Oscar Pierre

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.

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