The first round was valued at 280K free money, and we raised 100K.
Wow.
I would say all the European VCs, or most of them, passed on us.
Nobody believed in our story.
You know a bunch of kids from Barcelona beating the Deliveroo's and the Uber Eats of the world.
I remember the Series B, it was like 25 million.
We were going to die.
So we unlocked the biggest deal of all history for delivery, which was And that was a huge inflection point.
This is 20VC with me, Harry Stebbings, and the show today is the most incredible founding journey.
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You have now arrived at your destination.
Oscar, dude, I am so excited for this.
It is such an incredible journey.
So I'm very, very excited to unpack it with you.
Thank you for joining me today, man.
Thank you, man.
I've been a big fan of Twin ABC.
Actually, we started the same year.
2015.
Exactly.
Yeah, I was chatting to Paul on our team plan.
He was like, you're literally the same year.
You were 22 when you started.
Yeah.
How did you get the idea for Glovo?
What was that origin aha?
So the origins weren't huge.
There wasn't a huge ambition at the beginning.
I was in school.
I was studying for aerospace engineering and I graduated.
Immediately, I went to my dream company, which was Airbus in France.
And then I realized really fast that that was a very big corporate company that I didn't want to be in.
And that's when I started basically building a deck.
I got some inspiration because I finished my studies in Atlanta and I saw how Uber launched in Atlanta.
So I said, why don't we build the Uber for errands?
That was the first original idea.
I was thinking about my mom.
My mom was always very busy.
Doing errands for my father, for my brothers, for me.
I was like, why don't we digitize this?
Just build an app where anyone can just ask for any errand.
Just go to this store, pick up this, buy this and bring it to me.
And that was the first idea.
Of course, it was a very niche and very high-end service.
And then, when we launched it, the first aha moment that really made our ambitions a lot bigger was that we started seeing people ordering McDonald's.
They ordered Big Macs.
I was like, holy shit, like why Big Macs?
There's already a website called Just Eat where people ordered food.
And that was the big aha moment.
And that's when I understood that food delivery was still to be massively disrupted.
There was the generation one of food delivery in the case of Spain Barcelona, where we started the business.
It was Just Eat that basically had a marketplace where they aggregated restaurants that did the delivery themselves.
But there wasn't a marketplace that also offered the delivery and therefore unlocked all the supply of the city.
Okay, so going back, how long did it take from idea to launch?
I think a lot of people don't execute fast enough and they kind of just let ideas meander.
How long was it from, hey, I'm going to do this to launching first?
It was pretty fast.
Again, I was at the Airbus.
I had a lot of free time and I had 10K, 10,000 euros to spend in the first step.
I was not a computer science, so I couldn't code.
How did you get it made?
I Googled, built an X for Uber app and I found a developing company in Russia, in Eastern Russia, that was the cheapest provider I found.
And they promised me that they would deliver a first version of the app for like 8,000 euros.
How was the first version of the app?
And I was shitty.
It didn't work.
But I had something to start showing to investors.
I had some mockups.
Okay.
So you have something to show... Sorry.
Fuck the schedule.
You have something to start showing to investors.
And then what happens?
You go and raise like a pre-seed seed round?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I was so young.
I knew nothing about, of course, VC.
And you will find this very funny, but the first round was valued at 280k free money and we raised 100k.
Wow.
And with that, the first business plan and the first deck that we had took us to profitability and to a sustainable company.
So 100K at 380 post.
Yeah.
Wow.
Okay, so you raised the 100K.
What happens then?
We build out the app again, but it's much more fully fledged.
I mean, 100K is not much.
But yeah, with that, we could hire the first CTO, start the app from zero.
But we were already serving, no?
We were already getting some orders somehow.
We also had a website.
People just send us like text messages, like go to this store, pick up this.
Now again, we started seeing some orders from McDonald's.
So now we launched and then we started seeing some traction.
It took a while, took a year, and that took us to the next round, which was like a million and a half.
When do you think you had product market fit?
You said a year there.
When do you think you had product market fit?
For a very long time I could see we were delivering a service that people liked, but we had very negative unit economics.
Most of the investor community didn't believe that this new industry would turn into profitability.
So that's not really product market fit, because you're delivering a service that people like, but at the price that people don't want to pay.
So it took a while until you started seeing the power of network effects the fleet of couriers growing, gaining all the efficiencies.
And then, at some point which is the key of this business, of course is you start moving the revenue stream to what we call the merchant, the partner, the restaurants, the stores, the groceries.
You can start making the service cheaper and cheaper for the customer.
You have so many lessons in terms of marketplace dynamics that you said about network effects and kind of the maturation of markets and what it does to the efficiency of the model.
What have been your biggest lessons when it comes to marketplace dynamics?
I mean, it's all about scale.
So in our industry, Marketplace Dynamics work on a city or on a national level, right?
So we invest a lot in building the brand and the business on a national level.
And why the country is important is because most of the big partnerships are also countrywide.
So you negotiate with McDonald's, with I don't know with Walmart, with big brands that operate in our country, in all the country.
And then you also build a brand.
We use a lot of channels that apply to all the countries.
For example, we have invested a lot in TV.
So you have to win in every country, right?
And the network effects happen inside the country.
When you cross the border, it doesn't matter how big and how well known your brand is in Spain.
You go to Portugal and you start from zero.
And that's another battle that you have to win.
And I think what we learned really fast because, as an entrepreneur from Barcelona, our natural expansion was first we launched in Barcelona, then in Madrid, then Valencia.
Then we said, okay, let's try, let's go international.
And we picked Paris and Milan.
Milan worked really well.
Paris didn't work well.
And the main reason was because in Paris we were late.
We were launching...
Maybe like two or three years after Deliveroo and Uber Eats launched.
So we never gained the scale and the leadership to be a sustainable business, right?
In our industry, you really need a lot of market share.
You need to become... Does it work if you're number two?
It can work.
And we have.
Out of the 23 markets we have, we have very few where we are number two and are profitable.
It's tough.
You need to be a very relevant number two.
When you think about launching in a market, how long do you give it in terms of maturing into a profitable market or a unit economically sustainable market?
It depends, right?
Because we've been launching markets since day one.
Now, for example, the most recent market we launched, I think, was Tunisia.
And Tunisia has taken maybe between two and three years to turn it into profit.
Now, it all depends on how fast you want to go.
