YouSaid · the spoken record

Will Shu

lines on the record: 111
first: 2021-07-12
most recent: 2021-07-12
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

“It's hard. It takes me about three days I need to go on a holiday longer than four days. I think that's what I need to do.”
2021-07-12 · The Diary of a CEO · Deliveroo Founder - From £0 to £5 Billion: Will Shu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think you have to. And I think it will help with business as well, right? To take a step back to remove yourself and just think about other stuff. And when you step back in, that's why I do think going on holidays really, you know, it's funny. It's like I didn't take one for seven, eight years. Just didn't, which is like kind of stupid, honestly. But maybe in the first few years, I couldn't. Maybe that was fine. But just having the ability to step away for a week and do something totally different, I think is incredibly important.”
2021-07-12 · The Diary of a CEO · Deliveroo Founder - From £0 to £5 Billion: Will Shu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I think, yeah, yeah, I think that's interesting. Yeah, when you start something and it really becomes something, it has a gravitational pull of its own. And the question is, are you this thing? Are you in the orbit, right? And it's a little hard sometimes to separate those two things. So that's something I'd love to kind of understand.”
2021-07-12 · The Diary of a CEO · Deliveroo Founder - From £0 to £5 Billion: Will Shu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. And I think I wonder if other people feel that way. I don't know. Maybe you've asked that question. I don't know how you feel about it.”
2021-07-12 · The Diary of a CEO · Deliveroo Founder - From £0 to £5 Billion: Will Shu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because they're so intertwined and it becomes difficult. I'm not even saying separate necessarily, but just like having a better understanding.”
2021-07-12 · The Diary of a CEO · Deliveroo Founder - From £0 to £5 Billion: Will Shu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, Part of me Love to figure out myself. It may sound kind of weird, but just When you start this thing, you're on this journey, and the journey sort of propels, it has a life of its own, basically. It's probably the best way to put it. You start getting a lot of customers. You start getting a lot of writers, you start getting restaurants, you get investors. And the thing's moving and you're moving along with it. Many cases in a very deliberate way. In many cases, you're along for a journey. And so this thing has a life of its own. And it is pretty interesting to take a step back and think, okay. This journey completely everything that I had in mind and I wanted to do or whether just a lot of parts of it that were, it's like a wave kind of taking you along”
2021-07-12 · The Diary of a CEO · Deliveroo Founder - From £0 to £5 Billion: Will Shu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Don't know. I haven't really thought about it. I'm sure there's some, I'm sure having more at some point will make you a bit happier I'm sure, as you said, there's probably a limit to that, though, right? But I'm not like, I don't buy a lot of stuff. So. I don't know. Yeah, just don't buy a lot of stuff. So”
2021-07-12 · The Diary of a CEO · Deliveroo Founder - From £0 to £5 Billion: Will Shu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh man. I don't know. I never really thought about it. I mean, I don't really live very differently than I did. Seven or eight years ago, so kind of live in the same place. I mean, I'd rather have more money than less money probably, to be honest.”
2021-07-12 · The Diary of a CEO · Deliveroo Founder - From £0 to £5 Billion: Will Shu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“More transactional. Now, the reason you use Amazon is the best, most reliable service in the world. But I think with food, I think it's a little bit different. You need that reliability, but you also need that emotional connection.”
2021-07-12 · The Diary of a CEO · Deliveroo Founder - From £0 to £5 Billion: Will Shu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But I think having aspects of that. Right, we want to be an app you go to not just when you're hungry, but when you want to learn about food as well.”
2021-07-12 · The Diary of a CEO · Deliveroo Founder - From £0 to £5 Billion: Will Shu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Do you marry that with the emotional aspect of this brilliant food industry? And no one does it. Well, you don't do it well today. You look in our app, it's pretty transactional. You look at Ubers, you look at any of these other guys, pretty transactional. And I think the winner in this space, winner, I don't know. That's maybe a poor word, but whoever does really, really well in the space is going to nail that emotional side, right? The restaurant generated content. The FMCG generated content, the grocer generated content. We collect millions and millions of reviews each week on our platform. We don't do anything with that great today, in my view. So how do you marry all that together? How do you migrate the experience from a transactional one to more of an emotional one?”
