Rugby and relationships
The other day I went with some of my colleagues to a 6-nations rubgy match in Cardiff. We invited a couple of Just-Eat partners with us to have dinner first, then see the match and have a bit of fun. It was the first rugby match I have ever seen live, and to see a 6-nations match in Cardiff, where rugby is the national sport, was an extra twist. The Welsh made a number of blunders in the first half, so despite much better performance in the second half they were beaten on their home turf, which is as close as you can get to national disaster.
The trip was also a social opportunity to be together with some of our important partners. In business as in social life, building relationships is important. When Just-Eat and our partners knows each other better, it is much more fruitful to have brainstorms on how to help each other and to sort out disagreements, etc. In that respect our industry is just like any other.
Upping the TV factor in Denmark
It is not only in the UK we are building our consumer brand via TV. Actually it was Just-Eat.dk that as the first country on the planet promoted a portal for online takeaway via TV advertisement (link is to an English/Irish language version). It was first aired in June 2008 just when I started. I have never liked it (maaaany discussions with Morten Larsen running our great Danish company). Anyway, in the autumn we took the decision to make a proper analysis of the market situation in Denmark, and after that we made a number of Agencies do a pitch. The winner was Uncle Grey, who had some creative and funny ideas.
The result will be visible for the Danish TV audience in the coming weeks. And here are the stories: “feeling like home“, and “my first word“. It is in Danish, which may be a challenge for some (!), but then enjoy the pictures which are set in a very classic Danish house/apartment, where light and light colours are important since we don’t get that much sun light in Denmark. Which again is one of the reasons why takeaway food is big in that part of the world: only a few months of the year is it possible to sit outside at a piazza having Maki Rolls and Shashimi followed by a bit of white wine, so instead we sit home having a “hyggelig” time.
I like the ads – I still prefer Belly & Brain (more flexible universe), but I do believe this will work very well in a Danish context, and we will see Just-Eat improve it’s already impressive position, where more than 70% of the target market knows our servicend brand.
Belly cries, Brain is happy – the effect of creating a TV ad hit
Yesterday evening in peak time we had serious capacity problems on our UK service. For more than one hour, you had to be very hungry, patient and persistent in order to place an order. We deeply apologize for this very bad service to our customers, restaurants and partners!
The reasons for the problems can be boiled down to one thing: we had a major burst of nation wide UK TV advertisement that evening, and the ad’s did exactly what they had to do: make people curious. Even though most new visitors did not place an order, they did browse and test the system. And they did it in much larger numbers than we had estimated, which meant a positive turned into a negative when servers running parts of our service slowed down to snail speed. You can read more about the tech problems here.
It is not good enough. We should of course be ready to take incoming traffic well above the marketing estimates, so there is no excuse here. This morning a hand full of the Tech guys added and upgraded servers, so this evening – where we again had a lot of TV slots – things went much better. But some customers still had a bad experience. Luckily, we don’t have TV commercials the next couple of weeks, so there is time to improve to the right service level.
Belly cries, because he is hungry here and now, Brain, however - I think – is smiling, because he knows the capacity problem is almost solved, and the fact that TV worked well for us (expensive, yes-yes) means he is going to be very famous in the long term.
To add to our “TV success” challenge is not only the number of servers, but also a system, that has been build up over many years. Often systems and sub-systesm has been added, changed and deleted without the “grand overview”. The solutions might have made sense when they were made, but today, when the company is 10 times bigger, they are too expensive in server time. Therefore, the real solution is not only to add more iron to the server park, but to optimize the code base – significantly. We will fix the problem here and now by adding servers, but when that has happened then we will focus our attention to a smarter way of mitigating growing pains: smarter systems.
There are no news in this for us, and it is a problem most successful internet companies experience, but there are no excuses, and we need as a team to show that we can master this conversion from small start-up to big business also on the Tech side. 9 months ago, our entire Tech team was in Århus, Denmark, and it was only 6 full time employees (plus one Product Manager), which was tiny for an internet company of our size. Then we got our series A, we got Carlos on board as CTO, and we started expanding the team. Today our Tech team incl. Product Management is almost 25 people, and most of them are in London – and we are looking to hire another 8-10 people ASAP, some of the job ads you can see here, e.g. developers. We only hire top people, but if you are one of those, send your CV.
