 All right. Thomas, I'm so excited to be here with you today at Slush. It's great to have you here in person. I believe it's your first time at Slush. Absolutely. And hi, everyone. Thanks for coming. It's a great place to be. And INDEX has been privileged to partner with you since early 2021. And since a lot has happened and there are a number of important decisions you made with regards to where to take the business and how to think about the product and the technology. I'm excited to dive in a little bit more on these areas with you today. Before we go there, grocery is a very broad topic. And there are a number of different ways you could go about building a business in this space. So just to set the stage for the audience, what is Rolex and how have you thought about this? Right. I mean, I feel like over the last two, two and a half years, the industry has been kind of talked about left, right and center. But I was introduced as industry veteran. So we started in 2014. And our belief was that it has to be grocery market for online penetration. You need to be fast. You need to have an amazing assortment and it has to be affordable. And those are three vectors that are really difficult to achieve at the same time. So we've been working on this since 2014. And obviously with COVID, some crazy has happened in the market. But I was always very adamant that we will prevail. So we're now in six European markets offering delivery within two hours. So not 15 minutes, but we offer 15 minute delivery slots. So very precise. We offer about 20,000 SKU for our customers, which is very large and differentiated assortment. And we are priced very competitively. So you don't feel burden to your wallet if you go to Rochleek as opposed to your supermarket. And it's about 700 million in revenue. So it's becoming a sizable business. And, you know, one of the many areas that I admire you for is, as you said, you thought about this already in 2014. So in many ways, you took a contrarian approach early on. What was it that you saw already then when you began thinking about how to elevate the grocery delivery experience for consumers? So I was searching for a large market. So at that time, I was already kind of being a founder of two other businesses that we exited, want to secret escapes, want to deliver a hero. So if you're kind of becoming a third time founder, you're looking for something very sizable because, you know, you don't want to kind of go through the same journey. And the grocery was very intriguing because it was worldwide two trillion dollar market. And no one was doing it successfully, right? And that was very strange. The penetration was really low of customers shopping online. And that was the moment when I said, OK, I mean, there must be a way to crack this, right? It's so big that even if it costs a lot of money, and in the end we found a way that it doesn't have to cost a lot of money. We bootstrapped for, you know, five years at least before expanding internationally. But even if it did cost a bit of money, you know, there must be something in that market. And that was the reason why I've decided to start building. And then we were listening to customers very intensely because it was weird, right? So, like, people are going to those huge places. They spend a lot of time in there. You know, the stuff is not always fresh. And they do it, you know, day in, day out. And when you talk to them, you know, why wouldn't you want to shop online? No one was able to articulate a good reason. So we were kind of digging really deep into customer insight. And then we realized, you know, it's not, whatever's in the world, whatever was in the world at the time, was not better enough for people to break their habit. And grocery shopping is really deeply ingrained habit most people have. You need to be better enough. And that's what we set out to do. And what I also find fascinating is that during COVID, when the world started talking, as you said, about instant 10-minute grocery delivery, you held firm in your belief that, in fact, the model that you had chosen was perhaps the better solution. And so how did you build conviction that Rolik is the right business and the right business model in the space? So obviously, we've been at this since 2014. So we had benefit of understanding the consumers and the business way before any sort of tailwind, any sort of virus coming to the world. So the conviction that 15-minute delivery is not a necessity, we already had long before. Because we were bootstrapping, we couldn't afford it. We couldn't do 15-minute delivery anyway. That's one. Then it's physically impossible to do 15-minute delivery if you want to order large and differentiated assortment, right? So there is a time you need to assemble the order and then obviously you have to deliver it. So we were looking for this sweet spot sometime in 2015-16 and we actually intentionally slowed down, right? We started with like an hour delivery and then we realized no one really needs it in an hour. So we kind of arrived at this 90-minute slash two-hour proposition depending on the market. But that's the sweet spot that we found a long time ago. And you're not just delivering a very convenient experience for the consumer and perhaps as a consumer, that is what you see from a buyer perspective. But actually some folks might not realize the complexity that goes in behind all of that. And so I know you've spent a lot of time thinking about how do you build a product and how do you think about technology so that you build something that truly stands the test of time and how have you gone about thinking about what happens in the back end on the product and technology side? I mean, when I was thinking what is the mode of the business, right? What's going to be really differentiated? We very quickly realized it's not kind of buying an Apple and selling an Apple, you know, more expensively. Lots of people can do that. So we started building