You can turn it into profit in six months, but you're going to move a lot slower, right?
So if you want to reach a big scale and you want to invest, you only have to invest big in service, in marketing, in the first two years and then you turn it into profit.
Two to three years.
Yeah.
That's a long time.
How much did it cost to launch a market?
So in the case of Tunisia, maybe I'd say between five and 10 million.
But then these businesses get a lot of scale.
Like the beautiful thing about this industry is the scale.
Like we were in some markets where our GMV, our gross merchandise value, is getting too close to 1 of the GDP of the country.
It's a service that people use so frequently and for so many things, right?
It's not only restaurants, it's groceries, it's pharmacy, it's shops, that it gets to a lot of scale.
That's why there was so much money poured into it, right?
Because I think all VCs understood at some point that this model was here to stay and would become this massive scale platforms in every country.
But you had to win, right?
And that's why the 2018 to 2022.
I think it was probably the bloodiest VC battle of maybe of all consumer history.
You said about like scale being so important there.
Can you just help me understand specifically how scale impacts unit economics most significantly?
I mean, it helps everywhere in the marketplace, right?
On one end it's logistics, right?
We very fast, we become the largest logistics fleet in any city where we operate.
That means that we have the cheapest cost to move something from point A to point B.
It's like Uber, right?
You generate an order now in Glovo in Barcelona, you will probably find a courier available a few meters away from the pickup point.
Then there's all the data right, so all the data you generate with the restaurants.
Right, delivering food is so complex?
Right, because you can.
It's a business where where every single second matters a lot.
Right, you cannot send the courier late to pick up the order because the food is going to get cold.
You cannot send it very early because that's seconds that you're going to have to be paying the courier right, so it's a.
It's a.
It's a business about seconds and the more data you have about.
Okay, how long is this restaurant going to take to prepare a pizza?
Or how long is it going to take that same restaurant if, instead of preparing a pizza, it's preparing a paella right?
Which is going to take... So this is all data that you keep training the models.
And then I would say that the last one is... Can you train models on ambiguous externalities?
And what I mean by that is like yes, traditionally speaking, it takes 15 minutes to cook a pizza at Pronto Pizza.
But they've got a new person this week and they're 10 minutes late because they're new.
That's the challenge of real world, right?
Or it's raining.
And so it takes longer for the driver to get there because it's raining.
And so they're going to be five minutes late to pick up.
Does data actually help in a highly ambiguous world?
I mean on the rain.
Yes, you can train on weather and we have a lot of data, live data, on the weather of every single city where we operate.
You also build a lot of products so that the restaurant can tell you if there's any externality.
My store is busy.
I need some rest, right?
I need 20 minutes off or this order is really big.
I need to edit.
So all of those inputs, You have to build a lot of product that is very easy to use for the restaurant in saturation times, right?
It's very high tension moments for the restaurant, usually because they have people to serve in the restaurant and also the couriers to serve.
One area for me that's so optimized is when you can actually stack orders with the driver and one can take six.
How do you think about increasing unit economic, unit efficiency or whatever you want to call it, unit economics, improving them whatever, but actually a slight deterioration in customer experience.
They're going to wait a little bit longer because the driver's doing five orders.
Yeah, it's an optimization game.
It's all about lifetime value and understanding very well how every minute of delay is going to impact the lifetime value or the retention of that customer for the next order.
We try to measure this all the time.
It's the nature of our business.
When we were chatting before, you said about speeding up market expansion to capture time.
What did you mean by that?
So look, going back to our history, right?
So we cracked Spain.
And I can tell you a story.
We unlocked the biggest deal of all history of food delivery, which was McDonald's.
So this is back in 2018.
The CEO of McDonald's in Chicago sends a message to all the countries and says hey, we have to going to delivery and we have one exclusive partner, which is Uber Eats.
That was in 2018.
Back then, we were competing against three players in Spain, Uber, Delibro, and Just Eat.
And when we read the news, we were screwed.
If Uber gets this deal and can start delivering McDonald's for one or two-year delivery, we shut down the company for sure.
So we found who the decision maker was.
It was a lady called Suzette.
And we went to Madrid.
At least I traveled there like 40 times to see her.
And we convinced her to break the global exclusivity and give us a test.
For some reason, she trusted us more than above Uber Eats.
And she gave us that test.
And that was a huge inflection point.
What was the test?
A test is, well, we're going to launch with you.
We're going to launch in Madrid.
You guys look like a bunch of kids because we were- Because you are a bunch of kids.
We were in a garage.
Maybe the team was only 20 people, but everybody knew in the team that that was a life or death.
We were all in.
We had all the engineers building things that McDonald's wanted putting the McDonald's logo everywhere.
Any requests that they asked us, we said it was all yes.
And that Uber from San Francisco couldn't compete the local team in Spain.
So we won that deal and it was massive.
The power of that brand how many new customers it brings.
It was huge.
And that started the spinning the wheel effect of us growing a lot.
And then we replicated the same strategy in Italy.
With McDonald's.
Yeah, with McDonald's because the CEO of Italy McDonald's was like, wow, you're doing pretty well.
Who are you doing this with?
And with Global.
And they also gave us the exclusivity for two years.
So a lot of founders are told early on when they meet a big customer, like a McDonald's say, actually don't let it influence your product strategy.
Don't be too concentrated in your customer dominance, whatever you want to call it.
Would you say that's wrong advice?
In our case, scale is fundamental, right?
You have to win in every market to make it a sustainable business.
And these mega large brands like McDonald's, it's what brings all the new customers, right?
At some point, it was very scary because 70% of our volume in Spain was McDonald's.
But I was okay because I knew it was just part of the customer flow.
So customers went there, they ordered McDonald's, but then you could see in the cohorts how they started ordering more and more things.
So it was just a matter of time that that 70 decreased to the today levels, which is between 10 and 20 in most countries.
Okay.
So we get this big contract from McDonald's in Spain and then it expands to Italy.
Where are we in our funding then?
We've got 20 people or so at that point.
When did we actually raise our first multiple millions?
Our fundraising story is really tough.
We've been at the edge of dying at least three times.
You look at the cap table we had when we sold, and it looked like a Frankenstein cap table.
Why?
It was just so many?
It was so fragmented?
What was it?
It was so many, and there were so many names that you would not know.
All the typical VCs, or I would say all the European VCs, or most of them, passed on us.