2021-07-12 · The Diary of a CEO · Deliveroo Founder - From £0 to £5 Billion: Will Shu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“How do you take that same feeling and put it online, a really hard thing to do? So I think the future is going to be more and more food occasions online. They don't just have to be delivery, though. They could be dining. They could be a whole host of other things. Could be that, could be cool recipe kits, could a lot of different things, right?”
2021-07-12 · The Diary of a CEO · Deliveroo Founder - From £0 to £5 Billion: Will Shu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The future is look, this business is super underpenetrated online. Look at travel, it's 50%, right? Food is that low. Why is food difficult? Well, food's difficult because A, it's perishable. And B, it's emotional, which means to express food online is hard. You go to a restaurant, right? Restaurants are 75% gross margin business. Why? Low net margin, but high gross. Why? Because it's an experience, right? It's an emotional experience, but it's not just about the food. It's what was your relationship with the Mater D? What did the decor look like? All these things, right? I don't know, they're amorphous.”
2021-07-12 · The Diary of a CEO · Deliveroo Founder - From £0 to £5 Billion: Will Shu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Look, I think competition exists because this is such A big market right the it's 1.3 trillion pounds in the 12 markets we operate in online penetration is you know call it three to five percent it's early it's a big market that's why there's a lot of competition i think look the way we think about the competition is um Know, of course, we pay attention to it. I mean, very closely, but it's really about what is our consumer value proposition? And is it better than the competition? Is it growing on an absolute basis as well? And we fanatically sort of measure that. And we always think about what is the consumer, the rider, the restaurant, the grocer of the future want before they even know”
2021-07-12 · The Diary of a CEO · Deliveroo Founder - From £0 to £5 Billion: Will Shu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I waited around for a long time. You clearly had made the food was just sitting around. Like, we need better processes, right? We need to figure out a way to get this to work Please tell your staff to not And I get it, they're busy too. You know, it's just smile, say, hey, how are you doing? Makes a big difference in people's days, right?”
2021-07-12 · The Diary of a CEO · Deliveroo Founder - From £0 to £5 Billion: Will Shu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, I would never do No, no, I would I want the true experience, right? I want to understand. What the writers go through. It was really funny as they were being rude to me, this other writers walked up to me. He didn't know who I was. He was just like, oh, man, you see, these guys are at it again”
2021-07-12 · The Diary of a CEO · Deliveroo Founder - From £0 to £5 Billion: Will Shu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I'm like, come And then I got the food and it was like kind of cold. I'm like, hey, just you know, this food's kind of cold. And they were like, Just deliver it, buddy. And I'm like”
2021-07-12 · The Diary of a CEO · Deliveroo Founder - From £0 to £5 Billion: Will Shu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Few reasons. One, I always test our writer app, right? So it's a good way to do it. Secondly, decent way to get some exercise. You're just on the road and you're not thinking about anything else. I actually find it very relaxing. And then thirdly, I can actually kind of see the restaurants in action too. Because the interaction is usually not what the consumer. The consumer doesn't want to talk to you, but they just want their food. I get it. The restaurants, you can learn a lot just by spending time there.”
2021-07-12 · The Diary of a CEO · Deliveroo Founder - From £0 to £5 Billion: Will Shu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Still are. Yeah, I did. I did five deliveries last night, Notting Hill. And I talked to writers all the time. I know what they want. We're building a business for our riders, for our restaurant grocer partners, for our consumers. They're all customers at the end of the day. That's how we think about it, right? So a model that actually works for them. Got to be the most important thing. And we know our model can it improve? Absolutely can improve. We can improve everything. But do we think it's the best model for them? Yeah, 100%.”
2021-07-12 · The Diary of a CEO · Deliveroo Founder - From £0 to £5 Billion: Will Shu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“People in the company are like what's going on. You're on investor calls, like, what's going on? And ultimately, the way I sort of think about it is Know so proud of the fact we got here, right? I'm actually just focused on the business. How do we grow the business? How do we move the business in the right strategic direction, right? And I'm super, super, super optimistic about the future for all the stuff we've been doing for the past few years and I'm going to come to fruition in the future and all the future facing stuff we're working on now. So if I'm very honest with you, I don't think about the stock price. I actually think about the business. But for a few weeks, it was like. Difficult, right? It's very hard.”