a tech mode, right? So something that, you know, basically from the moment customer comes to the website to the order delivery and even what happens after the delivery, that's run by our proprietary tech. And we always understood that our position will be improving in time because we knew that the automated fulfillment centers are coming. And then we understand that autonomous delivery is coming. And those are the cost lines that we're happy to have at the moment, but obviously they are sharply decreasing and, you know, it's making online grocery more profitable than brick and mortar retail. But the mode is really the technology that allows you this real-time picking, real-time fulfillment of an order, delivery within minutes, right? But not 15 minutes, 60, with being profitable, right? And we are profitable in a couple of markets and we're heading very strong to profitability in Germany as well. So I think just being technology-based, even though obviously on the outside, it often looks like a couple of guys in cars and, you know, someone is buying some stuff and selling it with some margin. But the core of the business is really hardcore tech. Another thing I really admire about you is your customer obsession. Every time we talk, you're mentioning the latest NPS numbers, the latest engagement numbers that you're proud of. Can you elaborate a little bit more on this? How do you think about delivering a product that customers love? So this is my third consumer-facing business. So I really worked intentionally on the scale of acquiring a knowledge around customer insight. And I see a lot of entrepreneurs not paying enough attention to that customer insight and not hitting that product market fit quickly enough. And, you know, I spend a ton of time with consumers still now. When we expand to a new market, I very intentionally talk to our target audience, but I also like when we were opening Vienna, I walked in one day 25 kilometers and I would visit all high-end and all mid-tier stores and I would be looking, you know, like what are the gaps in the meat selection? What are the gaps in fruits and vegetables? How's the freshness? And I would be looking for that sweet spot of what we should be offering. So it is like this machine of acquiring customer insight constantly. Whenever you go on the website, there is a question that pops up. We're constantly learning. The assortment that we've built was 100% consumer curated because we were asking, what are you missing? And then when someone was missing something, we would just put it in the assortment. Very inefficient in a way, but very, very consumer-centric and that built the penetration. And just to double-click on launching in a new market, and I'm sure many founders in the room are also thinking about expanding, how do you decide on where to go next? It's a combination of data, right? So we look at the factors in E-City, number of households, average spend per owner groceries. We go really deep into the data. What has been showing that in every big city in Europe, there is a market for us, right? But it's like, how do you decide between Munich and Berlin? Between Berlin and Frankfurt, right? For us, it's better when there's like this portion of affluent customers is as big as possible because we're not going in with the price-only proposition. So we intentionally prioritized Berlin, which is a larger city, but in a sense, poorer city, right? So there's less of that affluent consumer base that we're targeting, and when I say affluent, it's 40% of the population of the city. It's not 5%. So that's that. And then what I talked about, and then we go on the ground to the markets, speak to people, visit stores, and combination, we call it art and science. Every decision we have at Rolex is art and science anyway. Science is the data. Art is some sort of gut feel and insight that you collect over time. And as you think about this journey, starting in Prague, expanding to Hungary, Austria, and now you're in Germany also, was there a particular inflection point in the business, would you say? A couple. So we were really on the ropes in 2017, just to give you a sense of the bootstrapping that I call. So we spent in this market grocery, which kind of has this notion of being super expensive. So we spent 7 million euros to build a business that was 150 million revenue in size. So it's not bootstrapping per se, hundreds of thousands, but single digit millions to get to that size. But in 2017, cash was running out. No COVID, so investors did not care about the market so much. They came later. And I had to pretty much like borrow money, and then against that money, I would have to pledge my house. Wow. And basically we had this seven month short to get profitable, and we did. So I did not lose my house. So that was one. That was a big one. And then obviously as we started expanding, I had to let go a lot. So I was running the market. I was really deep in execution. And now I'm running sort of a group with several markets, with standalone CEOs, standalone operations. So it's very different kind of leadership. It's not this hardcore, I know every career by name type of execution. So I had to learn a lot and also mature as a leader. So that was an inflection point. And working with a couple people as mentors definitely helped me. So I'm mentored by Ajay Kavan, who's ex-VP of Amazon, and this really helped me to understand how to scale the business. And so on that note of people and hiring, can you share a little bit about your hiring philosophy and what do you look for in those individuals that you want to take the business to the next level with? So hiring has been a huge learning curve for us. Because obviously in Czechia, the market is really small. So we knew people, we were hiring that sort of thing. But as we expanded and the expansion happened really fast, so we were one country business in 2019 and we were five countries business in 2021. And obviously that meant