When I launched Foodora in Australia
Once upon a time, in Australia…
My startup life led me to many places and paths I would have never dreamt of if you had asked me 10 years ago. One of them was when I flied to Australia to start a new business over there.
Back then, I was working for Rocket Internet within one of their startups called SpaceWays. We were offering a hassle-free storage service in several cities, where I was going one after the other to launch as Expansion Manager.
I was in Toronto during winter time, when SpaceWays’ founder called me to ask me if I wanted to go to Australia. I remember my answer to him: “Do you seriously think I could say no to such an offer?”. And that I needed some good sun to compensate for the very cold and snowy Canadian winter he exposed me to (-30 degrees!).
Not long after this call, I was in a plane, first flying back home to Paris, and then to Sydney via Dubai. The longest plane journey I had ever done — almost 24 hours in the sky! I landed in Sydney and instantly became an Australian lover: I was posting pictures of me by the sea or hanging out with a kangaroo on the SpaceWays internal chats :)
But something happened one month later: we decided to close SpaceWays, because it was not growing fast enough despite all our efforts. My colleague and I were two SpaceWays girls left in Australia and deeply saddened by the loss of our adored baby.
From SpaceWays to Foodora, a new Rocket adventure
But you can always count on the Rocket family when you’ve demonstrated your skills: right after the sad news, I got a call from the central HR team to let me know that there were a lot of open positions within the Rocket world I could fit in. I had a couple of chats, notably with the CEO of The Iconic (massive fashion e-retailer in Australia), which was very impressive for the “early-stage” startuppeur I was. Like many of my SpaceWays colleagues, I finally decided to jump in the Foodora boat, the new food delivery venture Rocket just bought and was planning to massively scale all over the world.
Foodora was a small German startup at that time, but we had big plans in a pure Rocket style. During Spring 2015, we wanted to launch 25 cities across the world, from Canada to Australia. Spread the pink wave everywhere — as that was the colour of our company! At that time, it was actually called Volo but we quickly changed the name and branding.
I was in charge of launching the Australian market alongside Rodrigo, one of Rocket’s top executives who notably built Foodpanda, another food delivery brand, all over Latin America, and formerly McKinsey. He was overviewing Foodora Australia and I was reporting to him. Rodrigo is extremely pushy, fast, on top of everything, both big picture and details — working with him was amazing and taught me a lot!
I got started straight away by flying to Singapore for a Foodpanda Global Summit with all the key people of the company from all over the world. Foodpanda was somewhat similar to Foodora: a restaurant delivery service, mostly focused on Asia while Foodora was targeting Europe and the “Western world” as well, with a slightly more premium approach (no fast-food chains accepted for instance).
The Summit made me meet up with pretty impressive people, among which the famous Samwer brothers who were following Foodpanda closely. Imagine a vast crowd of people from Berlin, Pakistan, Thailand, Philippines, India, Malaysia, Singapore and much more. Experts in Sales, Operations, Customer Support, Tech. The dream onboarding to the food delivery world for the SpaceWays girl I was!
After that, no doubt I was ready to launch Foodora in Sydney. The first focus was to build the Sales team, to go out and close Sydney’s best restaurants. I built up a very diverse team of people, from a Colombian backpacker to an Aussie 18 years old student. They were all united by the passion of selling, with the right incentives in place to make sure they deliver. As for me, my role was to coordinate with the Central Sales team in Berlin who was providing us with lists of restaurants based on scrapping diverse websites. I was then allocating the different restaurants to each salesperson, divided between those just calling the restaurants and getting meetings with key stakeholders, and those going to the meetings and “closing”, as we say in the sales world. We were splitting the list of restaurants depending on our nationalities — as a Pakistani, it was easier for me to go to an Indian place and start talking about how much the smell of the food was reminding me of home and my mum’s byriani ;) I could do the same with French places, also being from Paris! The trick is that it was genuine and not just a sales strategy — I’ve always been very emotional about food from my two countries because my Dad has always said that there is nothing more important in life than eating!
I was myself going out to as many meetings as possible because as the team leader you need to get your hands dirty and act as a role model. This leads to many memories of meeting up with funny Australian people and getting a lot of food for free — the perks of the job!
