Oscar Pierre, Glovo CEO & Founder: Selling 30% for €100K |The McDonald's Deal That Saved Them |E1263

The first round was valued at €280K pre-money, and we raised €100K. I would say all the European VCs, or most of them, passed on us. Nobody believed in our story: a bunch of kids from Barcelona beating the Just Eat and the Uber Eats of the world.

I remember the Series B. It was around €25 million, and we were going to die. We unlocked the biggest deal in the history of food delivery, which was McDonald’s.

Oscar, dude, I am so excited for this. It is such an incredible journey, so I am very excited to unpack it with you. Thank you for joining me today.

Thank you, man. I have been a big fan of 20VC, actually. We started the same year, 2015.

1. Starting with Nothing

Exactly. I was challenged by Paul on our team once. He was like, “You were literally the same age.” You were 22 when you started. How did you get the idea for Glovo? What was the origin and the “aha” moment?

The origins were huge. There was a huge ambition at the beginning. I was in school. I was studying aerospace engineering, and immediately after I graduated, I went to my dream company, which was Airbus in France. There, I realized very quickly that it was a very big corporate company that I did not want to be in.

That was when I started building a deck. I got some inspiration because I finished my studies in Atlanta, and I saw how Uber launched there, how big it was, how quickly it scaled, and the impact it had on all the students on campus. It was massive.

I said, “Why don’t we build the Uber for errands?” That was the original idea. I was thinking about my mom. She was always very busy doing errands for my father, my brothers, and me. I thought, “Why don’t we digitize this? Why don’t we build an app where anyone can ask for any errand? Go to this store, pick this up, buy this, and bring it to me.”

That was the first idea. Of course, it was a very niche and high-end service. Then, when we launched it, the first “aha” moment that made our ambitions much bigger was when we started seeing people ordering McDonald’s. They were ordering Big Macs, and I was like, “Holy shit, why Big Macs? There is already a website called Just Eat where people order food.”

That was the big “aha” moment. I understood that food delivery was still going to be massively disrupted. There was the first generation of food delivery. In the case of Barcelona, where we started the business, Just Eat was basically a marketplace that aggregated restaurants that did the delivery themselves.

There was not yet a marketplace that also offered the delivery, and therefore unlocked all the supply in the city.

Going back, how long did it take from the idea to launch? I think a lot of people do not execute fast enough. They let ideas meander. How long was it from, “I am going to do this,” to launching?

It was pretty fast. I was at Airbus, and I had a lot of free time. I had €10,000 to spend on the first app. I was not a computer scientist, so I could not code it myself.

I Googled “build an app like Uber,” and I found a development company in eastern Russia that was the cheapest provider I could find. They promised they would deliver a first version of the app for around €8,000.

What was the first version of the app like?

2. The First Funding Round: Selling ⅓ of the Company for €100K

It was awful. It did not work, but I had something to start showing to investors. I had some mock-ups.

You had something to start showing to investors. What happened then? Did you go and raise a pre-seed or seed round?

I knew nothing about VC, of course. You will find this very funny, but the first round was valued at €280K pre-money, and we raised €100K.

Wow.

With that first business plan and the first deck we had, we got to profitability and built a sustainable company.

€100K at €380K post-money. That is incredible. You raised €100K. What happened then?

We built out the app again, but this time it was much more fully fledged. €100K is not much, but with that we could hire our first CTO. Of course, we had to start the app from zero, but we were already getting some orders somehow.

We also had a website. People would just send us text messages saying, “Go to this store and pick up this.” Again, we started seeing some orders from McDonald’s. Then we launched, and we started seeing some traction.

It took a while—about a year—and that took us to the next round, which was around €1.5 million.

3. Biggest Lessons from M&A

When do you think you had product-market fit? You said it took a year. When did you think you had product-market fit?

For a very long time, I could see that we were delivering a service that people liked, but we had very negative unit economics. Most of the investment community did not believe that this new industry would become profitable.

That is not really product-market fit, because you are delivering a service that people like, but at a price they do not want to pay. It took a while until we started seeing the power of network effects: the fleet of couriers growing, gaining efficiencies, and then, at some point—which is the key to this business—you start moving the revenue stream to what we call the merchant, the partner: the restaurants, stores, and groceries.

Then you can start making the service cheaper and cheaper for the customer.

4. Marketplace Dynamics and Expansion

I do want to go to that, because you have so many lessons around marketplace dynamics. You have talked about network effects and the maturation of markets, and what that does to the efficiency of the model. What have been your biggest lessons when it comes to marketplace dynamics?

It is all about scale. In our industry, marketplace dynamics work at a city or national level. We invest a lot in building the brand and the business on a national level.

The country is important because most of the big partnerships are also countrywide. You negotiate with McDonald’s, Walmart, and other big brands that operate across the country. You also build a brand. We use a lot of channels that apply to the whole country. For example, we have invested a lot in television.

You have to win in every country. The network effects happen inside the country. When you cross the border, it does not matter how big and well known your brand is in Spain. You go to Portugal and start from zero. That is another battle you have to win.

I think we learned that very quickly. As entrepreneurs from Barcelona, our natural expansion was to launch in Barcelona, then Madrid, then Valencia. Then we said, “Okay, let’s try going international,” and we picked Paris and Milan.

Milan worked really well. Paris did not work well, and the main reason was that we were late. We launched maybe 2 or 3 years after Deliveroo and Uber launched. We never gained the scale or leadership to become a sustainable business.