2021-07-12 · The Diary of a CEO · Deliveroo Founder - From £0 to £5 Billion: Will Shu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm not like, I don't really, like I said, I don't really care that much about what people think and I don't really read the media that much or anything like that. But when it's that pervasive, you know, it's front page of every single newspaper telling you, you guys fucked up or you did this. Yeah, it was tough for a few weeks, I'll be honest with you. It was tough for a few weeks, you know.”
2021-07-12 · The Diary of a CEO · Deliveroo Founder - From £0 to £5 Billion: Will Shu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so I think the whole IPO process was a lot of work for about kind of three, four months before the IPO. I think we were all kind of looking forward to something really exciting. And it was really exciting to take a company public at a big market cap, you know, coming from an idea. Obviously, sort of the day one trading was hard, right?”
2021-07-12 · The Diary of a CEO · Deliveroo Founder - From £0 to £5 Billion: Will Shu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I had that. I had that. But I think it's really important to separate that. It's a solitary thing, right? Your founder, you know, kind of, especially when Greg kind of, you know. Left. And so you're just on your own, and you got to figure stuff out. We make this sound kind of like terrible, but I'm just like, listen to this thing.”
2021-07-12 · The Diary of a CEO · Deliveroo Founder - From £0 to £5 Billion: Will Shu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Probably it's a lonely job, you know, and you're not going to You don't want to like hang out with your friends and just talk about how tough your day is all the time, either, right? I don't know if you were the same way”
2021-07-12 · The Diary of a CEO · Deliveroo Founder - From £0 to £5 Billion: Will Shu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But I'm not a very retrospective person at all. I literally don't think about the past. Which may not be a good thing either. Good for certain things. Not good for others”
2021-07-12 · The Diary of a CEO · Deliveroo Founder - From £0 to £5 Billion: Will Shu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, yeah Yeah, but, you know, we make decisions we do. There's a difference between an abstraction and actually what happens, right?”
2021-07-12 · The Diary of a CEO · Deliveroo Founder - From £0 to £5 Billion: Will Shu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Little bit, right? Like, why am I so obsessive? But then I think back, and I've always been obsessive about everything, so I don't really think it's changed. But.”
2021-07-12 · The Diary of a CEO · Deliveroo Founder - From £0 to £5 Billion: Will Shu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“All of my But I don't know if like. Yeah, but I don't know if it's also like. We do this because, you know, I don't know, like we're hiding from something else, or like, you know, I don't know. That's something I think about sometimes. You think about it.”
2021-07-12 · The Diary of a CEO · Deliveroo Founder - From £0 to £5 Billion: Will Shu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think it's Yeah, I think the brain is capable of kind of filling itself up with certain things. And then there's just not room for. Other things I mean, that's how I think about it. I don't know if that's fair. And some people would say that I'm certain that other people can fill their brains up with more, but I'm like a very obsessive person, right? I don't know if you had the same. I”
2021-07-12 · The Diary of a CEO · Deliveroo Founder - From £0 to £5 Billion: Will Shu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I probably don't do a good job with that. I can put a pretty calm face on because I'm just not naturally like an up and down person, but. You know, I try breathing exercises. You know, I try to really kind of Not think about anything sometimes. I tried that calm app. Got through day six of the 30 day challenge. Got a little bored day seven, but. But I used to read a lot. I used to read a book a week. I now at this point, it's been a while since I read a book, which makes me a little sad. This is like my favorite thing to do. That does work or you just kind of go for a walk. I go on long walks all the time. That really helps me out a lot.”
2021-07-12 · The Diary of a CEO · Deliveroo Founder - From £0 to £5 Billion: Will Shu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Look, the job is like, I'm so proud of what we built, and I'm so excited about the future, but like it is a hard, hard job. And anyone that tells you otherwise is either having an exceptional experience or they're not being honest, right? I also think it's different when you're the founder, when the founder or CEO, right? Like I built the thing from an idea, right? And it's a big thing. And then I don't care about the press. I care about our employees. I care about the restaurant partners, the riders, the consumers.”
2021-07-12 · The Diary of a CEO · Deliveroo Founder - From £0 to £5 Billion: Will Shu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In a time when the future is so uncertain Going through my head. It's fucking terrible, right? I don't know what else to say. We have to do it, but it's terrible. And getting up in front of the company and explaining to people why this is the right thing to do. Really hard. These are their friends, colleagues, lost a lot of really great people, you know. It's definitely the hardest thing we've ever had to do.”
