Europe's Youngest Billionaire

Marcus Willig recently became the youngest self made billionaire in the European Union. But for some reason, no one really knows about him. He's the founder of Bolt, which is the fastest growing transportation company in Europe and Africa. Whether you need a ride to the airport in Paris, want an electric scooter in Switzerland, are hungry for a pizza in Romania, or are hailing a motorcycle taxi in Nigeria, Bolt has got you covered. The company serves 100 million customers in 45 countries and was recently valued by investors at over $8 billion. But behind this massive company is the incredible story of a teenage kid who just wanted to build something useful and wound up competing with the largest players in the transportation industry. Marcus was born in 1993 in Estonia, which had recently gained independence from Russia. Estonia is a very small country and not exactly the place where venture capitalists go to hunt for future billionaires. He grew up on a small island of just 40,000 people in a tight knit community where people leave their doors unlocked. But in 2003 when, when Marcus was just 10 years old and Estonia was preparing to join the European Union, something unpredictable happened that would set Estonia on a path to becoming one of the most technologically advanced countries in the world. That year, a group of Estonian engineers launched Skype, the first free and easy to use international voice calling software. Skype absolutely nailed the timing of their launch. Broadband use was growing fast and more and more laptops were shipping with built in microphones. Skype was downloaded over 1 million times within the first month as consumers around the world jumped at the chance to stop paying for expensive international phone calls. In just two years, Skype became a billion dollar business. Most kids wouldn't have been aware of the significance of Skype, but Marcus had an older brother who worked for the company. Marcus had always aspired to be a scientist when he grew up, but seeing his brother work at Skype building products that impacted millions of people around the world and inspired Marcus to break into tech startups. So while his peers were reading comic books, 12 year old Marcus was learning about high growth tech companies and new developments in software engineering. By high school, Marcus had learned to code and had a small business building websites for local businesses. Perhaps even more importantly, he started going to a series of hackathons called Garage 48 that his brother Martin was organizing. Marcus was often the youngest person in the room at those hackathon events. But getting out of his comfort zone paid off because he got the chance to work with world class entrepreneurs like Jan Talan, founding engineer of Skype and early investor in Google's. DeepMind. That's the caliber of talent that 16 year old Marcus was surrounding himself with. Even in the small Estonian tech community, Marcus was able to find the most influential people and learn from them. Now, none of Marcus's early hackathon projects gained traction, but he did learn some valuable skills about building and shipping software products. So in the spring of 2013, as he prepared to graduate high school, Marcus started Bolt, a taxi ordering app. As companies achieve success, their founding stories often get turned into myths which hide the truths about their messy beginnings. But when you dig deeper, you will often find important details that can provide lessons for future founders. With Markus, the story of Bolt's early days is not super straightforward. There was no lightbulb moment, rather a Over the course of six months, four separate events converged to give Marcus the confidence to start the company. First, in search of business ideas, Marcus evaluated a number of industries and noticed that transportation was one of the largest consumer categories in the world. It's a trillion dollar industry, so there had to be a big opportunity there. Second, in high school, Marcus had written a research paper about growing smartphone adoption, so he knew that mobile apps were a future trend worth betting on. Third, his brother Martin had told him about a web based taxi ordering system that he had while on a business trip in Ukraine. That system served as inspiration for the first version of Bolt. And fourth, Marcus knew that there was a problem with the local taxi industry in Estonia, since he had often experienced subpar taxi service in his hometown with long wait times and poor customer service. On a busy Friday or Saturday night, Marcus would often have to spend up to an hour calling all the local taxi companies trying to find a ride home. And even when he finally did get a taxi, the drivers could be rude. Those four factors gave Marcus confidence that there was a way to improve things with technology. He came up with the idea for a simple app where you could see every taxi in a city and order with just a few taps. He wasn't trying to build an Uber killer. In fact, at the time, he didn't even know Uber existed. In Estonia, the taxi market isn't as heavily regulated as in places like Germany or New York, so taxi prices were not the main problem for consumers. This allowed Marcus to work together with the local taxi companies instead of against them. Even though he was optimistic about the opportunity, Marcus started the company with very limited resources. He might be a billionaire today, but in 2013 he was excited just to receive a scholarship for €100 per month. You can see just how scrappy his start was by watching the first promo video for Bolt, it looks like Marcus recorded it in a second hand furniture store. All things pointed to Marcus not being able to make the business work. But in 2013, 19 year old Marcus wasn't worried about conquering the world. He just focused on building the best taxi app for Estonia. He concentrated his limited resources on mastering the three essential things required to launch a transportation network. Finding riders, finding drivers, and building the app. The first one was easy. Marcus had access to his school email list. So he sent out a Google form survey and got over 600 people to respond. Most people agreed that existing taxi services sucked and joined the waitlist to be notified when Bolt launched. Signing up drivers was harder. Every day after school, Marcus would go visit taxi ranks and try to convince drivers to sign up. Getting them to say yes was extremely difficult. The taxi drivers were resistant to any technological change. Most of them didn't even have a smartphone yet. Marcus probably holds the world record for the number of taxis that he has been thrown out of. But even though Marcus heard hundreds of no's, he persisted. Finally, after months of speaking to almost every taxi driver in Estonia, he, Marcus, succeeded in signing up the first 50 drivers. Not as much as he'd hoped for, but enough to gain initial traction. The third piece of the puzzle was technology. Marcus followed the lean startup playbook. He signed up the riders and drivers before he actually committed to building the app. Even though Marcus was more technically skilled than 99% of his peers, he still didn't feel like he had the engineering chops needed to build the app himself. So he borrowed €5,000 from his parents to hire a freelance developer. €5,000 might not sound like a lot of money, especially if you're from Switzerland or San Francisco, but remember, this was 2013 Estonia, where the average salary was only around €700. Marcus's parents had been saving this money for years to help fund his university studies.

