Introduction
Markus Villig: So the very first meeting with a taxi company in Serbia, we, um, go to this address, but it’s just an old-school Soviet-era apartment building. And then me and this young sales guy walk in—I think both of us were about 22 years old—we’re obviously quite nervous about what’s the situation we walked into. There’s a couple of guys who look like bodyguards sitting on a sofa. There’s a gun on the table, a big safe in the corner, and we’re wondering: what did we just walk into?
Roelof Botha: Welcome to Crucible Moments, a podcast about the inflection points that defined some of the most consequential start-ups of our time. I’m your host, Roelof Botha.
Markus Villig was still a teenager when he became frustrated with the dysfunctional taxi service in Tallinn, Estonia. Bootstrapping his start-up with 5,000 euros he borrowed from his parents, Markus dropped out of college and, against the odds, scaled Bolt into a top ride-hailing service across much of Europe, Africa and beyond. The company’s path to success, propelled by Markus’ grit and ambition, was unconventional and, in many cases, counterintuitive.
It began with a decision to partner with the taxi industry in Eastern Europe, then pivot to compete against them. With his data-driven strategy, Markus proved skeptics wrong by launching in overlooked countries he’d never even visited and where his competitors hadn’t yet entered. As the business grew, he made bold bets on new verticals, which ultimately saved the company from the tumult of the pandemic.
Today, Bolt offers ride-hailing, micro-mobility and food delivery services in over 500 cities worldwide, many of them in emerging markets underserved by big tech.
In this episode, we’ll explore the crucible moments that catapulted Bolt from a small Eastern European success story into a global force in transportation. And we’ll peek around the corner at how Bolt is navigating autonomy.
Markus Villig: My name is Markus Villig. I’m the Founder and CEO of Bolt.
From the age of 10, I knew I wanted to be a tech entrepreneur. I remember as a kid, I was selling, uh, collectibles at school, then I progressed to learning to code, starting to build websites as a teenager, uh, to local businesses.
It was especially exciting seeing how Skype was being founded in Estonia. My brother actually was one of the early employees, and that just gave me even further confidence that the first chance I get, I want to go and start my own business as well.
The Initial Idea
Roelof Botha: Markus, still in high school, knew he wanted to start a company, but he didn’t know what kind. Lacking a driver’s license, his reliance on—and frustration with—local taxis eventually spurred an idea.
Markus Villig: Getting a taxi in Tallinn was a horrible experience. And looking back, if anybody wanted to design a bad service, that’s what they would do, and it was bad on every step of the journey. So if you wanted to hail a ride, you had to call a dozen companies, and they wouldn’t pick up even if they promised the car is gonna get you.
They oftentimes picked up another passenger on the way and never actually made it. And then in the rare cases when you managed to get a car, it was in a horrible condition. The driver was quite rude and oftentimes smoking in the car.
And you could just forget about paying with a card. Uh, they always wanted you to take out the cash from an ATM, so it was very obvious that there must be an opportunity here.
Roelof Botha: It was 2013, and Uber and Lyft had already begun to disrupt the taxi industry in North America. Uber had even entered the market in Western Europe. But Markus’ concept was different: he hoped to work in tandem with the existing cab companies in Estonia, selling them dispatching and fleet management software to streamline the experience for both riders and drivers. But first, he needed seed money.
Markus Villig: So the first fundraising was very difficult because I was 19. I did not have any experience, any connections, any, um, real resources to speak of. And, um, I figured that I needed the first 5,000 euros to get the product off the ground, uh, to hire a developer to help me build a prototype and also have some money for initial marketing.
And, um, since I didn’t know any investors, I went to my parents and asked if they were willing to lend me about 5,000. And that was a funny episode where they thought about it for quite a while because that was a big sum of money for us back then. And initially they said that they’re willing to, to make this, uh, loan for me, uh, but that comes with my own personal risk. And then if I screw it up and all this money is gone, then I can, uh, cover my own rent during university.
Unlocking the Supply Side
Roelof Botha: Armed with this initial investment—and indebted to his parents—Markus got to work building the company then known as Taxify. But he soon faced a crucible moment: the success of the business rested on his ability to convince the supply side of his marketplace, the drivers, to come onboard. For a 19-year-old college dropout, that wasn’t easy.