The classic combination of high growth, too small a Tech team from the beginning and a non-optimized and complex system will be defining for the future of Just-Eat. If we have to put most of our Tech power into making sure Just-Eat.co.uk will always be smooth and fast (which is the key priority the coming week, so this does not happen again), then we will not accomplish the many other things that we want to do, e.g. launch in many other countries, build even better web products, streamline internal admin tools to bring down costs, etc. I am confident we will be able to be ambitious on both dimensions, but we will be busy for sure. We want to make sure, we help making Takeaway smarter, and technology is key to this.
Just-Eat, the first years and taking the credit
The guy who was the leading co-founder of Just-Eat is Jesper Buch. He was one of two people who got the idea around the same time so Just-Eat could launch in 2001 in Denmark. Jesper became CEO in 2002 and worked full time until the spring of 2008 when he moved to Spain. He ended his advisor role at the end of 2008 after which he has been involved in various projects as angel investor while also preparing his own new projects which apparently should be launched early summer 2010. Most of his shares were sold when Index Ventures invested in Just-Eat in July 2009. Jesper is a real nitty-gritty entrepreneur who played a very big role in building the DK company and also do the first steps out into the world.
I saw this post a couple of days ago that gave some insight into what happened with Just-Eat in the early years: http://www.jesperbuch.com/just-eat%c2%b4s-f%c3%b8rste-par-ar-og-credit/
Like many good entrepreneurs, Jesper is good at telling stories, but as I have understood from other people that were involved in the first years, Jesper’s version of what happened is fairly accurate. Jesper is very careful about giving credits to various people, and those of the people he mentions that I know definitely deserves it, and some of them are still here and playing an important role, e.g. David, Rune, Morten, Jakob, Rasmus & Ole. Others like Giorgio, David C., Momen, Martijn and Laurens (all still in the company, so I know they are spitze) also deserves to be mentioned as important contributors to Just-Eat before I came on board my self.
Often the most interesting stories from any company are those that are associated with the early years with point-of-no-return decisions, near-death encounters, shareholder revolts and personality clashes. If you have not already read it, there is a book about the drama behind Facebook, and if you don’t have time to read books, then the Times has a good abstract.
The “new Just-Eat team” (which is actually not “new”, but a good mix of new-kids-on-the-block and battle hardened veterans) has been working for nearly two years on taking this company to the next level. We will succeed with a lot of drama on the market place, but hopefully with less drama on the internal front.
Just-Eat on Techcrunch 100
It is official: we are a cool company. A Techcrunch article about the most succesfull internet companies in Europe put Just-Eat on the list of the 100 most most innovative and highest-potential European tech companies! Hurrah. Well, we are no. 96, but it is still cool to be the 96th. coolest tech company in Europe … it is a bit like being the guy that almost got a dance with the 52nd. most beautiful girl in high school. It sort of only makes sense, if we the next couple of years move way up the list, so that this is only a sign of things to come.
I am not sure I quite understand the parameters though. I would say, that there are quite a few of the companies ahead of us, that we would easily beat if you did an in-depth analysis, and at the same time, there are some companies not on the list, which should be there. Anyway, at Just-Eat we are happy (we usually are, so no big surprise there), and the real thing for us is, that it is yet another pad on our shoulder confirming that we are on track to build a true, international success.
Next year we will be a lot higher. If not, I promise to chew on one of my socks for a few minutes.
My second home country?
I have soon lived in the UK for two years, so I guess it is about time to assess whether I like being here on the personal level. And yes, I really do like this country. My love affair with UK started when I was only five years old.
It was a nice summer day, and I was sitting on a swing with one of my older brothers. I was five years old, so just a small kid running around playing all the time. My brother then said “brrrrrrrr, tatatatatatatata – kapooow”. He was obviously an airplane that shot down another airplane. I asked “what are you playing”, and he immediately replied “I am an English pilot in a Spitfire shooting down a Messerschmitt in the battle of Britain”. That sounded pretty cool, so immediately I was also flying a Spitfire and started shooting down those Messrritrrr’r.