In our industry, you really need a lot of market share. You need to become number one.

Does it work if you are number two?

It can work. Of the 23 markets we are in, we have very few where we are number two and profitable, but it is tough. You need to be a very relevant number two.

When you think about launching in a market, how long do you give it to mature into a profitable market or a unit-economically sustainable market?

It depends. We have been launching markets since day one. The most recent market we launched was Tunisia, I think, and Tunisia took between 2 and 3 years to become profitable.

It all depends on how fast you want to go. You can turn it profitable in 6 months, but you are going to move a lot more slowly. If you want to reach significant scale, you have to invest heavily in service and marketing in the first 2 years, and then you turn it into profit in 2 to 3 years.

That is a long time. How much does it cost to launch a market, on average?

In the case of Tunisia, I would say between €5 million and €10 million. Then these businesses get a lot of scale.

The beautiful thing about this industry is the scale. We are in some markets where our GMV—gross merchandise value—is getting close to 1% of the country’s GDP. It is a service that people use frequently and for many things. It is not only restaurants; it is groceries, pharmacies, and shops. It gets to a lot of scale.

5. The Burn Rate (Burning $1M per day) and Investor Concerns

That is why there was so much money poured into it. I think all the VCs understood at some point that this model was here to stay and would become these massive-scale platforms in every country. But you had to win.

That is why 2018 to 2022 was probably the bloodiest VC battle in consumer history.

You said scale is so important. Can you help me understand specifically how scale impacts unit economics most significantly?

It helps everywhere in the marketplace. On one end, it is logistics. Very quickly, we become the largest logistics fleet in any city where we operate. That means we have the cheapest cost to serve—to move something from point A to point B.

It is like Uber. In Barcelona, if you generate an order on Glovo, you will probably find a courier available a few meters away from the pickup point.

Then there is all the data you generate with the restaurants. Delivering food is very complex. Every single second matters. You cannot send the courier late to pick up the order because the food is going to get cold. You cannot send them too early because those are seconds you are paying the courier for.

It is a business about seconds. The more data you have about how long a restaurant is going to take to prepare a pizza, or how long that same restaurant will take if it is preparing paella, the more you can improve. You keep training the models with that data.

Can you train models on ambiguous externalities? Traditionally, it takes 15 minutes to cook a pizza at Pronto Pizza, but they have a new person that week and are 10 minutes late because they are new. That is the challenge of the real world.

Or it is raining, so it takes longer for the driver to get there and they are going to be 5 minutes late to pick up the order. Does data actually help in a highly ambiguous world?

With rain, yes, you can train on weather. We have a lot of live data on the weather in every city where we operate.

You also build a lot of products so that the restaurant can tell you if there is any externality. They can say, “Hey, my store is busy. I need some rest. I need 20 minutes off,” or, “This order is really big. I need to edit it.”

You have to build a lot of products that are very easy for the restaurant to use in moments of high tension. Those are usually very high-pressure moments for the restaurant because they have people to serve in the restaurant and couriers to serve as well.

One area that seems very optimized to me is when you can stack orders with a driver and one driver can take 6 orders. How do you think about increasing unit efficiency and improving unit economics when that involves a slight deterioration in customer experience? Customers are going to wait a little longer because the driver is doing 5 orders.

It is an optimization game. It is all about lifetime value and understanding very well how every minute of delay is going to impact the lifetime value or retention of that customer for the next order. We try to measure this all the time. It is the nature of our business.

6. The McDonald's Deal That Saved the Company

When we were chatting before, you talked about speeding up market expansion to capture time. What did you mean by that?

Going back to our history, we cracked Spain. I can tell that story later, because we unlocked the biggest deal in the history of food delivery, which was McDonald’s.

This was back in 2018. The CEO of McDonald’s in Chicago sent a message to all the countries saying, “We have to go into delivery, and we have one exclusive partner, which is Uber Eats.”

Back then, we were competing against 3 players in Spain: Uber Eats, Deliveroo, and Just Eat. When we read the news, we were like, “We’re screwed.” If Uber gets this deal and can start delivering McDonald’s for 1 or 2 years, we will have to shut down the company for sure.

We found the decision-maker. She was a woman called Suette. I traveled to Madrid around 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 Uber Eats, and she gave us that test. It was a huge inflection point.

What was the test?

The test was, “We are going to launch with you in Madrid.” We looked like a bunch of kids. We were in a garage, and the team was maybe only 20 people. But everybody knew that this was life or death.

We were all in. We had all the engineers building what McDonald’s wanted, putting the McDonald’s logo everywhere. Any request they made, we said yes.

Uber, from San Francisco, could not compete with the local team in Spain. We won that deal, and it was massive. The power of that brand and the number of new customers it brought us was huge. That started the flywheel effect of us growing a lot.

Then we replicated the same strategy in Italy with McDonald’s.

With McDonald’s?

Yes, with McDonald’s. The CEO of McDonald’s Italy said, “Wow, you are doing pretty well. Who are you doing this with?” We told them it was Glovo, and they also gave us exclusivity for 2 years.

A lot of founders are told early on, when they meet a big customer like McDonald’s, “Do not let it influence your product strategy. Do not become too concentrated in a single customer.” Would you say that is wrong advice?

As with all advice, it depends on the context. In our case, scale is fundamental. You have to win in every market to make it a sustainable business. These mega-large brands, like McDonald’s, are what bring in all the new customers.

