So, where do we start?
There was a bit chaotic back then. Let's face it.
We constantly ran out of space. Everyone was moving a million miles an hour. It just felt like anything was possible.
You get inspired by building something great.
Every order was precious at that time.
When our first TV spot aired, immediately the site crashed.
So, hi. I'm Niklas Östberg. I'm CEO and founder of Delivery Hero. I started a company 15 years ago. So, quite some time.
So, for me, the journey started even a little bit earlier, back in 2007. I found a couple of students who did a summer project hacking together a website where you can order food, and I thought it was magical. It was love at first sight.
I started a food delivery company there. I realized that delivery could be more than just a local startup by seeing the customer behavior and seeing how they come back over and over again. And I realized this cannot only be for our market. This must be the case for every market.
I saw the customers love it. They came back and I got hooked and I wanted to build it globally and decided to start Delivery Hero.
Yes, the food delivery when I grew up was pretty much having a couple of drawers, a couple of menu cards in your drawer. It was only pizza. So, I had three or four places of pizzerias I could order from.
And yeah, it was very cumbersome. You had to spell out your name, your address, the full order. Something always went wrong.
Back then, restaurants didn't really understand the concept of us delivering for them. There weren't a lot of restaurants who did food delivery. So, my first task was to launch Berlin and I was given like three weeks to launch it because Deliveroo was supposed to launch in six weeks and it was deemed very important to be the first one.
There were so many significant moments in the early days: the first time we onboarded riders, the first order we did, the first time we broke 100 orders, how we went live within three weeks. It was such a crazy and intense time of really working nearly all day and all night, and your life literally was this startup.
The original device that was used for sending orders for Delivery Hero was called a Live Link.
We had these thermal printer machines back then. They were actually pretty new and fancy. So, we were able to send orders to that device, and then it was making that funny sound, and it was printing out the receipt with the order. And then the vendors, they could interact with buttons on that box we called them, right? On that box, and they said like, 'Okay, it will take 15 minutes. It will take 60 minutes.' And that was pretty advanced back then.
It was just a constant noise in the office that we would hear all day long. People testing it, people... it was going off non-stop, making sure that it was working.
We started with these huge Epson printers where you just had a printout. It was quite annoying because there was a sound for the restaurant and a printout, but it was not like a tablet that you had constant reminders. So, it very often happened as a rider, you arrived at the restaurant and they hadn't seen it because it was just a printout. They said, 'Oh, yeah, yeah, we're already on it.' But basically, they only saw the printout when you arrived.
So, one thing I remember from the early days was that New Year's Day was very big, and we couldn't handle the traffic. So, every New Year's Day our servers went down.
Thankfully, we would get lots of orders, but then the site would crash, and then it would be like everybody on the phones, and we would run to the customer care floor and just sit there calling orders through for hours until the orders stabilized again.
One of the funny moments we had in the beginning was just seeing the orders coming in. Every time we got an order, we got a signal. It was a beep, and it was a receipt printed.
We had this special sound that we also used in the advertisement. When an order came, it was like doing this: do, do, do.
It was a big celebration every time we got an order. That happened in the beginning: 10 a day, 20 a day, 100 a day, thousands a day. That gave a lot of energy to see how you hear how it's changing over time.
When our first TV spot aired between Simpsons episodes or something, immediately the site crashed. Same moment as it aired, basically, Lieferando was down. Nobody could reach us anymore. So, that was one of my biggest learnings in the early days: advertisement works.
Yeah, the energy was chaotic. It was just new people coming aboard every day. Every week we grew with 10% of our staff. We constantly ran out of space.
You arrive in the office, with a bit of luck you had a signed contract. If not, you just started working straight into the action.
When we onboarded the first restaurants, it was like we went to Metro and just bought some kind of packaging because there was no process for proper packaging.
Nothing organized. A lot of things you had to figure out yourself.
Sometimes at the end of the night you had some orders, but you didn't have riders left. So, very often we were sitting there until 10:00, 10:30, I think was the opening times back then, and we were dispatching the orders. Then we saw that the last orders, there was no rider left to actually do it. So, then we always had to go on a bike or a scooter and deliver the last couple of orders.
We had to be very cost-conscious. I often brought my air mattress because I couldn't have time to find a hotel, so I brought my air mattress so I could stay in the office and sleep on the floor. So, it was not a comfortable air mattress. Yeah, blow-up boat, more or less, yeah.
Most people were in their 20s. Most people did not have families.
