An award from back home
The internet industry has over the last 10 years been littered with awards for this and that. When we don’t win awards we think they are just silly, when we win we think it is absolutely deserved -;)
Yesterday Just-Eat won the Danish e-commerce award in the category “cross-border”, i.e. the internet company with Danish roots that has made the most impressive internationalisation. Winning a Danish award is not what is going to make our company a world beater, but it is of course nice to get a bit of credit from the mother country, and then this picture is just awesome – I think they had a bit of a party afterwards!
Viva Espana
I have just been in Spain to visit the guys in Madrid and Barcelona, and there is only one thing to say: Viva Espana. Jerome & Co. has really shown how to execute the online takeaway ordering model on the Iberian Peninsula. When we a while ago were planning the Spanish launch, we were a bit careful in terms of how quickly we could grow the business, because the Mediterranean food culture is very different from the one in rainy Northern Europe. Yes, there are not thousands and thousands of delivery restaurants, but the team has been cracking on and quickly build a good restaurant network in Madrid and Spain. And the orders have followed, so much that the team is one of the fastest growing Just-Eat countries ever (maybe even the fastest growing). Well done ES!
Here is a picture of Jerome and Daniel in front of a map of Madrid, the first Spanish Just-Eat city.
Just learn Just-Eat
At Just-Eat we have up until recently followed the traditional HR development policy of start-ups, i.e. throw the new recruits out in the ocean and see if they could swim. If they staid afloat, great, they would be ready for the next storm coming in a few weeks. If they drowned, that was bad for all, but the company moved quickly on.
Start-up’s seldom thinks long term when it comes to talent development, and there is often a cynical view on HR. It’s one of the reasons why it can be much more challenging to succeed in a start-up, it is a much more demanding environment with bigger challenges and less support & coaching, but for those that can make it work it is the ride of a lifetime.
But long term, that philosophy does not work, and at Just-Eat we have come to the conclusion a while ago that it is time to change. Already nearly three years ago we introduced “Functional Groups” that cut across countries and departments to enhance collaboration and skill development in key areas. The Functional Groups (FG’s) is work in progress, but they add a lot of value to our institutional knowledge bank. We have a size where we can not afford to be reliant on a super genius in key areas, we need that super genius to institutionalise knowledge, spread it out and make all super geniuses. This philosophy has been key to obtaining the position as world leader in online takeaway ordering, but we want to go much further.
There is so much more to do. We need to have structured approach to all kinds of learning and development – not instead of on-the-job-in-the-line-of-fire training & development (still the most important piece of the learning curve), but as a valuable supplement. We need to establish coaching modules on account management, on SEO best practice, on” guard” management, we need to have an international development program for managers, we need to learn many people about interpersonal communication skills, etc., etc. Most of this we already know a lot about as a company, but we need to makeprofessional programs around it. We are moving on this, but we need someone to take full ownership of this process together with me and several other leaders in Just-Eat. Someone who works together with all the specialists to help them arrange the training sessions, work with external experts to coordinate their input in the many programs,handle logistics, etc. We need a HR development coordinator – or as we call it: a HRcor (pronounced “Hardcore”)!
If you would like to be a Hardcore at Just-Eat, and learn us “learn to learn”, then please send an email to Amy (am@just-eat.com). Just-Eat is according to our selves an exciting company, and in this role you will be working across the company, across borders, across functions and with a lot of different people, some of them proper nutters, some of them proper proper, but most of them nice an fun people. Help us to merge the best of the start-up HR philosophy with the best from the world of HR at the big corporations – merge the Jungle Law with INSEAD Business School. We will take people development into a new millennium (still to be decided what millennium I can assure it will be new -;) )
Looking forward to talk to you.
Groupon vs. Just-Eat
Recently many have asked me about the relationship and difference between online takeaway ordering via Just-Eat and group buying via Groupon. That is natural given the phenomenal growth of the group buying concept, the fact that they are a local concept just like ours and because some of Groupon’s many vouchers are related to the restaurant industry. In reality, there is not a lot of overlap between the Groupon and Just-Eat use case. The differences are much bigger than the similarities.
For the restaurants perspective, the key differences are as follows:
- Groupon is a campaign push model. Having access to campaign channels to push new products, or support periods with low business volumes in an industry with high fixed costs is an advantage, but it will never change the normal, day-to-day support that Just-Eat provides. Our model secures restaurants a steady flow of orders every day, all year round.
- Groupon typically charges 40-50% of the transaction value for their services, our average is around 10%. That makes a massive difference for a restaurant and underscores the point above. It is not sustainable to have a significant part of your business brought in via Groupon week-in and week-out.