Markus Villig: So the initial sales to taxi drivers were extremely difficult. When we first started, I did not have any experience, any connections, any real resources to speak of. And, um, the initial start was very, um, humble. I went on the streets of Tallinn talking to taxi drivers one by one. So as it goes in most cities around the world, they’re usually waiting in these hotspots around airports or sort of train stations and so on. So I just went to them, got in the car and started pitching that “I have this idea, would you like to make additional income by joining this platform? You’re gonna get additional trips each day and you only gotta pay a commission. So it’s a very, very risk-free proposition for you. You, you don’t have to join with any fixed fees or anything like that.”
Most of them back then were just using, uh, Excel, or they were using even worse, paper notebooks. So we actually had quite a lot of value to offer them even before we had a single customer to bring to them, um, in the first place. And, um, the sales went really poorly—probably 90% of them told me that they’re not interested because they thought it’s so risky. I was just a kid. I didn’t even have a product back then, so I was just pitching a concept.
Roelof Botha: There were even more reasons for taxi drivers to be skeptical.
Markus Villig: Most of them didn’t even have a smartphone. So for them, it was actually a fairly big monetary investment. They had to put down hundreds of euros to buy a new device just to be able to even use the app. So it turns out that there were some quite unexpected hurdles to actually get them onboard, and that’s what made the sales a lot more difficult than one might imagine.
Roelof Botha: Even when the individual drivers did see the benefit of working with Markus, they faced another obstacle. The legacy taxi companies had a stronghold over the market—and over the drivers themselves.
Markus Villig: When I was asking some of these drivers whether they would like to join the platform, some of them were just categorically banned from doing so. So their owners had told them that under no, uh, conditions, can you join any of these new entrants to the market. You have to stay loyal to the company and so on. So it was really bad.
There were many moments where I was very frustrated by the progress because we had spent months and we still had very little of these taxi companies and taxi drivers on board. But at the same time, it actually gave me quite a lot of confidence that we’re on the right track because I clearly understood as a customer that this industry is ripe for disruption.
Pivoting From Serving Taxi Companies to Competing Against Them
Roelof Botha: While the appeal to customers was clear, taxi drivers and their employers didn’t always appreciate the benefits of this disruption. This is because industries can often ossify. Incumbents are loath to change to embrace new technologies because they don’t need to. But in Estonia, this began to change in 2015, when Uber launched. It was an existential threat to the taxi industry. Those same companies that were initially wary of Bolt’s dispatch software didn’t want to be left behind in the on-demand revolution. Uber’s arrival prodded the taxi companies to act, and paved the way for Bolt’s initial wedge.
Markus Villig: We started off in a market that had relatively little competition. Back then people were just hailing taxis on the street or calling local dispatch centers with a, with a phone, uh, number. Um, and then over a couple of years, the market of course transitioned to apps. So everybody started hailing a ride digitally. And we had counter-positioned ourselves in that market by working together with the taxi companies and taxi drivers, um, because they were very afraid that new entrants were coming in and they were cutting them out completely. They were hard to deal with, but eventually we got them excited. They came to see the value of the software we could provide; they saw the value of joining this digital ecosystem. They could get additional customers for applications, so it made quite a bit of sense.
Roelof Botha: Bolt’s newfound partnership with legacy taxi companies allowed it to gain a footing and initial success in Estonia.
Markus Villig: We started to see some trips happening every day. And it was organically just growing and, and becoming quite viral because the baseline was so bad. So people are just used to having this horrible experience, and the moment experienced, uh, a new way to order a ride—you just tap a button, a car shows up—it was so great. So people were just sharing it without us actually having to spend too much marketing.
Roelof Botha: But as Bolt looked to expand throughout Eastern Europe, the challenge of working with legacy taxi companies again reared its head—proving not just unsustainable, but also dangerous.
Markus Villig: So the very first meeting with a taxi company in Serbia, we, um, go to this address, which is supposed to be the biggest taxi company in Belgrade, but it’s just an old-school Soviet-era apartment building. And then we walk in there, and, uh, there’s an old woman there cooking food.
There’s a couple of guys who obviously look like bodyguards sitting on a sofa. And then me and this young sales guy walk in—I think both of us were about 22 years old—we’re obviously quite nervous about what’s the situation we walked into.
We have a huge old guy sitting behind the table, uh, smoking a cigar; there’s a gun on the table, a big safe in the corner, and we’re wondering: what did we just walk into? But when you’re in that moment, uh, we didn’t really have a choice to back down.
So we took a seat. We pitched him on why Bolt is a fantastic product and why he should adopt it at his company. Clearly the meeting wasn’t going anywhere. So after about 15 minutes, he just told us no, and we walked out—and we were happy we were able to do that. But I think that really brought home the lesson that it’s much easier for us to, uh, not try to work with these dinosaurs and bring these taxi companies to the future, but rather let’s start to work directly with the drivers.
