 Thank you, my friend. Oh, wonderful. This is very exciting, a 20 VC live. I've done, what, 3,000 podcasts, and I think I've done one live before, so this is the very, very minority. So Mickey, thank you so much for doing this with me. Thank you for doing it to me as well. Are you getting stage fright? I'm terrible stage fright, not used to the moderating things. So let's start with a little bit on you. So we see Walt today in many countries, household name. Just take me back briefly. Founding moment, how did it come to you and walk me through that? Yeah, I kind of realized starting a university in 2009 that I thought when I started at uni that the world is ready and now we get to live in it. Like, someone founded IBM 100 years ago and now all we get to do is work at IBM. And to my delight, I realized that the world is actually changing quite a lot. And it's changing quite a lot right now because the world is going online. So I kept on thinking from 2009, a few years I ran it from 2011, 2014, I can realize that, OK, we're living through this industrial revolution. Everything is going online. Most industries are not very online. So I can start thinking that, you know, how is this going to impact industries that are not online? And I started thinking about local services and cities and what's going to happen to shops and stores and restaurants and so forth. And that was kind of the early thesis of Walt. Like, how do we take the city, the local services online? Now, we've spoke many times before. And you said something to me that I loved and I think it's important for us to unpack today, which is we kind of have this myth of the superhero CEO. And so when we think about the myth of the superhero CEO, I'm just going to, like, might drop this one. How do you feel, Mickey? So I think there's an unhealthy cult of the founder or myth of the superhero CEO in the tech industry where, like, you hear these stories of, like, hey, I'm the CEO of this 1,000-person company. I still interview everyone who joins the company. And that, like, ultimately, there's going to be this all-knowing founder that, like, knows everything about the industry and the company and everything and is going to be the right person to make every decision. And I think the reality is that, like, you know, my philosophy when it comes to this is that, like, our job as CEOs and founders is to ultimately create a team with great culture so that people like to work together and they can create an impact. And ultimately empower that team to make the decisions to be closest to the problems and to figure out what we need to do. And I think, like, whenever I hear a CEO saying that, hey, I'm still interviewing everyone where 1,000 people, I'm like, you don't trust your team. Like, you know, your job is to create a company that succeeds whether you're there or not. So I think, like, the goal is not to be the superhuman CEO. This goal is to build a team that is able to ultimately succeed without you. You said a really interesting word there, which is trust. And I'm glad, you know, I put the phone down so we can leave the schedule. But trust, do you start with, like, a lot of trust when you have a new hire and it starts to be lost? Or is it starting low? How do you embrace that? Actually, both. So there are certain things that are very close to my heart where the reality is that, like, I want to see someone new starting in that role, like, really get it before I'm willing to, you know, completely let go of it. Like, I'll give a few examples, like, you know, brand, you know, Aaloh who runs brand for Walt. Like, you know, we had a very long onboarding time together and he's absolutely amazing. But it's one of those things that is very close to my heart and something I've always done at Walt. Product, very similar topic. I used to run product at Walt. Vincent, who runs product today at Walt, like, he joined us in 2019. Not an easy role to join into. But, like, we would never be, you know, 550 people doing product and engineering at Walt if I would be still running it. So in those kind of things, like, trust has to be earned. But then the default in a lot of other places is trust. That it's used to be lost, but there's, like, a starting assumption of trust when you join. So we've had a discussion before. We discussed trust versus safety and kind of aligned it to are you running a team or, like, in a team or are you in a family? Can you talk to me about how you think about trust versus safety and team versus family when it comes to company building? So this is one of the things I learned in Supercell back in 2012. So I worked at Supercell where there's a 35-person company. I got to see the development of games like Clash of Clans and Hay Day. And that time I spent at Supercell is one of the foundational experiences that made me who I am as a founder and as a CEO. And Ilkko is the founder and CEO of Supercell. You know, someone I really look up to when it comes to, you know, being a great builder of culture and a great CEO. He always liked to say that, you know, he wants to build a team, not a family. As you might ask, like, you know, what is the difference between a team and a family? Like, Ilkko is a huge ice hockey fan. So if you're building a team, your goal is to build a winning team that is able to win the Stanley Cup, the biggest prize in NHL. So the difference between a team and a family is that, like, you know, there's a lot of things they share. Like, you support each other, you go through the thick and thin. You're going to be there on the rainy day and the sunny day. But, you know, a team doesn't exist if you don't win. So a team is defined by its capability to win matches. A team doesn't win is not going to be a team for a very long time. So in a team, you need to make difficult decisions. Like, you don't make similar difficult decisions with your family. You're not going to fire your, like, little brother because, like, you know, they fucked up. But, like, in