Jakob started in Just-Eat.dk as a part time customer care agent after having been approached by one of the veteran-vetarans (Rune Risom), and in the beginning he didn’t even work at the Just-Eat office. Back then, Just-Eat was based on a farm outside of Vejle, i.e not really the Tech center of the world. In the beginning of 2005 Jakob then became full time, and quickly turned into “Mr Admin System”. Jakob has a unique insight into all the corners of our now very complicated back end systems, and has always been very helpful to learn new people about the systems.

Rasmus started in Evonax.com, which was a competitor that started operating just after Just-Eat.dk was launched in August 2001. That company ran into major problems (the founder hurriedly left the country, allegedly with the tax authorities chasing him, but that is another story), and Just-Eat tried to help Rasmus to save Evonax and then merge it with Just-Eat.dk. The stakes were high back then in 2003 since Evonax had no less than 100-200 orders a day and 50 restaurants in the network (!). Evonax faded away, but luckily Rasmus joined Just-Eat.dk as a developer. Well in fact, doing development was an evening job, because the CEO and co-founder, Jesper Buch, made sure Rasmus was busy in the daytime hours with admin tasks. That is the way you run a proper start-up: make sure everybody has four hands and two brains! Rasmus has had his involvement in almost all the existing systems of Just-Eat, and he recalls how easy it was to deploy in the old days: “no QA, no test environment, just deploy it directly and see what happens” he tells with a smile on his face. The link between him as a developer and those that wanted development was very agile to say the least, they sat around the same table, and things could be done on the fly. Classic start-up style, but as Rasmus also notes, it only takes you so far. Things had to change, and they certainly have; today we have as many in QA as we had developers 3 years ago. It has been a major – and not yet finished project – to reinvent the platform and tech approach so it scales better and new sexy development can be done faster and more securely.

Jakob and Rasmus has many interesting, fun and slightly scary war stories from the early Just-Eat.dk period, where a farm was the center of the Just-Eat universe. It would be too much to mention just half of them here, but one of the stories I have to publish, because it is pretty insane since another outcome on that story could have meant a very different and not so attractive path for the company.

One day in April 2005, the hosting supplier of Just-Eat.dk had to change one of the two disks in the rack. One disk had been down for some time, and it is risky only to have one operational disk, so that makes of course a lot of sense. However, when the disk no. 1 was changed, then the still operational disk no. 2 decides it is time to kill it self!

That is bad, but in normal circumstances this is no catastrophe, there are of course back-ups. This is where it starts to become scary. The hosting provider (no names mentioned …) explained that for some strange reason they did not have a back-up. Rasmus and the other Just-Eat guys then turned to their own mirror solution which they had in the office. However, with perfectly bad timing that mirror had stopped working 5 days earlier in such a way that not only had it not taken a back-up the last 5 days, but the last functional back-up from 5 days earlier had been over-written with nothing! The perfect storm had gathered and M/S Just-Eat was lying very low in the water.

According to Jakob and Rasmus, CEO Jesper Buch went to the toilet and threw up when he realised that Just-Eat had absolutely no copy of the platform, which had been developed over the previous 5 years. But true entrepreneurs don’t give up so easily so after a chaotic discussion then it was decided that 1) Rasmus should together with the second developer and Per Meldgaard (co-founder of FoodZoom which merged with Just-Eat) look for what ever code he could find on various computers, etc, 2) everybody and their friends & family had to work 24 hrs a day to enter data into the system (menu cards, etc.) and 3) the damaged disks should be send to Ontrack Data Recovery in London.

After 2 days 40% of the system had been reestablished and after 5 days they were up to 90%. And finally after one week, Ontrack came back with a recovered disk that had almost all the lost data. So, in the end the entrepreneurs did protect the company from a devastating problem. Many thousands orders were lost, restaurant and consumer badwill mounted, but they did get the ship back to harbour and soon everything was all happiness again. That’s a great story!

Jakob and Rasmus has seen many changes in the company the last couple of years as the company has grown and become more ambitious. Internationalisation and professionalisation has been high on the agenda, and they both welcome all of that, but they are also afraid that some of the cherished things of the past is under pressure. They both point to the fact that “in the old days”, they were much more involved in taking decisions for example on new products, etc., whereas today other countries and departments far away from tiny Denmark runs with ball, and their involvement is more fragmented.

