some really, really amazing tech for our CVG partners to use and ultimately not just grow their share on GoPub, but grow their share nationally or regionally in the places that are really important for them as well. It's a place that we're investing a whole bunch of dollars, right? And the bulk of it is happening through kind of product innovation and really making sure we're”
2021-06-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: GoPuff's Rafael Ilishayev on How GoPuff Has Been EBITDA Profitable From Day 1; The Unit Economics Behind GoPuff, With Intense Competition What Happens To The Food Delivery Space & What It Takes To Launch, Grow and Maintain New Markets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There about the referrals because you know, invest it for my sins today and I speak to a lot of other investors in Europe and they often challenge the model and say not obviously go puff but in Europe and say there's zero consumer loyalty and there's zero brand loyalty because we're delivering commodity goods. I'm not sure I agree with that bluntly, but how do you think about like consumer loyalty and brand loyalty especially on the consumer side? Yeah, I think it's important to really listen to what your customers want. I think a lot of founders have these preconceived notions that like, I know what the customer wants, so I'm going to do exactly what the customer wants instead kind of really listening and understanding what the customer's needs are, right?”
2021-06-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: GoPuff's Rafael Ilishayev on How GoPuff Has Been EBITDA Profitable From Day 1; The Unit Economics Behind GoPuff, With Intense Competition What Happens To The Food Delivery Space & What It Takes To Launch, Grow and Maintain New Markets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Products that are really, really important for our customers. We call it this infant needs category. Delivering anything that anyone needs very, very fast. And while we only have relative, right, we have four and a half thousand SKUs per microfulment center, we don't have the massive tail that a traditional big box has, right? So we're not everything for everyone, but we'll have the smart selection to items that people need each and every day. And the combination of that plus delivering a really phenomenal, super fast, consistent experience because it's really easy to deliver one fast order. It's a lot harder to consistently deliver that fast order every single time someone orders. The combination of the consistent super speedy order plus smart selection, right, this instant needs category. So what's making this platform so much more sticky and it's what's driving the referral engine to really roar in a way that surpassed all of our expectations, right? We thought referral is going to be like a 15, 20% kind of new customer engine. I think that's going to be closer to 30% this year. It's interesting.”
2021-06-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: GoPuff's Rafael Ilishayev on How GoPuff Has Been EBITDA Profitable From Day 1; The Unit Economics Behind GoPuff, With Intense Competition What Happens To The Food Delivery Space & What It Takes To Launch, Grow and Maintain New Markets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The impact of CAX increasing impacting unit econ. You know, we always said the best marketing is operations. If you deliver an incredible experience to customers, your customers will bring more customers. It's why it's a quarter. I think it's going to grow to 30% of customers this year come from the NAT referral. So folks that are getting onto the platform, it's extremely cost effective, right? It's the lowest CAC you can get right outside of organic is kind of in app referral. And that channel is growing as a percentage of our new customers because we're just getting better and better at delivering a really phenomenal experience and increasing GOPUP's use case. There's no secret, right? This business started as a college delivery service. College, while it's an important part of our business is in the low teens as a total percentage of our customers, and we've dramatically expanded the use case of what makes GOPUP so special, right? We introduce alcohol, introduce pet and baby over-to-counter medication, household, and we're going to continue to press on the innovation lever on introducing more and more.”
2021-06-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: GoPuff's Rafael Ilishayev on How GoPuff Has Been EBITDA Profitable From Day 1; The Unit Economics Behind GoPuff, With Intense Competition What Happens To The Food Delivery Space & What It Takes To Launch, Grow and Maintain New Markets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When you have increased marketing costs, like Bunny, we both know this base is getting more and more competitive when we're fighting for the consumer more and more and we're going to see catas go up traditionally. It's just how the game works.”
2021-06-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: GoPuff's Rafael Ilishayev on How GoPuff Has Been EBITDA Profitable From Day 1; The Unit Economics Behind GoPuff, With Intense Competition What Happens To The Food Delivery Space & What It Takes To Launch, Grow and Maintain New Markets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a market by market approach. We're well over like four, four and a half ODH in some of our more established markets, kind of industry leading, right? And the keys that you could pull levers, right? You can have 35 minute deliveries and like a six ODH. But you're profitable well below that, right? You're profitable well below 48H. I think for us, we're really eyeing on the side of delivering a really spectacular customer experience and just really surprising the lighting the customer. And we could still do that by delivering really, really superb unit economics. Can I ask, and sorry if this is a controversial one. In terms of the union economics being so good, as you mentioned,”
2021-06-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: GoPuff's Rafael Ilishayev on How GoPuff Has Been EBITDA Profitable From Day 1; The Unit Economics Behind GoPuff, With Intense Competition What Happens To The Food Delivery Space & What It Takes To Launch, Grow and Maintain New Markets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Almost more popular. When you vertically integrate, you have a single pickup point. So bending and batching is a lot easier of an equation than multiple pickup points. So, you know, not talking about other models, but when you look at our model, there's an industry metric called ODH. The amount of orders a driver can fulfill an hour. The higher the ODH, the more efficient that driver is, the traditionally the worst delivery time. The reality is that once you get enough scale in the market, ODH and your kind of delivery experience become kind of hand in hand because the volume of orders that are coming from the same square block kind of increases exponentially as the more and more popular the service becomes. So while there's an initial trade-off why markets are generally unprofitable for the first couple of months, because you don't have enough density, once you really get the density in place and you can start really playing on that ODH lever, you can deliver things incredibly fast, 12, 13, 14 minutes, and still deliver two or three orders in a batch.”
