HelloFresh CEO on Why When You Raise VC You Only Have Two Options

Harry, it’s great to be here.

I probably had the dream that many young kids have. I always wanted to become a footballer. That’s what I did most in my youth, basically playing football each and every day. I played academy football. At some point, figured that the chances of getting there are very, very slim and then pivoted towards university and the boring path of becoming a professional.

Absolutely. A lot of lessons and also painful lessons that you get taught when you get left out of the team, when you don’t agree with the manager, when you don’t agree with some of your teammates, and then being able to absorb that, maybe, you know, shut up, go to bed, and next day, kind of, like, go back onto the pitch and really trying to make the best and not have anybody notice how sad you are or sort of, like, how much that worries you, I think that is, like, a key lesson that you learn very, very early on.

To be fair, I think that was a mistake on my side. I’m still always fascinated how good some of the big banks and the consulting firms are to lure in top talent. The job is pretty boring. Nonetheless, I think they attract, like, a huge deal of world class talent each and every year. And in the end, I think that all comes down to marketing. They’re just really good at marketing and at branding their places as these are the most desirable places where you should go if you’re a top graduate.

And I have not been immune to resisting that, and so I also ended up there but figured very quickly that it’s probably not the right place for me. So after about nine months, I already left. So

Already at university, I had a little void to fill. There was something of being an athlete and then ditching that career and focusing on something different, and I was always fascinated by entrepreneurship. I think the one thing that also throughout my childhood, I always figured sort of like I wanna run things. I wanna be at the helm of things. I wanna invent things. I wanna run a business. I wanna be the one making decisions. So I always had that type of drive of being my own boss and deciding about my own destiny.

I started two businesses on the side during university without funding, basically with some of our own funds and with free interns to do all of the work alongside myself and a friend. So after that short x courses to Goldman, I kind of like it was moved back on track and starting that business. So what I did is actually moved to Berlin, which was I think up and coming, very different from what it is right now. European tech was up and coming. So in 2011, arrived in Berlin, little money in my pockets and basically got together two of my smartest friends that I’ve met throughout university.

And we said, you know, we wanna start something, and we wanted to figure we wanted to settle on something that we have a big passion for because that to me was one of the key lessons I learned when starting my my side hustles at university that you should be doing something that you’re really passionate about because you’re always gonna hit some rough stretches and it’s way easier to get out of bed in the morning when you have a rough stretch when actually you’re very, very passionate about what you’re doing.

We were definitely very naive in the beginning. And I think if you had talked to industry experts, they all would have told you how complex it is to ship perishables, how complex it actually is to run fulfillment, to run a supply chain at scale, to get growth marketing right. So all of the things that we didn’t know, I think, were actually very, very good. We didn’t know them because otherwise, we would have never started that business. And in terms of fuck ups, there are a lot.

I think the the history of HelloFresh, especially in the first eighteen months, plastered with with fuck ups and things that we learned. I remember one very vividly. We had a new record week. We had to source, I don’t know the number any longer, but something like 10,000 potatoes. And you actually source 10,000 potatoes, which is like two big truckloads, and then the trucks actually collapsed. And a highway was actually closed down because our trucks collapsed, and the whole highway was full of potatoes. So we couldn’t deliver any customers.

It was a huge deal making sure the fireman came, they closed off the streets, they did all of these things just because, like, we had no idea how to ship potatoes. A truck broke down. We had no idea whether that’s the right trucking company or not. Probably chose the wrong one. That was very early on, fortunately. These things are eleven, twelve years behind us now, but this was definitely one that I remembered very, very vividly.

So it’s maybe a contrarian view. I think a view that sometimes in the investor community is not much appreciated, but I like hard businesses. I like complex businesses. Why? If you figure them out, you create really big competitive moats. And that’s because number one, you figured something out that is hard, that is complex, and you make it work. And that means that everybody else who wants to figure it out needs to work equally as hard, plus you have a head start. You figured something out and you’re already working on the next thing.

So I always feel like if you’re working on a complex business and you solve something, then you’re actually creating moats that are so hard to overcome, plus you have the advantage of time that you can then use to your own advantage that all compounds over time. And when you think about moats, right, in the beginning of a category, everybody starts from a blank sheet. Nobody has any moats. If you’re starting in a hard category and you’re figuring something out, number one, you probably have less competition in the beginning.

