 Onko hyper-exciting to be here and welcome. So today we are going to talk about the journeys with Wald and Bolt. An expansion so let's get straight into it. So Mickey, Wald is now present in 24 markets but what was the first country you expanded to after Finland? The first country we went to was Sweden. The logic was very simple. It was a one hour flight. Me approximate, as a productive movement exercise, as we need to learn what it is like to operate in a new country with a new currency language, culture and so forth. We figured that the closer it is going to be, the easier it is for us to fix things and to learn things. Markus Bolt is now present in 45 markets, but what was the first one? The first one for us was very similar logic was Latvia and Riga, because equally it was pretty much the closest city for us to go to, but that one actually went very similarly to Tallinn. So I think the third one we tried to enter actually was Helsinki, and still eight years later we've been unable to expand to Helsinki because of the regulations here. So oftentimes choosing only by proximity isn't the best idea. Sure. The topic of the title of this fireside is expanding in fringe markets. How conscious has been the decision to walt to expand in this fringe market? Yeah, I read this case study, this was already some time ago, where they said that one strategy you can take as a startup is to take a big market and then to go to these underserved like markets. And I was like, that's a really smart strategy. I hope we had figured that one out. You know, for us, how it went was that, you know, we expanded to our kind of nearest countries as starting point. So we're on all the Nordic countries, all the Baltic countries. And after that, because we're a small company and we're always in an industry that's massively funded and we were always the underdog. So we need to be very conscious about where we expand so that we're able to kind of back the bets that we take. And that meant that we chose markets that were not like the UK's or the U.S.C's or the whatness of the world, but like countries where we knew that we're going to be able to invest what it takes to be able to, you know, build strong possessions and win these markets. How about you, Markus, how conscious has that strategy been for vault? Absolutely crucial. We literally would not exist here today without choosing that. So for us as well, we raised the first tiny amount of like a million in funding and that first all the investors were saying you should go to these traditional markets, which were usually the UK and U.S. But for our sector that made zero sense whatsoever. Like there was all these existing players already there who had raised tens of millions, hundreds of millions of funding and actually once thought the consumer problem there wasn't as big. Like we realized that in Eastern Europe we could actually deal with much more value with the original taxi hailing product. So that was the sort of competitive landscape. But the other one was that actually what we realized was that by winning these smaller markets first of all we could actually win them, get them to financially profitability sustainable level and then use all of that funding and then expand into the Western markets afterwards. So what has actually happened is that all the players we thought were big five, six, eight years ago are now actually relatively small in comparison. So actually the dynamic has completely shifted and that's something most investors didn't get. I think seven, eight years ago the paradigm was that you need to go to these big markets because that's the only way how you can build a billion dollar company. That's not the case whatsoever. We realized a long time ago that if you look at the GDP growth, population growth, smartphone penetration and so on, then you can actually build a huge company. One of the biggest in the world by never even going to the US just by focusing on these markets. We have a lot of entrepreneurs in the audience today. So what advice would you give to founders what thinking about the first markets they're expanding to? What would you think about in the market pick model? Yeah, at least for us our playbook was that at the start expand to only one country at a time because you're going to make so many mistakes that you don't want to be making those mistakes in five places at the same time. You expand to your country, you make mistakes, you learn. You expand to the second one, you make mistakes, you learn new things. Over time you kind of develop a playbook of how to do this. Where do you find the right people? How do you launch? How do you get in our kind of case the right marketplace dynamics to work, the right selection supply, customer experience, speed, so forth. But I think this kind of goes slow at start to be able to go fast later is something that's a little bit counterintuitive. And especially like our investors told us at the start like we want to go fast and we have to go to the big markets and let's go to 10 places at the same time and that could have really killed the company. And I think like in hindsight we kind of realized quickly enough that no, we need to first figure out the scale playbook and only then go to more markets at the same time. Absolutely the same case. I think we made the mistake that we raised the first million after we had been relatively successful in Tallinn when we tried to launch four or five cities at once being Latvia, Lithuania, Finland and so on which are all relatively small markets but even then we took on too much at once and just the management team at the time was so small we were still figuring stuff out so we had really no idea what we were doing. So we burned most of that funding and we were like, okay this fails, let's actually stop it, let's start to take it sequentially one by one and that