Kagan Sümer & Philipp Westermeyer: The Gorillas Story

I mean, story is always at the heart. Well, I think both go hand in hand, because story is what keeps us together and what we believe in. Everything began with a story, and we are building an even better story with the data. So I think it's hand in hand, not either or, man.

Yeah, and I'm proud of all of them. So hey, I mean, if I name one highlight, maybe there were many highlights, but if I would say one highlight: we were at this factory building, we were all team in a factory building, and I was gonna announce the biggest round that we didn't expect what was coming. And I was super sleepless because I was at the Notter the day before. I came to this building, and we had the all hands. And in the all hands, especially Nico, our head of riders, super young guy, now is an entrepreneur, but he was super sad, like he was super tense, man. This is a one-hour all hands. 28 minutes in, I begin crying. I have been crying, and the last 40 minutes I begin crying and saying, you know, like we get this, we became unicorn, we got this money, it's gonna be big, and we give our riders and our operational crew one million as a bonus. We had this all hands. I went out, uh, I like I went out to settle a little bit, taking a deep breath. And you know, everything that we had, because we like until that point there was like a real war room and everyone was really like fighting so much, and that was this release of it. And we just promised ourselves two things at that moment: we never lose our goodwill, and we will always do our best and keep this tight connection. And that was my highlight, to be honest.

The first employee of Z Mass in Istanbul. My aunt is a retired bishop player, something professor in Turkey, so we had a school of like German school of thought. So I came here 10 years ago, nothing happened, couldn't find to do something, and I said in my mind, I'm going to come back and build this business in Germany. So, and I love it, it's creative, it's inspiring, a lot of nice people. So the perception from the outside is sometimes a lot better than the perception from the inside, maybe. I don't know what's your perception inside, but from inside I still have a lot of positives, and I have also I can also say a couple of areas to improve, definitely. Um, such as... Then I said, look man, I can do it myself, let me begin my thing. But my visa was tied to Rocket Internet, so I wasn't allowed to be an entrepreneur. Problems begin a little bit there. Yeah, so you're not allowed to be an entrepreneur because you come with a blue card. Then somehow we managed it, yeah, lawyers, XYZ. And then I said, okay, I'm in the process, let me get it going. I found my tech partner, I found 10k from my mom, I put in the bank, let's go. Great, let's hire an office building. We need a German guarantor, so you cannot have it. Okay, we found the German guarantor. Very angry woman on the call, and she says, if I must say Allah... I said, what? I don't understand. I gave Robert the phone. Yeah, Robert is my first employee, he's somewhere here in the front line. Um, Robert answered the phone. I watched Robert. Robert is turning to white. He gets angry, frustrated, and like says, what's happening here? And then there's an argument. I didn't understand, upper intermediate German for me. Uh, so, I, Robert... Bank, bank called me, told that they accused us for sending money to Lebanon for money laundering or drug dealing or something like that. They advise us to close operations. They advise us to... my visa process is cancelled, entrepreneurship visa. They advise us to go to police. Anyways, they are going to come after us on the phone. They say, this is how... this is what has happened in the beginning. This is the challenges of building a business in Berlin. But this is also an opportunity, because an immigrant in this place, we don't have B plans. I don't have a B plan, I only have an A plan. An A plan is to survive and make the best out of it. And you know, if you heard it, every second immigrant entrepreneur is having this. I mean, not only immigrant entrepreneur, also other entrepreneurs also having similar things, but I think this is not nice, yeah. And if you think about this, if I would have stopped there, you say 15,000, I'm proud of all my people, and if you just make a basic math, it's almost 1 billion yearly salaries that's given back to the economy with foreign investment for Germany. So I think this requires a little bit more attention from government. The government should be a bit more proud about what's happening there, you know. Well, well, one billion in... how beautiful is it for Germany? Like there's one guy who's in the most beautiful city in the earth, in my point of view, from Istanbul, looks at Germany, says creative, inspiring, let me build my business there, stable, comes here, solves the challenges, creates a lot of employment. And this is amazing. I'm not, I'm happy about what we have done, but on the way there are some challenges that can easily be tackled, and Germany deserves this because it's a creative and inspiring place to build a business. So this is an opportunity, that's what I'm saying. I'm happy otherwise.

