 I'm Amy, I'm a reporter at SIFTED. SIFTED, if you don't know about SIFTED, we are, the Financial Times is a kind of financial time spin-out and we write about startups and tech around Europe. We've been going for about a year and one of the very first interviews I did was actually I got a nice trip from London to Barcelona to meet Global and before I met Global for the first time I'd never really heard of you, sorry Oscar, because I live in London and in London we have Deliveroo and we have Uber Eats and in the Nordics you also don't have Global, but Global is kind of a hidden treat for people and I think what's super interesting is you chose not to go to the UK, you chose not to come to the Nordics. Tell us about that, why didn't you even bother going there? To give you some context, the beginnings of Global were very humble and let's say not very ambitious. We never planned to be a global food delivery company. We just found ourselves in Spain and Italy with a product that was beating or was better than the local competitors which at that time was Uber Eats Deliveroo and especially SIFTED. SIFTED was the big player and we laser focused on these two countries, Spain and Italy. We had a product that was better in the sense that we deliver everything beyond food, even though we three quarters or 80% of our orders are food delivery, there's a 20% of the orders that are groceries, pharmacy, sent some flowers, which again it's only 20% but emotionally for the user it weighs a lot when you can pick up your keys that you forgot at home even if it happens once every three months. Once we could crack these two markets, we just got ambitious and we looked at the entire world. We chose to go to LATAM and we chose to go to not very competitive markets. That was very clear for us that even though our product is one step further than any other food delivery company in terms of value proposition, that's usually not enough to go to a city like London and disrupt a market that is very penetrated on food delivery. So how did you, what went into assessing the kind of countries that you would go to? What made you decide, okay we're going to go to this place in Latin America? I mean there's a very long process of how we green light or red light countries to go to. The biggest questions we ask is, are we going to lead or co-lead the food delivery space? If it's a clear yes, because either there's no competition or the local competitors we think they're disruptable, right? They have a service and selection that we can beat. Then we go deeper and then we go into the unit economics, the legal model, the cost and etc. We started with LATAM for us, being from Spain was kind of easier for us to do that move just because of a language and a little bit of culture. What was different? What did you go to, you went to Latin America and you were like, hey they speak Spanish, this is going to be easy. Like what were some things where you were like, oh this is not Spain? First of all whenever you get out of Europe everything around payments and credit cards gets very messed up. If you want to have a good acceptance rate for any credit card you need to localise and develop a lot of localised products. That was big. Then we related to payments. When we launched in Argentina we thought we could run a business without cash. We thought that people would put their cards in an app that was new to them and the local teams told us that was a terrible idea. We launched without cash on delivery and we just had to pull back. We had to develop cash almost overnight. The ability for users to pay with cash. Cash is terribly complex. Now we've built a process that is scaling very well. Cash has two secondary effects. One is the fact that your couriers are building up cash that they hold in their pockets. One is very dangerous because at some point they're going to fraud. They're just going to leave the platform because they're accumulating a lot of cash. Two, if the word spreads around the city that all these couriers with the yellow backpacks are driving with a lot of cash in their pockets, that's also very dangerous because they can get stopped and robbed. That was probably the biggest thing that we had to develop almost overnight. How does it work? How do you stop them all just stealing from you or being stolen from? We've developed a system that is working very well. We're basically the couriers, they deposit cash on every store or restaurant they go to. There's an algorithm that optimises the cash on the pocket to the minimal. They collect cash from users and depending on the cash they have, they deposit that in. We're using our own partners in the cities, our stores, restaurants or stores, whatever to deposit that cash. Are there any cultural differences in terms of how people actually use the service or what they want delivered that's different? We realised that our multi-category value proposition was bigger in LATAM and then we saw that in emerging markets as well. We think that's simply a culture habit. In Argentina again for example, everyone there has been used to grocery, pharmacy, flower delivery offline so everyone had a phone they could call like, hey can you bring me this from the pharmacy which doesn't happen in Europe, it just doesn't exist. Therefore the value proposition is a lot more clear for them. It's just bringing that experience online. We see higher rates of multi-category or non-restaurants in LATAM. Then culture-wise not really, it's been more dependent on competition. We've seen more rational and more irrational competition depending on the markets. Our biggest surprise was we came to realise that it doesn't matter the country, how developed or how emerging it is. If you offer the right service and selection and pricing