Wolt CEO, Miki Kuusi on Leadership Lessons Scaling to a Reported $8.1BN Exit to Doordash

but I started in university in 2009 right after the financial crisis, and in hindsight it was a really good time to start in university. It’s like starting university today because when the world looks as fucked as is right now, that’s a really good place to be starting something new. Why? Because there’s going be a lot of things that get cleaned up from the economy. Right now you can see a lot of tech companies, for instance, laying off people after a decade of firming fighting for talent, which means that it’s a really great time to start a new company.

There’s a lot of people that are willing to take risks that are available in the labor market and so forth, so it’s this phase of economy and if you start to work on something new, you benefit out of whatever may come next. So high side was a very lucky time, the two thousand and eight financial crisis, I ran into this group of people that were talking about startups and TechCrunch and Facebook and Twitter in 2009 when, like in Europe, no one knew what any of those things were.

I just got hooked. This was a world that was talking about building stuff. This is a world where people were talking about how the world is changing when I was a little bit afraid starting in uni that the world is ready. It’s already been defined. We only get to live in it. And then you realize that hell, it’s this internet revolution. Everything is going online, a world of opportunity. It’s at the start. It could be hoped that I went with it. And over those years, I did many things in those years, but I just realized that we are living through this almost industrial revolution.

The world is going online, every industry is being redefined, every service, every part of the world being thought of in a new way because you can organize things more efficiently, differently because of the internet. And for me the moment was realizing that the smartphone in everyone’s pockets, like iPhone came out in 2008, it’s going to become a remote controller for everything we have in life. And I want to be a part of defining what that remote controller is going to do. Now, vault was the hypothesis was what is the button for food going to look like and ultimately for local services and everything in the city.

No. Wolt’s founding thesis was that, okay, the world is going online, consumers want interact with different services using their phone, it’s going to start with things that are easy to do as a pure digital service, music or entertainment or video or news and so forth, and eventually you end up with all the physical services, the things that are more difficult to do as an online thing because you have to do a hybrid of online and offline. And I was like, what is this going to mean to local services?

The restaurant is the biggest local service, we eat every day. What is the button for food going to look like on the phone? So we started with a vision. We didn’t start with, We have a problem. We’re going to fix this problem. We were like, The restaurant and food is going to end up as a button on the phone and we’re going to figure out how it happens. And the argument thesis was about, We’re going to do everything about the restaurant online. We’re going to take the order online, the transaction online, if there’s a reservation, we do a reservation, if there’s delivery, we do delivery, we do a takeaway, we do discovery.

We’re going to build the Spotify of people figuring out what are the most popular dishes in the city. Like, you like chicken and avocado? We’re going to find you the most popular chicken avocado including dish in the city that people that have similar things you like also like in that city. And we started with pickup. We started with a simple app, order in the app, there’s an iPad at the restaurant, we handle the transaction, the order, and you can order in take away. Man, we thought it would be a revolution.

If you could do this stuff with your phone, people are just going to use it. And we’re like, Yeah, there’s a few people that like to use it. They’re very sticky, but it’s not the explosive product market fit that we were hoping for. And that we found in delivery, but it was definitely not the first thing we tried. So when you had delivery, then you saw a media

Yeah, the biggest realization was that every e commerce company is as much of a consumer facing brand as they are a logistics company, because there’s a coupling of things going online and people wanting things to come to them. So we’ve realized that the magical product market fit for the restaurant was not really taking people to the restaurant, it was taking the restaurant to them. And most restaurants didn’t used to be available to people’s homes or offices, and that was the magical thing. And to make it into an app, it was quick, it was reliable, if something went wrong there was really good service, it was the restaurants that didn’t used to be available for delivery, it was golden.

And suddenly you could redefine what delivery was. Restaurant food delivery used to be a market where you’re hangover at home on a Sunday, it’s too painful to even crawl to the fridge. So you can do anything on a website even if it takes you an hour to fill in the order and another hour to get the order because it’s better than the pain of what the next best alternative is. But we’ve got to redefine that. We’ve to do it into a five second experience for lunch.

Cruel

I think it’s always harder than ever. I think consumer expectation will keep on increasing, not just from where we started and where we are today, but also where we’re going to be in five or ten years. Consumer experience, in our case, we like to think that it’s okay, it’s selection, it’s what you can order on the platform, it’s affordability, is it inexpensive to use, can you use it every day, it’s quality, like is it quick, we promise next, we deliver on next, what if something goes wrong?

All three, the expectation goes up. It has to be cheaper, it has to be better, it has to be more reliable, you need to have better selection, you need to have things available that are not available in the physical world and the race to build a company like us is to just be able to continue to improve as consumer expectations also improve. Otherwise, you’re out of business.

So for me, performance is all about focus. There’s a word that everyone in our company knows that’s gonna be focus because there are too many things we can spend time on in the current world. I was at Supercell back in 2012 when the company was working on its first mobile titles that came like Clash of Clans and Hay Day. I remember when we had Clash of Clans testing in North America and Canada, and it was only available on the iPhone. We could see the data. It looked like this is going to be a hugely popular game.

Every number was off the charts when you looked at what games were back then in terms of numbers. I asked Ilkka, the founder and CEO of Supercell, that we’re not working on an Android version. People are gonna see what we’re doing and they’re gonna try to out trace us to Android. We should start probably working on an Android version right And Ilkka was like, Yeah, I’d be thinking about this. We’re a small company, 35 people back at the time with 10,000,050 million dollars in funding. We get one chance.

We either get it right or we blow it. And if we blow it, we’re not going get a second chance. Why would we split our efforts, split our people, split our focus to try to succeed on two platforms versus putting all into one platform and succeeding on that? What happened was that Supercell launched Clash of Clash very famously only two years later on Android. That’s what focus means. Focus means making difficult decisions to put all of your effort in the smallest possible subset of things. And if I now think about performance, it’s the ability to decide what exactly are the things that you need to get right and getting that to the smallest possible area as an individual, as a team, as in a company.