Number two, as you’re figuring things out, you’re creating modes. And then number three, you have a head start. So when your competition is figuring out what you’ve already figured out, you’re already working on the next thing. And these things compound so much over time that then when a category like ours is now more than a decade old, we had a decade to solve some of the most complex problems here. Now if I look at that from the outside, it would be absolute insanity to launch a competitor to us as of today.

So that’s why I like complex business model and complex problems. I think they’re very often much more sustainable in the long run, and they also attract a lot less competition.

Over time, the type of business that we run, you really need to build a lot of different muscles. We talked about being an athlete before. So if you’re an athlete, you have a number of muscles and if just one of your muscles doesn’t work very well, you’re an injured athlete and you’re on the bench. And it’s a little bit the same with our business. Right? You need to be world class, you need to build muscles in a lot of different dimensions. You need to be very good at building a brand.

You need to be very good at building your last mile logistics network. You need to be very good at establishing all of your suppliers and your supplier relationships and those integrations. We’re running 42 different fulfillment centers with heavy automation in those fulfillment centers around the world. You need to scale up your operation and basically run people and processes and technology at scale. So all of these are, in a way, muscles. We have built two pretty big muscles that helps us also going into new business verticals like we have done more recently with a couple of others that we’ve launched.

But in the end, I think these muscles are pretty strong, and these are real competitive modes. We’ve always had some competitors that were also developing some of these muscles, but I think in the end, it’s the sum total that you need to really be successful.

If I look internally and what we’re trying to do and some of the philosophies that we carry, then maybe those are, like, a little bit different to some of the philosophies that some of our competitors or some of our US competitors specifically have carried. We’ve always had a big appreciation for understanding things in the most detail there is and diving deep and building things internally rather than leveraging external agencies or leveraging external suppliers. So we always felt there is a number of competencies, a number of muscles that we want to really understand in detail, and we rather build them in house, and we try to really figure things out, and then that will really pay off in the long run.

I don’t think you need to vertically own everything. I think there are some parts of the value chain that you want to own, but it also depends on the stage of the business. So even today, we’re incubating like a number of new business lines. And very clearly, in the first two, three years, we’re trying to keep fixed costs like as low as possible. It’s all about finding product market fit. In these times, I think it makes total sense to say everything that doesn’t have to do with product market fit, you wanna outsource.

I don’t wanna spend mental bandwidth on that. I wanna make sure I have a great product. I understand some of the distribution channels. I understand my consumers. I can act fast on their feedback. I don’t wanna do all the stuff that can keep me up the whole night and the whole day and worry about that stuff. But at some point, I think it’s really important that if you actually say like, hey, this is mission critical for my success. I don’t want to have any dependency on somebody else.

Plus, I also want to understand how good you are in something. Right? Then you actually need to go in and do that yourself. And I think there have been different phases in our journey. I would definitely say also looking at some of the competition that we’ve had, at certain points in time, we felt that really going from five wholesale suppliers to integrating with 1,500 suppliers all over The US directly to capture that margin upside to get much better freshness and quality that this is something that drives a lot of value.

It meant that we had to hire like a 100 people internally and build technology for that, etcetera, but it really helped us to capture a lot more margin on every order that we did. We also never said we wanna outsource anything that has to do with performance marketing, for example. Because as a direct to consumer company, right, that’s one of the biggest sensitivity on your LTV to CACs is your CAC. So I really wanna understand that end to end. I wanna dive deep. I wanna have world class people internally who I can challenge, who can build up like a great growth engine.

I don’t think that even if that takes some time and investment and technology and people and process, those are things that I just do not want to have any dependency on anybody else.

So I think you described the two dynamics well. Right? On the one hand side, you tend to penetrate much more deeply into a specific total addressable market, and that generally means that your customer acquisition cost goes up. On the other hand, like you’re building a brand, you probably have a big database of people who have ordered with you at some point. And so those two dynamics kind of offset each other. As you scale and with more tenure on a market or in a geographies, you have really those two effects that are in some ways offsetting each other.

And then you need to look really at the category weighing out the other one. But you’re describing well the two dynamics that you’re seeing.

I think that’s a very financial view. That’s probably what a PE fund would tell you. It’s they they are the best capital allocators. I think capital allocation is a very important part of your job, but it’s more than capital allocation. Right? It’s resource allocation. Where do you actually put sort of like your people? How do you organize your people? How do you make sure you bring out the best in your people, etcetera? These are jobs that are equally important as capital allocation. Probably capital allocation becomes more and more important, the more mature your business is, and the less it is about building and the more it is about allocating the capital that you have at the highest ROI projects.

