Oscar Pierre, Glovo CEO & Founder: Selling 30% for €100K |The McDonald's Deal That Saved Them |E1263

Summary

• The arc is the anti-blitzscaling proof: Glovo’s first round was “valued at 280k pre money and we raised 100K,” nearly died three times, raised a round every 9 months for seven years, was burning ~€1M a day at €3BN top line — and still sold to Delivery Hero for €2.3BN in all-stock on December 31, 2021. Today it’s approaching €7BN top line with its first profitable semester at year ten, and Oscar Pierre sees it “as Amazon 20 years ago,” 10x bigger from here.
• One enterprise deal saved the company: when McDonald’s Chicago declared a global Uber Eats exclusive in 2018, Pierre judged “we shut down the company for sure” if it held — so he traveled to Madrid ~40 times, convinced the local decision-maker, Suette, to break the exclusivity, and a 20-person garage team out-executed Uber’s San Francisco machine. McDonald’s hit 70% of Spanish volume before cohorts diversified it down to today’s 10–20% — the concentration was scary, but the mega-brand became a customer-acquisition funnel.
• Marketplace physics: network effects stop at the border and timing is everything. Brand, partnerships, and TV are national; “you go to Portugal and you start from zero.” Paris’s main failure was launching 2–3 years late; Brazil was a €30–40M “black hole” because iFood already had all the content and “vouchering in our business is horrible.” Kenya and Kazakhstan worked because nobody was there yet — Tunisia cost €5–10M and took 2–3 years to profit, for a prize of GMV approaching 1% of national GDP.
• European VC failed this company repeatedly: nearly every European fund passed (“nobody believed in our story… a bunch of kids from Barcelona beating the Deliveroos and the Ubers of the world”), a lead investor pulled out on December 23rd, and Rakuten’s founder only invested (~€15M) after a chance meeting at an FC Barcelona event. Pierre’s diagnosis: VCs who never built anything add pressure instead of absorbing it, and they missed “the power of working really hard with less money.”
• Culture broke at around 1,000 employees, and it was self-inflicted: Pierre “started being a bit of a politician” after all-hands pushback, until he overheard an engineer decline a poaching offer because the rival worked too hard — hardworking talent is itself a network effect you can lose. The fix — realign or fire the top, then say things as they are — cost “not a week, it’s a year of noise.” His hiring math: “I only need a thousand people that want to work hard.”
• The forward thesis is multicategory plus ads: Spanish offline grocery is €120BN with only 2% online; Pierre is “fully convinced” that goes to 20–30% and Glovo captures at least half, because retailers’ own online operations don’t work. Advertising is at €2–3 per €100 of GMV heading to at least €5, “almost full margin” — a potential margin engine.
• Regulatory asymmetry is a live risk: Pierre faces a criminal process in Spain involving six years in prison over a freelancer model “validated by judges in Spain up to 14 times” — while his US competitors go unaccused. He’s “not super optimistic” EU regulation eases for the next wave.

Deep dive

Big Macs Changed Glovo

• Pierre was a 22-year-old aerospace graduate at Airbus in France who’d watched Uber launch in Atlanta while finishing his studies. The first idea was “the Uber for errands” — digitizing his mother’s daily runs. With €10K to spend, he Googled “build an X for Uber app” and hired the cheapest developer he could find, in eastern Russia, for ~€8,000. The app “was shitty, it didn’t work — but I had something to start showing to investors.”
• The seed terms are the episode’s signature stat: “the first round was valued at 280k pre money and we raised 100K.” That €100K hired the first CTO and rebuilt the app from zero while early orders literally arrived by text message.
• The aha moment was users ordering Big Macs. Generation-one food delivery (Just Eat) aggregated restaurants that delivered themselves; a marketplace that also offered the delivery “unlocked all the supply of the city.”
• His honest revision on product-market fit: people liked the service for years, but a service people like “at a price that people don’t want to pay” isn’t PMF — it only arrived when merchant-side revenue let the consumer price keep falling.

Scale Stops at Borders

• The core marketplace lesson: dynamics work at city and national level — big partnerships (McDonald’s, Walmart-scale brands) and TV advertising are countrywide — but “you go to Portugal and you start from zero.” You have to win every country separately.
• Number two can survive, but barely: out of 23 markets Glovo is number two and profitable in “very few,” and only as “a very relevant number two.” Paris’s main failure was launching 2–3 years behind Deliveroo and Uber. “We were late. It was that simple.”
• Launch economics: Tunisia cost €5–10M and 2–3 years to profitability (“you can turn it into profit in six months but you’re going to move a lot slower”). The prize justifying 2018–2022 — “probably the bloodiest VC battle of maybe all consumer history” — is GMV approaching 1% of a country’s GDP in some markets.
• How scale converts to unit economics: the largest courier fleet in every city means the cheapest cost from A to B; then data — “it’s a business about seconds,” training models on how long the same restaurant takes for a pizza versus a paella. Order-stacking is framed as pure LTV optimization: measure how every minute of delay hits retention on the next order.