What’s been the hardest

We started with this grand vision of the everything app, every local service, everything you can buy in a city, can get on our platform. We wanna do everything. We restaurant, grocery. We want do clothes, electronics. We want to do services. We want to sell you mover tickets. That’s the vision of the company. And for the five first years of our existence, restaurant food delivery. When we saw that it worked, we cut everything else. This is really difficult to do. We’re only going to focus on doing this with great, quick, consistent customer experience and efficiency and good internet economics.

That was a very difficult decision over years to keep on bringing people back to the fact that we still want to do all of these other things, but right now we need

of our early investors, Patrick from Lifeline Ventures, once told me a story that he had a company that was a small team, like 15 people, and they figured out they had a good product market fit and they were growing. And they figured out something that was really, really interesting, that had also a great product market fit and a huge opportunity. And the team came to him and asked them, How should we do this? Should we split the team and have part of the team work on this or spit out another company?

Petru was like, You probably shouldn’t split a raisin because it’s already so small that having half a raisin is not very intelligent. The reality is that I think people just try to do too many things too early. And that’s been the case when Wolt started to expand really beyond the restaurant. That was when COVID started. We were not originally meant to go as early and as wide into the grocery space, and when COVID started, saw that this is the perfect storm, so it’s now or never.

But the reality is that at that time, we had raised close to a 250,000,000 in financing. The company was five, six, seven, eight hundred people. Think about how sizable we were as a company, and that’s let’s do thing number two. And now we’re a 7,000 person company, and we can do way more things today, but I think people are just going

if you think about companies, product market fit or if you have product market fit. If you don’t know that you have product market fit, you don’t have product market fit. It’s as simple as that. It’s something you can feel. It’s something everyone can see. It’s just drawing you in and it’s helping you grow and helping you prioritize things and so forth. If you don’t have product market fit, it’s incredibly difficult to figure out what are the things that help you get there, but realizing that you don’t have it means that you need to change something, need to do something differently.

I’m one of these people that tries to be hyper focused on things that matter. I feel guilty about doing stuff like this, for instance. I don’t do a lot of interviews because this doesn’t help me succeed as a company. It’s nice to have visibility and this stuff, that’s not what is gonna make or break the company if I think about end of this year or next year. So I always feel guilty when I’m doing stuff that is not directly contributing to the fact that how we’re gonna succeed.

I think in hiring, what I’ve learned is that I have to do an on stage session once every year or every two years because whenever I meet candidates for final interviews, most of them have watched me on YouTube do some talk. I realized, oh, actually, I have to do these things because people actually do watch this shit. For me, it’s more about the, should he just cool my career and business shit? No. It is valuable. The point I’m going for is that I try to have around, let’s call it, 80 or 90% of my time on things where I can see a direct correlation to the things that I’m trying to move.

I don’t do a lot of talks. Don’t do a lot of interviews. I don’t go to a lot of events. One thing I like to do is help new entrepreneurs and new companies and I try to spend some time on that, but I do spend too much time with people outside of our customers and partners and employees in the company. I try to focus on as CEO, my job is to help the team succeed. My job is to make sure we have the right team. I try to focus on that.

Then there’s always that 10% to 20% that you have to spend on serendipity. You have to take leaps of faith. It’s like brand marketing. You don’t necessarily know what it’s going to do for the company. If people know your name as a company, it’s likely to lead to some good things. So how much of your efforts do you put into that? That’s a very good question. But if you don’t know how valuable it is, probably you’re not gonna put like a 100%.

was an early stage CEO of Slush, my previous company, my chairman of the board at the time, an experienced investor told me that, Miki, as CEO, you’re like the knight on the white horse. You want to be there at the front with your sword in the air, leading the troops to the battle. But if you want to build something big, something scalable, you need to be able to build a team that is able to succeed without you. And your biggest KPI at the end of the day is if you die tomorrow, is the company still going to succeed?

Are you able to build something that succeeds in your absence? I think if I look at the methodology of the founder or the all powerful CEO, it’s almost like creating this picture of someone that hires everyone up until a thousand employees, which to me tells that, oh, you don’t trust your people to hire people. Because ultimately, your job as a CEO is to build a team that succeeds without you, to build a team that you can trust to hire really good people. Because if you’re required for every hire, your company is not gonna be a very scalable hiring operation.

talking about culture. So how do you create a culture where people actually care? People act like owners. The easiest way to make someone act like an owner is to make them an owner. That’s why I’m a big believer in having equity programs and in Volt up until very late stages, every single employee was a stockholder or shareholder or an option holder of Volt. It starts with compensation. If you don’t incentivize people to be there for the company, how can you expect them to be there for the company?

Then it goes to culture and the kind of people you hire, and ownership is a big part of that, giving ownership over things. You don’t need to be an owner in something to feel like an owner. Like Slush, when we started building the tech conference out of Helsinki, we set it up as a nonprofit. Yet if I look at our team, if I look at the current team, all the teams in between, they have an incredibly high ownership over what they’re building. But they don’t own it.

It’s a nonprofit. There’s a foundation behind it. Why? Because they make the decisions. They are accountable. It’s their thing. It’s their baby that they’re building, that they’re molding, that they over some time then pass on to the next generation. So it’s about true ownership. I think how you get people to care about the small things is that you give them ownership over the big things. And when people are responsible for the big things, they start to care about the small things that contribute to those big things.

People talk about delegating as if delegating is, I don’t want to do something, I’m going to delegate it to you, and now you have to do it. But I think the bigger thing is that I’m going to make you the owner of whatever area we’re talking about, and if there are small things related to that area, that’s your responsibility because you you own the area. You know, you’re going to make it or break it for us in this thing. Ownership leads people also caring about details.

If they feel like owners, they’re going to also

The first thing is that you have to have the right people. I joined Supercell as a 20 year old kid, not knowing anything about games and not knowing anything about the gaming industry or free to play games. And Ilkka is the founder and CEO of Supercell. He’s a huge ice hockey fan. He talked about how he wants to build the winning ice hockey team that’s going to win the Stanley Cup biggest prize in the NHL. You would ask him, What does this mean? And he’s like, A lot of companies say they want to be a family.