I think I have a pretty good track record in M and A. Over the last four years, we’ve generated about 1,500,000,000 in cash flow from operations. Of those 1,500,000,000 that we generated, we allocated roughly €900,000,000 into making our own operations better. So in our fulfillment network, in our last mile logistics, in our technology, in our automation of some of the fulfillment centers. We spent about 300,000,000 on M and A, and we did a share buyback of about 200,000,000 over that period. Hey, you generate 1,500,000,000, how do you allocate that?

That’s in the end is capital allocation, right? The best capital allocation decision nonetheless was probably one of the M and A deals that we did. We bought a company called Factor. That’s a ready meal company in The US, which has been growing very nicely, and that has certainly been a very good return for us and hence a very good capital allocation decision.

So first of all, we have been excited by other direct to consumer verticals. I think the way that I look at it, we operate a portfolio of different p and l’s of different business lines. We started the business in 2012. We IPO ed the business in 2017. And at that point, we were active in six markets globally with one brand, HelloFresh. Post IPO, we said there’s a lot more markets that we can go into with our meal kit brands, and we basically in the three, four years after that, so between 2017 and 2020, launched HelloFresh in another eight or nine markets as the one brand.

We also said there’s a good opportunity to actually go into a premium category and into a sort of like everyday value category and launched different meal kit brands with Green Chef in The U. S. And EveryPlate in The U. S. And also brought those to some of our European markets. At some point in 2020, we said, okay, meal kits, we have a lot of business units, a lot of markets that are in the early days of their growth S curve, and we have others that are maybe a little bit more mature and where it’s more about managing them for cash flow and where it’s more about really building out the customer proposition.

Basically, became interested in what are other direct to consumer vertical that share a lot of the things that we like about meal kits and maybe a lot of the complex problems that we already solved for meal kits. And we first had a big discussion about is that something we should incubate ourselves. Back in 2019, we actually tried our hand at coming up with our own ready meal provider, but we sucked at cooking the meals. We were very good at generating demand. So I think six months after launch, we were at $1,015,000,000 dollar run rate with a small brand that we that we launched, but the meals were terrible.

Like, we got really bad recipe ratings, customers didn’t stick around. We tried that for probably about a year, but we couldn’t really get the meal quality right. That’s when we started looking into sort of like some of the other companies in that space and really were focused on which companies make the best meals, which companies have really cracked that food manufacturing process, that cooking process at scale, and how can we potentially partner up with them?

I would say it’s one component of it, how much money you invest, but a lot is how do you cook that? How do you prep it? How long do you keep it in inventory? How quickly does it move from one station to the next station? That has all to do with the freshness of the product, and the quality of the product can degrade like very, very fast if you’re not moving it from one station to the next station. You know, those are big cooking facilities. At the moment with Factor, we have two of the three biggest cooking facilities in North America.

Guess what the other one is? The one that we are not owning of the top three cooking facilities in The US. Tell me. Disney World Orlando.

I think first, we do a lot of desk work. We do a lot of desk research. We’re trying to, like, really understand all of the competitors. We’re trying to look at things like credit card data. We’re trying to look at web traffic, blind tasting of meals, and mystery shopping to understand the products and do a lot of legwork and pre validation work before. And then at some point, make a decision, hey, we should build a relationship, get to know each other. That’s usually then your dating phase.

You’re trying to evaluate if that might be a fit, if there is some willingness.

Integration is very hard. Probably been an integration phase of about twelve to eighteen months where we worked through, like, a good plan. It was all about being aligned on our operating system. That is something that we talk a lot about internally. What is our operating system that makes large groups of people run-in the same direction, talk the same language, and then just, you know, making sure that, you know, we can build an athlete that carries over the best muscles that we have built at HelloFresh with the best muscles that we have built at Factor.

In the rearview mirror, one of our share buybacks was at much higher levels than where the share price is trading today. So if I’m looking at the IRR of that investment, that was probably not a great investment. But then in the end, right, we’re not doing that to to push the stock price. We’re doing that to grow free cash flow per share by reducing the share count. So I think in the long run, and in the end, all you can do is work on the long run.