At some point, it was very scary because 70% of our volume in Spain was McDonald’s. But I was okay with that because I knew this was just part of the customer flow. Customers came to Glovo and ordered McDonald’s, but then you could see in the cohorts that they started ordering more and more things.

7. Running out of Money Three Times: Fundraising Hell

It was just a matter of time before that 70% decreased to today’s levels, which are between 10% and 20% in most countries.

We get this big contract from McDonald’s in Spain, and then it expands to Italy. Where are we in our funding? We have 20 people or so at that point. When did we actually raise our first multiple millions?

Our fundraising story is really tough. We have been at the edge of dying at least 3 times. You look at the cap table we had when we sold, and it looked like a Frankenstein cap table. There were so many names that you would not recognize.

All the typical VCs, or most of them, passed on us. Nobody believed in our story: a bunch of kids from Barcelona beating the Deliveroo and Uber of the world, which were always 1 step ahead in fundraising.

I remember the Series B, which was the first large round. It was around €25 million, and we were going to die. I had visited all the VCs and had a list of all the ones that had passed—not just emails, but actual calls or meetings. I had no more VCs to pitch. I Googled them, and there were no more in Europe to go to.

Going back to that, respectfully, what did they miss? Or what did you do wrong?

I think I was not the best at fundraising. Maybe I was too transparent and too humble. I probably liked more ambition and aggressiveness.

What they missed was the power of working really hard with less money. How far can you go with less money but really good execution, even if you are inexperienced and very young?

I do not think any other competitor can beat us when it comes to the culture of working really hard. That is what allows us, for example, to win the McDonald’s deal or beat big competitors in every single market.

I do not think any large competitor is now bigger than us in any of the markets where we operate. That is just daily local execution and a mega-obsession with details.

Can I be blunt? What do you think of the European VC product at the early stage?

I struggled a lot. Most of the people I met had never built anything, so it was really hard to connect. Even the ones who had invested in the US had not built companies.

Building a company is such a roller coaster that if you do not have people who are used to that roller coaster, they add so much pressure. You get a lot of pressure from the company because there is always bad news coming. If you also get pressure from the VCs, it becomes too much.

I always say to founders that one of the benefits of working with the owner of a firm or the principal of a firm is that nobody is going to fire me if I do a bad deal. In another firm, you do feel the pressure if you have not done a great deal. People do get let go, and they bring that animosity and concern to you, the founder, because Glovo is not doing well.

Then my other partners are looking at me and saying, “Glovo is not doing well, and we put in €10 million.” That is not helpful to you.

Exactly. I felt that a lot.

Do you think European founders are aggressive enough? You are wonderfully talented, but you are also very humble and not a sales guy—no offense—and not aggressively sales-oriented. Do you think Europeans lack that in a way that Americans are amazing at?

On average, yes.

When you speak to Americans, and also when you go to Tel Aviv, you feel smaller. Then you look at the business you have built, and there is nothing to envy.

You mentioned some of the other competitors—the Deliveroos of the world—that raised a lot more money. If your competitors are raising a lot of money, do you have to raise a lot of money?

We raised as much money as we could. In the 7 years of fundraising, I could never choose. I never said no to an investor. That is how little optionality I had.

Going back to the round I mentioned, the Series B, when there were no VCs left to pitch to, Glovo was saved because I was at an event for FC Barcelona. Rakuten was a sponsor at the time. Rakuten is the Amazon of Japan, and its founder was at the event.

He met me, and for some reason he liked the company. He had seen the backpacks on the streets worn by the couriers, and he decided to invest.

How much did he put in?

I think he invested around €15 million.

I am glad you went to that event.

Me too.

Did you get VCs afterward saying, “We have heard about the round”?

It was a typical round in which I had a lot of money pending, but I needed a lead investor. In the end, there were 3 leads: 2 European VCs and Rakuten.

The story does not end there. It got even worse. 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 2 years.

The investment committee had already approved everything, and all the documents were ready. Then I got a call from one of the lead investors in Paris. They said, “We had another investment committee meeting.”

I said, “But you already had an investment committee meeting.”

They said, “Yes, but there was another one. They are fine moving forward, but we need the McDonald’s contract signed.”

I said, “No way. These contracts take time, and I have 3 weeks of cash left.”

I was negotiating with McDonald’s. At some point, I had to tell them, “We need this contract. Otherwise, we are going to have to shut down the operations.”

Finally, we got the contract.

You got the contract signed in time to meet the investor’s timelines?

Yes. It was very stressful.

Was that the most stressful moment of the company?

There were 2 more.

Go on. Series B, Series C?

I think it was our Series C. Again, we had 2 months of cash left.

For 7 years, you raised a round every 9 months. Respectfully, it is commonly done to raise one every 18 months. Was that because you could not raise a round that gave you 18 months? Why did you raise for 9 months? That feels far too fast.

The stakes kept getting higher. The industry kept becoming more irrational, and the growth expectations kept increasing. We were still at negative unit economics, so things were going well, but the burn kept scaling.

Every time we closed a round, we thought, “We either overinvest and shorten our runway, or Uber Eats and Deliveroo will kill us in all of our markets.” It was a life-or-death decision every time. We had to overspend every single time.

In one of those rounds, it was December, and we had to sign by the first week of January. By the end of January, we were running out of money. On December 23, I got a call from the lead investor saying they were passing.