And that was a crucial distinction, and it wasn’t an easy choice back then because until that moment we had been partnering with these local dispatch centers, uh, building software for them. And then suddenly, uh, we dropped that part of the business completely, and we tried to transition over to work with individual drivers. And you can imagine that was a massive transition.
First of all, these taxi companies were upset with us about us changing the business. Uh, the employee base was worried whether we’re gonna have a business at all six months from now. The media was, um, coming at us because they were thinking that so far the value of the application has been that you can hail a ride from these companies. If these companies are gonna get off the platform, what is gonna be left of the service?
So for sure it wasn’t a very easy transition, but it was one of those moments where we clearly knew that was going to be the future, and we just bet the company on that.
Roelof Botha: This pivot meant that Bolt was now in direct competition with both the established taxi companies and ride-hailing giants like Uber. But the benefits easily outweighed the risks. The partnership with taxi companies was fraught with risk because of fundamental incentive misalignment. By cutting ties with them and going all in on private drivers, it allowed Bolt to control its future.
Markus Villig: Looking back, it was the right decision to do both for the customers and for us. The lesson for me was that you gotta stay very rigid on what you’re trying to solve, what the problem is. But you can be quite flexible on the details of how you get there.
I think we figured out the really clever way how to position ourselves and then build something unique. But, uh, of course, uh, it was also very difficult, especially as, as most of the investors and, and employees, uh, from the outside might be thinking that, “How are you ever going to be competing with these giants that have a hundred times the funding that you do?”
The Unexpected Path to Emerging Markets
Roelof Botha: Markus and his team knew that in order to achieve their ambition of building a global company—one that could compete with fast-growing ride-hailing behemoths—they would need to expand outside of Eastern Europe, and do it fast.
Markus Villig: So my ambition always was to build a company that’s going to serve millions of people all around the world, hopefully make the world a better place through technology. So for me, I clearly knew that Estonia was just going to be the first test market to validate whether we have product-market-fit. But after that, the first moment we get, we’re going to be scaling this internationally.
And I remember, uh, when, uh, we had our first traction in Estonia for the first six months, we went out to raise our first funding round. We managed to scrape together about 1 million, uh, from local angel investors. And then we did a horrible mistake. So we tried to expand to nearly a dozen markets in less than a year, and it nearly bankrupted the company.
Pavel Karagjaur: I think I was expecting to kind of join an international startup. Uh, and then I think the, the day I joined, I opened up stats, uh, and I saw that, uh, Amsterdam had, like, five trips a day or something like that. So, uh, so it was, uh, yeah, I think we were kind of not doing too well.
My name is Pavel Karagjaur and I am an SVP Growth at Bolt.
We had problems with traction internationally. Estonia was, like, 80, 90% of the volume. Uh, and then the next biggest market was, uh, uh, Latvia, and it was, like, 10 times smaller than Estonia.
I knew that product is really good. I knew that there are a lot of customers, there are probably a lot of drivers who can, uh, benefit from this product. We just need to find them.
Markus Villig: So we almost ran out of cash and we had to do a complete restart. So we shut most of those markets down. We had to downscale the team and go back to the drawing board.
Roelof Botha: With the clock ticking and all but one European market rapidly burning cash, Bolt faced another crucible moment: successfully pivot their expansion strategy, or risk collapsing the business.
Markus Villig: We first talked to people who built large businesses before, including our—many of our—investors. And the conventional advice we got from all of them was that you should be looking at traditional markets like the U.S. or Western Europe, and we try to expand into those places. But it didn’t really make any sense. Like, already when we started to do the first pilots or, uh, just even the first research, we, we realized that we don’t really have a clear differentiated strategy. How are we going to be winning in those countries? They were just very, um, bad in terms of regulation, and they were also highly competitive. And when we just ran the math, we just couldn’t figure out how are you ever gonna get to the scale we aspire to be by doing that playbook.
So then at some point realized we have to restart. We have to think about expansion in a different way. What we did was that we threw away all of our biases. So instead of thinking about just going to the neighboring country, which is the closest geographically, we looked at the map of the world. We made a list of the top few hundred cities in the world and started to rank them by different characteristics.
Pavel Karagjaur: I mean we literally created a big Excel sheet. Each row was a city, and each column was, uh, a parameter, and into the parameters we would put in labor cost, unemployment rates, car ownership rate, fuel price, and we try to effectively quantify all of those areas. I remember how we were sitting in our, uh, this, uh, office downstairs at like 8:00 PM, 9:00 PM, uh, filling this out because we were just feeling excited.