You’re reducing the share count. And then hopefully, at some point in the future, that will also have been a good capital allocation decision. Two years or eighteen months after we’ve done it, the IRR on that does not look great.

We

ed at about €10 per share.

There are some things which are definitely beneficial, and there are others which are not incredibly beneficial. I feel when you raise venture capital, in the end, you need to make a decision. Are you gonna go for a trade sale, or are you gonna IPO the business? Those are, in the end, the only two credible path. If you still want to run the business, if you still feel that there is a lot of runway ahead of you, then you probably don’t wanna sell the business and give up complete control.

So you’re gonna IPO the business. It’s not the easiest to have a daily reflection of everything that’s going on on a on a screen and, like, a a value put on you every day instead of, like, every two years or so. But it also is sometimes good as disciplines, teams, kind of, like, makes you think straight. You have a lot less of this insanity in public market companies than you might have seen in private market companies in the last three years. But if you wanna keep being in charge and you have raised venture, in the end, you need to go public.

That’s pretty clear.

I do feel that people checking a stock price that happens, like, once you go public, especially in the beginning because everybody is excited and everybody thinks like, hey. What’s happening today? Why is it up 3%? Why is it down 3%? Guess what? It’s just randomness or macro factors, etcetera. Your business is still the same. I think Warren Buffett had that great quote where he basically said, if I buy a hamburger at $2 and the next day they sell the same hamburger to me at $1, like, I’m happy.

You know, I can buy double the amount. It’s still the same company. There might be, like, a different price on the stock ticker, but it’s still the same company. And that’s also if I look at the last twelve months, I think in almost every domain of the business, we’re a better company today than what we were twelve months ago. So that’s kind of like what really counts. And then in the long run, there will be times when when things look differently.

I don’t think it concerns me. When you look at different consumer categories, it’s very rare that you have a consumer category where one company has 100% market share. What you tend to have in consumer categories, you have one or two really big brands, usually global brands that own a large share of that category, but then you always have like smaller niche players. Tastes are very different, and that’s not only about food. Right? That’s in beauty. That’s basically everywhere in the direct to consumer or in different consumer categories.

You tend to have the gorillas in a certain category, and you tend to have a much more fragmented long tail because you also have long tail tastes and some niches.

So one of the first buckets people start saving is they’re going less to restaurants. That’s definitely what you have seen in previous recessions. The share of out of home food has actually declined, whereas the share of food that you consume inside your own home actually goes up. I think that’s something that is marginally positive for us. On the other hand, there are definitely some customers who are much more concerned about their disposable incomes, and they might think longer and harder about taking up a new routine.

And that’s also something that you can see with us. I think our existing customer base actually shows very good retention. They’re on average ordering more meals with us than they did before, part of that because we made a lot of investments into the assortment, into the menu. But in tough macro times, a little harder to get customers to that first purchase to basically say, I’m going to start something which maybe is the same price, maybe slightly higher. So I’d say we have now shown over the last two years that we can also navigate through economic cycles without having, like, a hugely negative impact on our business.

I’d say it’s a very different time than what it was maybe five or seven or eight years ago when the whole direct to consumer boom started. We started the company when direct to consumer was not really a term. I think we’re today one of the largest direct to consumer companies outside of China. I don’t really know any direct to consumer company that is much larger than we are, but it’s certainly like very different today than it was back then.

And I think back then, you had a lot of people that started the direct to consumer company by going to a retail store, looking at shelf space, looking at what are the most outdated brands there that could use a new font and a new branding, and you started your direct to consumer company, it was very easy to get the first customers in. And especially if you were operating in The US with such a large domestic market, it was very easy with one or two growth channels to actually get to 50 or 100,000,000 of revenue without being, like, extremely sophisticated.

I think very clearly those times are over, but I don’t think that the time for direct to consumer is over. Because in the end, right, direct to consumer means you make it more convenient for the consumer. The consumer probably has a lot more information, has a lot more advice, has a lot more crowd feedback on your products. So I think from a consumer perspective, direct to consumer is anything but that. But what you need to do today, you need to have a very differentiated proposition.

You need to either be deeply integrated on the supply chain, where you need to have a unique angle with distribution, where you need to be, like, very, very good to outperform some of your competitors or others to make the marketing equation work. But still, every single year, you have great direct to consumer companies being started. And every single year, you have great exits of direct to consumer companies, which have scaled to levels very few imagined they would actually get to.

I don’t think you can make a plain or broad statement that applies to all companies, but I do think they were I just

try.