That was a really bad Christmas.

Sorry, I did not mean to laugh. What do you do then? It is such a gut punch. What happened after the lead investor fell out?

In that case, we had to do a small internal round. That gave us another 3 months to find a new lead.

Was there ever a cash tap that turned on? You continuously had a lot of constraints. Was there ever a moment when, in the Series D or E, someone said, “Here you go, Oscar. Here is €200 million”?

We did get a round of €200 million, but it was at a moment when we were burning €30 million a month.

That must have felt like, “Thank God.”

8. International Expansion: What Worked

It did, but it was scary. After Spain and Italy, when we realized we had cracked the model, we became very ambitious.

Paris had failed, and we understood why: we were late. We could not acquire customers cheaply and retain them cheaply because there were already 2 competitors doing it well.

When we understood that, we looked at the map of the world. There were so many countries where nobody had disrupted the market yet. As Spaniards, we looked to Latin America. It is a small secret, but for Spanish entrepreneurs it is quite natural to expand into Latin America, which is a massive market with cultural and language connections.

We started with Peru, Chile, and Argentina. That was a big inflection point. When we launched in Lima and I saw that the first week was flying, I thought, “What did we see?”

What did you see?

It was very similar to what we saw in Milan, Barcelona, and Madrid. It was order frequency, average order value, restaurant signups, and courier signups.

What was it?

The 3 sides of the marketplace were working. It was easy to convince restaurants, and there was good courier availability. But the most important thing was the customers. We were acquiring and retaining customers.

When we saw that, we thought, “The platform works very far away from Barcelona. Let’s go huge.”

Then we rolled out across Latin America. We went to countries that, from the European point of view, investors found surprising. I had to really convince them, or even launch without their approval, in countries such as Kenya and Kazakhstan.

How do courier acquisition costs vary between Barcelona and Peru?

Courier acquisition is not a huge line in the P&L of our business compared with ride-hailing. It is fairly cheap.

Is the customer acquisition strategy the same or different?

There are a few differences, but not massive ones. We have a playbook that is quite scalable. Again, we use a lot of television, believe it or not, on top of online media. Television has worked very well for us to drive downloads and acquire new customers.

We have Peru, and we are thinking, “This works so well, thousands of miles away.” What happens then?

Arnau, who was our co-founder and COO, led Latin America for the first 2 years. We expanded into 10 or 12 countries.

Meanwhile, I hired someone from Uber who had been doing expansion there. We looked at the rest of the world, and we liked countries such as Kenya and Kazakhstan.

Investors would say, “Who is going to order food delivery in Kenya?” I would say, “There are a lot of people with cell phones. People like food, and they like convenience.”

Respectfully, are your average order values not much lower there?

More important than the average order value is the ratio between the cost of labor and the average order value. That is what matters most.

The bigger that ratio, the more affordably you can offer the service and the more demand you will find. The cost of labor is much lower in these emerging markets in some cases.

9. Lessons from Failures: What Brazil Taught Us

For example, we look for markets such as Morocco, where that ratio is very large. This allows us to offer the service much more affordably to the end customer.

Which markets did you try that did not work? You mentioned Paris, obviously. What other market did you try, and what did you learn?

The biggest failure was Brazil. Brazil was a big failure, and we lost a lot of money.

How much money did you lose?

It was like a black hole. We probably lost €30 million or €40 million.

What did you learn?

We simply did the wrong assessment. There was a very successful company called iFood. We thought iFood was very similar to Just Eat. Whenever we saw Just Eat in a market, we launched because we knew we could compete against them and offer a better service.

We saw a lot of similarities, but we did the wrong analysis. When we went there, we realized that iFood had all the content. All the restaurants and brands were delivering with iFood, and it had a pretty good service.

These platforms are very sticky. If a high percentage of the population is already using iFood, you need to spend a lot of money on vouchers to convince customers to switch to another app. Even if they switch, they tend to go back to their favorite app unless you keep giving them vouchers.

Vouchering in our business is horrible because the margins are very thin. Anytime you offer a voucher, you go into negative economics. We had to shut down Brazil.

How long did you give it?

It was fast. It was around a year.

Was it a tough decision to shut it down at that point?

It was really tough. Shutting things down is a super-important skill for a founder, because you have to go against what you previously told the board, the investors, and the employees.

A year before launching in Brazil, I was selling the Brazil dream. I was telling everyone, “This is going to be massive. Look how many people there are.”

Even when you launch and things are not going well, you have to keep selling it, because you need to inject that energy into everyone. Then one day, you have to go out there and say, “Everything I told you was wrong.”

The toughest thing is the ego. Apart from how difficult it is to lay off, in Brazil we probably had 100 employees, and we had to let them go. They were doing things well; the market was simply too tough.

10. How to Win in Emerging Markets

We go into these emerging markets—Kazakhstan, Kenya—and everything is going up and to the right, pretty much. Why does this journey not get easier on the fundraising side? I am confused. We now have Peru, Italy, Spain, Kazakhstan, and Kenya. They are performing well, the unit economics are looking good, and we are starting to see the benefits of scale. Why are investors not flocking to you at this point?

I think there were 2 things. One was the burn. The burn was really scary, and it kept going up: €15 million, €20 million, €30 million a month.

Did that make you nervous?

Of course. One thing I did for 7 years was check how much cash we had in the bank. It kept going down every single day. It was crazy.