We want to be a team. They share a lot of similar qualities. You support each other in both. You go through the thick and thin. You’re gonna be there on the rainy day and the sunny day. But the difference between a team and a family is that a team is defined by its capability to win. A team that doesn’t win matches is not going to be a team for too long. Whether it’s a family, gonna be a family no matter what. Whether you like it or not, you’re connected by blood.

So in team you make difficult decisions. You hire people, you fire people. If the team is not working and you have five players on ice plus the goalie, you can’t like double the number of players. You need to change players on the ice. The way you can give responsibility to people is that you’re very rigorous about setting a high bar to hiring people, but also that you’re making difficult decisions if something is not working out. So this way you’re not creating a culture of micromanagement where, because there’s someone in the team that is not able to live up to this kind of ownership and responsibility, you’re making everyone’s lives a lot more managed.

But also, if you onboard someone to do something new, they’re not gonna be as good as your day one. So you need to spend time on them, you need to invest them, you need to do things together, then you let them fly on their own wings, and if it doesn’t work out, you accept the fact it’s not going to be perfect on day one. And ultimately, you go forward two years in time and you’re like, Man, this person is a lot better than I ever was in doing this thing.

You need to have the patience.

concepts: trust and safety. Trust is very important. Trust is that we’re going to treat you fairly. If you’re doing badly, having a divorce, burning out, we’re going to make sure we take care of you. We’re going make sure that all you need to take time off from work, that you’re not feeling so well. That’s trust. Trust is also, Oh, this is not working out anymore, Harry. You’re a great person, but you need to find a better place for. You’re ambitious of what you’re doing and we need to find the right person in this role, but we’re to straighten you fairly.

We’re not going to leave you on top of nothing. We’re not going to do the bare legal minimum, but you’re just about to hit your cliff. We’re going give you your cliff. We’re going to give you some months of salary so you can take a break and figure out what you want to do next. Trust is important, but safety, no. If you want to build something that is able to be successful, you need to have a high performance environment. And in a high performance environment, the team knows that they’re as strong as the weakest player on ice.

And you need to have strong players on ice so that you’re able to win matches. Why are we playing this game if we don’t want to win? We need to be able to win matches. So I’m not a big believer in safety. I’m a big believer in trust, in giving people opportunities, giving people the opportunity to learn, to grow, to make mistakes and so forth. But at the end of the day, you still have to make difficult decisions about making sure that you have the right people in the right places.

I don’t remember parting ways or firing someone because of mistakes that they would have made, but it’s ultimately about trust when trust is violated. I can’t trust that this person owning this area, that they’re going to do a good job without having to be involved, without having to follow what’s going on and so forth. So it’s not about individual mistakes. Trust is a binary thing. There’s either trust or there’s no trust. As long as there’s that trust, people can make mistakes. As long as you understand that this is why it was done, and it was done and got conscious, and they tried their best, and they learned from it, and so forth, mistakes are more than fine.

That’s how you learn. Do you start from a relationship with full trust and it’s yours to be lost? Or do you start with little and it’s there to be gained? I try to start with an assumption of trust, and that’s what we also say within the company. Assume good intentions. Assume that people are trying to help the company succeed. That’s my starting point. But if I have something that I’m personally very passionate about, something that I’ve been close to during the history of the company, I’m not going to be very trusting until I see that you’ve got it.

The first person to lead product outside of myself involved. The first person to lead brand outside of myself involved. These kind of things that are very close to my heart and I have a very strong opinion about those things. I’m not gonna let someone take it over and do whatever they can out of it before I see that they get it right, because I don’t want us to fuck the thing up.

once asked me, what has been the biggest thing you’ve had to sacrifice? Do these things have to build your company and your career. I came to the conclusion that it’s my mind space. It’s my freedom. It’s my free time because there’s none of it. You’re always going to be thinking about the next thing that the company has to do, the things that are threatening you. You’re always going to be pissed off by the things where someone is trading your company unfairly, writing a news piece, doing something as a competitor thing.

Ben Horowitz wrote a fantastic book called Hard Things about Hard Things, one of my favorite books on management, because it talks about the difficult time of management. In that book there’s a good chapter called Wartime CEO versus Peacetime CEO. And in this chapter Ben describes that a peacetime CEO is a CEO who thinks of competition as other ships in the vast blue sea, and you might never intercept with them. A poor time CEO thinks of competition as someone trying to break into your house and steal your kids.

And that’s the kind of industry I live in, like very hyper bloody competitive all the time. And the point is that you can’t turn this off. It’s always going to be with you. So you either learn to live with it or you don’t. It’s the same today as it was eight years ago. I’ve just

A friend of mine who’s an entrepreneur once told me, being an entrepreneur is great. You get to choose when you want to work. Any sixteen hours per day will qualify.

It is a lonely job to be the CEO of a company because I describe being a CEO as being the single point of failure between two pyramids, one at the bottom and one at the top connected by their tips. On the top, have your shareholders, you have your investors, you have your former employees, your board, all these other people that they’re looking down and, Yeah, Miki, you got this. And then you have everyone in the building, which is like all of your employees, everyone in your team, your co founders, everyone, everyone is looking up, Miki, you got it.

You’re standing in the middle like, why is everyone staring at me?’ That’s oftentimes what it feels like being the CEO. There’s a really difficult position and everyone has opinions and a good conversation and then ultimately people look at you and say, what do we do?’ So it’s a very lonely job. One thing that has helped me is that since founding Wolt in my previous company, I realized that oftentimes as an inexperienced leader, you’re trying to protect the team from things you’re afraid of, from things that keep you up to night.

You’re like, I’m going to protect the team from these things and if they knew all these things, would they be able to work or would they even be here? They would probably leave the company. If they knew all the shit I knew. And I realized that, first of all, that’s very heavy. You burn out very easily if you’re making yourself a single point of failure and secondarily, your team is not gonna be able to work with full information to try to succeed. So I decided from the early days of Wolt that everything I know, everything I’m concerned about, everyone of my co founders knows, everyone in our management knows and my chairman of the board and board know.