2021-06-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: GoPuff's Rafael Ilishayev on How GoPuff Has Been EBITDA Profitable From Day 1; The Unit Economics Behind GoPuff, With Intense Competition What Happens To The Food Delivery Space & What It Takes To Launch, Grow and Maintain New Markets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Buy almost the more popular they become. Suddenly have multi deliveries and so the wait time becomes longer because it's not just like Was deli And say, if you're waiting longer.”
2021-06-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: GoPuff's Rafael Ilishayev on How GoPuff Has Been EBITDA Profitable From Day 1; The Unit Economics Behind GoPuff, With Intense Competition What Happens To The Food Delivery Space & What It Takes To Launch, Grow and Maintain New Markets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“15 minute deliveries when you're like kind of sub scale when you're delivering kind of millions and millions of orders a month it's a lot harder to do it consistently but we're really really confident we could go from like low 20s where we're at right now to mid teens in a matter of quarters”
2021-06-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: GoPuff's Rafael Ilishayev on How GoPuff Has Been EBITDA Profitable From Day 1; The Unit Economics Behind GoPuff, With Intense Competition What Happens To The Food Delivery Space & What It Takes To Launch, Grow and Maintain New Markets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, we call it the fortification strategy, right? Or fortress. The more you fortress a given market, so add more microfulment centers in a given city, the faster that specific microfulment center will get profitable. Obviously, right, there's already brand awareness and everything in that city. But two, deliveries actually get faster, right? You're reducing the drive time. There's a lot of things that you could do on the technology side, right? You can build the best bidding and batching algorithm in the world, right? You can improve pick and pack time in the buildings. You can improve routing. You cannot reduce the amount of time it takes to drive from point A to point B, right? It's just the reality of the situation. So you have to get close share to the customer. So we've been spending a lot of time in this fortressing strategy where we're adding more and more micro fulfillment centers within our given cities. And as a byproduct of that, those cities are getting profitable even faster. And it's great for the customer, right? You're reducing average delivery times significantly. We're hoping to get average delivery times to 15 minutes, roughly, this time next year on an aggregate basis. It's really easy to deliver.”
2021-06-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: GoPuff's Rafael Ilishayev on How GoPuff Has Been EBITDA Profitable From Day 1; The Unit Economics Behind GoPuff, With Intense Competition What Happens To The Food Delivery Space & What It Takes To Launch, Grow and Maintain New Markets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“2025 in theory, we were profitable for our first couple of years of existence. And the reality is we have all the levers we need to go back to EBITDA whenever we want. Right now, it's a massive growth opportunity. Customers are telling us that they want more and more GOP. They want GOP even faster. So we're really pressing on the accelerator lever right now, but keeping a close eye on unit economics. And the story is just getting better, right? We're getting profitable faster and 100% of all of our markets are profitable today.”
2021-06-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: GoPuff's Rafael Ilishayev on How GoPuff Has Been EBITDA Profitable From Day 1; The Unit Economics Behind GoPuff, With Intense Competition What Happens To The Food Delivery Space & What It Takes To Launch, Grow and Maintain New Markets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“spun up new markets for When you think about Up new markets. What does it take to get to break even and profitability in new markets? What does that resource allocation look like in new markets? Can you help me think through that? So we look at comp markets as markets that are 18 months or older. Today, here's what gives us all kind of clarity and confidence in the world to invest in hundreds and hundreds of buildings every single year is 100% of our markets that are profitable. They're producing cash flow. It kind of gives us everything that we need to continue to press on to accelerator. And that's been consistent kind of year over year. What's even better is our pots of profitability is increasing even faster. So even though 100% of our markets are profitable today on aggregate, the unit economics as a whole are profitable, we're producing positive contribution margin on an aggregate basis, including the markets that are kind of negative from a cash flow perspective because they're just too young. So the reality is we have all the levers in this business, right? Like a lot of people talk about this business or our business can be profitable in 2020.”
2021-06-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: GoPuff's Rafael Ilishayev on How GoPuff Has Been EBITDA Profitable From Day 1; The Unit Economics Behind GoPuff, With Intense Competition What Happens To The Food Delivery Space & What It Takes To Launch, Grow and Maintain New Markets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, Harry, now we have full market development team. There's a lot of insights that go into how and when and what parts of the cities we go in first and how do we expand afterwards. The first version of GoPov is just go where the customers are, right? If people were going on to GoPuff, requesting GoPuff and not able to order, you know, getting onto the app and saying, hey, we're not in your delivery zone. And there was a large pocket of those people. That was the expansion strategy. It was a very, very simple. Go where the customers are. And that served us swell for like the first three, four years. It worked really, really well. It's like a very simple go where the customers are strategy, right? We look at a lot more traffic patterns, densities. So whether like we look at a lot of things today and a lot of inputs, but still one of the most important inputs is a metric we call intent to purchase.”