When you are burning €30 million a month, that is €1 million a day. When we launched in Lima, there was a very well-funded competitor called Rappi.

They raised from Sequoia and, I think, DST. They were the best fundraisers.

When we went there, we went from saying, “These guys are crazy. They are so irrational,” to doing exactly what they were doing within 3 months.

Big exclusivities are worth a lot.

They are.

You pay restaurants a lump sum for exclusivity so they are only with you?

Yes.

You must have a lot of McKinsey consultants working out the payback periods on those deals.

We do it ourselves.

Does it pay back? How long does it take to pay back? I know it depends, but what is an acceptable payback period?

We usually invest at a 3- to 4-year payback.

A 3- to 4-year payback?

Yes.

And then you get the exclusivity for 3 or 4 years?

It depends.

That is astonishingly long.

The burn was very high. That was one reason investors did not like it.

The second was that we were getting some scale. We were reaching €1 billion or €2 billion in top line, but we were still really small compared with the big players.

Uber was at least 15 or 20 times bigger. Delivery Hero, and even Deliveroo back then, was much bigger than us. When you lack that scale, you are still very exposed to them. They have so much scale that they can go into your home market and destroy your business with a €20 million or €30 million investment.

Even though we were big, many investors—and I think rightly so—did not see us as big enough to fail.

11. The Biggest BS Elements of Company Values

You mentioned the layoffs in Brazil, which are incredibly hard. I do want to talk about talent. Building a business is merely a collection of people. You said some great things before about talent and about rewriting values. I speak mostly to Americans, and they love mission and values. What are your biggest lessons on rewriting values?

It is something I have pushed with my executive team every single year. We block a few hours, look at the values, and even though 12 months earlier we all agreed on every word and how to define each of our 6 values, every time we sit down and look at them we say, “This does not feel right anymore. We can improve it by changing this word or adding a new value.”

We have not changed the values very much, but we have proactively worked on them every year.

I think the problem was when we got to around 1,000 employees. That is when we messed up the culture.

You said you ruined the culture. Why did you ruin it? What did you do?

When you are hyperscaling, it is very easy to have a highly aligned culture with everyone working incredibly hard. Everybody is stretched, you are always behind the business, and everyone’s responsibilities are huge. That challenge pushes everyone to work really hard.

12. How I Ruined the Culture of the Company

It is inevitable, though, that one day your business starts growing at 30% year over year. That coincided with when we reached around 1,000 people.

I think I ruined it because I became scared of some part of the team reacting to the way I said certain things. I started becoming a bit of a politician.

What do politicians do? They say things in a way that a very large percentage of the population will like. It always gets to that first all-hands or Zoom call where you talk about values, work ethic, and the importance of working really hard and long hours.

When you finish the call, you get a message from someone saying, “What you said was a bit too aggressive. Certain people on my team did not like it.” As a young founder, when I started getting those messages, I thought, “Maybe I was too aggressive. Maybe I should say things a bit more nicely.”

That was the beginning—not the end, because we have corrected it—of the culture weakening.

I would love your help here, because I do not think I have that problem at all. I am very bullish and confident in my leadership. The challenge is that some people find that abrasive and, bluntly, too direct.

Part of me listens to this and thinks, “I am right to be this way. I am not affected by weak people who get offended by it.” But there are talented people whom you want to feel empowered and opinionated. How do you think about that balance?

The day I realized I was ruining the culture was at a Christmas party at Glovo. At that moment, another company was poaching a lot of our engineers. I am not going to name the company, but they worked really hard there. They had a very hard-working culture.

I heard one engineer say, “I was also approached, but I decided not to go there because they work really hard there.”

When I heard that, I thought, “Shit. It is not only that the intensity of the company is starting to go down. We are losing the hard-working people to another company that is managing to set and maintain that intensity.”

It is also a network effect that you need to keep working on.

What did you do then? I do not know you very well, but I know you a little bit. That must have been a crushing moment.

It was.

What did you do?

I started from the top. I aligned the top leaders and fired those who were not aligned. You realize that some of them did not want to go back to the Glovo of the beginnings.

Then I started saying things as they were. I wrote a couple of emails to the team, and the company was on fire for a few weeks.

If 20% of the company is really misaligned, it is not their fault. It was our fault, because we had relaxed. The messaging, recruiting process, and onboarding process had not told them that we wanted that type of work ethic and hard-working culture.

If the CEO suddenly goes out there and says, “We have to go back to the beginning. This is how we like working. This is our culture,” a lot of people will not like it.

Even if it is only 10% or 20%, it is very loud. You get a year of noise and really bad energy. It is not a week. It takes a year for people to leave or get fired, and there is a lot of toxicity.

Respectfully, is it a lack of work ethic, or is it work?

I think it is human nature. If nobody is pushing you, and your leader is not raising the standards or pushing for faster deliveries, things slow down.

How do you instill that velocity and unwillingness to relent? How do you say, “We are a different organization now. We operate at the highest level, and we do not accept anything that is not at that level”?

I would not point to a single thing. It is everywhere.

When you recruit people, you have to be completely transparent in the interview about what you expect in terms of working hard. If you feel that they do not understand what working hard means, you explain it.

You say, “Most days, I am here in the office until 8, and I hope you might have to do the same.” The people you fire are another major signal.

In every single meeting, when I walk into a meeting I try to remind myself, “My mission here is to add more velocity and raise the standards.” Nothing that they present is going to be fine. That is the mentality that any leader has to bring into a meeting.