a team, you have to make difficult decisions so that you have the right players in the right spots being able to play together to ultimately win. And I think when it comes to also our company culture, like, you know, we support each other. We're there for each other. You know, we celebrate. We grieve together. You know, we make mistakes. We learn from those. But at the end of the day, we also have to make difficult decisions about, like, you know, who is not the right fit for the team or who used to be a right fit for the team, but they're no longer the right fit for the role in the new context of the company. And I think that allows you to have a culture of trust because that means that, you know, you don't have to micromanage your people. Like, you don't have to create these systems in place where you're trying to catch the person that is not exactly the right fit into the company and you make everyone's life a little more difficult. So trust over safety. I'm using this purely for advice now. You know, obviously I run a media company as well. What's the difference between a mistake and a mistake too far? And then you also hear the advice commonly given, which is, you know, when you feel something is wrong, you know it already. And, like, when you have doubt, there's no doubt. So how do you think about a mistake versus something you really need to act on? So if you have a culture where it's not okay to fail, where it's not okay to take ownership over the things that go wrong and say, like, hey, that's one of, that's one of, that one's on me, you're not gonna have a very powerful culture when it comes to learning and when it comes to ultimately being able to do the right thing. So you have to have a culture where it's all right to put up your hand and take complete and full ownership over everything, over the good things and the bad things. So that's like the starting point. But mistakes, I've never really seen a person be let go because they made a mistake. It's more about trust. It's more about trust because, like, if you lose, if someone is making mistakes, they're learning from it, they're going forward, they're taking risks, but ultimately they have the right attitude, they're doing the right things, you know, things happen. But if you see that someone no longer has the trust that we can trust their judgment, that they're gonna make good decisions, that they're gonna learn from their mistakes and so forth, that's not gonna be the right person for the team. So I don't think it's about mistakes, but it's about trust in the person's judgment. And how to have that trust is to behave in the right ways if you do make mistakes, like own the mistake, recognize what we could have done differently, how we're gonna learn from it and move on. And then you're gonna retain that trust because people see that even if this person doesn't mistake, they're gonna own it, they're gonna learn from it, they're gonna fix it, then they're gonna move on and the trust remains. This is all part of culture, and you've mentioned culture many times, and it's kind of part of trust and safety. I think culture's quite a fluffy word, to be honest, throwing around today. And you've said to me before that compensation can be used as a driver or a tool in building culture today. How do you use compensation as a tool in building culture? So every now and then I see companies that say that, you know, hey, we have a culture where everyone's in it for the company and everyone is like, you know, taking ownership over the obvious and, you know, fixing whatever they see that is broken trying to help the company succeed. And yeah, how are you compensating your people? Yeah, we have this stock option program, but it's only eligible to these and these people. And hey, we have these goals that, you know, if you hit your sales quota, you're gonna get a bonus or more stock options and something. And you're effectively like saying that you want your people to be in it for the company and to be missionaries, but at the same time you're compensating for people to do this thing. So it's not very surprising if the end result is that people are optimizing for the things that ultimately lead to like a good outcome for them. I think one thing we got right with Walt since the start was that, you know, we had a very simple philosophy when it came to like ownership, like every single employee joining the company for a very, very long time was given like stock options in the company. The stock option terms were as clean as we could make it. Like I every now and then I look at companies and their stock option programs and there's all these weird clauses around if you leave the company, you know, how long is the subscription time and how is the strike price being defined and so forth. And I'm like, you don't really win that much as a company and putting these things into place, but you're violating a lot of trust with your employees. And at the same time, like, you know, I'll give you an example, like remember when we were launching Czech Republic and I was visiting the market before launching and I noticed that one of our Baltic restaurant partner managers, like salespeople, was there onboarding the first Czechian guy. And it was like, hey, Mantas, fantastic seeing you're here. And Mantas is like, yeah, you know, we needed someone to help with the new guy being onboarded here. So, you know, I got a call that, hey, can you come to Prague for a couple of weeks? And yeah, I've been going to meetings with him now for a while and it's actually not that different to do this in Prague than it is to do it in the Baltics. And the point is Mantas was not incentivized because of how many restaurants he was signing in his home city, trying to get to a quota. And ultimately, you know, being focused on that, Mantas was incentivized as a shareholder of the company by, you know, ultimately the company succeeding. Obviously there's a performance component that if they do well, they're