Deliveroo Founder - From £0 to £5 Billion: Will Shu

The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett

FlightStory

Society & Culture, Business, Education

4.6 • 13.2K Ratings

🗓️ 12 July 2021

⏱️ 84 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Deliveroo, wow this company is HUGE! I’m sure most of you would have used it but do you know anything about the guy behind it? My guest this week is Will Shu, founder and CEO of Deliveroo. Born in 1979, the son of Taiwanese immigrants, Shu grew up in New Haven, Connecticut, USA. His mother, a scientist, and father, who worked in insurance. He founded Deliveroo in 2013 with childhood friend and software engineer Greg Orlowski. Deliveroo operated in London for the first two years, growing via word of mouth. It now operates in 12 countries and more than 200 cities. Deliveroo is worth £5 billion, becoming Europes fastest growing company with 2,000+ employees. In mid-June 2016, Will and Greg received an award for the Best Startup Founders as part of The Europas Startup Conference and Awards, mainly given to technology companies. The company also received Fastest Rising Startup of the Year and the Europas Grand Prix award. In December 2017, a study by macroeconomic consultancy Capital Economics revealed that Deliveroo had helped create 7,200 jobs across the restaurant sector since it launched in 2013. It also boosted the industry's revenue by £460 million in the year to June 2017. The report also found that Deliveroo had helped add £372 million in value to the UK economy in the same 12-month period, a figure which Capital Economics projects to rise to £1.5 billion in the year to June 2019. By mid 2020, Deliveroo had not benefited from the COVID-19 pandemic, when demand for food delivery from restaurants and takeaways surged. Deliveroo reported to be cutting 367 jobs (and furloughing 50 more) from its workforce of 2,500. Will talks about how hard this decision was at the time in today's podcast. Will is an incredible entrepreneur, one thats a far cry from the usual braggadocios CEO of a multi billion dollar company. He’s a humble person and lives a very modest lifestyle saying his life hasn’t change much at all since the early days of Deliveroo. This is conversation proved to me that you don’t have to be born an entrepreneur. Follow Will: Twitter - https://twitter.com/willshuroo Follow me: https://beacons.ai/diaryofaceo Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	I just knew this city needed something better than the classic takeaways.
0:05.3	That's how I got the idea for delivery. I definitely know what it was like to walk in their shoes.
0:10.3	I did that job for a long time. I did you know five deliveries last night and that's why you know treating riders with
0:15.8	respect and making sure their voices are heard is so important to me
0:19.7	we're running low on money because we couldn't get money in for whatever 14 months
0:24.8	COVID kicks off our users were were disappearing because there are no restaurants left on the platform
0:29.7	So we see this plummeting growth. I had to do the hardest thing I ever had to do I had to lay off you
0:34.0	know a significant number of people at the company. I'm so proud of what we built and I'm so
0:39.4	excited about the future but it is a hard hard job and anyone that tells you otherwise are not being honest.
0:46.2	We're about to get all this money in the company and then suddenly it was just gone, right?
0:51.8	A big number. Six hundred million, something like that. And I was like,
0:55.8	holy shit, you've probably used it, but you probably don't know where it came from.
1:18.0	You probably don't know the founder and his story, his unconventional, very, very humble journey.
1:26.2	Delivery went from an idea that one guy had in London while working in the city
1:31.6	to becoming a multi billion dollar company in record time.
1:38.0	But the crazy thing about my conversation today with Will is he is not your typical founder he's not your
1:44.4	typical CEO doesn't feel like your typical entrepreneur this was really his first
1:50.3	business and the really puzzling thing about my conversation with will is he doesn't fit
1:56.7	the typical stereotype of what you expect an entrepreneur to be and I think that is amazing because it just goes to show that
2:05.0	entrepreneurs don't all share the same fundamental characteristics. They're not all these big
2:10.2	braggadocious characters with huge egos and you can achieve great success with great humility.
2:17.3	Will is an anomaly. I think you'll feel that today.
	...

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