Nobody believed in our story.
You know a bunch of kids from Barcelona beating the Liberos and the Uber Eats of the world who were always like one step ahead in fundraising right.
So I remember the Series B, which was the first large round, it was like 25 million.
We were going to die.
I had visited.
I still have the list 120 VCs that passed.
Not an email, but an actual call or a meeting.
And I just had no more VCs to pitch.
I Googled and there were no more in Europe, right?
And that round, it was... So just go back to that.
Respectfully, what did they miss or what did you do wrong?
I think I wasn't the best at fundraising.
Maybe I was too transparent, too humble.
Yeah, and maybe I liked the more big ambition or aggressiveness.
And I think what they missed is the power of working really hard with less money.
Where can you go, how far you can go with less money, but really, really good execution.
Even if you're really inexperienced and very young.
I think what no other competitor can beat us at is the culture of working really hard, what allows us to, for example, win the deal of McDonald's or to beat big competitors in any single market.
I don't think any large competitor is now bigger than us in any of the markets where we operate.
And this is just daily local execution and a mega obsession on details.
What do you think of the European VC product at the early stage?
Yeah, no, I struggled.
I struggled a lot.
Most of the people that I found had never built things.
Right?
So it was really hard to connect.
Even the ones that invested in us.
Building a company is such a roller coaster, right?
That if you don't have people that are used to this roller coaster, they add so much pressure, right?
You get a lot of pressure from the business because there's always bad news coming.
But if you also get pressure from the VCs, it's like, it's too much.
I always say to founders actually it's one of the benefits of another benefit of working with, like the owner of a firm or the principal of a firm.
Is that no one's going to fire me if I do a bad deal in another firm.
You do feel the pressure if you have not done great deals and people do get let go.
And so they bring that animosity and concern to you, the founder, because Glovo is not doing well.
And now my other partners are looking at me going, Glovo is not doing well.
And we put in 10 million and that is not helpful to you.
Exactly.
I felt that a lot.
Yeah.
Do you think that European founders are aggressive enough?
You are wonderfully talented, but you're also very humble and you are not a sales guy.
No offense and aggressively sales guy.
Do you think Europeans lack that in a way that Americans are fucking amazing at it?
I'd say an average, yes.
Yeah, yeah.
When you speak to not only Americans also, I don't know.
You go to Tel Aviv.
You also feel that you just feel smaller.
And then you look at the business you have and they have nothing to envy.
You mentioned some of the other competitors.
You mentioned your deliveries of the world.
You raised a lot more money.
If your other competitors are raising a lot of money, do you have to raise a lot of money?
So we raised as much money as we could.
In the seven years of fundraising, I could never choose.
I never said no to an investor.
That's how little optionality I had.
And back to that round that I was telling before the Series A, when there were no VCs left to pitch to, Glovo was saved because I was in an event of the FCB, Football Club Barcelona, whose sponsor back then was Rakuten.
Rakuten is the Amazon of Japan.
And Miki Tani, which is the founder.
He was there in the party and in the event and he met me and for some reason he liked the company.
He had seen the backpacks in the streets of the couriers and he decided to lead the round.
How much did he put in?
I think he did like 15 million.
Wow, I'm glad you went to that event.
Yeah, me too.
Did you get VCs after that?
Be like, oh, we've heard about the round and, you know, hey.
Well, in that round it was a typical round that I had a lot of money pending to have a lead investor.
At the end, it was three leads, two European VCs and Rakuten.
The story doesn't end there.
It got even worse because we were about to sign the contract with McDonald's.
We were already operating with McDonald's, but we had to sign the contract for the next two years.
ICs had been already approved, all the docs were ready.
And I get this call from one of the lead investors from Paris.
He's like, look, we had another IC.
I was like, but you already had an IC.
No, but there was another IC and they're fine moving forward, but we need the contract that McDonald's signed.
I was like, no way, man.
These contracts take time and I have three weeks left of cash.
So I was there negotiating with McDonald's.
At some point I had to tell McDonald's like, hey look, we need this contract otherwise, like our our, we're gonna have to shut down the the operations.
And and finally we got the contract.
Wow, so you got the contract signed to meet the investor timelines.
Yeah wow yeah, it was very stressful.
Was that the most stressful moment?
There were two more go on Series B, Series C Well, I mean, I think it was our Series C Again, two months left of cash.
So for seven years, we raised a round every nine months.
It's commonly done to raise one every 18 months.
Yeah.
Is that just because you couldn't raise a round that would give you 18 months?
Why did you raise for nine months?
That feels far too fast.
Because the stakes kept getting higher.
So the industry kept getting more and more irrational, more and more growth.
We were still at negative unit economics.
So things were going really well, but the burn kept scaling.
When we finally closed the round, every single time we were like fuck, like we either overinvest and we shorten our runway or Uber, Eats and Deliveroo will kill us in all of our markets.
It was a life or death decision all the time.
And we had to overspend every single time.
And in one of those, again, it was December.
We had to sign the round by, I think, the first week of January.
End of January, we were running out of money.
And December 23rd, I get a call from the lead investor saying that they're passing.
Two days before Christmas.
And yeah, that was a really bad Christmas.
Sorry, I didn't mean to laugh.
What do you do then, mate?
It's just like, it's such a gut punch.
What happened then?
You had the lead investor fall out.
So in that case I think we had to do like a small internal round and then it gave us another three months to find another lead.
Was there ever a cash tap that did turn on?
Like you continuously had a lot of constraints.
Was there ever a moment when in the series D or E or whatever it was, someone was like here you go, here's 200 million?
So we did get the round of 200 million, but it was in a moment where we were burning 30 million a month.
So it was... I was like, oh, thank God.
Yeah, no, no, it was scary.
So after Spain and Italy, when we realized we had cracked the model, we got super ambitious and we said hey, because Paris, we failed.
And we understood why we failed, because we were late.
Was it that simple?
We were late and we couldn't afford to outspend them.
Exactly.
We were late and we could not acquire customers cheaply and retain them cheaply, because there were already two competitors doing it well.
But when we got that, we were like, okay, let's look at the map of the world.
There's so many countries out there where nobody has disrupted them yet, right?
So we, as Spaniards, we look to LATAM.
I think Spaniards entrepreneurs.
It's a small secret we have there, but it's.
It's actually pretty natural for us to expand into LATAM, which is a massive market right.