hiring hundreds, thousands of people in different geographies and we were not equipped to do that. So it was just crumbling. And one thing that really dawned on me is that the sooner you codify the culture, as in really write it down and be very intentional about hiring for that culture, then you're just going to make series of trials and errors. So because no matter how good your hiring is, if you're not hiring for your specific execution culture, even great people will fail. Because you can have a great conversation with someone whose CV is amazing. But one of our, we call it rohlike ingredients, is moving fast and that is not just that, but it goes very deep into leadership behaviors. And then if for example someone in their career has not been used to build MVPs, minimum viable products, they're going to be completely lost in our company for a period of time. So if you hire someone to a senior position and they are lost, they're not used to being lost, so you have disengagement instantly. So it's then hard to fix. So codifying culture, writing it down and having interview questions specifically for that, for those ingredients, we have 10, has helped tremendously with engagement, employee retention and also employee happiness, because we have the right team now, as opposed to a team. Yeah, and just taking a step back, rohlike is not your first business. In fact, you had two prior businesses, both of which you have exited successfully. What motivated you to start rohlike and to really keep going? I'm a builder. I thought about investing at one point. So I would have those coffee chats with people, amazing entrepreneurs, right? And I would be thinking, I wish I could do that. Like really be in their shoes again and build that stuff. Giving them money and then observing, like it's not me. I need to be there on the ground and really execute. That's who I am. And were there any key insights that you took from your two prior businesses that you felt like this is something I'm not going to do again? Yeah, I was really shitty leader. So if I was learning anything, and I probably still am, but it's getting better. So it's this leadership journey that I embarked on that was the massive learning, right? Because you always kind of retrospectively realize your leadership mistakes. So this is for companies, hopefully at some point I'll do a really good job as a leader. And when I say I'm really hard on myself, like that's the ultimate bar. And I think it was just improving on the customer acquisition, inside beliefs. How do we build the tech? How do we structure the team? It was more iteration from the previous businesses than like a clear no-no. Do you have someone you inspire or a business that you truly inspire and that influences your decision making? A few, but none fully. I try to take a lot of good things from a lot of the companies and a lot of the leaders. I never had this ultimate inspiration except maybe at one point Elon Musk, but I'm a bit conflicted at the moment. But there's a lot of companies that do something great. If you look at who was able to scale in commerce, the obvious one would be Amazon, right? But that's part of Amazon that I would be inspired by. And the way, for example, they run tech and some of the other things are not so inspired. So I think I just take different things from different people and different products. And when you take all those different ingredients that inspire you and you apply them to Rolex and just thinking ahead, where do you want to take Rolex in the next two, five, ten years? I think we've built something that is truly scalable, right? Because we have a technology that powers fulfillment center that is automated, that very quickly fulfills orders that we can deliver very quickly, right? So it's just a number of those fulfillment centers we're going to have in Europe and the world. So first step is being a pan-European player. And we're on a good journey. We're going to make Munich and Frankfurt and then Hamburg, where we already have fully automated fulfillment center profitable. Once we have that, then we kind of build a few more German cities and then expand to other geographies. There is obviously not to be a tone deaf. There is uncertainty in the market. So we have a fairly long runway and it's time to be observant of your runway because, you know, things can happen in the next few months on the consumer side that bring change. So all I said is with this in mind. So it's not a reckless expansion. It's very sustainable, very mindful of runway expansion, but we phrased in July, I think. So we're very well equipped for that. And I'm really happy that this craziness of COVID and in our market especially is over because businesses that are fundamentally right, like ours, were not overlooked, of course, but they were not certainly valued as high as players that are now really struggling. So, you know, I think it's back to the core and that's what I'm happy about. Back to fundamentals and getting the right core in place. We're coming up on time. Are there any final words of advice you'd like to give to some of the founders in this room? Find your purpose. You know, my purpose and like I do this sort of third business in a row is to improve life of consumers in retail. So whether there's a crisis, whether there's COVID, or there's a heyday of funding, it does not matter because you're kind of fulfilling your purpose. So I know that whatever happens in the world in the next two years, I'm still going to be doing what I'm doing and we're going to be doing it well. If you jump on the latest Fed, right? Okay, everyone's setting up blockchain startups. You know, I want mine as well or everyone finding quick grocery. Then you might be disappointed a few years down the line because it's not really purposeful thing to do. Thomas, thank you so much for being here today. Round of applause everyone for Thomas. Thank you. And thanks to INDEX for supporting us for so long.