in a big city, food delivery is going to work very well. I think we had this light bulb moment when we launched in Morocco and then we launched in Naibiri coast. It just worked. There are very big cities. Our two fastest growth stories have been in Ukraine and Kazakhstan which are probably countries that if someone told me two years ago that we would be there two years ago I would say no way. What else has been tweaked around the product? I think you told me the way you deliver in Ukraine is different based on weather. Romania was the first country where we had snow and all our fleet was built on bicycles and motorbikes so that didn't work for sure. We had to adapt that to cars. I think now we're in a moment where our products can launch in any country. We've been in cash heavy markets. We've been in super cold super hot markets. So where's next? What else is on the market hit list? As I said all this Kazakhstan Ukraine has been a great surprise. Countries like Georgia which are not focused for most of the global food players. So we keep looking at that area as potential new launches. We also like Africa a lot. We're now in Morocco, Egypt, Kenya and Naibiri coast. But we're now at the moment we're in 26 markets. 2018 was very intense in terms of expansion. I think now we're at the moment where we're chilling a little bit on expansion, focusing a lot more in our countries and there's a lot to expand inside our countries. In Spain for example we're in 80 cities and we keep launching a rate of five cities every month. So there's always this conflict that we have internally on. Time to market is super important. So when you look at Kazakhstan for example it's going to be a lot more efficient to go to Kazakhstan today than in a year from now. But then you open another Kazakhstan and you're going to be spreading a little bit your budget and you're going to be taking a little bit of your money from Spain, from Italy, from these core markets. So it's a very hard decision we usually go for the aggressive one. But I think we've gone already quite far. How small can you go? How small a city does it make sense for you to like you said you're kind of spreading your team, you're spreading your energy every time. When do you stop? That's a question that we still haven't answered. Again we still haven't found the limit of in what size of city does building a fleet of couriers make sense because you're never going to build enough capillarity or efficiency. In Spain we're now launching cities of 50,000 population and we're seeing good economics. So that's the last limit that we have for now. Okay and so when you when you move to a new market, so when you went to Kazakhstan, for example, what does that actually mean? Who goes there? Who runs that? How do you find, tell the people of Kazakhstan that they can join global and become a courier? So that's I think one of the things we've done the best I think because it was right after cracking Spain and Italy that we realized that hey if you're going to a market and we go very fast in markets where food delivery is still not disrupted, we're going to build very efficiently a very solid businesses in a lot but we had to run a lot because we had Uber Eats and another global players also expanding. What we did was we started building a launchers training school in Barcelona, our headquarters. So we just looked for very smart young very resourceful people that basically signed up for an adventure and we trained them for two months. Culture was very important so we insisted a lot on culture because at the end of the day these are the launchers that are going to be building teams and this would allow us to you know have like in parallel a lot of different launchers going to green light or red light and then launch a new country. They're the first ones to hit the ground, they're the first ones to start hiring, building the operations and usually they take two months since they hit the ground to launching and then they move they are basically no match. Okay and what do they do in those two months? What are they getting in place? What are they figuring out? So we're a three side marketplace right we have users, partners and couriers. The last one couriers you can build up very fast in most of our markets there's a lot of demand for people looking for flexible jobs so you can open up slots of you know jobs in any you know job portal and you get a lot of requests in you know you can do that in the last two weeks. At the beginning it's mostly about building the partners, the restaurants and other stores list and start signing all those partnerships and then of course what comes last is is the users right once you've launched you soft launch first and then we start building a in market and they do a lot of hiring. How many different markets might they open? Do they burn out? They burn out and we've tracked this and it's part of the plan. We've seen some people burning out after two or three. We have some anomalies that they're still launching countries and they love it as a way of living. The thing is these people these launchers they built so much experience at the local level that headquarters doesn't have that they always they always find amazing opportunities in headquarters now whenever they say hey this is enough they go back and take cool roles in headquarters. What kind of roles did they take when they retire? So a lot of operations a lot of sales some of them they just love so much one of the countries they launched that they stayed as country managers. Okay and are there any what countries have you kind of investigated or even launched in that just haven't worked out? So our most expensive or cheap learning was Brazil. Okay what happened in Brazil? What happened in Brazil so we