So I’ve always acted on full transparency. There’s nothing going on with a company that I wouldn’t have shared with these groups of people. And you know what? It’s not as lonely. It’s not as heavy on your shoulders. And if the team comes up with a lot smarter solutions to these things than you would ever come up on your own.

One of my biggest lessons of hiring came from a guy called Case Kuhani. He was the CEO of booking.com from a 20 person company to, I think, the biggest consumer software company out of Europe. And Case told me that one mistake people make in hiring is that they’re looking for the person that has already done what you need. We need to hire that person. He’s done this before and he’s going do it for us and it’s going be amazing. But what people don’t realize is that very few people do these things twice in their life.

And actually what you need to be looking for is this person before they did the thing. Okay, in this company there’s a person that did the thing that we now need. I need to look at what was that person before they started that company. You’re looking for that person. And that’s been my biggest learning in hiring is that you ultimately need to be able to grow a lot of people with your company, take a lot of bets on people, and you need to be able to hire for that potential.

It’s so easy to go to this mode that you’re just trying to hire the logos into your company and the past experiences, but actually you build a successful company by having a large group of people that do those things for the first time with you.

this question is like asking a developer. So how do you write code? You have to write these lines. That’s what you do. What are growth companies? Growth companies are glorified recruiting operations and every single senior person in a growth company has to become a great recruiter. What is a great recruiter? A great recruiter is someone that can get people as excited about the opportunity as they are. That is the art. There’s a lot of things that you can do. I remember when we expanded to new countries as well that no one had ever heard of us and we didn’t announce a round of financing for three years.

We had raised financing, but we kept a low profile. We didn’t do any press because we didn’t want anyone noticing what we were doing. So we’re hiring people and people are like, Wolt sounds like a company that’s going go bankrupt because you haven’t raised funding in such a long time and so forth. So we just started hacking this thing. We noticed, for instance, that when using my LinkedIn profile to contact someone for a GM position hire in a country where no one’s ever heard of us, my profile had better conversion of the people responding back to me.

So I started writing these cold messages to people about these roles, and then when we started to scale that, some of our recruiters had my LinkedIn password and username, so they could write messages as Miki being like, Hey, you look like a really interesting person for this role we’re thinking and this is what we do. You be interested to talk more? I’ll connect you with the recruiter, as the recruiter writing the message. There’s a lot of this kind of hacking that we had to do in the early years because you’re literally looking for the people.

This is like zero CVs coming your way, putting an application open, zero people applying for it. You need to go out and hunt and get people excited about the opportunity and sell the opportunity, and then you have the chance to try to figure out, is this the right person for the company or not?

We brainstormed series a was €10,000,000 in January 2016. The next round we raised was in January 2018, two years later, that was our €27,000,000 Series B. And then we raised our Series C in April 2019, which we announced in June alongside with our Series B. From January 2016 up until June 2019, no press, no international English speaking press on hold. The reason was very simple. I just realized that our consumers and our merchants and people working with us as couriers don’t read international tech press. They care about whether we’re doing something that has value for them.

I realized that when you do these articles, people are excited about you and they contact you and you get all these opportunities and people want you to speak here and there and so forth and you get distracted. I just realized that we can be a lot more focused when it is us figuring out who we want to talk to, where we want to go, what we want to do, and then we can always reach out to Harry because we think Harry is a great candidate for GM of UK.

And being like Harry, we don’t do a lot of stuff. We try to a low profile, but this is who we are. This is what we have done. This is who’s invested. And people feel it led on a secret. This is something that most people don’t know yet about. So at least it worked for us, but our industry is a cutthroat industry. We went to Japan. After announcing all these rounds and everything. Foreign companies followed us in the half year that followed. Our industry is an industry where people do watch what others are doing.

Why the thought did you choose Japan? I remember reading this, was like, We’ve always looked at the globe as our kind of home base. The reason we stuck to Europe in the early years was that time zones are expensive. Lunar flights are more expensive. If you need to support customers six time zones away, it means there’s gonna be engineers up every night pretty late. And if you have a 20 person engineering team, man, that team is going to be under a lot of stress very quickly.

So, okay, let’s go south because the time zones are going be similar. But we were always looking at the whole globe, we just saw that’s an interesting market because it’s underpenetrated. It’s a very difficult market, but it’s an underpenetrated market in our industry. And that’s how we’ve expanded. We’ve always looked for the places where we can create the most value with the most efficient investment.

logos. Had another company that was interested in acquiring our company many years ago, I’m not going mention the year. They had a very impressive team. Their management team came to Helsinki and we spent time with them and we had all these dinners and stuff and so forth and ultimately they gave us an offer in the company that we ultimately said no to. And I remember my co father, he was talking about the VP of engineering of that other company and he was like, Yeah, he has a really impressive CV and he was in this company in Silicon Valley and that company in Silicon Valley and that company in this role and he’s involved in that project we all heard about.

Yeah, this is a very similar person to the best people or some of the people we see in Helsinki, but the logos are more well known. And I just remember being like, yeah, that’s a really good point. You get dazzled by these logos because they’re global services you’ve heard of, but it doesn’t mean that you wouldn’t have fantastic people in companies you’ve never heard of. That’s really the art and the skill, and I think my biggest mistakes in hiring, we’re going after logos, we’re going after this person has done this and that in this company and that company, and later on you realize that actually you need people that are very capable.

They can come in big companies or from other companies.

like several times. I’d the CEO of Wolt since I had an idea to a founding team to around 7,000 people today. The role has changed quite significantly on the journey and there’s been multiple points in time when I felt I’m underwater and I’m going to drown unless I somehow figure out a way to get back on top. It’s a vivid experience I remember. The same case Kuhlan, he led our series a fromikiT Ventures. Now we had this session in Amsterdam for over eight hours. We were talking about the booking story and he was an early investor in Uber and he was very involved in the early days of Uber and he explained the Uber story and so forth and what there to learn.

And one of the things he said to me was that, Miki, the most important hire you’re gonna make next is that you need a great recruiter. I’ve never met a recruiter in my life. Never worked at a real company outside of Supercell, and Supercell didn’t really have full time recruiters back then. And I’m like, what does a recruiter do? What does a great recruiter look like? Man, I have no idea what I’m doing. I remember feeling this uncomfortable feeling of having absolutely no idea what recruiting is or how it works or what a great recruiter is, and mind you, I’ve been doing a lot of recruiting, but I have no idea what a recruiter is.