2021-07-12 · The Diary of a CEO · Deliveroo Founder - From £0 to £5 Billion: Will Shu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so, yeah, I'd say that was hard and was compounded with the fact that we had to lay off all these people, which was the hardest thing we had to do. Now, luckily for us, these restaurants reestablished themselves and the business has been on this amazing trajectory. That was tough.”
2021-07-12 · The Diary of a CEO · Deliveroo Founder - From £0 to £5 Billion: Will Shu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I do. Just that whole because it's not like a problem you or I could solve, right? If it's like, hey, we didn't do this round, I can go and raise more capital, whatever. We can go figure it out. Or this feature doesn't work well the way we want it to. We can figure out a way to iterate around that. There's an orc structure issue. Well, we can figure that out. But when you're at the whim of a government institution, that's a very different feeling. You're totally not in control. And when it lasts for that long. And the issue is you're a tech company. You can't not compete hard for fourteen, sixteen months, right? That's not the world the way the world works. It's not like a two grocery chains battling it out, right? It's just different”
2021-07-12 · The Diary of a CEO · Deliveroo Founder - From £0 to £5 Billion: Will Shu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so we see this plummeting growth. We have to, and we have to do the hardest thing. I had to do the hardest thing I've ever had to do. I had to lay off a significant number of people at the company, which just was the hardest thing I had to do. Big layoffs because we just didn't know what the future was going to be like. We were in the middle of an antitrust process hoping to get a lot of money in our businesses plummeting. It was really bad, really bad. I mean, worse for people that lost their jobs, obviously, but really bad.”
2021-07-12 · The Diary of a CEO · Deliveroo Founder - From £0 to £5 Billion: Will Shu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's the whim of someone else, right? It's not a logical process. At the same time, what started happening was COVID kicked off in. Jan Feb of 2020, right? So we're running low on money because we couldn't get money in for whatever 14 months, whatever it was. COVID kicks off, and COVID, what it did to us initially was our restaurant partners were shutting down for delivery and dine-in, not just dine-in, right? So the restaurants on the platform started plummeting in Europe and the UK. Now, Asia was different. They handled it very differently. But our users were disappearing because there were no restaurants left on the platform, right? I don't know what they were doing. I guess they're going avado or whatever.”
2021-07-12 · The Diary of a CEO · Deliveroo Founder - From £0 to £5 Billion: Will Shu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Amazon was a minority shareholder in our company, I think a 13% stake, 14% stake shareholder, same as some of the other investors, right? They had one board seat. Everything was normal. And these guys just literally kind of went after this in an unprecedented way, but we couldn't get the capital in. So we're like, what do we do? And we're at the mercy of some sort of institution, right? It's not like a free market type of thing. You can go and like find, you know, we're at the mercy of this situation. And so they took us through what they call their phase one investigation, which lasted like six months and then a phase two investigation lasts another eight months. So that was terrible, right? Utterly terrible because you don't actually have any idea what's going to happen because it's not a logical process, right? It's sort of”
2021-07-12 · The Diary of a CEO · Deliveroo Founder - From £0 to £5 Billion: Will Shu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They wouldn't actually let us take the money in, right? And we're like, but how are we supposed to compete when we compete against the likes of Uber and Just that are well funded? They're kind of like, it's not really our problem. We're like, well, we're British company trying to build a big tech business here. And so that whole process was excruciating because it was 18 months long. 16 16 months 18 months long where”
2021-07-12 · The Diary of a CEO · Deliveroo Founder - From £0 to £5 Billion: Will Shu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The way this happened though was really crazy. So we had spent a bunch of time with Amazon. They decided to invest. We negotiated the deal. Normal, and they were great, and the due diligence process, I was like, wow, these guys really know what they're doing, right? So it was really great. So we announced the deal. And again, we're loss making, so we need the money, right? And again, this was a big round. And the CMA, the antitrust authorities. In the UK, they're just like, we need to review this.”
2021-07-12 · The Diary of a CEO · Deliveroo Founder - From £0 to £5 Billion: Will Shu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'll tell you a story about COVID, actually. It actually predates COVID a bit. So we raised the next round of capital from Amazon, which you probably know.”
2021-07-12 · The Diary of a CEO · Deliveroo Founder - From £0 to £5 Billion: Will Shu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Again, because if we didn't get the money, because we're loss making entity, right? We were running out of money, right? So that part was not fun. That was a tough one. But it was great. We ended up working with Fidelity and T-Row Price. So we got in terrific investors. So at the end of the day, if you look back on it, it was like, oh, that's actually a really good outcome. But at the time, it was really hard.”