A lot of companies ended up being venture backed when the better path would have been to raise an angel angel around trying to get to profitability and actually scale the business to a $102,100,000,000 in revenue. I’ve made a bunch of angel investments, and I’ve had that discussion with founders a lot where they say, like, you scaled the company to that level, you raised some venture money. I wanna do the same, and I very often advise them and said, like, look at the personal outcome for you.

The much less risky way is for many, many of those categories and many, many of those companies to not raise venture.

I think we have a number of particular features, characteristics of our business model, why it makes sense to raise venture. Number one, you’re cooking or eating basically on a daily basis. Right? It’s something that has like a very high frequency, which means what a lot of direct to consumer companies suffer from that they don’t get the frequency. We have very high frequency. Secondly, food is like such a big category that you can build like a really, really big company. So in the end, I think for what we actually did and achieved, we didn’t raise like crazy amounts of venture.

How much did you raise in the end? Up to IPO, we raised around about 300,000,000. We had a cumulative cash burn of about 300,000,000 before we actually started generating cash flow. And since we have started generating cash flow, I think about three years post IPO, we had our cash flow breakeven. And since then, we have returned cash to shareholders, invested in all the businesses, did M and A, etcetera. So I feel for the type of ambition level that we had and for the revenue growth and category that we were going after, it was not insane amounts that we raised.

We definitely developed our scar tissue around fundraising. We definitely started fundraising processes too late, and it was very, very close to actually closing around and getting it done.

So I think in the early days, there were one or two occasions where we were literally, like, three to five days before thinking about filing for chapter 11, which I guess is the is the is the right term, at least in US terms. Very, very close. Because in the end, I mean, you’re probably sitting on the other side of the table, but in the end, there’s always, like, you know, things popping up, gets delayed by two weeks, gets delayed by another month. There is this one document missing, etcetera, etcetera.

And all of a sudden, you’re like, hey, my duty is actually when I feel like I cannot be able to to do payroll, it’s actually my duty to flag that. They were definitely in the first one or two years, I think two occasions that I remember very vividly where it was very, very close to getting to that point.

I think it definitely helps when you run a profitable company. You definitely sleep much better. You still have, like, as many problems and as many things that worry you, but you don’t have this existential angst that you carry around with you. I think I definitely sleep better since the point that we were sustainably profitable and started generating, like, real profits. How do I deal with it? Generally, with stress, I think my way to deal with stress is just having, like, a very good routine of doing sports.

I’m a sports fanatic. It helps me clear my mind. It helps me get peace of mind. And every time I pick up one of many injuries that I pick up while doing sports and I can’t do something for two weeks or three weeks, I’m getting really anxious, and I can feel that I get, like, way more stress, that I don’t feel as healthy, that I don’t feel as fit, that I do feel a lot more stressed.

In the end, it’s always a race against yourself and against your mind and how you feel about things. You have all those cases where people, you know, from one day to the next make a lot of money, and that high goes away after two or three months already. And I think that is something that in the end, you need to be at peace with yourself, always just a race against yourself. Yes. You can probably afford a nicer chair and a better laptop and a nicer mattress.

But in the end, it’s all about being in control of your head, in control of your mind, and being at peace with yourself. I think that’s the most important thing.

I would describe it with problem solving at scale. I don’t wanna take the easy route. I wanna figure things out. It’s that sense of competition. It’s that sense of winning, and it’s that sense of probably, like, proving yourself over and over again that you can do it, but that is something that I really enjoy.

The differences really all go back to just the massive size of the domestic market in The US. Right? The massive TAM that you can go after. If you’re operating in such a big domestic TAM, you’re making right from the start, you tend to make different decisions. You’re trying to scale much faster. You’re trying to hire more expensive people because in the end, you’re gonna have a lot more operating leverage. You’re gonna have higher salaries. You’re probably not caring as much about the details as about telling your vision.

What I always felt is that bringing some of the more European skill sets, diving deep, more of an engineering mindset, having attention to detail to such a large domestic market like The US is like a really great success formula. The size of the domestic market caters more towards certain types of founders than what you tend to find in Europe. And what that means is that if you have grown up as a company in Europe and you go to The US, you definitely need to throw overboard a lot of the things that you feel that you have learned.