gonna get like, you know, a bigger ownership in the company as well. But I think compensation sets the foundation for culture. And if you want to have a culture where people are committed, where people give you more than is expected of them for the company, where people think beyond their role and scope, you also have to, you know, make sure that your stock option programs are set up in a fair way that, you know, if something goes wrong, if the person leaves, you're not gonna be like, huh, we're gonna take everything away from you. So I think it's a two-way street. What are the biggest mistakes that you see founders make today when it comes to culture setting and maintenance? So the thing I learned at Supercell is that culture is very small things. I'll give you two examples from Supercell. When Hayday was released to testing, if I remember correctly, it was Canada, and we started getting early data about it. We had a bi-weekly management meeting and the head of analytics asked Ilka, the CEO, that, hey, we're getting this data of, like, Hayday, how it's going, like, who should we send it to? And Ilka thought about it for a split second and said, everyone. A lot of companies say they wanna be transparent, people need to have the context and people need to know, but that decision, that split second decision of, like, how are you sharing the information and to whom is a foundational part of what kind of a culture you have? So I think my default in vault has always been that if I'm sharing information, I always ask, what is the biggest audience I can share this to? Is there some reason I could, I would only share this with management or could I share this, for instance, with the whole company? And I've always tried to default to the largest possible audience. Make sure that everyone has an overabundance of context available to them. Another example is that at Supercell when I was there, we killed one of the games we had been working on. It was a small team, I think it was five or six people that had been working on this beautiful game for four or five months, and we decided it was not the right game for us anymore. It didn't work out, the data didn't show that, okay, this is gonna be something that customers really love or a game is really love. And I remember when the game was killed in an all-hands call, there was this presentation about everything we learned making this game and the team was making it. And some of them were crying, explaining the design and the philosophies and the learnings. And at the end of it, Il gave everyone a bottle of champagne and they got a week off. And then when they came back from the week off, they would move to new teams and continue building new games. And that was celebrating failures, celebrating the fact that we as a team and as a company became better because of the work these people put on the table for the company and they worked hard for it and we should celebrate it. So these kind of things drive culture. Culture is hundreds of these kind of small things that usually start with the founders and the CEO. So we've got culture, we've got the team there, but we're told that the best founders can hire the best talent. And universally, founders are told, look for people that have done it before, look for that branded sales leader, marketing leader, you name it. You've said before that that's not the right way to go. So talk to me, why is that not the right way to go and how do you advise founders on the right way to go? So Case Coolen, who was the early CEO of Booking.com, I think today the biggest software company out of Europe. He was an early investor of ours and I spent a lot of time with him after he led our series A back in 2016. And Case told me a story of like how they ended up launching in Spain. So they had a Spanish customer support representative that was like 22, 23 years old working in Amsterdam. And they had like business already in Spain, but they didn't have like any office or any people in Spain. So this young girl came to pitch the case that like, hey, we should start an office in Spain. We could do so much better if we did like things in Spanish with local people on the ground and so forth. And Case was like, let's give it a shot. And this 23 year old woman ended up scaling, booking from basically zero to two billion GMV in Spain. And what Case taught me was that a lot of companies are looking for, okay, we need to launch in Spain. Let's find someone who's been reading a business in Spain or who's launched a business in Spain previously. And that's kind of how you start to think about profiling. But what many companies don't realize is that you don't actually want to find the person that did it successfully before to do it for you. You want to find who that person was before they did it. And that's the person you're going to be looking for. Like very few people do these kind of things two times in their life. So where do you go for that? Do you look for the deputy of someone who's done it before? How do you try and figure out who that person is? So one thing I spent a lot of time on was trying to figure out who were world-class benchmarks for the type of people that we needed to hire. And I would look at those people and I would look at what they did before they ended up on that track coming that person that we know benchmark. Because I'm like, we need to find that person when they're young and hungry and they have the right kind of capabilities and the right kind of smarts to be able to do it for the first time with us. Can I ask you, does changing technologies change that profile type? So if we look at CMOs today, you could look four or five years ago, they could have been, I don't know, the best email marketing experts, best SEO experts. But I think now the rising stars are actually the best short-form video experts, the best TikTok experts, you name it. Does the technology change the pathway to that profile? And does that make it harder? So when I was at