Markus Villig Started Bolt at 19 With €5,000. Now Bolt have 200 Million Customers...

Waymo has about 3,000 cars. Tesla has more than 3 million active cars. So Tesla has a thousand times more data than Waymo. And clearly the product isn't working nearly as well. So that should tell you all you need to know that data isn't everything.

Trust yourself. Honestly, I think that when I look back at the last decades of the biggest mistakes I've done, it's been in the cases where I've blindly followed external advice over what my own intuition tells me. In almost all of those cases, it's proven out to be incorrect. So, if it's been a strategic choice of which markets to expand to or, you know, should we hire this exec or so on, every time I've taken external advice that goes against my own intuition, it's almost always proven out to be the wrong thing to do.

Awesome to be here.

So, it's been quite an intense journey as you can imagine. Starting as a 19-year-old kid, no money, no connections, no experience. And then seeing the ramp of not just on the company size of getting us to 4,000 people, but just seeing the magnitude of people we can serve. So, today Bolt is in 52 countries. We're adding new ones every week. 200 million customers. And as mentioned, we're doing millions and millions of rides a day.

Yeah, it was a complete mess. Let's start with that. I didn't really know what I was getting into. So, just even coding the first version of the app, how do you even release it on the app store and so on back in 2014? That was quite a mess and took me, I mean it's embarrassing but you know, it took me many many days to sort it all out and get it live.

Exactly. So obviously like you know now this would be one-tenth of the effort it was back then but that was quite a big barrier to entry. So obviously if you're starting a business now it's much easier. And the other bit of just going on the streets, I had no idea what I was doing. First time ever doing sales. You get into these cars try to pitch the driver to sign up and join the platform. That was just, it took a lot of effort and obviously 90% of them immediately told me to get out like you're wasting my time. Who are you? You don't even have a product. So it took a lot of willpower to just keep going.

No, no, far from it.

Exactly. So originally when I was evaluating whether to even get into this industry and whether this is a good startup idea, I always had the ambition I wanted this to be one of the greatest, largest companies in the world. That was my dream. And then I always didn't want to build something that was just going to be a local or regional play that I'm going to do in Estonia or in a small part of the world. So that meant I need to have a clear path of how I'm going to compete and differentiate. And I had a background in math and computer science. So I was very used to solving this type of math puzzles and so on. And then every time I heard investors saying that there's network effects in different industries, that always seemed very superficial to me because I was thinking that clearly it's not a binary thing. So either your industry has network effects or it doesn't. You really got to get into the weeds of it and understand how strong those effects are and therefore what is your strategy going to be. And then I think that many people just took the analogy from let's say Airbnb which would have a very strong global network effect, right?

Or Facebook Meta, exactly. So you have very strong global network effects where like if you have supply of hotels or rooms around the world you also have global demand so effectively that is something that trends towards one monopolistic winner across the world or maybe two. We understood in this business first of all the right unit to think about is a city because it doesn't help you at all if you have cars in New York if I need to get a ride in Athens. So you got to build a local supply base. And second we understood that actually it doesn't need that many cars for you to be competitive. So Uber might have in a city 5,000 but if we could just even get to 300 we can start to compete and then work our way up. And that was a big core insight that every VC missed in the industry.

So I'd say that there's even another side concept here which is that I think most founders really think about product market fit in the way that they fix a market and then they try to iterate on the product until it clicks. We took the opposite approach. We actually realized pretty quickly that the product we built is really good. It clearly resonates with customers in our home market and we just got to figure out which markets fit those same characteristics so we can expand there. But then the problem was we didn't really have much budget. And then when we looked at how our competitors were expanding, they spent so much money and time on each market experiment. So they hired a full-fledged team. It took them like 12 months to try stuff out. We're like, 'Hey, we're never going to make it like this. We're not going to discover the markets that make sense.' So we're like, 'Hey, can we do something to make this funnel much faster? So is there a way we could test out the 100 cities at a cost of how these other guys test out five cities?' And we did a couple of clever hacks. So one was that we were running a lot of Facebook ads in 100 cities to just say that hey Bolt is launching in this city and then wanted to see where do we get consumer traction and then equally importantly where do we get driver traction. And then we just effectively use those input metrics to then rank all the cities in the world. And then we realized the African cities were top of the list which was very surprising to us because at first we almost completely ignored them or dismissed them. But then obviously we had the signal that here the product is resonating, here people want to try it out so let's zoom in. But then we had no budget to hire anybody there and we had even no idea how should one expand into Africa. We actually never even frankly been there from the team. So we're like hey what's the cheapest way to do it? It was literally back then even a Skype call where we just called up these people who had applied and we hired a bunch of young students and the cost to launch the whole thing was maybe like $10,000. So it was a very modest bet and then six months in it worked fantastically well.

I'd say that first of all, you really got to pick a field that you love so that you will get through the tough days. Because what I see is that if you get into a business that you don't really enjoy, then the moment you're going to hit these turbulent times, people will be like, 'Hey, I've already made some money. I'm just going to either exit or get in somebody professional, move out.' But like if you deeply care about what you're doing and you really think long term the best days of the company are ahead of you. I mean that will take you through the tough times. And the second thing is the team really matters. Honestly, like if we didn't have the great colleagues that we had from day one of the company still with us, I mean it would have made it 10 times as tough. But if you can really count on them as effectively founding core team members, you can share your problems with them, brainstorm through stuff and then get through the hard days as well.

So zoomed out it's very clear where the world is going in 10, 20 years from now. It's obvious we will be seeing robot taxis in most developed and emerging markets in the world to some extent. I think the only question is how quickly it's going to grow and how quickly the prices will come down so it really becomes a true replacement to your private car. I'm extremely bullish that this is going to happen sooner than what most people would expect. And I also think that there will be many companies who will be able to provide the self-driving car technology which isn't at all a consensus view at the moment.

Yes. So today when you talk to most investors I'm seeing the same parallels as what it was with the ride sharing business to be honest a decade ago where they think that hey there's some data network effects and if we fix it for this city it applies to the whole world. Exactly. And then you know you will have this flywheel effect where one company gets there they improve the model and then they're going to have this runaway effect and nobody can catch up and the data is the moat. Exactly. And like empirically that's obviously not the case even today. So just if you think about it Waymo has about 3,000 cars, Tesla has more than 3 million active cars. So Tesla has a thousand times more data than Waymo and clearly the product isn't working nearly as well. So that should tell you all you need to know that data isn't everything. Like what equally matters is what is the right set of sensors you have on the car, what is the right architecture and so on. So clearly I mean data isn't everything and what Waymo has demonstrated is like even with a thousand cars you can get it to a good enough level that the service is super human and you can launch a commercial service.

Exactly. And again, I think it's like a very superficial understanding of the world and I get why the companies who are ahead would try to propagate this because obviously they want to make sure they don't get any competition. But similarly to when we look at LLMs. Sure there's a couple of companies that are always at the frontier six months ahead of everybody but then you have a dozen labs from China who are not that far behind. So clearly again I think the similar dynamic is going to happen in self driving as well.

Trust yourself. Honestly, I think that when I look back at the last decades of the biggest mistakes I've done, it's been in the cases where I've blindly followed external advice over what my own intuition tells me. And in almost all of those cases, it's proven out to be incorrect. So, if it's been a strategic choice of which markets to expand to or, you know, should we hire this exec or so on, every time I've taken external advice that goes against my own intuition, it's almost always proven out to be the wrong thing to do.