Most people were really at the start of their career, super hungry, ambitious.
It was never about could we do it, it was just about how fast could we do it. It just felt like anything was possible.
I don't know, like there were probably no companies in Germany or even worldwide doing as much M&A as we were doing. We were buying all of these young competitors. And it was a lot of pace and a lot of fun.
I think a moment where I had a really strong realization of how important this business was going to be was when I did my first restaurant visit and I met a restaurant partner that had started working with us and he was so happy and grateful. It had basically changed his business. It had grown and I think that's when I realized that we weren't just offering a service for customers, that we were really helping people to build their own businesses and I think that's what made me feel like, 'Okay, this is super important and we are doing something great.'
In India, in LatAm, in Chile, the truth is that we have created an ecosystem and it is full of opportunities for many, many people.
We have brought millions of people under our umbrella and helped them earn a living, make their lives easier so that they can go and do whatever they want. And at the end of the day, we've allowed a whole, you know, be it dark stores, be it restaurants, be it cloud kitchens, we've shown how it works. We've really built proof of concept that it works in an emerging market.
One of the core memories for sure is still the IPO. Although it's so many years ago, like it was 2017, a few months after I joined Delivery Hero, the IPO was probably the craziest and most ambitious project I experienced. It was a huge challenge, but it was also a really big sense of accomplishment when we finally stood in Frankfurt and were ringing the bell and being happy about this amazing outcome.
As with, I think, every kind of great startup, we had to learn as we went and we learned a lot fast about what we should and shouldn't be doing and we were scaling fast and then also, you know, that breaking things all the time. From what I remember, the original Dmart was really just like somebody had put food on the shelves in a small shed. That's basically it. It was scrappy. I mean, we didn't even, you know, I think that we didn't know at the time the intricacies of managing a Dmart or a Q-commerce and the complexities of it, but the value was there. We just didn't know how to operationally set it up effectively.
So, the first Dmart opened in Turkey with our brand new Yemeksepeti. We were involved by supporting to give our logistics software to make it work, but we were not so close to actually setting it up. So, then they asked us to come there and test it and I was still very focused on food. We didn't fully understand it, but then we placed an order and it arrived in 8 minutes. You got some your Coke Zero, your chocolate bar and you kind of actually got some extras which they put in with the delivery and that was an eye-opener that you basically any craving you have for food and drinks you can now get instantly. We control the assortment, the quality. You can even target the customer and give something extra on top. That was, yeah, a game-changer.
One day we were talking about, you know, could we deliver coffee? And then the next day it's, yes, you can. You know, the next week it's, well, should we make our own coffee and deliver it? And we did. And suddenly, you know, we were making coffee. So, it was really a time where it felt like anything was possible.
We got an order for an office and it was, I think it was nearly 15 or 20 cups of coffee and we were going, how are we going to actually transport these? So, yeah, these are the complexities of an early stage environment.
The steps to order your morning coffee was like six or seven clicks. How can we do it in three clicks? How can we do it in two clicks, four clicks, etc.? We were really obsessed with that in a way that we wanted to put our order innovation in a way of how can you reorder your coffee and even how can it be frictionless? How can we make it super easy? It was linked to payments. It was linked to your convenience. And that was kind of what was exciting for me when I joined.
Yeah, we have had a lot of competition over the years. I think there's been 500, 600 different competitors over the last 15 years. Every week there was a new competitor with new funding and today out of the 500 competitors, there are only maybe 10 or a handful left. It's been extraordinarily competitive and every day we were looking at how many restaurants did they sign up? How many restaurants did we sign up? And it was very competitive and I still think it is.
Pressure from competition existed basically from day one. It's already when we were launching Berlin as the first new city after Rocket Internet acquired this Wolt, which then became Foodora. Deliveroo was live in the UK, but there was the rumor that they were launching Berlin within six weeks. So, we had to launch faster than was the target, to launch in three to four weeks and a few weeks before them, which we then ultimately did.
We have been facing competition in almost every single market at different points in time. When I joined, the competition was incredibly fierce in Korea, where we had our competitor Baemin, later became part of the family, but there was really a tough competitor back in the days.
There was of course with Foodpanda in Asia, you had Grab coming and this very regional competitor. I would say one of the most intense phases here because you saw in Berlin live was the Dmart cucumbers phase of Gorillas and later then Flink with former founders of us and Getir and so many of these 15-minute grocery delivery companies launching at the same time.