Supercell, I was 2012, I was 23 years old, after half a year I spent on free-to-play games, I realized, like I told me one day that Mickey realized you're one of the top experts on free-to-play gaming in the world. Like, yeah, it makes sense because free-to-play gaming is like half a year old. So there's not gonna be too many experts on that. And I think like the reality in technology companies is that you're working on a lot of things where it hasn't been done before. There's no university curriculum saying that, you know, how to do these things. You know, there's very few companies where you can hire people from that are gonna know how it should be done at your company next. So I think overall, there's a more broad thing for the tech industry. You need people that figure out with your company how these things should be done. You need people like, we do a world-class logistics optimization today as a company, it's a very complicated set of technologies. We're built to be able to do what we do, like live traveling salesman optimization, real-time in each of our cities, real-time optimizing every couple of seconds, what is the right way to solve the city? Did we have in our founding team or early employees like PhDs in logistics optimization or whatever? No, we had people who became subject matter experts by learning with the company how to do this. I think when I listened to you speak, Miki, the thing that kind of is very prominent for me is like, you just seem like a very innate leader. The question is though, it's always challenging with every stage of leadership. What was the most challenging stage of leadership for you personally to grow into? And how did you overcome it? That's a very good question. So up until when Walt was like 30 people, we didn't have any like middle management. I was technically everyone's boss. I was amazing at it for 30 people. Like I was the person like responsible for kind of everyone and everything. And after 30, 40 people, we started building like, you know, hire the COO to take over like the business side of it. And we set up like, you know, our current CTO as like, you know, head of engineering and he took over the engineering team. And that was like, I think one of the most difficult transitions you have to do as a founder is to let go of being so hands-on with everything. Because like, you know, a lot of founders are like really bloody good at what they do. They really know the product. They're really passionate about the industry. They're really passionate about the details and so forth. But that doesn't scale. Like if you're going to be that person still at a massively bigger scale, you're not going to build a great culture. You're not going to have a team that cares and owns these things with the same level as you do because you don't give them the room. So this balance of, you know, setting up new people, you know, trying to onboard them, teach them and giving them space to be worse than you, to make mistakes. And you're like, you want to go in there and you want to like change things. But like the thing is, if I continue doing this, like it's going to be 100% result. And I set up someone and maybe they do like 70 to 80% result. But if I allow them to keep on doing that, they're going to get to 100% and eventually like 120 or 130% because you are CEO. You have to do like tens and tens and hundreds of things. You can never be truly world-class long-term in all of these things. So you need to set up people that are going to become world-class. And the thing I know is that it's just the, the reluctance to do it the first time. If you can stop the first time, it's like almost going to the gym for the first time. You go to the gym the first time, the second day seems easier. If you don't jump in the first time, not jumping in the second time is so much easier. But it's difficult because sometimes you have to jump in and sometimes we may be even to change the person or like it's a difficult balance to get right. And like I think as CEO, what is the CEO role like? The CEO role is basically identifying things we're not doing as a company, taking ownership of those things, trying to figure out the thing a person internally or externally do those things with you up until the point where you're like, they kind of got it now. Can you please continue doing this? And I'm going to do something else. And like I've done this at world like a hundred times. I still remember the time when Case told me in 2016 that Mickey, your most important hire is going to be a recruiter. Because if you build a growth company, growth companies are glorified recruiting operations. Like we've hired since that moment, we've gone from like 50 people to 7,000 people today. So you need to hire a great recruiter. I'm like, great recruiter, let's do it. I've never worked with a recruiter. I've never seen a recruiter in my life. Supercell didn't have a full-time recruiter when I was there, which was my only benchmark. Slush. How did you know what great recruiters look like and how did you get hired? So first of all, it's very uncomfortable. You're like, someone tells you this is the most important thing and you have no idea how to do it. And you're like, am I the right person to be even the CEO? Like I have to get a great recruiter and I don't know what recruiting even is. So like what I did was that I kind of tried to figure out that okay, I need to figure out some other great recruiters that like, what does a great recruiter look like? And I tried to find companies that allegedly are the great recruiting and people that are doing that there and I tried to get a call or talk with them and tried to kind of learn that like, what does this person do? What, where do they come from? How do they talk to create a picture of what a great recruiter looks like? And it's just like start learning step by step. It's like the only way, I have a good saying that when in doubt, just take the next short step forward. Like it's oftentimes