Many of the heroic Spitfire pilots flew out of an airfield North of London next to a small village called Cranfield, and later on that airstrip was turned into a very good engineering school, which also ended up having a well respected MBA School. In 1993 I therefore moved to Cranfield for half a year, where I took term 3 and 4 at the school. It was a busy time, but I remember that just as much as I fell out with some of the English politeness (why do you say “how do you do?”, when you are not really interested in getting an honest answer?), I really enjoyed the humor and general feel of the society.
During the 90’s I was very often in London, either on business trips or as a weekend trips around Christmas. But all this is of course not the same as moving to London with wife and kids knowing that this is the real deal for several years. Now I am truly living here, and how is it?
I don’t want to write a long essay about England/Britain/United Kingdom, because so many people with much better observation and writing skills have done that already, so I will make it brief: I really-really like this country. Not only London, which together with New York are the two “big pulse” cities for me, but also countless places outside London with all the beatiful landscapes, the many other towns and diverse regions each with their own charachter. I absolutely do not love everything I see here (the trust among people is too low, the education system should be fundamentally overhauled, the transportation infrastructure needs a serious upgrade,the emmigration policy has failed etc.), but if I for some reason was kicked out of Denmark on a permanent basis, then this is probably the country I would choose to settle in for good with my family (in tough competition with the other Scandinavian countries though). No one can bicker and be sarcastic about their country as the British, but to that you should add much more pride, and get on with it. This society is not broken as some of your newspapers try to portray, you just need to keep on upgrading, revitalising and strengthening the society like you have done so many times before. From my perspective, no other nation has for the last several centuries given so much to the rest of the World. Some bear a grudge to the British due to the history of the Empire, but I turn it around: how many empires with all their power and glory has been as civilised ad the British, and given as much in terms science, philosophy, battles for democracy and social development? Yes, they overdid it from time to time (so did my ancestral forefathers in their longboats I have heard), but every other empire out there has done much worse. And no other empire decided to dismantle it self in the end and establish democracies and institutions all over the World. Then there were the Boer wars, Irish famine, slave trade, the Peshawar Bazaar massacre, etc. – yes, yes, but I hope you get my point!
So long live Britania, Britania rule the ways, and please: move on and find that spirit that gives this society a vibe we all need, whether we are Russian oligarchs, Indian software engineers, Danish entrepreneurs or just ordinary British people.
World Meeting January 2010, London
We had our latest World Meeting this week in London. We meet in the centre of the city for a couple of days with focus on the professional program, but I am sure quite a few of the team members also had a night out or two.
These World Meetings are always positive experiences, because I meet so many people from the different countries (we are around 30 participating now), and they are all fully charged to tell about how they are building their business, and how we can improve our offering to delivery restaurants and consumers. I have now been in the business for about 20 months, and it is amazing to see how these meetings has developed. The concept is quite different now compared to what I experienced when I started, but, the real change is how we are so much more professional in our approach to doing business. That is a natural progression any company has to go through, but it is very satisfying for all of us to see that it actually happens.
The big joy for me is that this is happening while we still maintain our no-nonsense, high energy approach to doing business. That is what often slips in a process like we are undergoing now, but we seem to be able to industrialise our industry while maintaining the best of the old virtues. Yehaaa!
Hi super star, here is your job!
We are now more than 250 people in Just-Eat, so it is getting a bit busy for me to be involved in the substance all the way round. Some of my dear colleagues wants me to hire a Personal Assistant (I will continue to book my own flights for some time still), but I don’t think that is the right solution for where we are now. Instead, I want to work together with a young, talented and energetic person with tech insight and business acumen that can support me and my colleagues with analysis, project management, follow-up, etc., i.e. a lot of substantial stuff. It is a great position, and I have pretty much drafted the job description according to what I would have loved to do when I was 10-15 years younger. If you are interested, then check out the job description and ponder whether this is your dream job. And remember: it is always fun to be involved in building a true, international success story -;)
Thanks 2009, welcome 2010
Happy New Year to everybody. 2009 was a great year for Just-Eat. Just-Eat is starting to grow up and get closer to the full potential of the company. The funding round this Summer, where Index Ventures among others invested in us is of course a sign of that, but there are so many other things that has happened. It would take too long – and would be too boring to read – to mention all the positive things here, but let me mention a few anyway.