There's a cultural and language thing there, right?
So we started with LATAM and we went to Peru, Chile, and Argentina.
And that was a big inflection point.
When we launched Lima and I saw the first week, it was flying.
I was like, wow.
What worked there?
What did you see?
It was the same as a very similar to what we saw in Milan and Barcelona and Madrid.
Which was frequency of orders.
It was AOV.
It was restaurant signups.
It was driver signups.
What was it?
It was the three sides of the marketplace were working.
It was easy to convince restaurants, couriers.
There was good availability.
But the most important thing was customers.
We were acquiring customers and retaining them.
And when we saw that, we were like, well, the platform works really far away from Barcelona.
Let's go huge.
And then we roll out, you know, LATAM.
We went to countries that... Just on LATAM while we're there.
How do driver acquisition costs vary between Barcelona and Peru?
Courier acquisition is not a huge line in the P&L in our business compared to ride hailing.
Yeah, it's fairly cheap.
Acquisition strategy the same, different?
For customers.
Well, no, for couriers actually.
Yeah.
Same for couriers.
On customer side, was it different in terms of CACs and then channel?
There were a few differences, but not massive.
We have a playbook that is quite scalable.
We again, we use a lot.
Believe it or not, we use a lot of TV on top of online media, but TV has worked very well for us to drive a lot of downloads and new customers.
Okay, so we have Peru and we're like, wow, this works so well, miles, miles away.
What happens then?
We're like, where else do we go?
So look, I sent Arnau.
Arnau was kind of our co-founder.
He was our COO.
And we sent him there to lead all Latin for the first two years.
And we expanded to, I think, 10 or 12 countries.
Meanwhile, I heard someone that came from Uber that had been doing expansion there.
And we looked at the rest of the world.
And where we Places that we liked a lot were countries that the investors I had to really convince them or even launch without their approval in countries like Kenya or Kazakhstan.
Because from the European point of view, it was like, who's going to order food delivery in Kenya?
I was like well, there's a lot of people with cell phones and people like food and they like convenience.
Respectfully, are your AOVs not much reduced there?
More than the AOVs is the ratio between cost of labor and AOVs, which matters a lot.
The bigger the ratio is, the more affordable you can offer the service and the more demand you will find.
And for you, the cost of labor is way, way less in these emerging markets.
In some cases, yeah.
For example, we seek markets like Morocco, where that ratio is very large, and this allows us to offer the service much more affordable to the end customer.
Which market did you try?
You mentioned Paris, which didn't work.
Which other market did you try and it didn't work?
And what did you learn from that?
So the biggest failure was Brazil.
Yeah, Brazil was a big failure.
We lost a lot of money.
How much money did you lose?
It was like a black hole.
Probably we lost like 30, 40 million euros.
Yeah, look, we just did the wrong assessment.
We looked at what was there in the market.
There was a company very successful called iFood.
And we thought that iFood was very similar to Just Eat.
Whenever we saw Just Eat in any market, actually we launched because we knew we could compete against them and we could offer a better service.
So we saw a lot of similar things, but we just did the wrong analysis.
And when we went there we realized that iFood had all the content.
All restaurants, all brands were delivering with iFood.
They had a pretty good service.
So at the end, these platforms are really sticky, right?
If a high percentage of population is already using iFood, you need to spend a lot of money in vouchers to convince customers to switch to another app.
Even if they switch, they will tend to go back to their favorite app, right?
Unless you keep vouchering them, right?
And vouchering in our business is horrible because you don't have, margins are really thin.
Anytime you go into a voucher, you go into negative economics.
So we had to shut down Brazil.
How long did you give it?
That was fast.
It was like a year.
Was that a tough decision to shut down at that year mark?
Yeah, it was really tough.
I think shutting down things is a super important skill for a founder.
At the end it's an ego thing because you have to go against what you have previously told the board, the investors, the employees.
One year before launching Brazil, I was selling the Brazil dream.
I was telling everyone, like, hey, this is going to be massive.
And even when you launch and you start saying things not going super well, you have to keep selling it right.
Because you need to inject that energy into everyone.
And one day you're like you have to go out there and be like hey, you know everything that I told you.
I was wrong.
The toughest thing is the ego when you have to take this decision.
Apart from, of course, how tough it is to you know, in Brazil probably, we had a hundred employees.
We had to let them go.
And they were doing things well.
It's just that the market was too tough.
So we go into these emerging markets, Kazakhstan, Kenya.
What do we see?
All up and to the right?
Pretty much.
Why does this journey not get easier on the fundraising side?
I'm confused.
We are now having Peru, Italy, Spain, Kazakhstan, Kenya.
But who gives a fuck?
They're performing great and the unit econ are looking good.
We're starting to see the benefits of scale.
Why are investors not flocking to you at this point?
So I think there were two things.
One was the burn.
The burn was really scary and it kept going up.
15, 20, 30.
Did it make you nervous?
Yeah, of course.
Because, you saw, one thing I did during seven years was checking how much cash we had in the bank for seven years.
And it keeps going down every single day.
Also, it keeps going down, no offense, a lot.
A lot.
If you're doing 30 mil a month, I mean... A million a day.
When we launched in LATAM, we had a competitor there, very well-funded, called Rappi.
They were the best fundraisers.
They raised from Sequoia, from, I think, from DST, SoftBank.
And it's crazy, when we went there, we went from saying, hey, these guys are crazy.
They're so irrational, to doing exactly what they were doing in a matter of three months.
Big exclusivities are worth a lot.
Wow.
So you pay these restaurants an exclusive, which is like a lump sum, to only be with you.
Yeah.
I mean, you must have a load of McKinsey consultants working out the payback periods on that.
We do it ourselves.
It does pay back.
How long does it take to pay back?
I know it depends, but what's acceptable payback?
So we usually invest that three, four years payback.
Three, four years payback?
Yeah.
And then you get the exclusivity for three to four years.
Yeah.
Well, it depends.
Depends.
Wow.
That's astonishing.
That's long.
Okay.
Okay.
Right.
So one, the burn was very high.
That was one reason why I didn't like it.
You said there were two.
Yeah.
The second was we were getting some scale, right?
We were getting to 1 billion 2 billion top line, but we were still really small against the big players.
Now you looked at Uber, they were at least 15, 20 times bigger.
Delivery Hero, even Delibro back then was a lot bigger than us.