Competition has always been there and if you look back, it always made us stronger because it forced ourselves to kind of think about how to go the extra mile for the customer, how our value proposition for the customer can be better, can be improved.
It keeps you on your toes. You know that any mistake you make, someone's going to be able to benefit from that and vice versa and I think that's what makes it exciting. It's also what makes it very difficult and challenging.
COVID times changed a lot. It's very surreal when you go from one day everyone is in the office to a couple of weeks later, you couldn't see anyone.
So, I remember having a conversation with PJ, the COO, just a few weeks after starting and we were right in the middle of COVID around a post-COVID recovery plan. So, we were already thinking about what are we going to do when COVID ends.
Here in the Philippines, we, you know, again, we not just survived but thrived in COVID. We had the longest lockdown in the world and we were able to emerge stronger than ever as a business, as a platform.
Some countries completely shut down food delivery. In other countries, food delivery grew very, very fast.
You know, we were somewhere where we were moving so fast that just as we were dealing with, you know, COVID and the increase in business that was coming from that, we were already starting to think about what's going to happen when that comes down.
I remember the day when lockdown was announced and all of us were taking our screens and felt like you're saying goodbye to your colleagues and you don't know when you're ever going to see them again. It was really a bit this dystopian feeling of this is the last day where we're supposed to be loud and I think a lot of people still have their screens at home from that time.
Yeah, COVID times were incredible. Like, of course, it was sad, but I remember it as an amazing life experience, right? Because it was very challenging to manage the company. We were running very, very short on cash. So, we had to close a big fund raise during COVID. I think we were weeks away from, you know, shutting down due to bankruptcy.
So many retailers, so many brands that never really answered our emails or never really believed in our vision. Then they realized now that they could access their customers at home through us and they onboarded the platform and they have never left since then.
Next 15 years of food delivery. To be honest, I always find it very difficult to predict even one year of delivery here. So, it's such a fast-paced environment. Things are changing so quickly and sometimes quite unexpectedly. You might experience a turn of events. So, 15 years seems almost impossible to predict. I guess that's a question for Niklas.
If you look at the next 15 years of this change, I think the change will be equally dramatic.
I think we're in really early days of AI. Even though it seems like we've had AI around for ages because that's all we hear about. But I think today what we're seeing is the app eventually becoming very intuitive and really knowing what the customer wants before they sort of want it, right? So, I think over the next 15 years customers will expect us to deliver even more things fast. I can imagine you'll be able to get pretty much anything in 30 minutes or less. I also think that customers will expect more personalization. So, everything about their interaction with us will need to be tailored to them.
I think one thing that's interesting and makes it fun being here is that change is inevitable. We embrace change and we celebrate it and we're not shy to take on new things and pivot.
Delivery Hero will keep adding value, but not only to our end users, but also for all the stakeholders that Delivery Hero operates, such as our couriers or our vendors and partners.
So, in 15 years, I think Delivery Hero will definitely be the everyday app for consumers. So, if they think about ordering something quickly, whether it's food, pharmacy, or other products, Delivery Hero will be the app that's top of mind.
So, in 15 years' time, I can see us thinking about how did we ever tolerate standing in a queue in a supermarket, scanning stuff, scanning each product one by one.
I hope our legacy at Delivery Hero is not measured by the number of orders that we delivered, but by the moments we help to create. The birthdays, the family gatherings, and Eid celebrations.
I think one of Delivery Hero's biggest legacies will be having developed fantastic consumer brands globally. When you walk into the streets in any given market, and you see our brands popping up every 10 meters, I think that's super exciting. It means that we're very relevant for our customers, riders, and vendors.
As we improve our service, we also see our customers expect more from us. In the early days, they were happy getting a pizza delivered in an hour. Today, they expect a lot more. We want to make our service so good and cover so many use cases and verticals that customers can come back every day and that's the vision of the everyday app.
Cool. This is good for you? Then I am good for me.
So the last 15 years have been extraordinary at Delivery Hero. And what makes the company special is that there is always change. And in July we announced that we are partnering up with Uber in the largest deal in our industry by far. So this is not only very exciting, but it's also a testament to the incredible work that we have been doing across the globe. And when we set out to build an everyday app to serve the daily needs of our customers, we did so to help millions and millions of customers in dozens and dozens of markets. This has not changed. Going forward, we will continue to drive this service and build an everyday app. Thank you for watching and for being part of this journey. It's been 15 incredible years and I hope for another 15 fantastic years to come.