was the only right strategy to do looking back. So that's of course like one very important recommendation. The other one is that we were actually I think trying to get rid of the biases which we realized we had many when we first started expansion. So what we then tried to do was we actually figured ten parameters how we would rank a market. Most of them are pretty straight forward like what's the population size and GDP and so on and for us one of the crucial points was regulation because for the tax industry that's always been historically the biggest broker and then we made a table of a couple of hundred cities in the world where just we were putting in all the cities just whatever we thought like those could realistically at least be viable and then we started to prioritize them and actually we realized all the African cities were top of the list but we had zero experience in Africa. Most of us had even never even been there but all the data was showing us that it should be right. So we didn't even have any budget to fly there. I mean we had basically nothing, we were a team of ten people so we were like okay let's try so we hired a young university student just fully remotely had them on the ground and started to test out the market and you know a year later of course we realized it was the best market for us and it became the biggest city but I think that was one of the big insights we had that like we had so much biases where it might not work but actually when we started to look at the data we discovered some completely new opportunities. That's very interesting and I think that's something that also now changing as companies get more used to like remote work and also building remote first companies that startups nowadays can look at expansion through a different lens. Vault and Vault operate in fiercely competed markets. What advice do you have for founders how to look at competition if there are markets you should not enter? Yeah I think the first thing to say is that like a lot of people might look at like for instance Vault or Vault as like oh the guys saw what some other company somewhere else was doing and they you know did a copy of that and went to these markets before you know the other company had the chance to do that and like for instance in our case that was not the case like when we founded Vault there was not really like this kind of a restaurant food delivery industry like there were some last month delivery companies that ended up going with the restaurant and then there was companies like us that for instance started in the restaurant side and ended up on delivery and our kind of ambition was always to build like the best product in the world the best service in the world. That was always our aspiration since the start our aspiration ended up being something that many years later as we were building the company kind of was the natural thing to do given the competitive dynamics and the landscape and so forth but that was not really what we started off doing and I think the important thing to take home is that you know you want to build a world class product you want to build a world class service you want to build something because otherwise you are not going to be competitive in the long term and the other thing about competition is that ultimately this is another competition it's a competition against the corner grocery store like that's the competition and hence like you need to obsess and focus on the customer and building the best possible service for the customer like companies like us are only as good as the last order people made so you can lose a business in this industry very very quickly if you don't execute well so as a result like you know we've never really focused on a competition we've always just focused on the customer and if we are able to build a service where we efficiently get customers the service retention is good year economics are good frequency is good that's how you build a great business not by obsessing on what the competitors are doing same I think two points here one is that again when we started in 2013 there was really no ride-healing company that was even working with private drivers back then back then our core first major competitor was Uber which was actually started off as a very expensive fancy limousine service and when we started that was the audience I started the company as a 19 year old who was thinking that I need an affordable service I can use and I want to replace the private car still to this day I don't have a driver's license so we came at very very different ends where they came from very premium service we wanted to make a service that's affordable for the masses to use on a daily basis and that very much philosophy has carried with us today as well another point is that yes these industries are huge some of the largest sectors there are but they're also brutally competitive so obviously as a company you need to be very mindful what's the right sequence of countries to go to if we had started to go to the most competitive markets in the beginning we would have most likely failed yes we were much more frugal than the rest yes we were getting many many times more value for customers out of every euro we invested but if the other player has 10 times more money to spend it's still going to be extremely difficult so we did the right choice of picking which are the cities that we are definitely going to offer the best service in win those one by one and only then go to these more competitive markets when it actually has a company we're ready to do it so you've mentioned the playbook when was the point you kind of found the recipe that works when did the expansion become scalable for you Margos well it definitely took four or five years of just iterating a lot of failures and still to this day we realized that markets