And when you lack this scale, you're still really exposed to them, right?
Because they have so much scale that they can just go into your home market and destroy your business with maybe like 20, 30 million investment.
So I think, even though we were big, many investors and I think rightly so they didn't see us as big enough to fail.
You mentioned layoffs in Brazil.
Super hard thing to do.
I do want to talk about talent.
Building a business is merely a collection of people.
You said some great things before about talent.
You said to me before about rewriting values.
Everyone, I speak to mostly Americans, and they love mission and values.
What are your biggest lessons on rewriting values?
It's something that I've pushed in the executive team every single year, right?
So we block a few hours.
We look at the values and, even though 12 months ago we all agreed on every single word on how to define each one of the six values that we have, every time we sit down and we look at them we're like this doesn't feel right anymore.
We can improve it with this word or changing this or maybe adding a new value, right?
We haven't changed the values so much, but we have proactively worked on them on a yearly basis.
So that was really important.
I think the problem was when we got to like 1,000 employees, that's when we messed up the culture.
That's when we... It was all my fault because... Yeah, you said you ruined the culture.
Yeah.
Why did you ruin it and what did you do?
When you're hyperscaling, it's really easy to have a very aligned culture and everyone working super hard.
Everybody's so stretched.
Everyone's responsibility is huge.
And that challenge, it just pushes everyone to work really hard.
But it's inevitable that one day your business starts growing at 30% year on year, right?
And that coincided when we got to around a thousand people.
And I think I ruined it because I started getting scared of some part of our team reacting to how I said certain things.
And I started being a bit of a politician.
So what do politicians do?
They say things in a way that a very large percentage of the population will like it.
It always gets to that first all hands or Zoom call, where you say something you're talking about values, you're talking about work ethics, you're talking about the importance of working really hard and long hours.
And when you finish the call, you're going to get a message from someone like hey, what you said, maybe it was a bit too aggressive.
Certain people in my team didn't like it.
And as a young founder, when I started getting those messages, I was like, yeah, it's true.
Maybe I was too aggressive.
Maybe I should say things a bit nicer.
And that was the beginning of, not the end, because we have reconducted it.
How do you think about that?
I'd love your help here because I think I don't have that at all.
I'm very, very bullish and confident in my leadership.
But the challenge is some people find that abrasive and bluntly too direct.
And part of me listens to this and goes, ha ha, I'm right to be this way.
Like, brilliant.
I'm not affected by kind of bluntly weak people who get offended by it.
But then you do have talented people who you want to feel empowered and opinionated and great.
How do you think about that balance?
The day I realized I was ruining the culture was in a Christmas party of Global.
I was in a conversation with a few engineers.
At that moment, there was a company poaching a lot of our engineers.
And that company, I'm not going to name who it is, but they were they worked really hard there.
Now they had a very hardworking culture.
And I heard one engineer saying yeah, I was also poached, but I decided not to go there because they worked really hard there.
And when I heard that I was like shit.
Like it's not only the intensity starts going down of the company, it's that you're losing the hardworking people to another company that is achieving to set and keep that intensity right.
So it's also a network effect that you need to keep working on.
What did you do then?
Like, I don't know you very well, but I know you a little bit.
That must have been a crushing moment for you.
It was.
What did you do?
Start from the top.
Start aligning the top leaders, firing those that were not aligned.
Now you realize that some of them didn't want to go back to the global of the beginnings and then start saying things as they are.
Now I wrote a couple of emails to the team that you know.
It was like the company was on fire for a few weeks because at the end if you have 20 of the company, that is really misaligned.
And it wasn't their fault, it was our fault because we just relaxed.
And all the messaging, the recruiting process, the onboarding process.
Nobody told them that we wanted that type of work, ethics and a hardworking culture.
So if all of a sudden, the CEO goes out there and sends a message that hey, we have to go back to the beginnings?
This is how we like working.
This is our culture.
A lot of people didn't like it.
And then even if it's a 10, 20%, it's very loud, right?
So you do get.
It's not a week, it's a year of noise and it's a year of really bad energy, a lot of toxicity.
People take time to leave or get fired.
Respectfully, is it lack of work ethic or is it wokeness?
I don't know.
I think it's just human nature that if your leader is not on top of you raising the standards, pushing for faster deliveries, How do you do that?
Just relax.
How do you instill that velocity, that unwillingness to relent and just say hey, we are a different organization now?
We operate at the highest level and we don't accept anything that's not that.
How do you do that?
I wouldn't point to a single thing, but it's just everywhere.
It's when you recruit people.
In that interview, you have to be super transparent about what you expect in terms of working hard.
And if you feel that he or she doesn't understand what working hard is, you explain it.
It's like, hey, look, most of the days I'm here in the office until eight.
You might have to do the same.
And on weekends, I connect.
The people you fire is another mega signal.
And then in every single meeting, when I walk into a meeting, I try to remind myself okay, my mission here is just to add more velocity and to raise the standards.
Nothing that they will present is going to be fine.
This is the mentality that any leader has to go into, because if you go to the report and you see the manager, your leader is fine with everything you're presenting.
I think it's just human nature that the next time you have to report it's going to be a little less quality.
Do you have any other big management lessons?
You've managed now thousands of people for years.
Any other big ones?
Look, I've had two stages at Glovo.
One was hyperscaling.
As I said before, I think in hyperscaling things can work with the CEO being away fundraising, because there's just so much energy into the business.
And actually, that's what I had to do.
I was all day fundraising.
I was almost until six hours a day fundraising, and then I worked on the business.
And then my new stage was after acquisition of Delivery Hero, which coincided when we started growing at 30 year-on-year.
And when you're at these growth rates, which are good, but it's not hyperscale or hypergrowth, that's when you cannot sit back.
You need to be injecting velocity and energy into what I said before, into any single meeting where you go.
How were the layoffs?
Layoffs suck.
If you were to advise founders on giving layoffs, what would you advise a founder who is about to give layoffs?
So we, unfortunately we've done a few layoffs.
What I found is that people are a lot more mature than what you expect when you're planning the comms and all that.
We've always put a lot of budget into it to treat people well.
It's not only about the people that will be leaving.
They deserve it.
It's not their fault that you have to lay off or do a big layoff.
It's even more important for the people that stay, because those people that you lay off are their friends, and the way they exit the company is super important in the post layoff era.