I still remember how uncomfortable it was for the weeks that followed that I started to pick apart this problem and meet with recruiters and try to figure out what they do and try to figure out what great looks like and ultimately we hired our first recruiter. Same thing, we raised our Series B. We’re like, we’re running out of money in six months. We need to raise a growth round. We have absolutely no idea how you raise a growth round. Unless we do this, we’re gonna run out of money.

And I remember we were making a deck with my CEO, what does a deck for a growth round look like? Absolutely no idea. I would blow up the first couple of investor meetings, oh, this company doesn’t know what they’re doing, and you learn that we somehow were able to pull together the round. That sounds a 100. That’s what it’s like to be a CEO of this kind of a growth company.

So rightsizing a company is easy in occupations where the relationship with the person’s work and the value they’re creating is very connected. If you’re running a restaurant, you either have enough waiters and waitresses serving customers, you either have enough chefs or not enough chefs in the kitchen. If you have too many, you probably should have less and pay less, so you get the efficiency through that. If have too little, you probably should hire more. And then you find this equilibrium and you’re like, great, we were able to make all the dishes, customer experience was great, not too much slack time, the economics looked good.

So right sizing this kind of an operation is easier by customer support. But when it comes to engineers, the issue is that there’s not this direct correlation. If we have a thousand engineers today, we can build all these beautiful products and everything and it’s going to be amazing and so forth, and we only have 50. Should we have 100, 200, 150? Should we have it in one year, two years, five years? So the issue is that in these kind of occupations where it’s not immediately clear what the value creation of each individual is, it’s very easy to overhire.

Things are going well. The company is growing like hell. It’s very competitive. Everyone is afraid of someone else beating you to the opportunity, so you just have to be safe hiring as fast as you can if you can. And then when the market changes, you’re a little bit what do we actually need? And then it might look very different. And I think different companies have been built differently to our benefit. We haven’t had to go through any layoffs, God forbid, in the current landscape at least so far.

And the reason is that we were just always very careful because we were always running out of money. We were always on the little bit more conservative side of the spectrum. I think different companies are built differently, but ultimately the core problem is that it’s not easy to right size these things where technically WhatsApp was 20 people when it was acquired by Facebook and today Meta is like 87,000 people. The right answer to how many people Meta needs is probably somewhere between twenty and eighty seven thousand people.

Where? It’s a very difficult question to answer. Totally agree. Do you agree

No. My thinking is that hiring is a commitment. When we hire someone, we’re serious. We are hiring someone because we want to commit to them or we want them to commit to us. We will have failed as a company if we part ways with you. We will still have to make those difficult decisions because we’re not going to be a successful company if we don’t make the difficult decisions. But companies that are like, Oh, we’re going hire 10 people and fire half of them, I don’t think that’s a great company.

I don’t think that’s a very high level of trustworthiness or integrity that the company is showing. I want to work for a company that I can work my ass off for, and the company is gonna be there for me even if I fumble and things go a little bit wrong because they see all the work I’ve done for the company. Then it it needs to be a two way street.

So my feeling was always that I’d rather be a little bit more generous than a little bit more stingy. That was my guiding principle. It’s the same thing about culture. I always earn the side of transparency. If there’s something I can share with the company, I always ask, Is there a reason I couldn’t share it? If there’s not, I’m going to share it. If I’m thinking about sharing it to the smaller group and I’m like, Is there some reason I couldn’t share it to the bigger group?

I will default to the bigger group. It’s the same thing with compensation. I try to on the side of training the employees, training the team more fairly than not. I think a lot of companies try to be a little bit too smart around all the terms and how quickly you need to subscribe your shares if you leave the company and the vesting periods and whatnas. My kind of thinking has been make it as vanilla, as fair as possible for the team. Up until we were like hundreds and hundreds of people, every single employee in the company was eligible to get stock options in the company.

Even when we were thousands of people and you came to customer support as a part time employee, there’s a way to become a stock option holder in the company. I remember the earlier days, I was in Czech Republic during the weeks we were launching it, and I meet with some of the local folks in the team, and I noticed that there’s an employee from our Baltic operation. And the guy is like a restaurant partner manager, helping acquire restaurants to the platform. And he’s helping the Czechian guy doing the same thing.

I’m like, Anthos, why are you doing here? And he’s like, yeah. We needed someone to onboard the new guy, and they called me in. Anthos, can you come to Czech Republic for a while and teach the new guy the ropes? I’ve realized now doing meetings with this guy for a couple of weeks that it’s not that different from where I’m from. But the point is, if that guy was incentivized based on how many restaurants they acquired in their home city or home country or whatever, what’s their incentive to really be out to the company?

A lot of companies say everyone is an owner and it’s a mission that we’re building this thing and so forth. But when you look at how they’re paying people, they’re paying people based on doing this. Then you’re expecting people to do that, to seek ownership and responsibility and fix the small things and take the trash and whatnot. If you want to build a company where people are in it for the company, you need to make sure that the company is in it for them.

I’ve noticed Twitter adds very little value in company building, unfortunately.

some entrepreneur says, Go through the wall, there’s some entrepreneur who’s like, Don’t hit your head at the wall, just go around it. That’s how it goes. There’s always two different ways to succeed in everything.

into Woltas, like, different roles. If Miki founding Wolt applied to work at Wolt today, I would at best work in customer support. At best. I would never qualify for the top 95% of the jobs in the company if I even qualified in the first place. I dropped out from university and I didn’t study at Stanford or MIT and I didn’t work at McKinsey, a Boston Consulting Group and all the biggest of the fastest companies in the world. I think the big realization is that as a company, you have to take more bets on people in the early days, and you also find people that take a bigger bet on you as a company.

And as a result, you get this very entrepreneurial type of bunch of people that can go through many very interesting and intriguing paths with the company’s growth. And then when we’ve become bigger and bigger, you’re just able to choose more and more merited and smart and driven and motivated and so forth people from around the world. That’s just the way it goes. You have to accept this, that at every stage you’re going to be hiring the best people that you can get and you’re going to get different profiles of people at different stages and that’s fine.