What do you need to throw overboard? I think number one, everything that you know about competition will be 10 x what you’ll what you’ll find in The US. Because the size of the price is just so much bigger that you will naturally have more competitors going after the same space. They will be able to raise vastly more venture capital than any of your competitors could do in in Europe. They will probably kind of, like, move equally fast as you do or even faster. So I think that’s just one of the those notions where we also struggled in the beginning, Like, what does that actually mean now?

Do we need to pay people very differently now? That was definitely, like, a big discussion. Right? And that, I think, is a big discussion for every for every company from Europe that goes to The US.

In the beginning, it’s a lot more cowboy math that you need to do and where you need to get comfortable with certain levels so that you can actually build a competitor that’s worth competing with.

So the approach to fundraising as well. Right? I believe for my seat round and for my series a round, I’ve been asked about providing business plans for the next five years, which were obviously all made up, etcetera. That is also like very different in The US. I think it has changed. We have been public since 2017. But back in the day, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, I think that environment was very, very different, and it was very different what people were asking for.

We had the notion that we wanna run this company for a long time. When you raise a lot of venture capital, you need to make a decision. Are you gonna sell that company, or are you gonna take it public? My view is the price at which you go public is completely irrelevant. Almost nobody sells at the price of the IPO. Everybody is locked up. In the end, it just matters at the point sort of like when lockups are over, when somebody wants to sell, etcetera. So the price at which you go public doesn’t matter.

It’s all about grabbing the window. And we felt back in 2017, there was a window for business models like ours, tried to make sure that we can get out through that window, and then felt like if we establish a public market track record, then sort of like valuation will take care of itself versus saying like, hey, let’s optimize the last 10 percentage points and go public at that share price. And then, you know, the market is not there or you’re actually going public and six months later when lockups are up, kind of like you’re down 50%, the price at which you go public is completely irrelevant for everybody.

I think it’s irrelevant. First day price, completely irrelevant. The price after twelve months, after two years, yes, that starts being relevant. The price after three years, that’s what you should be optimizing for. Think about it like that. Right? I think also for us, if we had missed the window in 2017, potentially, there would have been another window in 2020. Now who knows whether that window actually opens or not? Whether you have a big crisis like the pandemic coming and the window is actually closed or not?

All of the macro factors that you have that you can’t control. There is so much uncertainty. History is littered with companies that wanted to go public and optimize and squeeze out the last 10% for the first day, and they missed the window and then had to do emergency fundraising if they weren’t profitable or put a lot of structure and ratchets in. We never had any structure. We never had any ratchets. We always were, like, very conservative on that end, and we wanted to go kind of, like, very quickly towards having common shares, no pref stacks in there.

And we felt like if there is a window, we wanna go out. And then on public markets, we can prove ourselves and everybody can decide. Let’s make a decision whether that was successful or not three years in. In the end, I think it was the right decision. I think the way that our category traded would have not allowed us to IPO the business at any other point in time.

I don’t particularly enjoy being the center of attention. I can be fairly good at it, but I just don’t enjoy it that much. I always have to push myself. I think they are important up to a certain point, but it’s definitely something that I’m definitely scoring very light on that one.

There’s like different stages. And definitely in the beginning, I think we prioritized a lot frugality and mostly recruited friends, family, and acquaintances. That’s also always what I tell everybody in my angel portfolio. If you cannot convince some of your friends, family or acquaintances to join your company, then either your idea is not that good, or you’re just not a great salesperson. After that period, you have the opportunity for a couple of years to hire for raw smartness only. You don’t need to hire for a lot of experience at that point in time.

Business tries to figure itself out. All of the domains kind of like are still open. We’ve had really good experience with hiring people with very high degree of raw smartness, putting them on certain domains, and those people over the sort of like next five, seven years becoming like some of the deepest domain experts in those topics. And I think back then, my board always pushed me during that stage. I think that is what he’s referring to, always pushed me at that stage to to hire more experienced people, to hire people that have led larger organization, larger teams, etcetera, etcetera.

But we always felt like we need people who are super scalable in terms of their skill set, in terms of their personality, who have an incredibly high work ethics. I think back in those days was very much expected of everybody to stay in the office till 10PM. I think that’s also very different today. But nonetheless, I think that was a time where we hired for raw smartness only. And I think that was, at that point, I think very contrarian with some of both our US investors versus our European investors.

Are you back in office? For a certain amount of time, I think it’s very important for collaboration and also for mentorship and building team cohesion.