I always push.
We always got the layoff proposal from the HR department.
I always push for more.
Let's give them more.
For sure, it's a good investment.
I always say to people, the way you leave somewhere is often the way you're remembered.
When we chatted before, you said that you did too much M&A.
What did you mean by that?
I did a lot of M&A.
I think entrepreneurs are by nature very optimistic and you think only about the upsides, not like well, I'm going to take this company, just going to connect it to global.
Eventually we shut down everything.
And my conclusion was I was just too optimistic about the upside but not looking at how complex it is to integrate different tech stacks, different cultures, different teams.
Of course, when you buy a company, that founder will most probably stop thinking about building and leave.
What was the biggest acquisition you made?
So we bought a couple Instacart type of businesses, right?
So large baskets, grocery marketplaces, one in Spain and one in Portugal, maybe like 5 million each.
I don't remember.
5 million each doesn't feel like a huge amount of money.
No.
This is not a sink the boat decision.
No, no, it wasn't huge.
It was also a lot of the focus.
I also got really excited, right?
Because it was like me going back to the beginnings and starting again.
And I talked a lot about it to the company.
So now I think about it, I'm like, man, you're so stupid.
Just, our business is about focusing on the small details every single day and making the marketplace better every single day.
Not about expanding to other things.
How do you think about market depth versus breadth in terms of like penetration of you?
Know you could have stayed in Italy and Spain and just gone.
More services, more services gone into pharmacy, gone into cash delivery, gone into driver, banking and financing.
I mean, we could take this a long way versus breadth as you did of Peru, Kazakhstan, Kenya.
I think the answer to that is how time sensitive it is and when is your right to win.
So, for example, I know I can keep expanding now in Italy and in Spain into other delivery services, because we have already won the battles.
We are already by far the largest delivery brand.
The opportunity of groceries or pharma, where we're growing very fast, is still there.
And we can crack it and we can invest massively now in 2025.
The opportunity is still there.
If you go to Peru or you go to I don't know to Romania.
It was a now or never decision back in 2018, because you had to be the first mover.
Like getting there first and building the scale, it was a now or never, no?
So now we know that you know our playbook basically is number one winning food delivery in restaurant delivery.
And number two, expand multi-category.
And we think the second will be much larger than the first.
It's just a matter of the timing.
Can you unpack what is multi-category?
So multi-category is basically groceries, pharma, and then anything else.
Anything else is any shop.
Electronics, flowers, retail in general.
Anything that can fit into a rider's backpack.
That said, groceries is massive.
Groceries is so big.
Just going to Spain, for example, the groceries offline market is 120 billion, out of which only 2 is online.
2% of groceries industry is online.
We're fully convinced that this 2% will turn into 20, 30%.
And the magic of it is that we don't see...
Delivering groceries on demand with no mistakes.
You need so much technology.
And to make it profitable without overcharging the customer, you need so much technology that we now see all retailers, all grocers.
They're relying on us to go into the online business because their online business is not working.
That's a massive opportunity.
We know that when this 2% of online penetration turns into 20, we can capture at least half of it.
Before we get to the future of e-commerce.
You build a business to the scale where acquisition offers start to come.
And you decided to take the acquisition offer at one point.
Yeah.
Why did you decide to sell?
And was it the first acquisition offer?
No, no, no.
We had multiple offers.
When we were only in Spain and Italy, we got the first offer.
How much was it for?
I think 100 million.
Half of the board was in favor of taking it.
I guess it makes sense for them.
How much did you have of the business then?
Maybe 25%, 30%.
25, 30 million is a lot when you're 25, 26.
It's a lot at any time.
Was any part of you tempted?
Honestly, no.
And I don't think it was rational because of course that changes your life already by a lot.
But I was just so convinced that what we had was working and we could expand to 20 more markets, which is what we've done.
Okay.
So that was the first.
And then tell me about the delivery hero one.
How does that come to be?
First of all, Delivery Hero invested in Global in series B.
It was part of those rounds that nobody wanted to invest, so we ended up taking the competitor's money.
We were competing against Delivery Hero in some markets and Delivery Hero also did some investments and we agreed to take their money.
Why did we decide to sell?
Well, after the series I think it was the series F you know that moment when you close the round, you go to the notary.
You're so happy.
But you know, you go back to the office, you look at the business plan and you're with your CFO, with Edu.
And I was like, Edu, we need to start fundraising for the next one.
We cannot wait much.
And we looked at each other and we were like, I can't do another one.
Emotionally, I can't.
Because every single round was so stressful.
And it was rational also not to do it because in every single round there were high chances of failing and having to shut down the company.
So that's when we decided, hey, either we IPO or we sell.
And we started looking at both options, IPOing.
We were still burning almost a million a year.
A day.
A million a day.
Wow, capital efficiency is really taking effect.
A million a day.
So IPO wasn't very viable.
And you weren't profitable.
We were not profitable.
We were already at 3 billion top line.
And then we started looking for a sale.
We talked to all the potential buyers.
And Delivery Hero by far, was the best bidder, not only for my investors, but also for the team and for me.
Basically, Delivery Hero operating model is to empower local brands.
They have Talabat in Middle East, which actually recently IPO, and they have 80%.
They have Pedidos Ya in South America.
They have Glovo.
So they have a bunch of amazing delivery brands.
And they empowered them with a lot of technology and with capital when we needed it.
So this allowed us to keep operating and keep running the business.
And it was a great deal for everyone.
How much did they buy it for?
It was an all stock acquisition for 2.3 billion.
When you sign that deal, how does it feel?
It was 31st of December.
We had to do it in 2021.
How did it feel?
Good.
I felt really good.
I felt like part of the mission was completed, which was, on one end, you know, returning the money and, on the other, making sure that Glovo would keep existing, keep delivering to customers, keep serving riders and restaurants.
Bluntly on paper.
You suddenly have, I don't know whatever your ownership was 220 million, 300 million, whatever it was of stock.
You don't seem like a guy who really cares that much about money, Oscar.
How did it change your mindset?
So one thing I did was I started speaking with a lot of people that had done an exit.
And I think one thing I realized very fast is a correlation between unhappiness and people that had stopped working.
So those entrepreneurs that had made a big exit and moved into a wealth management lifestyle were the unhappiest.
And that to me was very clear.
Like.
What gives me a lot of happiness is going to the office every day, spending time with my team cracking big problems.