McDonald’s Deal Changed Everything

• In 2018 McDonald’s Chicago mandated one global delivery partner: Uber Eats. Pierre’s read: “if Uber gets this deal… we shut down the company for sure.” So they identified the Spanish decision-maker (a woman he names as Suette), and Pierre traveled to Madrid ~40 times until she broke the global exclusivity and granted a Madrid test.
• The garage-versus-giant dynamic is the point: a 20-person team where “everybody knew that was life or death,” engineers building whatever McDonald’s asked, every request answered yes — “Uber from San Francisco couldn’t compete with the local team in Spain.” Winning it spun the flywheel, and Italy’s McDonald’s CEO handed Glovo a two-year exclusivity next.
• On the standard advice to avoid customer concentration, Pierre says context decides: at peak, 70% of Spanish volume was McDonald’s, and he was fine with it — cohorts showed those customers ordering more categories over time, decaying the concentration to today’s 10–20% in most countries. The concentration was scary, but the mega-brand became the customer-acquisition engine.

Fundraising Nearly Killed Glovo

• The cap table “looked like a Frankenstein.” Pierre says, “I never said no to an investor. That’s how little optionality I had.” At the ~€25M Series B he had exhausted his list of VCs who passed — actual meetings, not emails — “I Googled and there were no more in Europe.”
• The saves were improbable. Rakuten’s founder met Pierre at an FC Barcelona event, had noticed the courier backpacks in the streets, and invested ~€15M; the round ultimately had 3 leads. Later, a Paris lead investor held a second IC and demanded the McDonald’s contract signed — with three weeks of cash left, Pierre told McDonald’s the company would fold without it, and got the signature. In another round, a lead passed by phone on December 23rd, two days before Christmas — “that was a really bad Christmas” — patched with a small internal round buying three months.
• Why every nine months instead of eighteen: “either we over-invest and shorten our runway, or Uber Eats and Deliveroo will kill us in all of our markets… it was a life or death decision all the time and we had to overspend every single time.” The one big round — €200M — arrived when burn was already €30M a month.
• Why investors kept balking even as Kenya-to-Peru worked: the burn (15, 20, 30M/month), and relative scale — Uber was 15–20x bigger and “can just go into your home market and destroy your business with maybe 20–30 million.” Even at €1–2BN top line, “they didn’t see us as big enough to fail” — which Pierre concedes was “rightly so.”

Expansion Tested Glovo

• After cracking Spain and Italy, the map logic: Spaniards naturally expand to LatAm. Co-founder Arnau ran it for two years; Lima’s first week “was flying” — all three sides of the marketplace working far from Barcelona — and they rolled out 10–12 countries. Frontier launches like Kenya and Kazakhstan happened over investor objections, sometimes without approval: “who’s going to order food delivery in Kenya? Well, there’s a lot of people with cell phones, and people like food.” The screening metric isn’t AOV but the ratio of labor cost to AOV — large in Morocco, which makes the service affordable and demand deep.
• Brazil was the biggest failure: €30–40M lost, shut in a year. The wrong analysis was pattern-matching iFood to Just Eat; in reality iFood had all the content and good service, and prying users off a sticky incumbent means vouchers — “vouchering in our business is horrible” on thin margins. His generalization: “shutting down things is a super important skill for a founder because at the end it’s an ego thing” — a year earlier he’d been selling the Brazil dream to board and employees, and had to unsay it while laying off ~100 people.
• On Rappi in LatAm — Sequoia and, he thinks, DST-backed, “the best fundraisers”: “we went from saying these guys are crazy, they’re so irrational, to doing exactly what they were doing in a matter of three months. Big exclusivities are worth a lot.” Glovo pays restaurants lump-sum exclusivities itself, underwriting to a 3–4 year payback — no McKinsey, done in-house.

Glovo’s Culture Softened

• Pierre’s confession: hyperscaling hides culture problems because everyone is stretched; the rot arrived when the business was growing at ~30% year over year at ~1,000 heads. After all-hands talks on hard work, he’d get messages that he’d been “a bit too aggressive” — and he softened. “What do politicians do? They say things in a way that a very large percentage of the population will like.”
• The wake-up was overheard at a Christmas party: an engineer saying “I was also poached, but I decided not to go there because they work really hard there.” The realization: intensity decay doesn’t just lower output — you lose your hardworking people to companies that kept the bar, a talent network effect running in reverse.
• The fix was blunt: realign the top, fire the leaders who didn’t want to go back to the early Glovo, and send emails that set “the company on fire for a few weeks.” His warning on the cost: even 10–20% misaligned is very loud — “it’s not a week, it’s a year of noise” and toxicity. And it wasn’t the employees’ fault: recruiting and onboarding had stopped telling people what work ethic was expected.
• The maintenance regime: total transparency in interviews (“most days I’m here in the office until 8… on weekends I connect”), firings as “a mega signal,” and a rule for every meeting: “my mission here is just to add more velocity and raise the standards — nothing they present is going to be fine,” because a leader who’s fine with everything trains the next report to be a little worse. On hiring hard workers in a work-life-balance generation: “I only need a thousand — I don’t need to convince the entire young community.”