This is the eternal problem companies face as they grow: how to maintain the involvement that secured crucial commitment from the entire company as you grow from 25 people to 150 people, and again when you grow from 125 to 500, etc. We try our best, and I am sure we are doing better than the average company of this size, but some compromises also have to be made, so every decision does not end up having to pass through layer and layer of people. Involvement is needed, it drives commitment, but we need to split up and specialise more than in the old days.

The story highlights one of the problems Just-Eat has encountered outside of Denmark for the last few years until we got the Index investment last year: talented people always looked at us with some suspicion – “who are you, selling pizza’s, hmm”. But the truth is also, that every time someone took the time to talk to us, they always got intrigued about the concept, the opportunity, the team.

Anyway, Momen went on to become an absolute star performer. During his reign as first sales rep, and later Sales Manager for Southern England he signed 700 restaurants! That is a lot. I asked him whether our current UK Sales Director (DC, who started a few months later) did not have the same performance, and Momen says quickly with a big smile “no, he has only 670″. That Momen convinced 700 restaurant owners in less than 3 years to join Just-Eat and build a good relationship to them so they are still with us is just amazing. For people that don’t know about how hard a trade it is to walk the streets, find delivery restaurants, engage them and convince them, I will tell you it is absolutely fantastic what Momen did. It is a record that will maybe never surpassed.

Since the beginning of the year Momen has been in charge of the restaurant side of customer care in the UK. It was an area that needed some love and care, so with Momen’s Just-Eat sales background and his former job in telesales he was a good pick, and has as usual done well.

I asked Momen about what has changed for good and bad the last couple of years.

“A lot has changed. But the company is much better today, more professional,so  many good people. The thing that I am missing, is the spirit we had when the sales guys “blitzed” cities (a special Just-Eat concept, red). In the old days, it was a lot of fun, and there was intense competition between the sales reps who all focused on building restaurant relationships in a “blitz” city. Today, I don’t feel the same spirit when we do blitzes, some puts in an effort and likes to hang out and have fun as well, but others just show up to show the flag and are not really engaged”.

Momen is of course touching on something here. Many good things has happened in our company, but we should not lose that teamwork spirit and the fun of working. Let that be Momen’s input to the continued journey of our company.

Thanks for the chat Momen.

To boast a bit, I think one of the things we have done fairly well (meaning not perfect, but sort of fairly well …) is to mix new and old. There were some parts of the old Just-Eat that we really wanted to support also in the future (e.g. drive/energy, team spirit, etc.), but there were also some areas, where we needed to change (e.g. investment willingness/ambition, respect for professional experience, etc.) so it has been a challenge. Today our company is more diverse than ever (e.g. probably at least 20 nationalities represented in the Group) and we still have a strong and effective culture.

But just like our new colleagues are coming with a lot of good stuff, then the veterans have some valuable lessons for all of us. To get that message out, and to get their stories out, I will start to publish “veteran interviews” on this blog, i.e. making summaries of conversations I have had with some of those people that has been in the company for 3, 4, 5 years or more.

More coming soon!

But I of course have a new challenge to the UK Sales team: get Ulverston in the Lake District and Fort Williams in Scotland, then it’s getting serious -:)

Below a picture of me, Belly & Brain checking out whether we have signed enough restaurants in Inverness, Scotland – this one we did not have, so a good lead to Leigh Philipson and his guys in the Northern Sales Team.

But a good BBQ with some nice folks is of course also a treat, so let us not get too excited about millions of regular takeaway users turning to their Weber grill these hot summer days (grrr …). I went to a nice BBQ my self yesterday together with the family. Me and a handful of my colleagues met to socialise and listen to the kids destroying a bouncing castle, all very relaxing. Here is a picture of the BBQ before the kids went on a rampage.

If I was a composer, I would write this sad song to mark PD-41, and I would write this fantastic piece (thanks Grieg) to celebrate we are moving on, and quickly so -;)

Thanks to all who struggled to make it happen.