So when I was trying to convince my parents to give me the first couple of thousand euros to get going, it took me many, many weeks to actually convince them to do it.

Even though that small investment would be worth millions in just a few years. At the time, it seemed like Marcus had just flushed his entire college down the drain. It took many months for the freelancer to complete the project. And when it was finally done, Marcus received a rudimentary app that barely worked. He spent sleepless nights trying to fix the app himself, but he couldn't wait forever. When he wasn't debugging code on Stack Overflow, he was still Hustling on the streets, trying to sign up more drivers. But entrepreneurs can't wait forever to reach perfection. So In August of 2013, Marcus launched Bolt's service. And in its first city, Tallinn, Estonia.

The summer before I went to university, we founded the company.

The start of Bolt was slow and bumpy. Only 20 rides a day. At first, Bolt had absolutely no marketing budget. So Marcus cold called journalists to get the word out about the company. It's common knowledge that hiring friends and family members can be risky, but Marcus had to break that rule. Instead of hiring a graphic designer, he had his girlfriend design the company's logo for free.

So I just asked her to help.

Me, basically just because we were leaving.

That, you know, hey, can you help.

Me do some designs for them and the logo and so on. And a few months after launch, his older brother Martin joined as a co founder. If you're impressed at the fact that Marcus started Bolt when he was just 19 years old, his brother Martin has an equally impressive track record. When Martin was just 20 years old, he started a technology company, took it public on the local stock exchange and and then went through bankruptcy after the dot com bubble. All in the span of just a couple years.

Greetings from Tallinn, Estonia. Yes, I have been entrepreneur for about 20 years and we founded Bolt together with my brother in 2013.

But Bolt's initial prototype was still being held together by digital duct tape, and Marcus desperately needed someone to fix the technical debt. Most founders would have promoted a job post on LinkedIn, but Marcus chose a different path. You see, Most people on LinkedIn generally want to get paid for their work with money, but Marcus didn't have any money left. He was completely broke. So instead, Marcus did what all great entrepreneurs do. He posted the software engineering job ad on an obscure PHP software developer forum. He got just one response from an engineer named Oliver.

The job ad was literally two sentences looking for a developer contact email. That was it.