First of all, we finished getting the top team in place. I am very pleased with the kind of talent that I now has as my nearest colleagues. It is smart and experienced people that all want to go that extra mile, and which all want this company to become a true, international success. Importantly, it is also a team, that works as a team. Getting old and new to work together, mixing skills and experiences has been key, and is often something that is difficult to achieve when a company goes through the phase from small to quite a lot bigger. It takes a cultural change, but it is necessary.
Second, as indicated above, we have managed to change our culture and modus operandi. A lot of soft stuff with hard consequences. We have taken the best of the old culture/belief set, gotten rid of some not so productive elements and introduced some badly needed new perspectives. It has not happened overnight without clashes and misunderstandings, but we are very far in the process now, and there is no way back which, importantly, everybody understands. Having a shared, but also open culture, is key to succeed in what we want to do.
Thirdly, we have managed to accelerate our UK company tremendously. This is so important, since the UK takeaway market is the biggest in Europe, and the second biggest in the Western World (I don’t know much about China and Japan yet, but they do eat a bit of delivery pizza, sushi and noodles). I remember when we did the 2009 budgets in November 2008, and the numbers looked really staggering. But we have delivered on the promises. For example, we have now more than 4,000 restaurants signed up all over the UK. Order levels are in the hundreds of thousands pr month. The organisation has been strengthened significantly. We are starting to become a brand, that many people know. Etc., etc. As a consequence of all this, we have achieved one of our key business objectives for 2009, which was to make sure, we were the only national player. There are of course still a couple of competitors in the UK (and there always will be), but they are all de facto local. This gives us important leverage in many aspects of our business system.
The last key accomplishment I want to highlight is something that is not at all finished yet, but has come a long way in 2009. It is to increase the general skill level in all the important business dimensions of the company, and to institutionalise these skills in various ways. Just-Eat has like all other start-ups had some areas, where things worked really well, and some other areas, where there was not so much focus. For example, Just-Eat has always been good in Sales, but the last few years Marketing has not been executed at a professional level. Tech is another area, where underinvestment in many years meant, that “Tech Debt” has been accumulating. Tech Debt is manageable if a company grows at a “normal pace”, but when growth is accelerating in all dimensions (no. of customers, no. of restaurants, no. of employees, no. of countries, etc.), then Tech Debt can be deadly. We are dealing with this now in a professional way, even though we still need more work to be world class (e.g. a world class company does not experience the down time we saw on 1.1. when DK had problems one hour and UK had problems for a couple of hours – not good, and a big apology to all you Just-Eat fans out there!).
I think we are well prepared to go full steam ahead in yet another year. There will be challenges and all that, but that is part of the joy of buidling companies and new ways of doing things – you have to enjoy those horrible moments somehow (if you want a visual version of what I mean, then check this video, and note the final comment, “yehaa“!). The takeaway revolution is unstoppable; Order takeaway, the smart way.
I hope the best for our company, our customers, our restaurateurs, partners, employees, and everybody else in 2009. Happy New Year.
Megaphone! And a fun and positive attitude to life
Friday night, we had Christmas Party for UK, UK-Tech and HQ. We were 65 people that went to Oxford and had dinner on a boat (that never left the quay), and then suddenly Santa Claus came by with a lot of presents. That was very handy, and it added to the party atmosphere, where “spirits” were already very high. Santa looked a lot like our CFO by the way.
My dear colleagues made sure, that Santa had the present just for me; a megaphone! Now, what does that tell me? Maybe they indicate that I speak loud and like to tell other people what to do … nah, can’t be that. I am sure they just wanted to give me a present that is practical, when I am trying to discipline my kids.
Next week it is DK, NO and DK-Tech that celebrate the coming Christmas with a proper party in Aarhus, and the other countries also have their parties throughout December. A Christmas party is an important social event in any company, and much more telling about the internal dynamics than people realise. I think the party’s in Just-Eat are always good, because we have so many young people, and so many with a good, fun attitude to life, but it still makes a difference whether the planning has been taken care of or not. In our case, especially our dear CFO, Mike, and his energetic assistant, Sumaya, has done a fantastic job. Big applause to them. And what does it say about our company, that it is Finance & Accounting that acts as social committee and do a great job? That we do prefer to hire people with a positive and fun attitude to life, no matter what positions we are talking about.