Yeah. Look. One of the biggest trends in in engineering is mob programming, which basically means, like, you’re getting together three people around one laptop, giving them each other instant feedback. There’s a huge value in that. Everything that has to do with planning, that has to do with aligning on strategy, figuring out architecture, playing thoughts back and forth, these things work way better. I do think if you have a plan, if you need to deliver, if it’s like very clear what are the milestones, where do you need to get to, then potentially you don’t need to necessarily sit next to your colleague.

But I do think there are huge benefits to working together very, very closely and having strong bonds in your team.

Alright.

Everything around tactics is much more important than strategy. If you have the right strategy, you don’t need to change your strategy every six months, every year. You have a long term strategy, three to five years, and you are spending 99% of your time on tactics.

Going back to my youth fascination with professional football, I probably would love to be the CEO of a Premier League football club for a day. Which one? Oh, I don’t mind that much. I think it’s not so much my my personal affiliation with any club as to rather wanting to to be on the table and understand how those businesses are run, how sophisticated some of the decision making is, etcetera, etcetera.

In my view, competition is a constant source of innovation and inspiration. I think it’s extremely arrogant to not pay super close attention to competition, and I’m not only talking about your direct competitors. I’m also talking about all other companies that market to consumers that wanna reach the same consumer. Like, what are they doing? What are they experimenting with? What have they learned? Thousands of super smart people at all of those companies which are thinking every day about how to reach customers, how to build new technology, etcetera, to not listen to them, observe them, and not basically get inspired and see that as as a big shortcut to your own experimentation and learning is extremely arrogant in my view.

I’m probably gonna choose, Jeff Bezos. It’s such an outlier, such an anomaly how Amazon has scaled with such high investments in infrastructure, in technology and processes, reinvented how people think about organizations. And given that I’m also building in that space sort of like at the intersection of supply chain, marketing, and technology, I probably have questions for two weeks straight.

I think DoorDash has done an amazing job. I don’t think they’re directly competitive with us, maybe on the margin, like we’re going after the same wallet. In the end, I think the way that they have also had a huge focus on operational excellence, how they have scaled in non obvious ways where everybody else in that space was focusing on other areas, had a certain hypothesis, and they took the contrarian view, have a business that is, I think, operationally also very challenging, a three sided marketplace. That is something that I have huge respect for, and I think they’ve built like a massive the successful business, and they’re very much focused on the long term.

Tony and the team are doing such an amazing job. How do you think about your relationship to money, Dominik? There is a certain threshold where probably some things become a lot easier and a little bit more comfortable, but it’s not the main motivator in everything that you do or that you should be doing.

I think best piece of advice is, I would say, like, question a lot of things and, like, form your own view. I always feel if you’re too much trying to follow the crowds, if you’re not thinking first principle, if you’re not kind of, like, asking the tough questions, then very often, you know, you end up being above average, but you’re never gonna be, like, part of the 0.1% in whatever domain you choose. I think you have to be contrarian to out execute and outperform the 99.9% of others.

Work is part of life. I don’t think that you need to be in balance. You should be enjoying what you’re doing, and I think it’s very fluid between am I reading that article or that book because it makes me a better CEO, or am I reading it because I actually enjoy it? Am I reading that report or that consumer research that my team has prepared because I’m very interested or because I have to? I think that that whole term always assumes that work is bad and life is good, but in the end, sort of, like, they’re very tightly connected.

And work is part of life, so everybody needs to be balanced in some way, but it’s not necessarily between work and life. You read books? I probably read about 25 to 30 books a year.

Probably an obvious one because a lot of people have been talking about it, but, the Elon Musk biography definitely allowed me to pick up, some things and also understand, like, some of the companies much, much better. There were definitely some elements of SpaceX in particular that I didn’t understand as well before the book and then after.

I think most likely, I’d I’d still be running HelloFresh. Hopefully, HelloFresh at that point, not only $2,000,000,000 business lines like we have today with our meal kits and our ready meals, but with a lot more different business lines that we have at that point, still solving problems at scale with some of the smartest people in the world. If I ever wake up and I feel this is not fun any longer, I feel like I’m not spending my time problem solving, but I’m spending my time solving other people’s problems and not my own problems and not problems that I’m excited about, then you’ll probably find me either on a beach or running a football club.

If after the one day that I sneak into the boardroom, I find that exciting enough.

It was a lot of fun. Thanks a lot, Harry.