If you go to a report and the manager or leader is fine with everything being presented, it is human nature that the next time you report, the quality will be a little lower.

Do you have any other big management lessons? You have managed thousands of people for years.

I had 2 stages at Glovo. One was hyperscaling. During hyperscaling, things can work with the CEO being away fundraising because there is so much energy in the business that it is transmitted throughout the company.

That is what I had to do. I spent almost 6 hours a day fundraising, and then I worked on the business.

My new stage came after the acquisition by Delivery Hero, which coincided with us growing at around 30% year over year. When you are growing at those rates—which are good, but are not hyper-scale or hypergrowth—you cannot sit back. You need to inject velocity and energy into every meeting you attend.

I totally agree with you. I think you always fundraise as CEO, so do not worry about that.

13. Layoffs and Talent Management

How would you advise founders who are about to conduct layoffs? I think there are more coming.

Unfortunately, we have done a few layoffs. What I found is that people are much more mature than you expect when you are planning the communications and everything else.

We have always put a lot of budget into treating people well. It is not only about the people who are leaving, although they deserve it. It is not their fault that you have to do a layoff or a big reduction.

It is even more important for the people who stay, because the people you lay off are their friends. The way those people exit the company is incredibly important in the post-layoff period.

We would always get the layoff proposal from the HR department, and I would push for more. I would say, “Let’s give them more.” It is a good investment.

I always tell people that the way you leave somewhere is often the way you are remembered.

Earlier, you said that you did too much M&A. What did you mean by that?

I did a lot of M&A. Entrepreneurs are optimistic by nature, and we think only about the upside. We think, “I am going to take this company and connect it to Glovo.”

Eventually, we shut everything down. My conclusion was that I was too optimistic about the upside and did not look at how complex it is to integrate different tech stacks, cultures, and teams.

When you buy a company, the founder will most probably stop thinking about building and leave.

What was the biggest acquisition you made?

We bought a couple of Instacart-type businesses—large-basket grocery marketplaces—one in Spain and one in Portugal.

How much did you spend on them?

Maybe €5 million each. I do not remember exactly.

€5 million each does not feel like a huge amount of money. This was not a multibillion-dollar decision.

No, it was not huge. But it also consumed a lot of focus. I got really excited because it felt like going back to the beginnings and starting again. I talked about it a lot with the company.

Now that I think about it, I think, “You were so stupid.” Our business is about focusing on the small details every day and making the marketplace better every day, not about expanding into other things.

How do you think about market depth versus breadth? You could have stayed in Italy and Spain and gone deeper into more services—pharmacy, cash delivery, driver banking, and financing. You could have taken that a long way, rather than expanding into Peru, Kazakhstan, and Kenya.

The answer is how time-sensitive the opportunity is and when you have the right to win.

For example, I know I can keep expanding in Italy and Spain into other delivery services because we have already won those battles. We are by far the largest delivery brand, so the opportunity in groceries and pharmacy is still there. We are growing very fast, and we can crack those categories and invest massively.

In 2025, the opportunity is still there. If you go to Peru or Romania, that was a “now or never” decision back in 2018 because you had to be the first mover. Getting there first and building scale was a “now or never.”

We now know that our playbook is, first, to win food delivery and restaurant delivery; second, to expand into multi-category. We think the second will be much larger than the first, but it is a matter of timing.

14. The Future of Quick Commerce

Can you unpack what multi-category means?

Multi-category is basically groceries, pharmacy, and anything else. Anything else is shops, electronics, flowers, and retail in general—anything that can fit into a rider’s backpack.

That said, groceries is massive. In Spain, for example, the offline grocery market is €120 billion, of which only 2% is online.

We are fully convinced that this 2% will turn into 20% or 30%. The magic of it is that delivering groceries on demand with no mistakes requires a lot of technology.

To make it profitable without overcharging the customer, you need a lot of technology. We now see retailers and grocers relying on us to enter the online business because their online businesses are not working.

That is a massive opportunity. When that 2% online penetration turns into 20%, we believe we can capture at least half of it.

15. Acquisition by Delivery Hero

Before we get to the future of e-commerce, you built a business to the scale where acquisition offers started coming in. At one point, you decided to accept an acquisition offer. Why did you decide to sell, and was it the first acquisition offer?

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 it was €100 million.

Half the board was in favor of taking it, I guess. How much of the business did you own then?

Maybe 25% or 30%.

€25 million or €30 million is a lot when you are 25 or 26.

It is a lot at any time, but when you are that age it is a lot.

Was any part of you tempted?

Honestly, no. I do not think it was rational, because of course €25 million or €30 million changes your life by a lot. I was just so convinced that what we had was working and that we could expand into 20 more markets, which is what we did.

That was the first offer. Tell me about the Delivery Hero one. How did that come to be?

First of all, Delivery Hero invested in Glovo in the Series B. It was part of those rounds where nobody wanted to invest, so we ended up taking money from a competitor.

We were competing against Delivery Hero in some markets, and Delivery Hero also made some investments. We agreed to take their money.

After the Series F, you have that moment when you close the round and go to the notary. You are so happy. Then you go back to the office, look at the business plan with your CFO, Edu, and say, “Edu, we need to start fundraising for the next round. We cannot wait long.”