2021-07-12 · The Diary of a CEO · Deliveroo Founder - From £0 to £5 Billion: Will Shu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“600 million, something like that. It's a lot of money, right? 700 maybe? I don't even remember. But then we... I was like kind of pissed off for like 10 minutes. And then I got the team together. I'm like, guys, we got a lot of work to do over the next month, six weeks. So we lined up like 25 investor meetings all around the world. And we just went, we met with all these other funds, and we got it done. But that was really, really tough, right?”
2021-07-12 · The Diary of a CEO · Deliveroo Founder - From £0 to £5 Billion: Will Shu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was related to Uber, I think Something like that. Remember exactly the specifics, but it doesn't really matter. The point is we're about to get all this money in the company. And then suddenly Just gone, right?”
2021-07-12 · The Diary of a CEO · Deliveroo Founder - From £0 to £5 Billion: Will Shu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, one of them was we were, so back in 2017, holy shit, I guess four years ago now, yeah, we were, you know, we'd raised a bunch of money from our kind of investors. So that was Index, Excel, Green Oaks, DST, you know, businesses sort of flying. And then we were going to raise money from the world's biggest fund, right? I'm not going to name who they are, but you can probably guess who they are at some point, right? So, anyway, so we were about to do that. We just term sheet signed, doing due diligence summer of 17. And big round. Suddenly get a call, like, oh, we three days before we're supposed to close. Oh, we can't do this. No blah, blah, blah reason. I think it was related to”
2021-07-12 · The Diary of a CEO · Deliveroo Founder - From £0 to £5 Billion: Will Shu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, but I guess it's a little hard to say because if you told me, hey, business would be where it is today, would I have started it? Probably yes. He told me the thing wouldn't work out, and I'd be having to chew in glass for like years, then probably not, right? It all depends, but it's like hard to a completely different degree because as the founder, you think about it every single hour. You think about it, you know, when you're in bed, you know, when you're talking to a friend, you can't escape it, right?”
2021-07-12 · The Diary of a CEO · Deliveroo Founder - From £0 to £5 Billion: Will Shu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Don't really do that anymore. But I would say a lot of the journey is super, super, super hard. I'm happy to talk about any of those stories with you, but there's definitely been long periods of time, not just like for hours, like long periods of time where just like, man, this has to get easier. I forget if it was Elon Musk or whoever talks about it, the standing on the abyss thing. Know chewing glass. I felt that like many, many, many times, right? That's hard. That's really hard.”
2021-07-12 · The Diary of a CEO · Deliveroo Founder - From £0 to £5 Billion: Will Shu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Look, I'd say this. I don't know about other people. I don't think I'm a very up and down person. So I guess that's probably a good thing, but I'm not totally sure could mean I'm just suppressing a lot of stuff. I don't really know. But I don't have these enormous ups where I'm like going around, jumping up and down and I'm not going bananas when things are, you know, kind of going bad. That being said, some of my former colleagues in the early days might disagree with me. I would absolutely go nuts when I thought an order was handled inappropriately or customer service interaction was handled inappropriately. I think some people probably they can have some memories of that. But I kind of got over that.”
2021-07-12 · The Diary of a CEO · Deliveroo Founder - From £0 to £5 Billion: Will Shu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To me, that's got to be the way. Now, obviously, there's going to be a lot of different people at different approaches, but for me, absolutely, that's got to be the way.”
2021-07-12 · The Diary of a CEO · Deliveroo Founder - From £0 to £5 Billion: Will Shu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, I always thought about it. I wanted to build an online food company. That's how I always thought about it. Whether it's business or entrepreneur, I don't know. I don't know what the title means.”
2021-07-12 · The Diary of a CEO · Deliveroo Founder - From £0 to £5 Billion: Will Shu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know why because everyone's on the same page Don't need to be deliberate about communications. You don't need to be deliberate about how all the pieces fit together. Everyone just kind of knows. Obviously, to scale a company and do that in a high quality way, you need to figure out the systems to do that so that when you have 3,000 people, it's similar to when you have 100. But when you have 100, I think it's the best.”
2021-07-12 · The Diary of a CEO · Deliveroo Founder - From £0 to £5 Billion: Will Shu · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT