The Decisions That Made Me A Leader: The Depop Story
The Bottom Line
BBC
4.6 • 615 Ratings
🗓️ 20 May 2024
⏱️ 45 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Simon Beckerman is the founder of Depop, a platform where people can buy and sell pre-loved fashion, it currently has around 35 million registered users. He sold the company to Etsy for £1.25 billion in 2021.
Simon grew up in Italy to British and Italian parents who he describes as rebels in their own way and even as a teenager he knew he had to build his own business because ‘I was unemployable’
His latest business, is DELLI a food app connecting independent retailers with consumers. Evan asks about the key personal and business-related decisions that got him to where he is today.
The Decisions That Made Me A Leader is a mini-series from The Bottom Line. It features one-on-one interviews with entrepreneurs and business leaders, including Duncan Bannatyne, Martha Lane Fox, and the boss of Depop, Simon Beckerman. All of these episodes are available on BBC Sounds and you can also watch them on BBC iPlayer. To find the series, just search: The Decisions That Made Me A Leader. You can also watch the series on BBC iPlayer. To find the series, just search: The Decisions That Made Me A Leader.
Host: Evan Davis Producers: Paige Neal-Holder and Farhana Haider Assistant Editor: Matt Willis Senior News Editor: Sam Bonham Commissioning Editor: Hugh Levinson
A BBC News Long Form Audio production.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, podcasts. |
| 0:09.5 | Hello, welcome to this spin-off series from Radio 4's Bottom Line team. |
| 0:16.2 | This is a series of business interviews, business and personal interviews. |
| 0:20.3 | We're calling it the decisions that |
| 0:22.3 | made me a leader. And we're going to be focusing on the key moments, the key decisions that each of our |
| 0:27.4 | guests has faced in their life that have got them to where they are today. I'm Evan Davis. |
| 0:32.8 | And our guest today is Simon Beckerman. Now, he is currently involved in his latest business called |
| 0:39.7 | Delhi. It's a couple of years old. We'll hear more about that. But he's best known as the |
| 0:44.5 | founder of Deepop. Now, if you don't know Deepop, it is a platform. It is a marketplace where |
| 0:50.4 | people trade second-hand, pre-loved, they prefer to say, fashion items, vintage clothing, |
| 0:56.5 | and the like. But Simon's background goes to Milan, to Italy, where he was brought up, |
| 1:01.8 | and his business ventures with his brother. Simon, welcome. It is good to have you here. |
| 1:06.5 | Thank you. And we want to start with your latest decision, which is Delhi, not Deepop. |
| 1:13.0 | We will go back to Deepop. |
| 1:14.7 | Because the decision was really to switch from fashion to Delhi, the business, which is about |
| 1:21.0 | food. |
| 1:22.0 | So tell us about Delhi and tell us about that decision. |
| 1:24.7 | Delhi is a platform where people can go and buy food, mainly grocery food products from |
| 1:30.0 | very small food makers. So we want to go out there and discover food producers who do new |
| 1:37.1 | kind of food. And there are many coming on the market in these years. The decision that made me |
| 1:43.3 | decide to do it is because I thought |
| 1:46.2 | the next 10 to 20 years is going to be a key phase in our society where people are going |
... |
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