Markus Villig: After actually just a couple of weeks of this analysis, all the African cities actually turned out to be the top of the list: large population, massive need for alternatives in terms of transportation and very high unemployment. So clearly millions of people who would like to join these kind of platforms to make additional income.
Roelof Botha: Expanding into Africa was not obvious. But Markus decided to trust the data and lean into his team’s research—even when those outside of the company cautioned against it.
Markus Villig: When, uh, we asked for advice from investors, um, they all said for sure don’t go to any of these risky markets because anything can happen. You don’t know anything about these markets in terms of payments and legal.
From the sort of superficial level, might presume that it’s very hard to, to make actually a sort of a big business in, in some of these countries with fairly low income levels. But we thought that it’s a much bigger risk not to try at all.
So we thought, let’s try to carve out the small budget, just a couple of thousands, uh, tens of thousands of dollars, and launch these markets and see what happens.
What we realized was that the volume is so vast and these economies are growing so quickly that it makes sense for us in the long term to bet on these countries. And that’s what we did.
Roelof Botha: In 2016, Bolt set its sights on Johannesburg as its first point of entry into Africa. The company didn’t have the resources to fly there and staff the operation in person, so they started advertising their services remotely.
Pavel Karagjaur: Keep in mind also when we were advertising, we were saying that the product is actually live. We didn’t say we plan to enter; we were like, the product is live. So what started happening is that the drivers would sign up and we would, like, receive emails like, “Hey, why are you not operating like you promised me, like, whatever this 15 commission cash, uh, payment option, and I can’t go online.” So we were like, let’s just hire a person and, uh, let them onboard drivers.
Markus Villig: So we just ran these job ads. We found a young kid in university who applied, uh, we figured out a way how to send him a, uh, some credit card so he could actually use it to make local expenditures and then get an office and so on.
Pavel Karagjaur: I think the first day he was at work, probably some drivers even came over because we sent an email and say, “Hey, go to this address, sign up,” and uh, uh, we were open for business.
Markus Villig: I remember once we finally turned on the service, it took us just a couple of weeks and, uh, we realized the numbers are completely off the charts. We were seeing so massive customer adoption. It was so different than what we’d seen in Europe. Once we figured out that there’s this huge new world out there, uh, in terms of these emerging markets all the way from South Africa to Nigeria, to Kenya, to places like Azerbaijan, um, we suddenly realized that the product-market-fit there is so great that we actually need to invest significantly less, and we were able to really accelerate the growth of the business.
So we went from having no presence in these emerging markets to suddenly those being more than 50% of the business in about six months. We really pivoted the whole management team attention just to double down on that and figure out how do we find even more markets like this to accelerate.
Hard Won Lessons About Expanding
Roelof Botha: As the new playbook brought successful launches in emerging markets, Bolt became one of Europe’s fastest-growing startups. It was a remarkable rise for a company that began by bootstrapping outside of a major tech hub with a few thousand euros. New investors took notice.
Andrew Reed: Investors in general, you know, used to pay a great deal of attention to the U.S. app charts. And maybe a cursory amount of attention to Western European app charts, but we all had access to app charts all over the world. And, you know, as Sequoia built out its data science systems and began to track, you know, what was happening in every part of the world, uh, it was very unique seeing Bolt’s ascent in all these different places.
My name is Andrew Reed and I’m a Partner at Sequoia.
You know, at first it’s easy to overlook because any of these markets, including Estonia by the way, you know, is roughly the size of Kansas, you know. But the sum total is, like, a global market-leading business. And when you have a company that can compete and win in such diverse markets, it suggests that they will have the ability to compete and win in even more larger, more interesting markets over time.
Roelof Botha: Bolt had achieved the seemingly impossible in dozens of emerging markets across the globe. Now, feeling emboldened, they set their sights on a major market closer to home.
Markus Villig: We clearly knew that we had to be in London over the long term. It’s the single biggest market in Europe for ride sharing, and we just didn’t have sufficient funding to launch there before. And then once we had earned the track record of demonstrating we can launch this business in a hundred cities, we can compete, we can build the category leader, then we earned the confidence from investors to invest in the business efficiently that we could go and launch London as well.