have quite a lot of differences so of course many things are the thing customers always want lower prices faster speeds more selection what not like all of those are true and will continue to be true in 10 years but how do you deliver that in each specific market can be very very different so what we tried to find and I think what we do pretty well now is have a good balance so we on one hand take all the central learnings and we have pretty good playbooks and the same people actually who are running the first markets are still today running the core major businesses for us in seven years they know better than anyone how this is done but they never get arrogant and try to force this global approach everywhere but we have really sharp people locally who give them autonomy and then this sort of hybrid and this combination is what results in the best outcomes what about you Miki yeah I still remember being given the advice that you know you have to build the playbook for expansion and I was like what does the playbook look like I was like physically thinking about the book in my mind and I remember even asking like you know someone who worked in another company that developed the playbook for expansion in another industry and I was like can you show me the book because I was like physically thinking about like a playbook but what playbook ultimately means is that it's almost like a list of things that you do to build up a market and you know in our case like it's a list of like you know some hundred ish things where it starts with you know where do we find the office where do we hire the people what are the different people different roles in the team like it's this list of activities and actions that you do to build up a market and what developing the playbook basically means is that every launch that you do you learn you kind of learn that oh we haven't figured about that or actually this we should do in that way or oh this is the best way to hire a marketing person in a country and so forth and that's ultimately the playbook and I think you know for us it was between 2016 when we launched our first country outside of Finland and then 2017 that we basically developed the core of the playbook and then like after that we were launching eight countries at the same time and that's when we kind of iterated the playbook that you know we could do many places at the same time but still today like we learn we learn from launches and you know we become better at doing this thing and as Markus said it's a lot about sequencing a lot about because all of these when the marketplace industries are about you know building a portfolio of markets where some markets you're going to be very strong in and you're going to have cash flow that you can take and invest to other markets then you're going to have up and coming markets and battlegrounds you're not going to be able to build a very long long term competitive company so you need to be very mindful about like balancing the portfolio if you're only you know in these battlegrounds where it's a nightmare of a competition and no one has a strong market position it's going to be very expensive to build up a company What are some of your biggest learnings over the years and if there's one thing or some things that you would do differently when you look back five plus years thousands and dozens of things but definitely the one that we always keep in mind is that the big companies often too a lot of stupid shit and to be honest like we've seen this play out so many times like everybody was looking from the outside that Uber is this big success story whatever they had been raising more funding than any other company before but then when we started to zoom in how they were actually operating in these markets we realized they were doing so many stupid things because we can actually out compete and offer so much of a better customer experience so for example one was when we were starting to launch these African countries on a super frugal budget we literally couldn't even fly there we were hiring people remotely back then when that was a weird thing to do and we realized for example that we started off with cash payments and digital payments and Uber back then was actually only enabling payments in credit cards in Africa where like less than 5% of people have a credit card and they were operating there for like a year or two so just you look at this and you're like it's a whatever, 70 billion dollar company they apparently have super smart people and then like they are just missing out like 90% of the market because of a simple thing as a payment method and that's like the most obvious example so when you start to look at like the details of it they were doing just dozens and dozens of things wrong so that gave us a lot of confidence as a company that let's start off from the first principles let's look at what the customer needs work backwards and be more confident in us actually and not just follow whatever these big companies apparently are doing that's almost never the right thing to do yeah it's a very similar thing for us just stay very close to the customer like you know ever since we launched Vault in Helsinki our first city when we've asked customers what do they want Vault to do the number one most requested thing was I want to get my groceries with the same experience and we knew that basically since 2015 and we're always like asking ourselves when is the right time, what is the right way to enable that and nowadays we do that in virtually all of our countries but we waited and focused on building a restaurant food delivery business actually for the first six years of our existence so I think like you know your customers ultimately tell you in either ways that they say or either ways that they do what they want from the service and I think just by following