Of course, that's not all my life, right?
They have a lot of life outside of work.
But for me, it's very clear.
I want to keep working until I die.
And you're still at Delivery Hero today.
Like still in the role.
Yeah.
Most leave post-acquisition.
Yeah.
It's something that I think about.
On one end, I co-founded a small VC in Europe called Yellow.
So it's a 30 million fund we invest in young entrepreneurs.
Why move into VC?
I mean it in the nicest way.
You're like an amazing entrepreneur and you've been through this incredible journey.
You've redefined a category.
Why do a VC?
Yeah.
I mean, in some way I was already investing a lot as a business angel.
I had done like four investments and I loved spending time with entrepreneurs.
It got too messy.
Like as a business angel, it's really hard to keep things under control.
So I just teamed up with Adam, which came from Atomico, and gave them all my money that I wanted to invest in pre-seed.
For me, it's like an important hobby.
I spent a few hours with them every week and I like it a lot.
I'm learning.
But I also, back to your question, I realized that I don't want to be an investor full-time.
I really like operating businesses.
What have been your biggest lessons from investing as well?
As a first-time founder.
When I spoke to VCs back then, I thought I was having a one-on-one conversation.
And in reality, it's like if you are broadcasting to the entire VC community.
So the amount of chit-chatting that happens across all VCs, like they're talking all day, like they're sharing all the deals or sharing all the intel.
So that's an advice for all founders, especially first-time founders.
It's a very, very connected community.
And anything you're saying to one.
Don't try to play games assuming that conversations are confidential, because they're not.
Also, don't go out too early.
This is often not in my interest, but don't go out too early, because they talk so much that if you go and meet one, it will likely go in an associate's WhatsApp group that you are meeting.
Do you see what I mean?
Yeah.
And then suddenly... people think you're raising.
And then suddenly it's like, oh, we turn them down.
And it gets known that they were turned down by Excel or Index or whoever it was.
And suddenly that vicious rumors can start.
Yeah, totally.
That's dangerous.
Will you still be a delivery hero in five years?
I want to operate businesses all my life, right?
Or build things.
That's what I like and I enjoy.
And every time I think about starting something new, I realize how cool it's global and the platform we're building.
How much we're growing.
I still see Glovo being 10X bigger than today.
We're getting to 7 billion top line.
I see so much potential.
I see us as Amazon 20 years ago.
Is Glovo profitable today?
Yeah.
Yeah, we just turned profitable.
We just turned 10 years.
Last semester was our first profitable semester.
That must be a special moment.
Yeah, it was good.
One thing I think that's a big needle mover in the industry.
That was, you know, respect for the reason why I've invested in the past is because I actually believe that you can subsidize one part of the business with a very effective ads engine on the other side of it.
And I don't think we've seen that fully taken advantage of yet.
How does advertising and media change the quick commerce business?
It's fascinating, the ads space.
And that's an area where I feel we just started.
Yeah.
We believe in our business.
Out of every 100 euros of GMV, we will be able to generate at least five euros of advertising money which, of course, are almost full margin.
We're now at two.
We're halfway, more or less, between two and three.
It makes so much sense, right?
Because every time someone, a customer opens Glovo, they open it with an intention of purchase.
So for any brand, any restaurant, they want to be there, right?
It's so efficient advertising, right?
If you are I don't know a shampoo brand, you want to be there when the customer is searching for shampoo and you want to be in the first listing, right?
So what will drive your revenues from two to three to five?
Is it purely a traffic?
So it's more advertising product and more penetration.
So we have around a fraction of all the merchants that we work with and all the groceries and brands that we work with using our advertising products.
So it's a matter of penetration and also improving just the advertising engine.
Totally get you.
Which brand do you not have today?
Could be a restaurant brand or other brand.
Which do you not have today that you would most like to have?
In terms of merchant, I think that the number one I would like to have are two Spanish ones.
One is Inditex.
So all the Zaras, et cetera, they still don't want to go into the quick commerce.
Why not?
They're in the quick fashion game.
They're not in marketplaces.
You will not find them also in Zalando, maybe a bit in Zalando, but they really want to control end-to-end their online experience.
And the other one is Mercadona, which is the Walmart of Spain, 40% market share offline.
And they also want to control end-to-end their experience.
What company did you not acquire that you wish you had acquired with the benefit of hindsight?
We have a very beautiful story with Miki from World because we started the same month, almost the same month, in 2014.
End of 2014.
And we sold like two months away.
So our story is very, very parallel.
And we always had conversations of teaming up and joining forces and building a very large European new delivery company.
But our paths never joined.
I think Mickey is one of the great entrepreneurs of Europe, so I'm super happy to hear that.
I agree.
One element I do just have to discuss before we do a quick fire is regulation.
Regulation is difficult to implement and sometimes poorly done.
When I look at the market that you operate a lot of time in, it seems that Uber have a lot of freedom to do what they want to do, and you maybe don't.
Is regulation enacted fairly?
Of course, the gig economy needs more regulation, right?
It's a reality that has grown everywhere in the world and operating this business across 23 different markets, with all governments realizing that they need to regulate it somehow, right.
Because it's growing so much and so many people are working and generating revenues from it.
It's been tough.
Like it's been tough.
We have to build public affairs themes in every single country, etc.
And unfortunately, the country where we suffer from regulation the most is Spain.
I'm not going to go into the details, but it's so extreme that I'm now in a criminal process.
The general attorney accused me with six years of prison for running with a freelancer's model, which is something that has been validated by judges in Spain up to 14 times.
It has gotten really political, but the reality is that I'm there.
I had to go declare three months ago.
I think it's the only country in the world where a founder, a CEO of a digital platform has to be declaring with criminal accusations.
Does that make you very nervous?
I mean, it was big.
Yeah, it was big.
And it also got a lot of noise in the media.
And the worst thing now that I think there's a lot of discussions around bureaucracy in Europe as a barrier for entrepreneurs building great things the worst thing is that we're not playing a fair game against our competitors.
So for some reason, we were the only company that the administration went against in Spain.
And our competitors who are from, yeah, the US, Uber Eats, they're still not being accused.
So we're not only suffering from, I think, aggressive regulation, but we're not playing.
Is that lobbying?
Is someone paying for that?
No, look, I think it's just that we were by far the largest one, the most visible one.