when we were it was at the beginning of you know let's get let's go global and when we got very ambitious we looked at Brazil and there was a local competitor there called iFood and we said look iFood is one of these generation one companies similar to just eat terrible product bad service we can disrupt it with our product. We went there and we realized it was a very different story now iFood was amazing in everything that I just said in service in selection in pricing a lot of budget plus just the cost of running a business in Brazil people-wise and media-wise are super super expensive. So it was a it was a very it was a very expensive learning we almost burned like 20 million there but we were quite fast. So how when did you go in and when did you get out? We went in on January we decided to go out on September we tried to solve whatever we had built which was not bad in terms especially in terms of partners and service and we couldn't there was no interest and we just pulled back. We know of another competitor of us that entered at the same time they're burning 20 million every month there and there's I think they still have very low census of winning so that's why I say it was a very expensive learning but in some you know in some sense it was also very cheap. So to go back to the beginning of global obviously you're in a super super competitive market and I know it was hard to raise money at the start how when you're kind of a few years behind the competition they've raised loads of money how the hell do you go to investors and convince them like I know we're late to the party but honestly give us a shot. Give us a shot yeah I mean realities that we didn't convince them most of them. We we've had we've had terrible times with fundraising it's been really really tough. I remember our series B was probably the toughest because it was in this moment when the local ecosystem in Spain was definitely not enough we were trying to raise between 10 and 20 and in Spain at that time you could maximum do like you know raise a maximum five million and when you went to London or Paris they just looked at you like you know who are you you know the Spanish business we were trying to raise 15 million the liberal had just announced I think 400 million so we I think I read a I read a blog opposed on our fundraise because we we got nos from 116 vcs. You got nos from 160. And it wasn't just emails it was like going to present or calls or pitch 116 and then magically we had a Rakuten that had invested a little bit of mobility and they liked a lot of the space um and Miki Tani the the founder he said look our next move is is is delivery we want to test delivery uh Miki Tani is is he loves Barcelona he has invested in the soccer team and they got to know us they really like the business and and they decided to invest very very last minute we were were you just lucky or did you somehow pitch them differently or I think had you like given up so you were just somehow easy I think I think we're by far like the one of the most efficient delivery businesses in the world if not the most by you know how much GMB we've built versus a burn so we've done things very well but we've been extremely lucky so in in three rounds we were maybe weeks away from from having to shut down so in in some sense that's right tell myself every day I think yes we've been lucky and you um you recently bought a company didn't you in Poland to expand your engineering team tell us a bit about the kind of the the dev side of Provo so in our dealing in Poland yeah yeah so we we bought a pizza portal it's the second player uh Poland is a market which is super under penetrated um we think the the the local the bigger player there is also disruptible through uh you know just building a better service and and we thought that what pizza portal had in terms of you know user base uh exclusive partnerships uh was very powerful plus um our tech team is still quite small and you know we we're building it in Barcelona but we thought having two hubs was something uh good to test so we we've kept the their tech team the pizza portal team and we're building a second hub in in in Warsaw and what kind of like technical things can you bring in to make global even more efficient and profitable the biggest thing is is drops per hour um the second which is which we are behind so we've we've we haven't we haven't invested enough uh versus what other competitors have done uh well here you guys have world which is a a great example of of a high you know really good algorithms and drops per hour we're still a bit behind um and we're I think now we have the right team we're going to correct that in the next 12 months um the second thing is uh food delivery or anything delivery just has so many more variable costs especially live operations so there's a there's a team of outsourced uh I think 3000 agents um and our cost is still like uh almost 40 cents per per order um that's huge when you're doing almost 10 million orders per month it's a huge cost so um and that's a big focus for us next year you know we want to uh prepare the company so that by the end of next year um keep growing we're still growing very fast like almost more than 200% year in year but we want to prepare the company so that by December um we can decide to go profitable okay um and so you so you're expanding to different markets you're expanding into in like deeper in the markets you're already in tell us about you're also doing dark kitchens yeah and you're sitting like on demand grocery yeah we're a lot more excited with the second uh we did the first because we saw a lot of competitors doing it so we wanted to test it um and it's going well we have eight dark kitchens that basically we add our our we invite