I mean, I love our brand, and I think we built a good brand, a great brand I would say. And we need more attention to our brand, and this is what we're going to do over the course of next nine months. Um, so, I mean, we love our brand, it's our story, we love our brand, and because it represents our values, it creates our values. I told you many times, we are authentic people, you know, we have tough times staying in our own place and your own selves. And as a company also we are like that, yeah, we cannot stop really. But I mean, we identified our values: what do we want, how do we want to behave as a collective, how do we want to feel? We want to feel bold, we want to feel authentic, we want to constantly ride and have that culture, and we want to really change this. And with that base, we talked about okay, how should we name it, what should be the name, what should be the color, what should be the visuals. And then it created, like in the second step, it created a in a PowerPoint, super basic, a couple of ideas, and I think this is you can come until here easy. Then you take hard decisions on the way: what is really a bold marketing campaign? We launched UK with a skydiving campaign. What we made a mistake in my point of view lately, and this is going to change by the way, like wait for September, we relaunch it. Uh, we talk too much about competition, yeah. And uh, how are we gonna compete? Uh, Getir is doing like extreme discounts, there's this... When you think about competition, you create a notion, you get far from yourself. And when you get far from yourself, you get detached from your values a little bit, and you begin doing things that other people do. And this is something we caught early, three months we did this. And now we sit together with our team, yeah, we said okay, how can we get these values back? We need to go back to ourselves.

Yeah, I mean, a couple of key figures maybe in the beginning, but the real thing is we need to think about in the context of today. So we are less than 800 million dollars of revenue run rate today. You asked me in the podcast, can it be 100? I told you monthly, that number is coming. So this is one. So we are 60% bigger than our second player in Europe. Basically we are size-wise the most, but this is... metropoles generating operating profits almost one to one. Two months we generate, we have profitable cities. And as a company, we are by far the most, I mean in European space, we are by far the most efficient company. But does it matter even in today's conditions? Everything will change, so we need to look at today's context. I mean, last 20, 24 months, Federal Reserve was injecting money in the market. This created high interest rates, high inflation, and created greed most importantly. Everyone was getting money, every valuation was super high, and we also benefited from that to a certain degree. But now, with what's happening in the market, March, first time decline, yeah. So Sagan also... As a company, we are going towards that, and we have a super clear plan on how to do that.

Of course I do, because I'm very busy, and whenever my wife tells me you need to go grocery shopping, I'm coming back to you, brother.

So, you get into hypnosis session, and it's about this question, exactly this question. So, first you get under a tree, you hug the tree, that's your inner self, and then there's a path downwards, you go to the path, there are doors. There's a success door, there's this door, there's that door. And at the very end, you go like you're completely, you're you know like you're almost half baked a little bit, you know. So you go, and as you get close to that final door, there's the success door, uh, there's the motivation door. So you open the door, you get inside, and at that point there is guided. And then, it asks you questions, yeah, like how do you... it's relationships. And did I do a good job on this? In the beginning, not in the middle, really good. But now I will, I looked at my calendar and I said okay, I told Natalie, Natalie, these relationships, like how can you? So then I dedicated time on the relationships, like three days through this happening. I'm not that I did this, but I'm gonna do this now. But I think if I focus now on the relationships, then I will inject like distill this to my people, because if I don't do this, I try to solve questions rather than getting in front of them and giving it. I'm much better than that, but I think man, Tarantino is coming. I mean, I'm just kidding. I'm just so, I'm super appreciative. But yours, I mean the motivation, I just see you have a gorilla tattooed on your neck. That is new, right?

I mean, it changed me as a person. I'm because of this kind of stuff, you know, like I'm constantly trying to navigate myself through a lot of things that I haven't seen or experienced before, and not so many people also experienced that scene before. So I said, man, I'm a different person, and I love tattoos, you know, that's why I said it's time to do it.

In the Zoom, it's hard, you know, like you have to show this. Where's the camera? Show this.

Yeah, so first of all, I mean, look at if you forget cucumbers, there's Rewe, there's Aldi, there's Edeka, there's this and that side. The market is huge, and that's what I try to say. If we trapped into this question and we thought too much about the competition, and Gorillas' initial success was the fact that we were extremely grounded in what we do, and we did things quite differently. So now there's a natural selection happening. There were 30 players, everyone was big, everyone was getting access to capital. Some player got the scale, some... Now we see pharmacy, we're going to see bigger basket deliveries, we're going to see smaller basket deliveries, and the product will change a lot, and there will be multiple players that are owning one part of the product. In my point of view, I might be wrong, and especially this corner, think about.com, yeah, 2000, there's only Amazon and eBay remaining from there, but there are a bunch of other players. So of course, on the long run, there's a big corner coming now, and after this corner, I believe if there's going to be survival of the quickest, and I think there's going to be one or two players that will be prominent in 12 to 24 months from now. But I might be completely wrong, that's why we just...

Thank you, it's amazing. And thank you very much for listening.