you have this scary big goal. Like, I remember we raised our series B and we're like, we have to raise a series B around the financing in six months or we go bankrupt. And with my CEO we're like, we have no idea how to do this. We have no idea what the data room looks like, what the deck looks like, what the investors want to hear about. And I still remember being at home at night, being like, I have no idea how we're gonna do this. I was scared, I was like, everyone's looking up to like Mickey, he's gonna do the thing. I have no idea how to do it. And then next week we sit down in a room, we're like, let's make V1, version one of the deck. We talk with some investors. Retention is really important. Yes, let's pull up retention. And you kind of learn step by step by step until like six months later we're raised around the financing. Final one before we do a quick fire. When you felt scared and insecure in that moment, who did you talk to? So when I was the CEO of Slash, I was the CEO that like, had all these fears going for me that what if we don't sell them enough tickets and we're gonna go bankrupt and their production was very scary and all these things I was concerned about. And I kind of kept them to myself. I was like, if everyone in our team knew all the things that I would know, would they be here? Would they be like, oh, this is not a very good operation to stay as a part of. And it was very heavy. So when we found it, Walt, I had a very simple philosophy. Everything I know, everything I'm concerned about, everything I'm fearful for, I'm gonna share 100% with my co-founders, I'm gonna share 100% with my kind of lead investor, our chairman of the board. And when we became bigger, that expanded to like the whole of our management team. So I've kind of like, since the starting days of Walt, operated with 100% transparency, you know, with the people close to me. What it means is that your best people, not only know kind of the full context, but you have all these smart people figuring out these difficult problems together with you. And I think like a lot of CEOs try to carry too much stuff on their shoulders. Or they don't really have like this transparency with their board, so they're kind of afraid about the board and trying to sell. Like one thing I see a lot of entrepreneurs doing is that they're selling. Like I'm an investor in one company that's doing really well, but like every time they send this investor update, it's like another record month and we crushed it and amazing and this and that and so forth. And I'm like, that's great, but like I know for a fact, they're gonna have things they're concerned about, things that are getting fucked up and so forth. Like don't go to this mode of like, like you already sold the investor, so they invested. Like, you know, make sure that you're using them to help you figure out the difficult stuff. I think what people are scared of is uncertainty. It's not actually knowing, it's just the uncertainty of not knowing. Quick fire round. So I'm gonna give you a couple of short statements. We have two minutes, okay? What's your biggest strength? What's your biggest weakness? One of my co-founders says that, says well that usually your biggest strength, this is also the source of your biggest weakness. My biggest strength allegedly could be said that it's energy. Like, you know, I am able to drive energy into people, into, you know, doing things, into, you know, solving difficult problems. The downside of energy is that, you know, you also have to stop. You also have to listen. Not everything should be done very quickly, but sometimes you have to pause and you have to think. And that's what I have to kind of try to balance with. Why did you decide to sell Storash? That was actually a very difficult decision. So for background over the years, we had multiple opportunities to sell the company. Like this was not the first time we had the opportunity to sell the company. However, how this was different was that this was the first time we felt that we can do something more by going together with DoorDash than what we could do on our own. That was the first time where it kind of felt that if we don't take this, I'm gonna be afraid of regretting that I didn't go for it because I'm gonna see after the fact all the things that we could have done that we couldn't do on our own. What would you most like to change in the world of startups? Traumatic effects. I love the startup world. Like I think like there's a lot of very difficult problems we need to solve. I think one thing I don't enjoy is that like, if there are customers wanting to use some service pay for something that is something that is valuable to do as a starting point. Doesn't apply to everything, but that's just a starting point. And I think like what I don't like in the startup ecosystem today is that there's a little bit of this knobbiness every now and then that like if you're not fixing climate issues, like you're not working on something relevant. I think we need to fix the climate issues, but we also need to work on a lot of other things. So I think generally speaking, I don't grade entrepreneurs based on what they're working on. I grade entrepreneurs based on their output, what they are able to get done. That's the important thing. So 10 seconds left. So we'll probably get another 10 seconds in. Walt in 10 years. What does it look like then? I mean people, I think people are gonna laugh at the fact that companies like us started with restaurant food delivery. Similarly to how we kind of laugh about Amazon starting with books. I think it's incredibly early for retail becoming e-commerce and what mobile and kind of this real-time delivery is gonna do for the world. So buckle up, I think it's only getting started. So I've done 3,000 podcasts. I think Mickey is universally one of the best guests I've had on the show. Thank you so much Mickey for doing this with me and this has been fantastic. Thank you Harry.