Now, Oliver's resume might not look all that impressive, and he doesn't have many LinkedIn connections. And instead of experience at a fancy tech company, Oliver had only worked for a small local software development agency. He designed an online music store, a news website for a city in Spain, as well as a website that offered to help you increase the odds of picking winning lottery numbers. Now, none of these projects are visually stunning. They all scream late 2000s web design. But you should never judge an introverted software engineer by their LinkedIn profile. As Marcus got to know Oliver, he realized that he was talking to one of the best developers in Estonia and made him a co founder. It was the opportunity of a lifetime, and one that Oliver had been preparing for since he started coding at the age of 8. In a matter of weeks, Oliver built a working version of the app, which put the company's expansion plans on more solid ground.

And I got hooked on the technical aspect of it also. It was so interesting thing to build because there's so many different aspects of building this real time application.

None of the founders took a salary for the first six months, and even later on they continued to operate on a shoestring budget. But their sacrifice was worth it. Just eight months in, Bolt had become the local market leader, doing 50,000 rides per month and generating €7,000 per month in revenue from taxi companies. But most of the challenges that Bolt had to overcome still lay ahead when Marcus tried to raise money for international expansion. No venture capitalists wanted to invest in Bolt because they thought that Uber was going to dominate the global ride hailing market. Getting turned down by venture capitalists is typically a rite of passage for new entrepreneurs. Most investors say no, but that doesn't really matter because it only takes one yes to get a deal done. But in Bolt's case, literally every single brand name venture capital fund that Marcus pitched turned him down.

I think there's probably 100 investors in the room who I've pitched over the last six years who all bought into the idea that Uber is going to be a monopoly.

But Marcus is not your typical 19 year old. He does not take no for an answer. So instead of shutting the company down, Marcus got creative with the funding strategy. While Uber was raising billions of dollars from the likes of Goldman Sachs and Jeff Bezos, Marcus kept Bolt afloat with small funding rounds from local and unknown investors. Early Bolt backers included Finnish angel investor Miko Silvan Tola, who made a 4000x return on his 2014 investment, and Kamos Group, an Estonian forest management company that no TechCrunch journalist has ever heard of. The limited funding forced Marcus to become a master of frugally expanding into obscure markets others wouldn't touch. This is kind of similar to how Sam Walton built Walmart into the biggest retailer in the world by expanding into small towns where bigger chains didn't operate. For the first couple of years, while Uber was burning billions of dollars in frustrating regulators, Marcus flew under the radar, expanding his company in Eastern Europe, where competition and regulation was limited. And while Uber had to pay its Silicon Valley engineers six figure salaries, Bolt hired programmers in Europe, where payroll is two to three times lower.

Engineering we have in three locations, Estonia, Poland and Romania.

This lower overhead meant Bolt could take smaller commissions from drivers while offering better prices to riders.

Whenever the leading player pushes margins to be too high, starts really abusing their position with drivers, it actually creates an opening for other players to come in.

Major ride sharing companies were charging 30 to 40% commissions from drivers, while Bolt took only 15 to 20%.

In some cases, we even take about half the level that our competition does. And why that's even possible is because from the start, we've been a very lean company.

After building a strong foothold in Eastern Europe, Bolt decided to expand into a new another market ignored by most Africa. This was initially a counterintuitive decision.

We had zero experience in Africa. Most of us had even never even been there.