What I set out to do with my blog post was something different: 1) there is an even more fascinating and even older story behind Just-Eat than what I had known until now, and 2) co-founders that did contribute in the important early days should be remembered for their effort no matter whether they played a big or a small role. I am not interested in who was the most important person, and who did what in 2002. We are in an excellent position today and that is the most important thing.

Then last week I get across a guy that is the actual founding father of Just-Eat, and I had hardly ever heard about him. His name is Christian Frismodt, he is Danish and in his mid-30’s. I have always been told that Just-Eat was launched in August 2001, so 2001 was kind of the founding year of the company. However, Christian got the idea to Just-Eat all the way back in 1998, when he worked for Coca-Cola Denmark as a Regional Manager. It was one of his co-founders (Poul David Videbæk) that came up with the idea to one of the key technology pillars of Just-Eat, the GPRS based terminal to communicate with the restaurants instead of using fax machines. Another of the co-founders, Peter Bøje, should also be mentioned since he established Just-Eat formally as a company together with Christian in 2000. A fourth person was drawn into the founding team (Torben Munkholm) via a Danish incubator called Vækstfonden. They were also the team who made a couple of the first and very important partnerships that made it possible for the company to grow, i.e. with Coca-Cola. An article in a Danish business publication from the beginning of 2002 is one of the few places where the team’s efforts is being documented – you can read it here (Just-Eat article 2002), and for those of you can read Danish (or know that such an awesome thing as Google Translate  exists) it is interesting to see the enthusiasm and early aspiration of Peter Bøje and Christian Frismodt. Young, eager entrepreneurs that want to conquer the world (well, it was probably only Denmark, but still).

What is also mentioned in the article is a merger with the company called FoodZoom. It was another Danish company founded around 2001 by three or four other entrepreneurs. They also wanted to build a company helping to connect hungry surfers and restaurants, and in a small market as Denmark it made a lot of sense to collaborate – so they merged in 2001 which lead to the launch of just-eat.dk on 1. August 2001. And the rest is well-known history with Jesper Buch leading the charge!

Or is it? Because something happened some time in 2002. I wasn’t in the company back then, and all of my existing colleagues started after 2002, so I don’t have a good insight into that classic founder clash that took place. I guess one could argue that with 6-8 founders from two different companies, then something had to happen, and it did. There are different versions of the story, but from my view all of those people that played a positive role the first couple of years should get credit. The 6,7 or 8 co-founders should be honoured for doing their bit to get Just-Eat going even though some of them indisputable played a much bigger role than others.

I am very pleased that I have now linked up with Christian Frismodt. He has done well since he left the company (despite having been involved in a serious accident that nearly killed him) and has founded a couple of other companies, of which one for a strange reason is called something with “Just” -;)

It is very interesting to hear how he envisioned the company 11 years ago. I think the company today is much bigger than what he could ever imagine back then, so it is also thrilling for him to hear how we are doing today. I think it is fair to say, that his baby has been nurtured, and it is now a big kid, but still with many years of growth ahead.

Another interesting point that I like in this so far 12 year long story is that Just-Eat is being build to last. Many entrepreneurial people have been in and out of the company, but the idea and the company build around the idea is so strong, that we are all “just” caretakers for a while. It is one of my most important responsibilities to assure, that when I am no longer running the company, then an even greater team will take the company to new heights. That is building a proper, great company. That is assured by recruiting talent on all levels of the company, and that is something we care a lot about here at Just-Eat. Every generation of Just-Eat caretakers should do better than the last.

Even though Spain is not going to be a major market for many years, then we have decided to enter the market aggressively, since we know how to scale the business, and we are confident that by pushing hard in the first couple of years, then we will also make the overall online market grow even bigger. But with a significant investment, we also need a strong team on the ground in Spain, and most importantly we need a first rate Country Manager. Country Managers for our kind of business (demanding and challenging on many levels) is difficult, but we have found our Spanish champion: let me introduce Jerome Gavin.

Jerome has everything we are looking for in a Country Manager; sales, marketing & operational experience, leadership, energy, smartness and on top of that both experience from a big internet company (eBay) as well as his own start-up. Hungry surfers in Spain can be looking forward to a treat.

Jerome will take charge very soon running Just-Eat.es out of Madrid, but with significant focus also on Barcelona (the location of our next World Meeting), so the launch can happen in the best possible way before Christmas. Viva Espana!