Also that the first person you hire to do recruiting in your company is probably not the person that runs a 100% recruiting organization where you’re way bigger. Also accepting that people change along the journey, that’s fine. Some stay with the company and they’re fantastic at what they do. There might be ICs, there might be team leads and you hire above them. Some people are going to have to leave the company. Some people are going to grow with the company and that’s fine. But for me the biggest learning is that the company in reality is a journey.

And in this journey, you have to optimize for each moment in the journey and then you accept that things are going to change. You learn new things, you change things and that’s how it goes. Which was the most difficult change? My most painful day in the world was 2017. We were running out of our series A. It was a horrible year of our industry. No one believed in delivery anymore, and Uber is going kill everyone anyway, and no one could raise money. And when we tried to raise our series B, everyone said no.

Every single investor we spoke with said no. So we had to part ways with one third of our staff in the summer of twenty seventeen. On a personal level, going through the day of the conversations, one on one, I wanted to do each and every one of them one on and I one on one told one third of our entire company, around 30 people back then, that I’m sorry. I fucked up. We can’t continue with any of you anymore. It’s a very tight spot. I hope we’re going be able to make it, but we need to be able to operate with the bare minimum.

That was the saddest, most difficult day I’ve had at work in my entire life. Ultimately, we came out of it stronger. We were able to have a little bit more runway. Every investor said no until we found one that said yes. And our journey continued and here we are today. The saying that rings with me from that time is, again, actually, Supercell founder and CEO of Ilkka has been a good friend and a mentor and he was on our board for many years up until the DoorDash transaction.

He told me that, Miki, the difficulty between bad and good companies is that bad companies don’t know what to do. Good companies do know what they need to do. The difference between good and great companies is that both know what needs to be done. Only the great ones execute on the truly difficult things. And when you have to lay off one third of your people because you know that it’s the right decision for you to be able to succeed, that’s a difficult decision to go through with.

easier on a personal level. The conversation of telling someone who fought hard for the company that this is not the right thing anymore. We’re not gonna be able to continue with you. It doesn’t get easier if you’re a small company or a big company. Actually, it’s a little bit easier even if you’re a small company because you have a more credible way of saying that we have to do this. In a 7,000 person company, sure, we have to do this. You individually can’t be here anymore.

I don’t think Mark Zuckerberg is going to go through 11,000 people personally. So sure, it’s going to be easier than having to lay off 20 people where you do it one on one. I’m sure Mark does like a lot of these one on one and so forth, but the point is that it’s more difficult when you do things in person. If you have a big company, you can rely on your management and your structures you have in place and you might be so far away from people that are impacted by some of these decisions that for you it’s a financial decision.

We need to cut this line by that much. But I don’t think it gets easier. It’s just that for companies that are big, they might have to deal with it in a similar fashion than a small company. It is harsh. You mentioned the investor

It’s Lauri Baurdan out of 83 North. 83 North, formerly Graylock in Europe. Like, Lauri is hands down truly the best growth investor I know of. I look to her immensely when it comes to her impact on Walden, what she’s like as an investor. Also her partner Arnon is just world class. There were the two involved in Walden. How it went actually, she was an early investor in Just Eat, so she sat on the board of Just Eat basically from I think series A or B until IPO, so she knew the industry.

I didn’t know this, but they had been looking for a company with our type of a model in The US. They had a hypothesis that there’s an opportunity in The US in these kind of underserved long tail markets in food delivery. They were trying to look for a company to invest in that space and they realized that a lot of restaurants don’t do delivery in these areas, so they figured that we have to invest in someone who does delivery as a service. Then they looked at close to a 100 companies doing what Wolt does and they concluded that this model does not work.

It is impossible to have great retention, and great unit economics and a viable business for the merchant and for the courier exist at the same time. I happened to run into someone who was like, You have to talk with Lauri and eighty three North. They did this just did. They know this industry. And I took a call with one of the more junior folks on their team and I haven’t heard of them as big, mighty Xmosh CEOs. I don’t know them, so they must not be relevant.

But I sent them the deck as a follow-up out of courtesy because I promised to do that. The next day, I got a phone call from an unknown British number, and I answered the call. He’s like, this is Laura Bowden for eighty three North. I saw your deck. You must be lying. These numbers can’t be true. And they ended up leading our series B. The only one investor that said yes. Everyone else said no. We even had an acquisition offer at 3x the valuation that we raised money at.

It was the stupidest thing I’d have ever done, raising that round being like, why the hell don’t we sell the company? No one believes in us if you look at the level of what we’re getting from an industry player.

me, this has genuinely never been about money. The moment I realized that this is not just something you say to investors to make them feel like you’re in it for the long term, you just want to run when someone gives you a cheque or offers you a cheque. The moment I realized that was when we got our first acquisition offer. This was 2015. We were one year old as a company and we got an acquisition offer which had cash or stock involved. In 2015, I was 26.

It was a big amount of money. When I started Wolt, my credit card was maxed out. I had €0 in my bank account. Was literally living from hand to mouth. I wasn’t one of these people that had money to go around or whatever. And I remember contemplating on it for quite a few nights and same with my co founders. I just ultimately came to the conclusion that I want to see what comes out of this. And there’s the same thing, the next acquisition offer we got was the same thing.

Sure, there’s a lot of money that you could have made in the moment, but we are not done. I realized over that time that for me it was never about the money. It was about the fact that we get this maybe once in a lifetime opportunity to build something and I wanna see what comes out of it. And to be frank, even with DoorDash, I’d sold secondary over the years, I’d made money in the later years. So it was not really about money. It was about can we build something bigger together than what we could build on our own?

For me, it’s always been about building, first and foremost. But I can say that that it’s not about money because I’ve literally said no to money and struggled for years after that position. That’s when you realize whether that’s actually true or not. What advice do you give to founders who are contemplating selling? So there’s a good piece of advice. P3R, chairman of the board in later years, said from Life Line mentions that he once spoke with someone from Sequoia and they said that out of their research of I think like 400 companies or something, one thing they noticed was that as a founder you are paranoid and fearful about losing that momentum.