We looked at each other, and I said, “I cannot do another one emotionally.” Every round was so stressful, and rationally it was also difficult not to do another one because every round carried a high chance of failing and having to shut down the company.

That is when we decided, “Either we IPO or we sell.” We started looking at both options.

With an IPO, we were still burning almost €1 million a day.

So capital efficiency was really taking effect.

Exactly. An IPO was not very viable. We were not profitable. We were already at €3 billion in top line, but we were not profitable.

Then we started looking for a sale. We talked to all the potential buyers, and Delivery Hero was by far the best bidder—not only for my investors, but also for the team and for me.

The Delivery Hero operating model is about empowering local brands. They have talabat in the Middle East, which recently went public, and PedidosYa in South America. They have Glovo as well. They have a group of amazing delivery brands and empower them with a lot of technology and capital when they need it.

This allowed us to keep operating and running the business. It was a great deal for everyone.

Can I ask how much they bought it for?

It was an all-stock acquisition for €2.3 billion.

When you signed that deal, how did it feel?

It was December 31, 2021. I felt really good. I felt that part of the mission was complete.

On one end, we had returned the money to investors. On the other, we had made sure that Glovo would continue to exist—continue delivering to customers and serving couriers and restaurants.

16. Post-Acquisition Reflections

Bluntly, on paper you suddenly had whatever your ownership was—€220 million, €300 million, or whatever it was. You do not seem like a guy who cares that much about money. How did it change your mindset?

One thing I did was speak with people who had made an exit. I realized very quickly that there was a correlation between unhappiness and people who had stopped working.

The entrepreneurs who had made a big exit and moved into a wealth-management lifestyle were not the happiest. To me, it became very clear that what gives me happiness is going to the office every day, spending time with my team, and solving big problems.

That is not all of my life. I have a lot of life outside of work. But I want to keep working until I die.

You are still at Delivery Hero today?

Yes, I am still there.

Most people leave after an acquisition. It is something I think about. On one hand, I co-founded a small VC in Europe called Yellow. It is a €30 million fund, and we invest in young entrepreneurs.

You are an amazing entrepreneur who has been through this incredible journey and redefined a category. Why do VC?

In some way, I was already investing a lot as a business angel. I had made around 4 investments, and I loved spending time with entrepreneurs.

As a business angel, it is really hard to keep things under control. It became too messy, so I teamed up with Adam, who came from Atomico. I gave them all the money I wanted to invest in pre-seed companies.

For me, it is an important hobby. I spend a few hours with them every week, and I like it a lot. I am learning, but going back to your question, I realize that I do not want to be a full-time investor. I really like operating businesses.

What have been your biggest lessons from investing as well?

One thing I realized is that, as a first-time founder, when I spoke to VCs I thought I was having a one-on-one conversation. In reality, it is like broadcasting to the entire VC community.

The amount of chatter that happens across VCs is enormous. They talk all day. They share deals and information.

That is advice for all founders, especially first-time founders: it is a very connected community. Anything you say to one person can travel. Do not try to play games assuming conversations are confidential, because they are not.

Also, do not go out too early. This is often not in my interest, but if you meet one investor, it will likely go into an associate’s WhatsApp group that you are fundraising.

Then suddenly people think you are raising, and it becomes known that you were turned down by a named fund or whoever it was. Those vicious rumors can start.

Yes, I have seen that. It is dangerous.

Will you still be at Delivery Hero in 5 years?

I want to operate businesses all my life. That is what I like and enjoy.

Every time I think about starting something new, I realize how cool Glovo is, how cool the platform we are building is, and how much we are growing. I still see Glovo becoming 10 times bigger than it is today.

We are approaching €7 billion in top line. I see so much potential. I see Glovo the way I saw Amazon 20 years ago.

Is Glovo profitable today?

Yes. We just turned profitable. We have just turned 10 years old, and the last semester was our first profitable semester.

That must have been a special moment.

It was good.

Now we are profitable. One thing I think is a big needle-mover in the industry—and, respectfully, one reason why I have invested in the past—is that I believe you can subsidize one part of the business with a very effective advertising engine on the other side.

I do not think we have seen that fully taken advantage of yet. How does advertising and media change the quick-commerce business?

The ad space is fascinating, and I feel we have only just started.

We believe that, out of every €100 of GMV, we will be able to generate at least €5 of advertising revenue. Those revenues are almost all margin. We are currently at around €2, so we are halfway there—somewhere between €2 and €3.

It makes a lot of sense. Every time a customer opens Glovo, they open it with an intention to purchase. Any brand or restaurant wants to be there.

It is very efficient advertising. If you are a shampoo brand, you want to be there when the customer is searching for shampoo, and you want to be in the first listing.

What would drive advertising revenue from €2 or €3 to €5? Is it purely more traffic?

It is more advertising products and more penetration. We still have only a fraction of the merchants, groceries, and brands we work with using our advertising products.

It is a matter of penetration and improving the advertising engine.

Which brand do you not have today—whether a restaurant brand or another type of brand—that you would most like to have?

There are 2 Spanish ones. One is likely Inditex, including Zara and the other brands. They still do not want to go into quick commerce.

Why not? They are in the quick-fashion game.

They are not in marketplaces. You will not find them on Zalando either, except perhaps to a limited extent. They really want to control the end-to-end online experience.

The other one is Mercadona, which is the Walmart of Spain. It has 40% market share offline, and it also wants to control the end-to-end 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 [likely Wolt]. We started in the same month, almost—the end of 2014—and we sold only about 2 months apart. Our stories are very parallel.