So we applied for a license in the market, but it took us so long time to get it that we thought, we can’t wait forever. We’re just completely gonna miss out on the opportunity here. So we, we tried to buy a local company that had a license. So we did that. We launched, and then of course the local regulator didn’t really like that because we bypassed what they thought was, was the legitimate way how you should be going about getting a license.
Roelof Botha: In September 2017, Bolt launched in London. Less than 72 hours later, its operations were shut down by local regulators.
Markus Villig: Us launching in London and then having to shut it down a couple days later was probably the most frustrating experience in this whole 12 years of building the business.
I remember that I had just flown to China to meet some of the players in the industry, and we then we get this call that we’re, uh, being forced to shut down in London.
And I remember I just wanted to fly back and immediately, uh, uh, meet with the regulators and explain to them that this, uh, doesn’t make any sense and they should, uh, let us keep going. But, uh, since I was stuck in China, I couldn’t immediately fly back. I mean, I had a couple of hours to do some reflection on it, and then eventually I realized that we do actually have to restart the ways of how we operate.
Pavel Karagjaur: Because we had operated with, like, low-regulation markets, uh, before, we had historically just underinvested in, into our, like, policy compliance teams. And that was the root cause, uh, why we were not that well prepared.
Markus Villig: And that was obviously a big, uh, embarrassing moment for us. And I think a big inflection point where we, we sat down with the management team and we had a long discussion about it—that, hey, there’s some countries where you optimize for speed; there’s other countries where you gotta optimize for risks and building a long-term, great relationship with the city. And I think London was the first and biggest mistake we did on that front.
Roelof Botha: Despite the sting of the public failure, the team refused to give up on London. They began working on a new plan to re-enter the market.
Markus Villig: We really had to pivot, build up strong legal team, public policy team. Invest in technology—like, how do you verify the drivers? How do you make sure the platform is safe? How do we build reporting so the city can actually monitor and assess that we’re, we’re doing what we’re saying?
Jevgeni Kabanov: A lot of, uh, software was created specifically for London.
I’m Jevgeni Kabanov. You can call me JK, President at Bolt.
London for us was the first launch with a very complex regulatory environment. Today it’s fairly routine, but at that time it was really, like, a completely different animal. It happened that I was in London during the launch. And I thought like, okay, I’m gonna test the product and I’m gonna drive as a driver, as a rider.
And there was a few days before the launch I actually found some bugs. If we wouldn’t have fixed them, we would be in trouble.
Roelof Botha: In June 2019, nearly two years after its first attempt, the company relaunched in London, with the approval of the city’s regulatory agencies. And they did so under their new name—“Bolt”—which they’d adopted to reflect the scope of their ambition.
Jevgeni Kabanov: Yeah, it was exhilarating to launch in London because at that time we were really, uh, an Eastern Europe and Africa company. And having this, uh, launch in the biggest European capital, uh, seeing that people actually took up the service, seeing drivers take, come out and seeing riders, uh, take the rides—it was really exciting. We were all watching the graphs grow. It was very fun.
Markus Villig: My lesson in London and actually all across, um, the business now, is that you have to be very smart in terms of how you approach regulated industries. And I think there’s some people who fall in the camp that they’re too risk-averse and they therefore move too slowly or they don’t launch many products that would actually serve customers at all just in order to make sure that they minimize all the risks. And of course you have the other end of the spectrum where you ignore some of these regulations and you move too quickly. And that has its own benefits.
So I think what we’ve learned as a company now is how you balance those things. My advice there is that you have to be smart about it. You have to find the right balances, and you have to be patient with regulators.
The Next Bet: Micromobility
Roelof Botha: Since inception, Bolt had focused solely on ride-hailing. But as the company saw increasing success across multiple geographies, Markus and his team started to consider new products.
Markus Villig: We actually, uh, had this ambition that we wanted to launch other modes of transportation on the platform for many years because we realized that ride sharing alone is not gonna replace your private car. There needs to be other modes of transportation we offer.
And we’ve actually been looking at the space for quite a while because we had seen what worked in China. But, uh, we thought that, that form factor of just having regular pedal bikes is not gonna be the one that’s going to be very popular in Europe. But then the moment we saw electric scooters arrive to the market and I was just using them myself, I was immediately convinced that this is the future.
Pavel Karagjaur: It was also summer at the time, so we’re like, okay. It kind of feels like a product that has a future. Uh, a lot of people would probably prefer that. And it’s almost, like, a new segment for the, for the trip distances between, like, walking and taking a car, and, uh, we ended up doing a bet that, uh, the segment will grow in the future.