What if it stops? It’s this competitor, that regulatory thing, this money running out, this economic change. You’re so afraid of losing that thing because it was so difficult to get it that you’re almost always mentally trying to run for the exit. Let’s sign this off as a success before it’s too late, before people see that we’re in reality a fraud and none of this was real and people just thought we were better than we were. And the Sequoia thing was that out of looking at 400 entrepreneurs, if you have achieved momentum, that momentum is statistically so incredibly difficult to lose.

Of course there’s going to be the case in FTX and so forth when things go horribly wrong, but those are the edge cases. Mostly when you get momentum, that momentum is not going to go away, and you have to manage your mentality as a founder and switch that we need to see where this goes. This is why I think secondary in later rounds is important because secondary a little bit relieves the pressure. It relieves the pressure of everything being in one basket. If we don’t make it, I’m going be out on the street.

My wife is going to leave me. I’m not going to have any money. I need to find a job because I don’t have money to live. So you take off that with secondary, you can be a little bit more rational. But the thing that helped me was this kind of realization that maybe I just have to trust what we’ve built that it’s going to carry on longer than right now. Every advice you hear from an entrepreneur, always be mindful about that. Because first of all, entrepreneurs, their successful selling advice is like a lottery millionaire telling that keep on betting, you’re going to eventually win.

It’s one in fifteen million. Keep on going. The point that, like, you have to take every piece of advice with a grain of salt. There’s different occasions, different kind of stories people go through, different kind of things work in different kind of places. But I think there’s also these 70% of the time this might apply. And you might be in the 30% and it doesn’t help you, but at

25 when I found it. Wolt, you’re very, very young. I’m 33, and I feel like super old when I’m talking with you right now.

I remember when I was a young student at the university dabbling in the world of startups and I ran into this older student that has started a gaming startup and they raised 2,500,000 from index. And they had this penthouse office, 15 employees, their their own sauna with a terrace with a view of the city in Helsinki. This is 2011 or something. And I was, man, these people are cool. They have their own company, have their own office and millions of financing and they’re building games and it’s the coolest thing ever.

I was like, you’ve made it when you make there. We raised €2,000,000 round of financing, our seed extension round back in 2015. I was like, fuck, we’re so underfunded. We need to get more financing. And we raised a €10,000,000 round of finance, Still so underfunded. We raised a 100,000,000. We raised 500,000. You get cities profitable. You get countries profitable. You sell secondary. You exit the company to DoorDash. There’s just always the next mountain. I’ve learned over the years that if you’re one of these personalities that just wants to build something, you’re never gonna be satisfied.

There’s never gonna be a mountaintop that you reach. And you’re looking back at where you came from and you’re looking down the other side of the mountain and you’re like, we made it. You’re just gonna come there and you’re gonna be, oh, I didn’t see that big before. And it’s a lot higher. And it’s a lot steeper. Man, we can’t stay here for too long because we have to keep on going. That’s what it’s like. You never really get to the point. People ask me how does it feel you’ve made it.

I’ve never felt I’ve made it. I’ve always felt we’re still in the way somewhere, and it’s a lot more difficult than the previous thing. And I’m not sure we’re gonna make it to the level of our ambition. But we’re gonna work our asses off to get there. I wanna move into a quick firearm, my friend. So I’m gonna say a short statement. You go and hear your thoughts. What’s your favorite book of mine? I don’t have time to read books, seriously. I read 200 pages of internal documents a day.

Welcome to a 20,000 person company, my friend. My favorite book though, it’s actually very clear from a professional point of view, that would be Hard Things About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz. If there’s a book I spent the most time on professionally, that’s that book. I’ve read the paragraph, the struggle, maybe, like, 20 times in my career. The paragraph about how to fire as an executive several times when I’ve had to do it, how to demote a loyal friend several times when I have to do it, Wartime CEO, peacetime CEO several times when I’ve been in a fucked up competitive situation.

So that’s really the only book that has really given me solace, because there’s a lot of these management books that tell you how to be an amazing leader. And then you’re like, how are you an amazing leader when you’re running out of money or competition is killing you, you’re not sure that you’re gonna be able to keep everyone that’s working on the team, you’re not sure that technology is gonna work out, the product is gonna work out, you’re doing the right decisions. How did you make great decisions and be a great leader in that instance?

That book I love for that reason that it gives you solace. Tell me, have you learned from Tony at DoorDash? So I had actually a personal blocking right to any M and A transaction fault. This is a blockade for allowing the company to be sold. It’s called managing director concept. It’s a stupid thing we negotiated as part of while we’re around. But the point is that I wouldn’t have gone for this if it didn’t feel like the right decision, not just for the shareholders and the employees and the company, but also from a personal growth perspective.

Tony is a leader that I look up to. He’s a leader that I’ve already learned tremendously from and I recognized that when we had spent time together. He’s an incredibly thoughtful leader and he’s great at articulating culture. DoorDash is a magical place when it comes to how culture is embedded in language, and the kind of things that people say that are like DoorDash type things to say. We have similar things in Wolt, but for DoorDash usage of language and culture internally was on a whole another level.

That’s a very good example, and it oftentimes just starts with Tony as my culture tends to start from fartic CEOs. Tell me, what’s your biggest guilty pleasure, Miki? Fortnite. I’m a gamer by background, so I spent my growing up years, like, being a shit ton of games. DOTA, I grew up with that game. My first leadership experience was starting a DOTA clan on Warcraft three, then a battle net, and we had 60 people, I was the chieftain of the clan. That’s the first time I fired someone.

I still don’t remember firing a person. I was 15 and the other guy is 15, and you’re not, like, making it work for the clan anymore. Sorry. You have to go. So I’m a gamer. I hadn’t played games for a very long time. Can notice I have a gaming rig on because this gaming rig I bought myself as a present in January 2020, and you know what happened to this game rig in March 2020 when COVID started. But for that, I picked up with some friends when COVID started where he couldn’t go out and do stuff, and we kept on doing it since.

