How Bolt Survived An 85% Revenue Crash And Became Europe's Ride-Hailing Champion (Markus Villig, Founder & CEO)

It was 2020. The company was already fairly big. Suddenly you started seeing this news where there was a virus spreading, and then in a couple of weeks it got so bad that the business declined 85%. That isn't an easy position to be in. We very quickly pivoted to food delivery. We launched suddenly in about 15 countries across Europe and Africa with a food product. We were very lucky in the timings. It actually worked out really well.

You've read Lord of the Rings 5 times. Why that book and why so many times?

Lord of the Rings somehow stuck with me. Sort of the narrative arc of how you can have people come from all sorts of small places and make something great. in the world, coming from a small village in Estonia, really resonated with me as well. We operate in 50 countries. We have more than 200,000 vehicles in more than 200 cities, and we custom design them. We have our own team in China for the manufacturing. We're profitable for the last 2 years. We have a tech team of 800 people. We have taken a lot of effort to make sure that we design the best hardware we can. This sort of more experimentation R&D culture, I think, is starting to pay off.

In 2013, a 19-year-old from from a tiny Estonian island town, borrows €5,000 from his parents, and decides to take on Uber. Just over 12 years later, and Bolt now operates in more than 50 countries, generates nearly €2 billion in revenue, and is one of the only European startups competing at a genuinely global scale. Markus Vilig is the CEO, and he's still only 32. Today, Markus and I talk about his philosophy of Culture market fit, how to fix Europe's ambition problem, the economics and impact of autonomous cars, and lessons from Markus's favorite series, Lord of the Rings. I'm Mario, and this is The Generalist. I'm really excited about today's sponsor, Granola. Simply put, Granola is the AI notepad for people in back-to-back meetings. I've been using Granola for over a year now. And honestly, it's a tool that has transformed the way I work. Granola takes meeting notes for you without any intrusive bots joining your calls. You can jot down rough notes like you always do, and in the background, Granola transcribes and turns those notes into clear, useful notes when the meeting ends. You can also chat with your notes, which is one of my favorite features. If someone says something on the call that you didn't quite catch or want to learn more about, Granola can help you out. It's an amazing way to be better informed during a conversation without having to interrupt everyone else's flow. You can also have Granola review all your recent conversations to pull out to-dos, write a weekly recap, or surface interesting ideas you might have forgotten. Another thing I love. To get started with Granola, head to granola.ai/mario. And for new users, you can get 3 months free with the code Mario. So go to granola.ai/mario and use code Mario for 3 months free. This episode is brought to you by Brex. If you're a founder, the hardest part isn't the idea. It's scaling fast without getting buried in back office work. That's where Brex comes in. Brex is the intelligent finance platform for founders. With Brex, you get high limit corporate cards, easy banking, and high yield treasury, plus a team of AI agents that handle manual finance tasks for you. They take care of things. like expenses, all according to your rules, so you can move faster while staying in full control. 1 in 3 startups in the US already runs on Brex. You can too at brex.com/mario. I'd love to start with a little bit about your mind and understanding how you think. One of the things that when I was researching you came up is that you've read Lord of the Rings 5 times. Why that book and why so many times?

I was growing up in a tiny village in Estonia, so I spent many, many days of my childhood just reading books, everything I could find. And I remember fantasy and Lord of the Rings was always top of the list, but I was heavily into everything from science fiction, reading encyclopedias and so on. But yeah, Lord of the Rings somehow stuck with me, this sort of fight between good and evil and Sort of the narrative arc of how you can have people come from all sorts of small places and make something great in the world. Coming from a small village in Estonia really resonated with me as well.

You grew up on an island of like 10,000 people, right?

Yeah, so the city is 10,000 people. It was a very great place actually to grow up as a kid. It was very safe. You could just wander around the city as a 6-year-old. We didn't even need to lock our doors. So, I mean, growing up, I thought that's a good way to grow up, but I realized later on it's obviously very unusual. That's not the upbringing of most people. I don't know if you saw, but

There was a really great sort of discussion where Palmer Luckey was talking about Lord of the Rings and what it meant to him. I imagine there's some of that valence to it too. You talked about the good and evil piece, but even when we're talking about it on a geopolitical scale or on a company-wide scale, is that a text that you end up sort of coming back to a lot for its lessons?