Markus Villig: So what we had to figure out was just how do you bring it to market? How do you make this actually safe, uh, convenient, uh, and of course, crucially for this type of business, cost-effective.
Roelof Botha: Launching a second product always brings risk. It drains your resources. It’s a distraction, and you have to fund it. If it fails, it could hurt the business’s core product and its bottom line. So Markus decided to test his way into the category.
Markus Villig: I was very paranoid about launching a second, uh, product line myself. Uh, I was just, uh, thinking that the best companies do one thing and they do that really well. And therefore I delayed launching anything until it was already six years into the business and we thought that we had a fantastic team on the ride sharing side, and it was growing really well.
And then we carved out just a small team of about five people initially to start working on the scooter bet. And we gave them a small budget. We gave them a six-month timeline. We said, “You have to figure it out. Build the basic MVP of the app, order some scooters, figure out the first city you’re gonna launch in, set up the operations, show us what you can do, and if that works, we’re gonna continue—give you more funding, we’ll expand this team. If not, we’re gonna shut it down.”
Roelof Botha: Sensing that they’d have to move quickly to capture the emerging micro-mobility market, the team purchased scooters from a third party and introduced them in a first market. What they didn’t anticipate was consumers’ reaction.
Markus Villig: We first launched the scooters in Paris thinking that, um, it’s the best city in Europe for that because, of course, it has a large population, it’s quite wealthy. We put the first couple thousand scooters on the road, and we started losing dozens of them each day—people were just throwing them in the rivers, just breaking them. There was even some Romanian gangs who were going around and stealing the scooters, putting them in vans and just, you know, selling them for parts. So it was a complete mess.
Jevgeni Kabanov: I went with Markus to Paris and, and we basically, in the evening, we went, uh, you know, we wanted to try the other side of the service, so we went to, uh, gather and charge scooters. So we went in the van, and in three hours we went to locations of eight scooters, and we haven’t found a single one.
And I remember that in the end we were both so upset that we went to McDonald’s. Neither of us usually goes to McDonald’s, but we both needed something. There definitely were doubts, uh, in the company at the time, and we were discussing whether we should just abandon the service because it just was so bad.
Markus Villig: After a couple of months, it got so bad we thought we thought we should potentially just exit this whole scooter business, uh, in the first place. Like, it maybe doesn’t even make sense to continue.
Jevgeni Kabanov: My position was I really wanted to launch in Tallinn because my belief is—and with all the services—is that you need to first launch in your home market, even if it’s not the perfect market for that. Almost always you really want to launch in your home market so you could keep an eye on the service, so you could understand how it works, what works, what doesn’t.
Roelof Botha: Ultimately, the team decided to give scooters another shot. On Jevgeni’s advice, they rolled it out first in Tallinn.
Jevgeni Kabanov: And suddenly it was very successful [laughs]. So our Tallinn launch was very successful, and it just turns out that Paris just wasn’t a good place for micro-mobility at the time. When we launched in Tallinn, I think we had a much better operational team, but also just the amount of theft and vandalism in Estonia was so much less than in Paris—like, 20 times less.
So one fundamental thing we learned very early on is that if you don’t control your hardware, uh, you don’t control anything. One of the biggest things that reduced the vandalism, the theft, was the fact that we switched from consumer scooters, which could be easily resold, to custom scooters, and that was huge. And eventually we developed our own scooters.
Roelof Botha: As the scooter business grew in other European cities, the team began to think critically about additional product expansions.
Jevgeni Kabanov: We started doing these workshops, uh, one every couple of months, and every time we would, uh, try to analyze what, uh, new businesses should be launching. And so, we, we did those workshops for, like, two, three years before we built a dedicated team for that.
Markus Villig: When we thought about what are the biggest opportunities for us to get into, food delivery was always top of the list. And, um, the reason for it was that in many of the countries where we operated, it was a completely underpenetrated category. So back in 2019, there was very little adoption of food delivery in most of our countries. And we thought that there’s an opportunity for us to enter and build a category leader in at least a dozen countries, and that could be a multi-billion business over the next few years.
Jevgeni Kabanov: It was just so clear for us that not only is it a good business, but it’s also—the time is ticking on that business because there are more and more competitors coming in, more and more markets. And so, we basically had the case that either we launch it now or we don’t launch it at all.
Markus Villig: And then how we go about it is, is our typical structure where we assign a small team, typically about 10 people. We give them a very short timeline of about six months to build a prototype, roll it out and see if we can get any traction with it. And that’s what we did with food delivery.