- Groupon works together with all local merchants, Just-Eat focuses 100% on delivery restaurants. This means, that even though the core of our relationship with the restaurants is based on providing a steady flow of extra orders, then we do a lot of other things for the restaurants. For example, we provide customer care, great discount offers on products and services they need to do business, technology services, we invite them to restaurant conferences to get news from the sector, etc. Our ambition is to be significant and integrated partners with the delivery restaurants.
- As a minor but not irrelevant point, it is worth mentioning, that the mechanism used to support the transaction on Groupon and other group buying sites result in some level of manual, administrative work for the restaurant. At Just-Eat we provide digital two-way communication between our servers/customers and the restaurants via our terminal technology, i.e.everything incl. billing is automated and very easy to manage for the restaurant.
For the consumer, the main differences is that we are always there! There might be a Groupon voucher available for next Tuesday, but that doesn’t help if you are hungry here and now. And if the voucher is for today, then it is probably not for the restaurant you really want your food from, e.g. it might be for sushi when what you want is “sweet and sour” from your local Chinese delivery restaurant. On top of that, the convenience and assurance offered by our fully web and mobile supported model incl. customer care when an order causes problems, is also key to our consumers.
And then we are of course nicer and more fun than the Groupon guys -;)
These differences are substantial and means that we are not competing 1:1 for consumers or restaurant relationship. Of course there is some indirect competition, but the way the two business models are defined today means Just-Eat and Groupon does not see each other as real competitors. We are the primary day-to-day partner for the restaurants, and Groupon is sometimes for somerestaurants a valuable campaign channel. Furthermore, at Just-Eat we already have many more discount offers available to our customers, and we are working on presenting these discounts much better, and we will also introduce new discount features (group buying, hmm!), so even the most cost stingy customer can rely on Just-Eat any day of the week for any time of cuisine.
There is talk of Facebook entering the group buying space, just like many publishers, directory companies, etc. has done or are planning to do. That is great for both consumers and merchants, and I think Groupon will feel the pressure from all these initiatives. In reality the barriers to entry are quite low in the group buying industry, so the margins will come under a lot of pressure the next couple of years, and I think we will see consolidation and specialisation as well as integration/”featurization”. There is plenty of competition in the online takeaway ordering industry, but the real competition is not originating from what Facebook, Google, etc are doing, but rather what hundreds of focused start-ups are doing all over the world. It takes dedicated focus to succeed in our space – satisfying the needs of restaurants and hungry surfers demands a customized and complex system that can not just be bolted on another business.
New ideas and technologies will of course come and go in the coming years to the benefit of restaurants and consumers, so things will change, but for now Just-Eat and Groupon can live happy side-by-side. Groupon will work horizontally to take a big bite of the very big “local marketing/campaign” market, and at Just-Eat we will support the delivery restaurants in all sorts of ways to be their preferred partner. We can all live happily for ever after!
Just-Eat.ca goes West via Yummy acquisition
Nearly two years ago we launched our Canadian service. Since then the Canadian team has build the clear Canadian leader in terms of restaurants and order numbers even though we have so far only focused on Toronto and the wider province of Ontario. We of course want to have nation wide coverage, so getting into “the West” makes perfect sense, so it is with pleasure we today are announcing the acquisition of Yummyweb.
“Yummy” has over the last few years become the clear leader in British Columbia/Vancouver, so there is a good geographical match with our Ontario presence. We will of course keep growing the company in BC, both in Vancouver and cities like Edmonton and Calgary. All takeaway lovers in Western Canada, enjoy!
Thanks to the Yummy team for building their business so well, we will nurture their baby going forward.
The obvious question after this acquisition is “what about the province of Quebec”? Stay tuned, we will soon be there.
Just-Eat no. 1 in Switzerland without the “Just”
It is with great pleasure Just-Eat tonight can announce that we have entered into a partnership with the no. 1 Swiss operator of online takeaway ordering, Eat.ch. Reto, Lukas and the other guys behind Eat.ch has done a very good job with limited resources the last couple of years. Combining their position, local insight and energy with our capital and knowledge of how to scale a business aggressively will create a very strong company in the Alps.
Reto & Co. actually found the original inspiration for their venture when they a handful of years ago experienced Just-Eat in Denmark. We know that quite a few entrepreneurs around the world has been inspired by how we do business, and we take pride in that. Especially when the same entrepreneurs end up partnering with us.
Thanks to Eat.ch for trusting Just-Eat, and thanks to Rasmus, Camron and Jeff for making it happen on the Just-Eat side.
Just-Eat does everything to make customers happy
Except in Denmark, Just-Eat is not involved in the logistical part of getting food delivered. We help to facilitate the process, and if things turns bad (hot food turned cold, late delivery, etc.) we often get involved to turn the situation around via our Customer Care teams. There are also other ways to help out, and a new approach was tested the other day in the office: we insert one of our colleagues into the actual bag that the food is delivered in! In that way we can provide first hand support and keep the food warm by hugging it all the way.