our best partners in the city to take a slot in our dark kitchens that it's a service for our our favorite partners that they like what we're more excited about this is our grocery business um and and there we're doing two things one is we're partnering with the biggest retailers in the world with you know curry force and walmarts uh so that the users can find their brands in in our app but what we're we're we're investing more time and resources is our our warehouses so we we're starting to build uh one year ago we started to build the dark stores in the city which is like a like a 7 11 uh type of store uh dark so closed and not dark and and we stock between a thousand and two thousand skus um what this allows us to do is um a lot better service so now in barcelona for example we're building enough capillarity so that we can guarantee 15 minute delivery time for any grocery order uh we think this is big uh today delivery time just around 25 which is it's decent um and and yeah we we have like 10 around the world it's it's a model that we're very excited about why why does it make sense for you you know that's a whole another like can of worms to open up you've got to deal with like fresh food you've got to make it still super fast you've got your couriers going to restaurants and already going to pharmacies and flower shops and now also these stores like why why do it um for sure all this multi category adds a lot of inefficiency i think we're just following what our users are telling us right before we started doing dark stores uh people were already ordering uh a lot of uh grocery orders and usually it's your your highest quality users those that are multi category they have a much higher lifetime value and much higher quality so we're just improving the service through building dark stores or other things um assuming you know this cost of extra inefficiency yeah and what do you think that will work equally well across the world in all your different markets so there's some market to the store um so i do think maybe more emerging markets the adoption is we're seeing faster adoption on groceries and other categories uh spain and italy they're also catching up and they're going to take a bit longer okay and what about the dark kitchens you said you're not as excited about them as delivery and uber eats seems to be why why is so we're very excited about um food delivery as an industry uh moving slowly or fast towards more dark kitchen businesses because it it just makes the entire industry more efficient the cost for our partners go down these cost efficiencies will will end up passing into the users so users will be able to eat for delivery cheaper that's great that it's happening my what we're still discussing is you know are we going to be a real estate company right with you know Travis Kalaneg and and all these other companies raising money now to to build really good dark kitchens for restaurants um are we really going to be able to you know to have dark kitchens that are as good as them um that's an open question that we have today and and i'm sure you know will she also has it um but you know it's it's the reality it's quite cheap to test and run okay and and so globo is the kind of everything app that's your your kind of line where where else can that go like we spoke about dark kitchens we spoke about grocery there's all the things you already deliver what else can be kind of taken around um i think any and how how we look at our vision is anything any pain point for our citizen we want to solve it right or we want to digitalize it imagine things like reservations ticketing home services now you need a cleaning service or fixing anything at home we just launched a very small test in argentina where we added the scooters in our we bought 300 scooters like like the kick scooters we it was a it was a test we don't plan to to go into operators but we want globo isn't spinning out to become a scooter business as well no but we thought let's test it was very cheap to to launch it and if it works why not start building a a marketplace on integrating with realities people open our app every three days in average right that's a very high frequency app so you can start adding anything that you can think of for a for a citizen but i think our big focus today is groceries okay is there is there there's nothing else around like what what else can be transported or what i guess is the goal for you to be an app that people open every day every few hours like what's the what's the the goal there um we haven't defined it that way for now we do track very very very hard the the percentage of users that move to other categories because we know that when they do this jump their lifetime value goes will go up a lot no they it becomes a much more sticky app yeah okay final question the tricky one food delivery it's been very hard for people to become profitable in lots of their markets like how are you actually going to do that i think there's a lot of companies making a lot of profit with food delivery both generation one and generation two we have a couple countries that are not only cross margin but but bottom line a bit that profitable um and i think it's a matter of time you know i think launching these businesses in new cities building the right efficiency and capillarity takes time as i said in spain you know we're still launching 10 cities every week every month so every new city you have to start from zero and with very negative margins um so i think it's a matter of time okay amazing um final plug from me um we at sifted have just written a big report on the food delivery sector so if you're interested please head to our website sign up to receive it there's an interview with oscar there for more all thanks