The Pivot that Saved Bolt in the Pandemic
Roelof Botha: Bolt Food launched officially in August 2019. Taking a cue from their scooter business, they first introduced the product in their home base of Tallinn. Three months later, they expanded to Vilnius, Lithuania.
Markus Villig: So the initial traction we had in the first two cities was good, but then suddenly the whole world went into lockdowns.
Pavel Karagjaur: We were actually in Kenya, eating breakfast, uh, in a hotel and, uh, Trump came on TV and said, “Hey, U.S. stops all incoming flights from the rest of the world,” and this is when everyone went crazy. And this is when countries started to lockdowns and everyone was like, “Oh my God, they’re serious.” Uh, and, this is where we started to lose volume really fast.
Markus Villig: The ridesharing business declined by 85%. So you can imagine it was vast majority of our revenue. What most of our competitors did was that they immediately raised the rounds and they also really went after the costs. And for most of these companies, the main cost they had was employees. So they let go 30%, in some cases even 50%, of their entire workforce.
And that, of course, was a big drain on morale. And these companies were effectively paralyzed for the next six to 12 months. They couldn’t do much. So what we did was, um, we thought we’re gonna take the gamble. We’re not gonna let go of a single person.
We told the company that we’re just going to be reducing salaries by a flat 20%, and then people could opt in to take a bigger cut in that if they could afford to, with founders going to zero and most of the executives going to zero as well, just on an opt-in basis.
And of course, many other people were very skeptical. How is the company going to react to that? But actually we had hundreds of people opting in to take quite large meaningful pay cuts—20, 30, 40%—uh, on top of what we had offered. And actually it brought the team’s morale to a completely new level.
We thought for the next six months, we can’t really do ride sharing because all the cities are banning that from happening. So let’s take all this operational expertise and technology we have and pivot that to food delivery instead. And then we’re really doubled down on launching food in these lockdowns from just one country to more than a dozen.
That was a very risky bet, or course. I mean, if it had taken longer or delivery wouldn’t have worked out, the company would’ve been in real trouble. But we had a lot of confidence that, uh, this is the bet we wanna do as a company. We thought this is really a crucible moment where you can actually meaningfully change your position in the entire market.
Jevgeni Kabanov: It was a very scary and stressful time, but also very exciting, because people really mobilized, the whole company came together and people did whatever needed to be done. The ride hailing teams were launching, uh, food delivery. The engineering team, in, for, in, I think, 12 days, we put together the business delivery, delivering packages from merchants because we thought that merchants—suddenly, a lot of merchants—need to deliver packages home, and we wanted to create volume for the drivers.
Pavel Karagjaur: And we managed to just reallocate people to work on food delivery and scale that up really fast.
Markus Villig: And it worked out beautifully. The food delivery business really took off really rapidly and actually exactly as we imagined. Just six months later, the first cities in Europe started opening up and ride sharing was recovering quite nicely. And because all of our competitors were so paralyzed from the layoffs, uh, and they weren’t really focused, we were able to take a lot of market share. So coming out of COVID, we tripled our market share relative to what we had going in. And I think there’s this perfect analogy that it’s very hard to overtake, uh, drivers during a normal race, but you can take, overtake a lot of drivers when it’s raining. And I think it was exactly what happened, uh, during COVID with us.
Building Bolt Market: The Next Leap in Delivery
Roelof Botha: In the fall of 2021, with the whole team riding high, the company introduced yet another product: Bolt Market, a grocery delivery service. It launched first in Tallinn, and then later across Europe and Africa.
Markus Villig: We launched together with the local grocery chains because they didn’t really have a great mechanism how to do real-time deliveries. They didn’t even know their inventory to be honest. So we had to work with them to figure all of that out real time. Um, and we also launched our own stores because we thought that it makes quite a bit of sense for us to operate at least a couple dozen stores ourselves.
So we actually understand the grocery business better. We build great ERP software to manage these stores. Uh, and once we built that, then we can actually partner much more deeply with the local grocery chains. So looking back, that was actually a, a difficult but, but actually a very valuable decision for us to do.
Roelof Botha: Around this time, Sequoia led Bolt’s Series E financing of $713 million.
Andrew Reed: Bolt is a complicated business ’cause you match multiple products with multiple geographies and all the underlying complexities. But on the other side of that is an enormous market opportunity measured in the hundreds of billions of dollars at least.
To me, with Markus, it all comes from him. When he pitched Sequoia for our investment, we had 45 minutes on the calendar. I think he was done in 29, and then he asked, “Any more questions?” And we said, “No.” And he said, “Thanks,” and hung up. Like, he is hardcore, take no prisoners—he is truly incredible.