the customer we had a very similar experience about cash and delivery like we expanded to markets like Greece and Croatia and we saw that this was a thing that was culturally very important we went to Israel and one of the most common pieces of feedback we got was that Vault is an amazing service but why do I need to have cash to tip because our team was so against tipping from like an ideological point of view so you just have to listen to the customer and you learn about like what you should do as a company also when you expand, you know we always try to understand customers in the market we are evaluating for expansion like are we building something, are we doing something that could produce value in this market in a way that no one is really truly doing you know yet I want to talk about talent and culture for a bit when you are hiring that first person to your new market what do you look for in that person Yeah, this is perhaps the most important part of the playbook at least for us because what are companies, companies are a compilation of people working towards a common goal and when you go to a new country no one has heard of your company especially like in the early days when we've raised like 2 million or 10 million of funding like no one had ever heard of Vault restaurant food delivery as a starting point was not the very sexy thing to be doing and we go to a country where we need to teach people about the opportunity the industry, the company, what we do and to actually be able to hire good people and we just became very good at hunting people like the amount of hacking LinkedIn that our company has done over the years has been insane and it's about finding candidates without having any applications like we've never been a company that waits for applications we need to hire an operations manager in Country X we know what good operations managers look like we're shortly 60, 70 people we reach out to them, we get them for coffee we tell them about the company what we're doing, we get them excited and then we have an opportunity to understand which one of these people could be the right person for us and that's really when the recruiting process starts but we didn't wait for any applications we went out to find the people that we need absolutely, two points to add here I think one is that investing in recruiting when you start to scale is absolutely core we got very lucky that among the first 30 employees we got the best recruiter I've ever seen my life was built up our entire recruiting by until now and it's probably one of the only reasons why we've been able to scale this quickly so really just getting these extremely sharp people who know how to find talent aggressively hunt them not just wait aggressively for people to apply that makes no sense in this talent environment is absolutely core and the other one is that we've always been much more focused on the actual intrinsic abilities of the person, how talented they are integrity and so on and not get misleading sort of info from the CV like sure they might have been working in some awesome company like Google but what we've realized over the years is actually those companies have a very different culture than what we need this is a very brutal operational business this is not some like only software business that you can build in Silicon Valley you need great technology and you need great operations on the ground and that actually requires a very different kind of person so it's not like you can just go and hire brand name US companies and those people are going to work out often times they don't I think this is something a lot of founders are thinking about when they are launching their their first markets and hiring hiring the first people to join the team so how do you convince people to join when people have never heard of Balt or Walt well actually in some cases we've on purpose been actually warning candidates upfront that this is not going to be an easy ride this is one of the most competitive sectors that technology world has ever seen in fact no competitor has raised more funding than Uber I mean they raised more than 20 billion and we both had to face against them with an order of magnitude less funding and that actually works I think extremely well so on one hand it sort of filters out the candidates who don't want that kind of environment they want something more relaxing but on the other hand it does really attract to the people who want to compete in the toughest league for the biggest prize there is and I think that's actually worked really well for us to be very transparent about what's the challenge upfront and not try to make it seem like we're a company or not Great people attract other great people like we've had so many of our people join Walt because we expanded to a new country and our launcher for the market was able to get people excited about what we can build or other people in our company when we hire for instance a general manager as Walt we usually use other general managers from other markets as part of the recruiting process because we're at the same time trying to raise the bar of what it is like to be a general manager at Walt so we're not just thinking about a general manager for this market but we're thinking about the general manager community and how does this person make the community better so it's using the peers from different markets also as help when you look at engineers and product people everyone wants to work with smart people and build something with an impact so I think in our case it's been about the people that we have that bring more people like them and about the problems we solve the quality of product that we build and the opportunity that we have as a company and ultimately hiring people as an early stage company is exactly like raising funding like you are selling