I think that a lot of it obviously resonated with me as a kid and then still to this day, that my view of the world still in some ways is maybe more black and white than I think has become the norm over the last couple of decades, and probably that's heavily shaped by the fact that my parents were growing up and lived most of their life under the Russian occupation in Estonia. So very clearly they understood that there was this Iron Curtain on one side of it, everything was horrible and you were living under this oppression, even to the point where entrepreneurship was banned. And if you said anything wrong about the government, you know, you were going to be sent to a prison. And then on the other side of that, to the West, were all these sort of light values of democracy and so on. And I think we sort of always were growing up, me and my siblings, with that type of attitude that, hey, Like, let's make Estonia a great country that belongs to the West. And like, we don't ever want to fall back under this regime again.

In the history of Bolt, who have been like the biggest sort of baddies, the Saurons that you've had to fight most? Like, is it a concept? Is it like entropy? Is it, you know, a competitor like Uber? Like, how do you sort of think about that?

I think internally we've always viewed ourselves in that way as the underdogs and then probably the rebels versus the Darth Vader out there. And I think the brand Yeah,

exactly.

So, so very clearly, we've seen ourselves as coming from Europe, trying to have more, uh, sort of human values of making sure that the drivers and partners are better taken care of as well. Not maybe just always optimizing for the sort of short-term pennies that you can make, but we understand that we're actually a physical service at the end of the day, working with real people, and we want to have these drivers on the platform for many, many years. So if you piss them off in the short term, like, you're not going to have a great business long term as well. And that's something that, uh, I think to our advantage, it doesn't come that naturally to many of these US companies headquartered in SF. And they see Europe as sort of a peripheral second-tier market for them.

Yeah, there's been so much of your story that has been sort of like finding these markets that other people have overlooked and winning in them. Before we sort of talk more about that, maybe when someone says they read Lord of the Rings 5 times, it sparks something in my brain. And I went down a bit of a Tolkien rabbit hole where I was like, okay, like what does this say about you? What does it maybe say about the world? And one thing that came to me is apparently Tolkien invented a word called eucatastrophe, eu from the Greek word of like good. And the idea is sort of like right at the edge of catastrophe, something great happens. And so I was curious, when you think about Bolt, like what have been the moments where you've gotten closest to catastrophe and then something fantastic came out of it?

Oof, there's been many stories like that. First one that comes to mind is during COVID So, I mean, it was 2020. Um, the company was already fairly big. We were probably doing $100 million in revenue. We probably had about 1,000 employees and already quite a wide presence in about the, like, 30 countries or so. And then, um, suddenly you started seeing this news where there's a virus spreading and some cities were going to be shutting down and not allowing people to move. And then in a couple of weeks, it got so bad that the business declined 85%. We're thinking like, wow, okay, that isn't an easy position to be in. Like, you know, you can't raise money in that type of a condition. Obviously you're losing all your revenue. What are you going to do with the 1,000 employees you have? What are you doing with the hundreds of thousands of drivers who are counting on you as well to make a living? So I think a lot of the people in the company obviously got, for right reasons, very panicky about what are we going to do? But then we thought that, hey, let's keep our cool, figure out what are we going to do in this situation to make the most of it. And then, uh, we very quickly pivoted to food delivery. So, um, we had, uh, just launched the first prototype version of food delivery just coincidentally a couple of months before, but then we were very lucky in the timing. So we were like, hey, let's use all these people we have who can't work on ride-hailing at the moment. Let's just push them into food. And we launched suddenly in about 15 countries across Europe and Africa with the food product. And it actually worked out really well. So it was able to compensate for quite a bit of the loss we were making on the ride-hailing side. Maybe this sort of, yeah, resembles one of these Tolkien sort of catastrophe scenarios as well.

What did it take to go from, hey, we've prototyped this and we have sort of the first version running to like production mode? Like I can imagine there's obviously huge operational things. Were there regulatory things that you had to sort of get over, technical things?

A lot, because you can imagine food delivery by now is quite a complex problem to solve, both in terms of technology and operations, right? First of all, you have to sign up thousands of restaurants or merchants to get on the platform. So we repurposed all the people we could, you know, where possible they went on the streets and just signed up merchants offline. But wherever possible, we just online were asking them to, hey, send us your menus, we're going to digitize them, put them in the app. So you can imagine doing that at rapid speed in a matter of days is quite a complex undertaking across nearly 20 countries with very different levels of technology sophistication as well, all the way from places like Portugal to Nigeria to Poland. So yeah, it was quite a mess. And then at the same time, how do you scale up the technology so that it actually makes all of this easy to administer as well? So you can actually report your local taxes correctly, the logistics run smoothly. How do you localize the app to just work in such so many languages and so on? So it was quite an intense hackathon effectively for the whole company for a couple of months.