I’ll tell one story about Markus, which was I, uh, he came over to my house and he said he wanted to go for a bike ride. I asked him what kind of ride he wanted to do and he said he wanted to do, like, the hardest ride around.
So we went up Old La Honda, which is a little over five kilometers, 8% average grade climb. And Markus, despite—I don’t think he’d been on a bike in, certainly not, like, a road bike in years—just powered up this climb. And I remember just coming to the top of it and I’m like, this guy—like, he will not quit.
Charting Bolt’s Future: From Global Scale to the Self-Driving Era
Roelof Botha: Today, Bolt operates its ride-hailing, micro-mobility, and delivery services across more than 500 cities. It now has five different business lines that together generate more than 2 billion dollars in revenue. Bolt has become not just a major competitor with American companies like Uber and Lyft, but it has radically changed the way people move around cities.
Andrew Reed: The sort of company that is able to achieve success in such an array of markets is a company that’s not just doing the same thing over and over again on a greater scale. This is a company that culturally is built to solve novel problems and win wherever it applies itself. Like, Bolt is the number one player in Norway and South Africa. These are the opposite ends of the earth.
Roelof Botha: The next category that Bolt is pursuing? Autonomous vehicles.
Markus Villig: I am now thinking about the company’s future in two quite distinct phases. So, one is the pre-autonomy phase, and we think that’s fairly predictable because this category is just getting started. Um, ride sharing and food delivery still have years of compounding ahead of them. And it’s very clear that this is gonna be a very large and very successful business on its own. And then you have this moment, even sort of an event horizon, where you don’t really know what’s gonna happen after that, which is self-driving.
Andrew Reed: There’s a humongous change happening with self-driving and I think the existence proof of Waymo’s success in certain North American cities is not something to be taken lightly. And it’s not just because it’s technically possible, but it’s because a lot of people really love the service. And I think for Bolt, being able to, you know, play a big role in the successful rollout of self-driving around the world is the biggest opportunity this company’s ever gonna find.
Markus Villig: So we can make our best bets in trying to position ourselves for that era. And we think we have very unique strategy there because we’re actually having the capabilities other ride sharing networks don’t have. Uh, we’ve been running our own first-party car rental business for years. We know how to clean, maintain and, and just operate thousands of cars in, in dozens of cities. And we think, coupled with our ride sharing network, that’s a very unique asset. So we’re very optimistic about the self-driving era, but everybody must admit, we’re still in the early days and nobody really knows how the industry structure is going to work out.
Jevgeni Kabanov: Bolt has this capacity to learn and improve, uh, as, as an organization, as a team. And I think it, it wasn’t just this one thing that made us great. I think it, it was the fact that every time we failed, you know, we, we learned from it and we improved.
Whenever somebody asks me how do you do something hard and big and, uh, complex, I always say, you know, it’s, uh, the way you eat an elephant—one bite at a time. So you just need to break the complex, high-pressure situation into, uh, chunks that can be done by people and then just do one at a time and keep learning and improving. And if you just keep doing those things, then, uh, and if you have great people, and if you have great talent, then you’re gonna succeed.
Markus Villig: My advice always is that you should do a few things, but do them really well. And you gotta have a very clear end goal in mind of where we are trying to take the company, but you can be flexible on the details of how you get there. And that’s the approach we try to take. And we’re always very pragmatic and analytical about how we assess these new bets and new countries.
I think there’s companies who have a lot of ego involved, so once they launch the product or a country, they’re never going to shut it down. And uh, it’s just embarrassing for them. Uh, we’ve taken the other approach, which is that we treat this as a portfolio of bets. We assign a team, we give this country, uh, a fixed envelope of how much time and then budget they get. And if it fails, we shut it down and we move on. And then we’re just an experimentation machine.
I think we’re always, on the talent side, very eager to focus on entrepreneurial people.
So hiring smart generalists rather than hiring very deep specialists who can only do one thing—because otherwise, you know, things change and you have fixed people who can only do one thing, that’s not really gonna work. So that, that’s been our philosophy and that, uh, it’s something we think we’re gonna continue for a long time.
VO: This has been Crucible Moments, a podcast from Sequoia Capital.
Credits: Crucible Moments is produced by the Epic Stories and Vox Creative podcast teams along with Sequoia Capital. Special thanks to Markus Villig, Pavel Karagjaur, Jevgeni Kabanov, and Andrew Reed for sharing their stories.