Management Lessons Shaped Glovo

• On doing “too much M&A”: founders are optimists who see only upside. Two Instacart-style grocery acquisitions (~€5M each, Spain and Portugal) were all shut down — the money was small, the focus cost was the real price. “Our business is about focusing on the small details every single day… man, you’re so stupid.”
• On layoffs — with more coming industry-wide, his advice: people are “a lot more mature than you expect,” and he always pushed HR for more generous packages than proposed, because how the leavers exit is what the stayers remember. Harry’s line lands here: the way you leave somewhere is often the way you’re remembered.
• His two-stage theory of the CEO job: in hypergrowth the business runs on its own energy — he spent almost six hours a day fundraising for seven years. At ~30% growth, “you cannot sit back” — the CEO’s job becomes injecting velocity into every single meeting.

Glovo Chose Its Exit

• The first offer came when Glovo was only in Spain and Italy: €100M, with half the board in favor, and Pierre owning 25–30%. He wasn’t tempted “and I don’t think it was rational” — he was simply convinced the model would work in 20 more markets, “which is what we’ve done.”
• The sale trigger was emotional exhaustion, then arithmetic: after Series F he told his CFO “I can’t do another one — emotionally I can’t,” and every round carried real odds of shutdown. IPO looked unattractive while burning almost €1M a day at €3BN top line, so it was sell — and Delivery Hero, already a Series B investor (“we ended up taking the competitor money”), was “by far the best bidder”: an all-stock €2.3BN deal signed December 31, 2021, into a model that empowers local brands (Talabat in the Middle East, recently IPO’d with Delivery Hero keeping 80%; PedidosYa in LatAm).
• On sudden paper wealth: he interviewed exited founders and found “a correlation between unhappiness and people that had stopped working.” His conclusion is categorical: “I want to keep working until I die.” Harry says he co-founded Yellow, a €30M fund with Adam from Atomico; Pierre teamed up with Adam and gave them the money he wanted to invest in pre-seed companies, but calls VC “an important hobby” — and his VC-side lesson for founders is that pitching one fund is “broadcasting to the entire VC community”: don’t go out early, don’t assume confidentiality, because a pass at a named fund becomes a rumor everywhere.

Multicategory and Ads Drive Growth

• Glovo just crossed the line the skeptics said didn’t exist: first profitable semester, in year ten, at ~€7BN top line. Pierre’s frame: “I see it as Amazon 20 years ago” — still 10x bigger from here, with the playbook being (1) win restaurant delivery, (2) expand multicategory, and “we think the second will be much larger than the first.”
• The grocery math: Spain’s offline grocery market is €120BN with only 2% online. “We’re fully convinced this 2% will turn into 20–30%” — and because on-demand grocery with no mistakes requires technology retailers don’t have, “all grocers are relying on us… we can capture at least half of it.”
• The ads engine — which Harry flags as the reason he’s invested in the space — is the margin story: per €100 of GMV, Glovo is at €2–3 of advertising revenue heading to “at least five euros… almost full margin,” driven by merchant penetration (still a fraction of partners use ad products) and a better engine. “Every time a customer opens Glovo, they open it with an intention of purchase.”
• The merchants he most wants and can’t get: [likely Inditex] and Mercadona (40% offline share in Spain) — both insist on controlling their online experience end to end. Depth-versus-breadth resolves by timing: category expansion in won markets is durable optionality, but new countries in 2018 were “now or never” — you had to be first.

Regulation Threatened Glovo

• The regulation section is stark: across 23 markets the hardest country is his own. Pierre is in a criminal process in Spain involving six years in prison — over a freelancer courier model “validated by judges in Spain up to 14 times.” The sharper grievance is asymmetry: “we were not playing a fair game” — the administration went only after the largest, most visible player, while US competitors “are still not being accused.” On EU red tape easing: “I just don’t see the incentives so that this trend changes.”
• Yet he “strongly disagrees” that Europeans must move to the Valley: Barcelona-built tech had “nothing to envy our American competitors.” What he wishes someone had told him: have more ambition — “for the first three, four years I didn’t fully believe I could do it” because Spain had no big examples. He concedes Europeans are on average less aggressive than Americans (“you just feel smaller — and then you look at the business you have and they have nothing to envy”), and credits his family safety net for “irrational ambition”: “I wasn’t that scared about death… my life didn’t depend on it.”
• Quick-fire signal: the competitor he most respects is [likely Wolt] (“they do things with high standards” — he and its founder started almost the same month in 2014, sold two months apart, and repeatedly discussed joining forces); the market he most wants to flip from #2 is Portugal, “we’re going to get there in a year” against Uber Eats. The investor he’d take to a new company: Bea from [likely Seaya] — the board member who never asked “how’s the term sheet going,” because she knew good news would come unprompted.