people on what we can build together it's not that what we've done so far it's about what we can do from here on Exactly you both now are present in dozens of countries do you have one company culture or does that question even make sense well there's definitely some elements that are shared so in terms of how we look for people, what are the traits we care about how we operate on a daily basis all of that we have actually over time invested more and more to document it and make sure that everybody's on the same page what are the commonalities but on the other hand of course each country and each team even will have a bit of a nuance or what is actually the function is the country's needs and so on and we allow a bit of the country managers to have a fit of freedom in what kind of people they attract so I think you just need to find a good balance there you can't really find like define a too narrow box otherwise you're just limiting yourself from the wider talent pool as well Can you give me an example of something that is shared something that's so important to you that is shared across the world well one of the core ones is again that we look at talent over CVs and that's something that we always universally just constant remind people always when we look at hiring that look at like how hard working is the person are they a good team player are they actually super smart as a learner can they adapt to this new industry not just get overly focused that have they done this particular thing before because what we see is that some of the best people some of the best managers in the company have started off at much lower junior roles before they actually didn't have prior experience but they were just so talented whatever months they managed to actually grow into the role and beat others who supposedly had much more experience so that's for example something we really hold true across the company until now I remember when we had like our previous offsite before Covid we were 500 people at the time now we're 4,500 people but I remember being super nervous about bringing everyone together into the same place because we'd hired out of those 500 people around like 400 in the last 12 months at the time and I remember coming together with the team and like being so positively taken by the fact how similar the team felt like it felt like family coming together people had never met each other across different countries that interacted like online but you had this similar vibe to the people and I think that's what culture ultimately is about do you have people that have a similar philosophy about you know work about what they want to do about what kind of pride they can work what kind of work they have and so forth so it's always like subculture but like you want 80% of your culture to be very similar like in our case it's very similar like we think that attitude often times beats experience you need experience in a lot of things but like a great attitude a great ability to learn and the curiosity usually makes you a lot stronger in the long term or we have people that really care about the work that they do we talk a lot about doing like common things uncommonly well about wanting to achieve excellence wanting to build for the world class wanting to have the best service possible both in product and operations so these are the things that like form up a culture and ultimately those are the important things that you need to get right across every place where you operate then there's like subcultures like engineering culture is a little bit different from product culture from operations culture from customer support and so forth but the big things need to be very similar across the company something I want to still still touch during this fireside is advice to European founder so how do you think you can build being from a small small European country into your advantage as a founder and when you are thinking of expanding many things for a long time I think the big blocker we had was access to funding and I see in Europe that has actually now been removed as an obstacle you see companies in Europe coming up and raising hundreds of millions in the first couple of years so I think that is largely a solved problem if you are a great entrepreneur, great business great execution like you can get access to the best investors in the world so I think that's out of the way so we need to play to our strengths and I see often times that is exactly combining these businesses that have a strong technology component with a strong offline operational component as well because often times that doesn't come very naturally to the Silicon Valley companies but I think that's something that very much fits much more with this European frugal more cost efficient mindset which might not matter in some industries like if building Facebook or Google like being cost efficient doesn't matter at all but if you're operating a business such as ours a marketplace then that's everything if you're able to be 5-10% more efficient and then you scale that out I mean it starts to compound over time that can make all the difference in the world yeah I mean great companies thanks to the internet and I think like it has never been a better time to come from virtually any place in the world to be able to build like a world class company and a global company so I think it's a great time to be an entrepreneur also in Europe and in our case we started in a very small home market so we made up into our advantage like our company culture, our company language is English yet we operate in zero English speaking markets like we had to build an international company from day one and hence we became very good at expansion and I think you can turn this disadvantage to your advantage by virtue of the company that you built thank you so much Miki and Markus