With a small group of people just hanging out, talking shit about stuff, maybe drinking a beer, it’s a really nice pastime. Are you married? Yes. Does she mind? Well, she’s not excited about it. I don’t get as much time to do it as I maybe prefer, but we find time here and there.

The one thing I’m most grateful for in my life is that I was able to venture onto this path that is not predescribed. That is not you go to uni, you go to intern in this place, you build up a CV, and then you graduate, then you go to this place and place, and you get promoted to this and that and so forth. I was on that track. And then I somehow got misdirected into this world of startups and so forth. And I’m incredibly grateful for it because I think that my life as a result has been way more interesting than it would have been otherwise.

My goal for my kids is that they can do whatever it may be, something that’s off the beaten track, something that’s a little bit more risk taking, something that they’re gonna find enjoyment and joy in. That’s my hope. And if that track for them is becoming a lawyer and larking their ass off their decade to become a partner, that’s fine. My hope is that they’re not going do it because of their dad or any other expectation, but because they want to do it.

Be patient. You get surprised. I’ve been surprised over the years how much time changes things, how much things develop. I remember looking up to people being, oh my god, how has that person done all these things that they’ve done in their lives and they’re so smart and achieved and everything? Then you realize over time that everyone’s the same. Some people got lucky. Everyone was hard working and smart that you have to be lucky on top of it, and you realize that people are not that different.

And the biggest surprise to me has been that there’s not really Dalai Lama’s sages and what else that are just a whole new level of sentience to the rest of us. Ultimately, everyone is just similar people. Do you agree with the

I’ve met a lot of my heroes over the years and some of them are still my heroes and I’ve made new heroes along the way. You meet people where over time you realize that these are people you want to look up to. These are people you want to learn from. Oftentimes they’re not the same people that you look up to from the outside. I think the reality is, one of my co founders said it really well, that the greatest strengths of any individual are often the sources of their greatest weaknesses.

If you have great energy, you’re also maybe going to be a bit disruptive on the organization. One of my strengths are one of my weaknesses as an example. And that means that the heroes, you only see the strengths. You don’t see the weaknesses. When you get to know them, you see the weaknesses and they might not be quite the kind of people that you thought they would be. And ultimately one, what would you most like to change about the world of startups? I would like more companies out of Europe.

That’s one thing I’m passionate about because the world is being redefined right now. There’s an industrial revolution going on and I don’t want this world to only happen in like US and China. We need to have companies that are working on things for the twenty first century coming from everywhere. So that’s one thing I’m passionate about. I’m passionate about helping Europe step up as a continent of new things. Alongside that, I think we have a lot of very difficult problems to solve as humanity, as a planet right now.

That’s something I also want to contribute towards, but those are incredibly difficult problems to solve. What would you think can be done to increase Europe’s chances of having a more prominent role? Patience, my friend. I think all the right things are in the pot, and now we have to wait for the pot to stir. I think regulation. You ever tried doing

Regulation is a fair one. The You issue in Europe is having this kind of old fashioned regulation, starting with you have to physically sign something, which in the twenty first century is the stupidest thing to put in your law and you should probably immediately take it out. So there’s stuff like that, but there’s also the fact that every regulation is different. Every country has their own thing of doing x and y and z. We operate in 70 European countries ourselves, so we’ve seen our fair share of it.

But you can deal with it. It’s not a walk in the park, but you can deal with it. I think in Europe, the bigger issue has been that we haven’t had this ecosystem for companies. Founders supporting founders, experienced shareholders, investing back, helping domestic venture funds, international venture funds, proof points of you can build these companies. We have that increasingly. I think we just need time to give to the scene to produce more and bigger outcomes. Can I ask how many millionaires were made from Volt? I have no idea.

No idea? No idea. It hasn’t been really a KPI we’ve been following. What I’m most proud about with Slush is all the people that worked with me in Slush or after me in Slush or on Slush that I never met and all the things those people have done. This influence and impact you can have on an individual’s lives through the things that you do, through companies you found and so forth, that’s the most meaningful thing in life.

Yeah, money is a part of it if they’re able to buy a house or support their family and so forth or start new companies, but it’s also about the learnings they make, the experiences they have, the colleagues and the friends and the new companies they found and the new places they go and create an impact. If you think about companies like PayPal and Skype and so forth, I would argue the biggest impact of those companies the services they created. It’s the people that they touched and what those people ended up doing next and all the

those people ended up touching.

I have absolutely no idea. Especially in the current world, I’m hoping third world war. I’m hoping no pandemic that kills half the population. I’m hoping the currency system doesn’t collapse and we still can buy stuff with money in the future and not have to trade stuff. There’s a lot of things in the world right now that don’t make me very happy about trying to give a prediction for the future. A lot of people have asked me, especially as of late, what is your next thing? This is my next thing.

Man, I’m on the executive team of a stock listed US company. I’m learning so much every day. I’m beginning to see an inside view into Silicon Valley and into building one of these companies, what it is like to build or to run one of the biggest food delivery businesses in the world that is expanding to so many other categories. I’m 33 years old, but this is my next thing. I’m not one of those people that is counting the days to be able to start my next company.

I could leave tomorrow if I wanted to. I’m here because I like what I do and I think it’s still very much early days for us what we can build. If I have to give a five year view, I think people are going to laugh and smile that companies like DoorDash and Wolt and others started as restaurant food delivery companies. Similarly to how we a little bit smile if we think about Amazon starting as a book reseller online, I think what companies like us can become as true everyday applications and service for all of local commerce, all of local retail, all of local services, and I think this has only started.

The future of e commerce is mobile. The future of logistics and delivery is not next day, not even same day, not even next two hours, the next ten, twenty, thirty minutes. We’re building a platform that’s very strong in both of those categories. I’m very excited about where all of this is going. The world is very fucked up right now, we have to deal with that, and that’s how it is. But I’m excited about where all of this is going. Eventually, we’re going to come back from this recession or whatever is going on right now, and I like how we’re headed there.

I’m I’m really honored to be on the podcast. I’ve been listening to your stuff for years, so honored to be finally on myself.