We are still tweaking the concept – next week we will try with a robot.
Just-Eat fills up the fridge with big funding round
It is with enormous joy we can announce that Just-Eat has secured a $48 Mio. series B funding round co-lead by Greylock Partners and Redpoint Ventures which both are world class investors. Existing VC investor Index Ventures also participated significantly. It is by far the biggest funding round ever in this sector.
This event means a huge amount to us here at Just-Eat. Firstly, we get our bank account filled up, so we can keep on growing our company throughout the world. We are already the world leader, but getting significant amounts of fresh capital into the company means our launch plan for new geographies can become even more ambitious. We are already profitable in our existing countries, but this funding round makes it possible to keep on investing heavily in existing countries, launching in a few of the remaining key markets in Europe while also pushing into Asia and the Americas.
Furthermore, the investment is a big pad on the shoulder to everybody in the company who has helped grow this company the last 10 years. Many people have played a significant role in the success of the company all the way from a small start-up Denmark to the international success story which is now run out of London.
Lastly, I think it is great, that for once, Americans VC’s are acknowledging that it is a European company who is the clear leader in a future multi-multi-billion dollar industry. I have lots of respect for the US/Silicon Valley ecosystem and it’s amazing ability to churn out world beating tech companies, but I think we will all benefit from Europe getting joining the race for the future to a much bigger extent.
Thanks to all Just-Eat’ers, and thanks to the investors for believing so much in us. We will do everything we can to show that the trust was well deserved. Cheers for many more years of growth – and now we will go back to work!
NB: to be honest, even though I am extremely happy about this milestone for our company, then the situation in Japan with fires and explosions in a nuclear facility is dampening my mood a great deal. Must be terrible and nervewreaking for the people of Japan. Let us all hope that this situation gets under control ASAP!
Moving office
The UK business was launched out of a small office in Canary Wharf, London. That area is more known to be one of the key centres for global finance than a tech start-up hot bed, but it served the company well in two years from March 2006 to the beginning of 2008. I never visited that first office because I didn’t sign up with Just-Eat until March 2008, so in my memory Just-Eat UK will always be our Edgware office, North London. When the internationalisation gained momentum in 2008, we also needed to build up more centrally located staff, and since UK was our key future market, and London provides access to a lot of talent, then Just-Eat Group HQ also became our Edgware office. Therefore, I have for almost 3 years spend most of my working life in Edgware. But that is changing now.
We have decided to split our London office up in two. UK operations and some central functions (e.g. Finance & Accounting and most of central Marketing) will stay in Edgware, but me, the international team, etc. will join Tech & Product which since June 2010 has been based in Farringdon, City of London. In effect this means that Group HQ is now in Farringdon. 5 of the partners/exec’s will be based in Farringdon, 2 will be split 50/50 between Edgware and Farringdon, and one (UK MD) will be mainly in Edgware. It sounds a bit complicated, but given the way we are organised, how much we grow, rental costs in London and a bigger need for some of us to be close to agencies, bankers and collaboration partners in London, then it is the best model.
Key challenge when splitting offices is of course to maintain a close relationship, and secure that sub-cultues are still part of the overall Just-Eat Jam, but that is no different from what we already is dealing with, as we grow our company internationally and have offices thousands of kilometers apart.
So, how complicated is to move the office of the CEO of Just-Eat? This picture says it all:
I grabbed my computer, a couple of bags, our world domination map and then it was off in a taxi. At Just-Eat we prefer to travel light.
Introducing Adrian: from music to food
In the summer of 2010, we started to look for a COO here at Just-Eat. Throughout the autumn we talked to dozens of candidates, many of them with very strong backgrounds and personalities. A couple of times we were really close, but then something came in the way. When we recruit to our partnership (i.e. the exec team), it is a rigid process, where all the partners/exec’s are involved, and everybody has a veto. It is so important that the chemistry and balance in the team is right, so I don’t want one or two guys not buying into the arrival of a new partner. The process dragged out a couple of months until we met Adrian Blair in November. Not only does Adrian has an impressive pedigree (Oxford, Ask.com Harvard, Google, Spotify), but much more important is it, that he is a genuinely smart and energetic person with a nice personality. Exactly what we were looking for.
Late in December we then agreed with Adrian that he should move out of the music business and join the food business, but unfortunately he had to spend a couple of months before he could leave his existing employer, so it is not until next week Adrian is fully on board. Together with the local teams, Adrian shall secure Just-Eat always become market leaders wherever we are. The international team is now almost fully in place, and together with Rasmus heading up our Incubator activities (new launches, partnerships, M&A), we have a very strong group of paratroopers that can support the local teams in their pursuit of gold and glory.
And when talking about internationalisation, stay tuned because quite a lot will happen the next month!