We were in a very aggressive mode as Deliveroo and UberEats were not yet in Australia but we were getting intel that they were shortly coming in, so it was time to hustle and benefit from the first mover advantage.
Alongside Sales, I was also organising the operational part. On this side, we got lucky: initially, we wanted to have our own fleet of drivers and structure Customer Support in-house, which is quite some work — although I was not realising it too much at that time. But since I’ve been working at Stuart Delivery for 3 years now, I know very well that recruiting and monitoring a large fleet of couriers is a full-time job.
In our case, we ended up buying another restaurants delivery service, called Suppertime, which was operating in Australia since a couple of years and had not only solid relationships with great restaurants but also a fleet of drivers and all the operations already set up. I onboarded the two founders Nathan and David to the Rocket world, which was quite different from what they were used to: they built their business just the two of them, doing all the Sales and Operations themselves, and all of a sudden they were part of a global company live in 25 countries across the world. What a journey!
We launched! The Australian market was doing great — we were at the top of the global Foodora leaderboard with notably a B2B approach (delivering to corporates) quite unique and pushed by the two founders of Suppertime since years. So a good mix of learnings from the ground thanks to Nathan and David, and Rocket Internet best practices to go fast.
The team grew as well, with new comers.
Sydney was just launched, that already we were planning on Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide, and the other major Australian cities. Again, it was a race against time and part of the Rocket model to scale very fast, now that we had a platform and processes we could replicate in place. War times, good times.
We were sitting in this coworking space called Fishburners at first, where I was asking the other startuppeurs sitting around us to give me feedback on our website, our flyers, to try out the service. We then moved to our own office in Surrey Hills, the trendy neighborhood of Sydney.
It was an Aussie culture with German vibes. One cannot forget where he or she comes from: I was a Rocket launcher first and foremost, “the machine” as my colleagues were calling me. I was very much in touch with the Foodora teams in other countries, especially with the headquarters in Berlin. We were reporting KPIs to Rocket top management every week and had these global calls with 50 people logged in at the same time at 1 am Australian time — when one wouldn’t be on mute, it was quickly turning into chaos.
Learnings from my Foodora time
Overall, it was an awesome experience of building a team and a business in a country I didn’t know at all. I arrived in Australia to sell storage boxes, I ended up visiting restaurants to convince them to add a new revenue stream and try online delivery.
Everything was moving and iterating very fast. We started with a premium restaurant approach, we had to review it as this kind of food wasn’t suited for delivery boxes. We changed the branding. The team kept changing and growing. It was startup style power 100, as everything needed to be done yesterday to satisfy the Rocket standards of growth.
I was the link with Berlin and Rocket Internet, trying to spread the Rocket culture while balancing it with the local specificities (5 pm? Surf time!). I wanted the team to feel that we were part of something bigger than the Australian business, that these people sitting in Berlin, France or Toronto were our family — while we needed to beat them at the same time ;) That’s the “friendly competition” mindset I have been fostering in terms of scaling a company globally, and yes it is possible to achieve!
It was my first experience of managing an extremely diverse team, with heterogeneous profiles who were motivated by different things and thus needed different styles of management. I was in a role model position, so it was important for me not only to manage the team but also to go out and close some big accounts. It was also the first time I was doing pure Sales, while I was more in a partnership role before as Expansion Manager at SpaceWays. I remember Rodrigo telling me Sales was the key thing to learn to build a startup — and not only monitoring a Sales team but doing it yourself.
This same Rodrigo turned to be my mentor and pushed me the position of Global Head of Operations at Somuchmore, another Rocket Internet venture. I wanted to go back to Europe even if Australia is an awesome country because I felt a bit far from my family — you are literally at the end of the world! I also wanted to have experience in Operations after 2 roles focused on Business Development, in order to keep exploring the different aspects of a business, before having my own one day :) So this position looked like an awesome fit.
I was leaving Australia and going back to Berlin. I still remember the last day at the office: we had this polaroid camera for Marketing purpose, where you could take a picture and it would come out of the device straight away, blurry at first, and then more and more accurate as you flip it up and down. We took a picture with all the team, and I put it in my wallet. It is still there 3 years later, to keep some Foodora love with me everywhere I go.
This story is published in The Startup, Medium’s largest entrepreneurship publication followed by +392,714 people.
Subscribe to receive our top stories here.