We always had conversations about teaming up and joining forces to build a very large European delivery company, but our paths never joined. I think Miki is one of the great entrepreneurs in Europe.

I agree. I am very happy to hear you say that.

17. The CEO on Trial and Facing Prison

One element I 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 markets where you operate, it seems that Uber has a lot of freedom to do what it wants, while perhaps you do not. Is regulation enacted fairly?

First of all, the gig economy needs more regulation. It is a reality that has grown everywhere in the world. We operate across 23 different markets, and governments are realizing that they need to regulate it somehow because it is growing so much and so many people are working and generating revenue from it.

It has been tough. We have had to build public-affairs teams in every country.

Unfortunately, the country where we have suffered most from regulation is Spain. I am not going to go into all the details, but it is so extreme that I am now in a criminal process. The prosecutor general has accused me in a criminal process involving 6 years in prison for operating with a freelancer model, which has been validated by judges in Spain up to 14 times.

It has become very political. I had to go and give evidence 3 months ago. I think it is the only country in the world where the founder and CEO of a digital platform has to give evidence in a criminal case.

Does that make you nervous?

It was a big deal. It also generated a lot of noise in the media.

The worst thing is that we were not playing a fair game against our competitors. For some reason, we were the only company the administration went after in Spain. Our competitors, who are from the US and elsewhere, have not been accused.

Is someone paying for that lobbying?

I do not think so. We were by far the largest and most visible company. Because it was very political, I guess the administration targeted the largest one first.

I guess they will go after the second one now, but the timings are slow here. There will be a time difference that reduces our advantage, perhaps.

Do you worry it is going to get worse? To be blunt, the EU has hired 1,500 people for AI safety enforcement. Do you worry that regulation will generally get worse?

I am generally very optimistic in life, but I do not see the incentives changing. I am not optimistic that regulation in the EU will become easier for the next wave of entrepreneurs.

One final question before we do the quick fire. When you think about being a young European entrepreneur, what would you say to the thousands who listen to this show and are often told, “You really need to move to Silicon Valley if you want to build a technology company”?

I strongly disagree.

From Barcelona, where there was a very small ecosystem of technology and talent, we were able to build top-notch technology. I do not think our technology had anything to envy in our American competitors. I fully disagree with that advice.

I wish somebody had told me to have more ambition when I started, because for at least the first 3 or 4 years I did not fully believe I could do it. There were no big examples in Europe, or at least in Spain.

In the end, we are as smart, and we can work as hard, as people anywhere else.

Do you think it is a fallacy that Europeans do not work as hard?

If you sustain a hard-working culture, you will keep finding the talent. The talent is there. There is young talent that wants to work hard.

18. Quick-Fire Round

You do not need to convince a million people. I told the team, “Younger talent may want more work-life balance, but I only need 1,000 people. I do not need to convince the entire young community. I just need 1,000 people who want to work hard.” You will find them.

Dude, I want to do a quick fire. I could talk to you all day.

What do you believe most that most people around you disbelieve?

I think we are building a platform that most people see as only food delivery. I see it as the future of online commerce.

When people have their first experience of ordering a MacBook charger and getting it in 30 minutes, and then repeat that experience, I think that is going to be the future. Everything will be on demand, and everything will be delivered in 30 minutes.

Which competitor do you respect most, and why?

[likely Wolt]. We compete against them in 5 or 6 markets. In some we beat them, and in some we do not. It is always a very nice battle.

They do things the way we like to do them. They operate to high standards.

Which market are you number two in that you would most like to be number one in?

Portugal. But we are going to get there in a year. Uber Eats is still ahead because we launched too late, but we are going to get there.

You can take one investor with you to your new company. Which investor do you take?

Bea from [likely Seaya]. She was the first VC who believed in us, and she was on the board all the way until the very last day.

What makes a great board member to you?

What I loved about her was that she always told me, “Oscar, I know that if you do not call me, it is because you do not have news.”

Most of my other investors would say, “How is the term sheet going? Have you received the term sheet? Are they signing it?” That added so much pressure because they were suffering too.

Bea knew that the moment I had good news, I would call her immediately. I appreciated that a lot.

What about the way your parents brought you up will you deliberately do differently with your children?

I was lucky that my parents had money, so we never lacked anything at home. At the same time, I saw my father working until 2 a.m.

Every single day. And that, I think, marked me a lot. I think that's also the other very important reason to keep working, just 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 an 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.

So, if you want your kids to work hard, you've got to work hard.

Yeah, exactly the same.

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. My family was kind of middle class, but 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. It was not 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 3 times, right? Because I was always pushing to the limit so much because, I guess, back to your point, I wasn't that scared about death.

No, I didn't have kids. I didn't have a house for the first 4 years. I was living with my parents, so I was like, look, if it—I mean, I would be terribly sad, but my life didn't depend on it.

If you could 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.

Oh, wow. 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 that you wish you'd known when you started Glovo?

Yeah, I think 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. It doesn't matter how many people you have in front of you, and it 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? It could be anything that you work around. What excites you most when you see it today?

So, in those lines, I guess what feels really exciting is how terrible jobs will disappear very soon now. Those jobs that nobody wants to do, like, I don't know, in hospitality or cleaning—all of this will get robotized now.

If you think about a world where nobody has to do shitty jobs, that's a much better world.

Dude, 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.