But Marcus is an extremely data driven entrepreneur, so he ignored conventional wisdom and focused solely on the economic opportunity. And the numbers didn't lie. Africa's high unemployment made it easy to sign up drivers, while poor public transport created strong demand for ride sharing. Things that on the surface looked like negatives actually turned into positives for Bolt. Now, one of the key reasons that Bolt has been successful is that Marcus is extremely frugal. Seriously, he never spends money on anything unless he is certain that it creates more value for the customer. While American tech unicorns were chartering private jets, Marcus didn't want to waste money on an $800 plane ticket to South Africa to plan his expansion. So what did they do? Well, Bolt started in South Africa with just one local employee who they hired over Skype from Estonia. No one from the headquarters actually traveled to the country until almost a year later. And Bolt's first office had none of the usual tech startup office perks. And when Bolt expanded to other African nations, including Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda and Tunisia, they always localized the product rather than cars. Bolt's most popular category in Africa is motorcycles. Bolt arrived in Africa one year after Uber, so you'd think that Marcus had no chance of going up against a much better funded competitor. But as Marcus researched Uber's service, he realized the San Francisco based ride sharing behemoth was making mistakes, which Bolt was quick to capitalize on. Uber initially only accepted credit cards, even though only a few percent of Africans actually had credit cards at the time. So Bolt offered locally popular payment methods like cash payments and mobile carrier billing. And safety is a hot topic in Africa. So Bolt added an SOS button to its app. And when drivers struggled to get car loans from banks, it partnered with local financing companies to help up to 200,000 new drivers. Get cars and start driving for Bolt. Today, one third of Bolt's business is in Africa. Marcus expanded to Africa and was able to beat Uber, even though Uber was more than 10 times the size of Bolt. The lesson here is that you should never be afraid to go up against bigger companies, especially if your name is Markus Vilig. In 2010, Daimler, the parent company of Mercedes Benz, made what could have been the investment of the century. They paid $50 million for a 10% stake of an electric vehicle startup named Tesla Motors. Today those shares would be worth $77 billion. Unfortunately, Daimler decided to sell their Tesla stake just a few years later, so they missed out on those incredible returns. But the German automotive giant seems to have learned from its mistakes with Tesla. In 2018, Daimler invested $150 million in Bolt and remains one of the company's largest shareholders to this day. This German automotive giant gave up on one of the greatest entrepreneurs of our generation. So why is it betting on a millennial university dropout from Estonia who still walks three miles to work every morning? Well, Daimler might be the largest manufacturer of luxury cars in the world today, but looking to the future, it knows it has a problem. Today there are about 250 million private cars in Europe. And it's clear that 10 years from now, we are going to have a lot fewer private cars than we do today. Cities are suffering from traffic congestion and pollution. No politician today is thinking about how to make car ownership and driving easier. But a lot of politicians across Europe are working to make it more difficult. They're increasing fuel taxes, introducing low emissions zones in city centers, and promoting public transport. Daimler sees this as a massive risk to their business, so they invested in Bolt as a hedge. Now, a lot of people think that self driving cars are the solution to congestion and pollution. And you might remember that Uber invested billions of dollars into developing autonomous vehicles a few years ago. But Marcus actually doesn't believe that the technology will be ready anytime soon. It's not that Marcus is burying his head in the Sandbold's chief product officer has a PhD in computer science. But for now, they are focusing on the things that work today, not 10 years from now. Marcus mentioned three important things. Public transportation. Micromobility, which is simply an umbrella term for light vehicles like bicycles and electric scooters and shared cars. That's why in 2018, Bolt entered the micro mobility space with the launch of scooter sharing. Again, it's a bit of an unexpected move, but Bolt is already the largest micromobility company in Europe. It has 130,000 scooters today and is adding 230,000 more this year. One in four urban trips is less than two miles. Scooters and bicycles can replace a lot of these short car journeys. I mean, even the president of Estonia swapped out his motorcade for a Bolt Skill scooter. But there are still over 250 million passenger cars in Europe. Because of edge, cases like transporting furniture or traveling to the countryside prevent many people from giving up their personal cars. Marcus wants to help people give up their cars entirely. So in 2021, Bolt launched Bolt Drive, a short term car rental service which allows you to rent a car with fuel, insurance and parking included for as low as just 12 cents per minute. Car sharing is Bolt's most capital intensive business, which means Bolt can't scale this as fast as its scooter fleet. For car sharing to become as convenient as personal cars, you need to have a high density of vehicles available at basically every street corner. So every city requires massive investment. But Marcus clearly believes that despite the high capital requirements, the business model has merit. This year, Bolt plans to expand Bolt Drive into nine cities across Europe. One thing is for certain, Marcus isn't slow slowing down anytime soon. Remember, transportation is a massive industry globally, so Bolt won't run out of growth opportunities anytime soon. Marcus wants to build Bolt into one of the largest technology companies in Europe. This might sound audacious, but Marcus recently said that he increasingly believes that the only company that operates with the same strategy as Bolt is Amazon. Both companies enter new industries and find ways to make them significantly more efficient with technology. A lot of companies are good at technology or operations, but Bolt and Amazon are good at both. I'll leave you with this. In 1998, Amazon was a 600 million dollar revenue company and its billionaire founder drove a Honda Civic to work. In 2021, Bolt was a 500 million euro revenue company and its billionaire founder walked to work.