And as it was very political, I guess the administration targeted first the larger one.
And I guess they're going to go now after the second one.
The timings are slow here, so there's going to be a time difference that reduces our advantage maybe.
Do you worry it's going to get worse?
Just being blunt, EU has hired 1,500 people for AI safety policing.
Do you worry that it's going to get worse?
Generally I'm very optimistic in life, but I just don't see the incentives so that this trend changes.
So in EU and regulations getting easier for the next wave of entrepreneurs, I'm not super optimistic.
Final one before we do a quick fire.
When you think about being a young European entrepreneur?
And for the thousands that will listen to this show, what would you say to them when they're often told you really need to move to the Valley if you want to build a tech company?
No, I strongly disagree.
Look, I think from Barcelona, where there was a very small ecosystem of tech and tech talent, we were able to build top-notch technology.
I don't think our technology had anything to envy our American competitors.
So I fully disagree.
I wish somebody had told me to have more ambition when I started.
At least for the first three, four years, I didn't fully believe I could do it.
There were no big examples in Europe, or at least in Spain.
So I wish somebody had told me.
But at the end, we are as smart and we can work harder or as hard as in any other place.
Do you think it's a fallacy that Europeans don't work as hard?
If you sustain a hardworking culture, you will keep finding the talent is there.
I mean, you don't need to convince a million people.
That's what I told the team when they told me no, because now younger talent, they want more work-life balance.
I'm like, look, I only need a thousand.
I don't need to convince the entire young community.
I just need a thousand people that want to work hard and you will find them.
Dude, I want to do a quick fire.
I could talk to you all day.
So let's start with what do you believe most that most people around you disbelieve?
I think we're building a platform that most people think of it as only food delivery.
And I see it as the future of online commerce.
When people have this first experience of ordering a MacBook charger and getting it in 30 minutes and repeating, I think that's going to be the future.
So everything will be on demand and everything will be delivered in 30 minutes.
Which competitor do you most respect and why?
I like Walt.
We compete against them in five, six markets.
In some, we beat them.
In some, we don't.
But it's always a very nice battle.
And they do things as we like.
They do things with high standards.
Which market are you number two in that you would most like to be number one in?
I'd say Portugal, but we're going to get there in a year.
Uber Eats is still ahead because we launched too late, but we're going to get there.
You can take one investor with you to your new company.
Which investor do you take?
Bea from Seaya.
She was the first VC that believed in us and she was in the board all the way until the very last day.
What makes a great board member to you?
What I loved about her is she always told me hey Oscar, because most of the conversations with her were around fundraising.
And she was always like, hey, look, I know that if you don't call me is that you don't have news.
While most of the other investors were like, how's the term sheet going?
Have you received the term sheet?
Are they signing it?
How did that?
No, so they just added so much pressure because they were suffering also.
And Bea knew that the moment I had good news, I would call her immediately.
So I appreciate it a lot.
What about the way that your parents brought you up?
Will you do differently deliberately with your children?
Look, I was lucky that my parents had money.
We've never lacked anything at home.
But at the same time, I saw my father working until 2am every single day, every single day.
And that, I think, marked me a lot.
I think that's also the other very important reason to keep working, to show the example to your kids.
I'm not a father yet, but I know that when I am, it's really important that your kids see you suffering every day.
Or not every day, but that they don't see that it's easy life all the time.
One of the most famous CEOs in the world said to me once that if you want to learn to be a good parent, just watch the Discovery Channel or National Geographic and watch the elephants.
The little ones learn by watching the big ones.
You learn by doing.
And so if you want your kids to work hard, you've got to work hard.
Yeah exactly, can i ask you, did having a bit of a safety net, like not worrying about money, help you as an entrepreneur?
I always kind of say i'm not an entrepreneur.
I started, my family was kind of middle class but like i lived at home in a nice home, mom paid for food.
I was going to be a law scholar.
If mine failed, i'd just be like a middle class lawyer, wasn't that risky?
I think it helped me in having irrational ambition and taking a lot of risks, to the point that we almost shut down the company three times because I was always pushing to the limit so much.
Because back to your point, I guess that I wasn't that scared about death.
No, I didn't have kids.
I didn't have a house.
For the first four years, I was living with my parents.
So I was like, look, I mean, I would be terribly sad, but my life didn't depend on it.
You can be CEO of any other company for a day.
What would you be CEO of and why?
I think Vinted.
I think about Vinted a lot.
Yeah.
Because I like big consumer platforms.
And of course, I like the impact they have.
Do you know Thomas?
No, I've never met him.
But you should meet him.
He's a friend and investor in the fund.
He's wonderful.
Like really one of the most fantastic CEOs.
What do you know now you wish you'd known when you started Glovo?
What I suffered the most was when the culture started softening a lot.
So what I would tell the Oscar of the beginning is keep speaking with full transparency all the time.
Doesn't matter how many people you have in front and doesn't matter if a fraction of them get upset.
Final one for you.
I like to end on positivity.
I'm an optimist like you are.
What are you most excited for in the world?
When you look at all the developments could be anything that you work around.
See what excites you most.
When you see it today.
So for me, it's AI and its ability to help MS patients, multiple sclerosis patients, find new and more innovative cures.
My mother's got MS.
It was always told to me that you'd never find a cure for MS.
Now it looks like you might do in five to 10 years.
In those lines, I guess what feels really exciting is how terrible jobs will disappear very soon.
So those jobs that nobody wants to do, like in hospitality or cleaning or all of this, will get robotized.
If you think about the world where nobody has to do shitty jobs, that's a much better world.
I've so enjoyed doing this.
Thank you so much for putting up with my very meandering schedule.
You've been fantastic and I so appreciate it.
Thank you.
It's been great.
I have to say Oscar is one of the most humble, thoughtful strategic leaders that I've been fortunate enough to have on the show.
It was so great to have him in the studio.
And just what a fantastic guy.
If you want to watch the full episode, you can find it on YouTube by searching for 20VC.
That's 20VC on YouTube.
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The first round was valued at 280k free money and we raised 100k.
Wow!
I would say all the European VCs or most of them passed on us.
Nobody believed in our story.
You know a bunch of kids from Barcelona beating the Deliveroo's and the Uber Eats of the world.
I remember the series B, it was like 25 million.
We were going to die.
So we unlocked the biggest deal of all history of food delivery, which was And that was a huge inflection point.