2021-06-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: GoPuff's Rafael Ilishayev on How GoPuff Has Been EBITDA Profitable From Day 1; The Unit Economics Behind GoPuff, With Intense Competition What Happens To The Food Delivery Space & What It Takes To Launch, Grow and Maintain New Markets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Now, I kind of go back and forth there. It gave us a lot of really strong discipline. Kieran and I literally lived in the warehouse our first year, right? We were the drivers and we've had to figure out the supply chain and logistics. We didn't have the hires. We were doing everything. And I think that brought on a really great deal of discipline and a lot of empathy to a lot of folks that are actually doing all the deliveries, packing all the orders, everything else. Literally was our home. The other side of the equation was like business would probably have been a bit larger today, right? We've been able to scale triple digits year over year for the last eight years consistently, but we would probably be even larger today, right? We raised money and can fuel growth a lot earlier, right? And basically that fuel of growth is not really marketing growth, but infrastructure growth, being able to open up more buildings faster. So that's probably the trade-off on both sides. But as you said, hindsight 2020, I'm really, really happy where we are today.”
2021-06-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: GoPuff's Rafael Ilishayev on How GoPuff Has Been EBITDA Profitable From Day 1; The Unit Economics Behind GoPuff, With Intense Competition What Happens To The Food Delivery Space & What It Takes To Launch, Grow and Maintain New Markets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, when you vertically integrate and you own the goods, your blended gross margin is significantly higher, obviously, than when you partner with folks, right? So when we started this business, the blended gross margin was in the high 30s, right? It's now in the high 40s and growing. And the contribution margin is double digit positive. So ultimately, by owning the goods and having in our fulfillment centers, we're able to buy these things. And obviously as the business grew so that our buying power and our ability to vertically integrate even more to kind of larger FCs and buy directly from manufacturers kind of led to really, really superior unit economics. Now I'll tell you kind of one step further. It was really important for us to nail the business model before scaling it. It was really important to figure out how are the unit economics going to work? How are we going to produce a profit before we started taking out external cash? So that's exactly what we did, obviously. We maybe waited even a little too long and a half years, but we believed it was the right thing to do for the business.”
2021-06-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: GoPuff's Rafael Ilishayev on How GoPuff Has Been EBITDA Profitable From Day 1; The Unit Economics Behind GoPuff, With Intense Competition What Happens To The Food Delivery Space & What It Takes To Launch, Grow and Maintain New Markets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We had a very unorthodox kind of upbringing, especially kind of being US based startup. We didn't raise money for our first two and a half years. Day one, the business was producing EBITDA. It was profitable from day one. And it's because our gross margin structure even back then it's improved significantly over the years. Even back then was far superior than everyone else. So we were able to produce positive contribution margin ultimately from day one. And we used that profit to expand to a number of our first cities, right? Philadelphia helped fuel Boston's growth, which then helped fuel Washington, D.C.'s growth. We then, for one reason or another, decided to go to Texas and we opened up Austin as city number four. And only as we're approaching to fifth and sixth city did we raise our first round, right? So it took a lot longer, obviously, to open up markets because there was no external cash. But the foundation of the business and the underlying unit economics supported profitable growth from day one. So we didn't even need to raise money in the beginning. The reason why we raised money in 2015 and beyond is to accelerate.”
2021-06-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: GoPuff's Rafael Ilishayev on How GoPuff Has Been EBITDA Profitable From Day 1; The Unit Economics Behind GoPuff, With Intense Competition What Happens To The Food Delivery Space & What It Takes To Launch, Grow and Maintain New Markets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, we were young men. We were 19 years old when we thought of the business Ecure and I. And essentially Cure was GoPuff 1.0. He was always driving us around everywhere. Can we get snacks? Can we get drinks? What can we do to kind of make sure we can utilize Ekira in all aspects of our lives? Because he's the only guy with the car. And we realized that there's two pretty big problems. Stores were not so convenient. On-demand delivery services were on demand. And he cure is not very scalable. We thought about how do we rethink this problem? How do we redo it? And the initial idea was very different than what else was out there, right? We said instead of partnering with folks and kind of creating this third-party marketplace, the only way to effectively solve this problem for both consumers, which is first and foremost, and ultimately unaccompanied, is by vertically integrating. So owning the entire experience end-to-end, owning the microfulment centers to inventory and everything in between. And Aria, I got to tell you, in 2013, that wasn't a very beloved idea.”
2021-06-14 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: GoPuff's Rafael Ilishayev on How GoPuff Has Been EBITDA Profitable From Day 1; The Unit Economics Behind GoPuff, With Intense Competition What Happens To The Food Delivery Space & What It Takes To Launch, Grow and Maintain New Markets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source