You mentioned that, you know, you're the European sort of underdog that has, you know, been fighting against the Sauron, the Darth Vader. How much of Bolt's culture do you feel like is an Estonian culture fundamentally? Because in some ways that is also like the Estonian story of like this small company, this small country that really outcompetes on a relative basis in tech.

Absolutely. I think that those 3 being Estonians sort of culture and history and my own and the company's, I think they all have a lot of overlap and that's quite natural. I think obviously if you start the company and you run it for 12 years, at the end of the day, it's going to be reflecting the values and your own behaviors to a large extent. And I think similarly, Estonia, as I mentioned, I mean, we have this very unique history where we've only now had a re-independence for the last 30 years. And in that time, Estonia has gone from one of the lowest GDP countries in the world even Uh, to one of the fastest growing in Europe. Living standards now are better than in most European countries. We have more startups than almost any place in the world.

Yes.

Um, maybe Israel

is the only

one above it, right? Per capita, Estonia is even ahead.

Really?

Uh, and in terms of unicorns, similarly. So clearly in terms of any metric you look at, um, Estonia is doing really well in tech and then in general. And I think we've always tried to take that, um, enthusiasm and then those values into Bolt as well. And We don't care that we're from a small country. We've always had the view that if we work harder and we do smarter decisions, we can beat whoever company in the world, regardless of how big they are.

Something that I've heard from other entrepreneurs, some sort of Scandinavian entrepreneurs, which has a good tech ecosystem, could always be better, of course. But folks from that region, folks maybe from Central Europe, is that a lot of times there's sort of a sense of tall poppy syndrome where even in their culture, it's not, you don't want to dream too big in some sense. And there's parts of that that are keeping people back. Like, does Estonia have its version of that? Or is that sort of different given the fact that it has this history of great technology companies?

I think that what's quite unique about this Estonian situation is that like, again, until the '90s, entrepreneurship was banned. So I think we had this huge pent-up demand of people who wanted to build a business, but they couldn't. And then in the '90s, once we had our independence again, it was such a common thing. Everybody wanted to start businesses. So there was so much hope and enthusiasm that we can build something great. And then, so I think most people had completely unbounded ambition because they were just naive. Like they didn't know any better because we were coming up from this sort of closed ecosystem. Right. And I think that optimism and naivety to some extent has been serving us really well. Um, and then what further boosted that was that in 2003, Skype was founded and the core team members and the core R&D center was in Estonia. And, uh, of course that over time became one of the most successful internet businesses of all time with hundreds of millions of customers. It was actually the biggest exit, um, of that time at all in the internet world, not just in Europe, but around the world. And I think that just further boosted it where people in Estonia were like, hey, like we can build something from our home. and build a world-class product and then conquer the world. And I think that's just carried through to the next generation of entrepreneurs as well.

One of the reasons I was excited to talk to you is really that you were a very vocal proponent of Europe and the need for Europe to sort of step up into a bigger role on the tech landscape. I think you had a tweet that said, you know, Europe has zero of the top 25 companies in the world that got a lot of attention. Why do you think like there those sorts of messages capture so much attention? What does it say about like the state of Europe today and maybe what needs to happen?

Well, I'd say that when you follow what's going on on X or Twitter, right, then I think the zeitgeist is very much that, oh, Europe is falling behind and we're regulating bottle caps and we haven't done anything meaningful in the technology space in a long time. And partially, of course, objectively, when you look at it, it's also true.

Yes.

The biggest technology companies we have are still 30 times smaller than the biggest US ones, just when you benchmark versus revenue or market cap. So clearly, like there's still a massive way to go. However, when you look at the last 20 years, the progress is astonishing. So when you look at it, the exponential curve keeps on getting better every year. There's more founders, more funding coming in, better companies being built. But just the problem is that that curve is like 20 years behind the US. So question is, how do we accelerate that? And to some extent, I think having this, um, sort of hopefully helpful criticism and these jokes about Europe is, is also raising awareness that, hey, there are structural problems and we gotta address them. So in that sense, I think this criticism is not always bad.

What are the biggest sort of self-owns that Europe does that, you know, if you could just get in there and fix it tomorrow, would make the biggest difference?

There's so many things and they're interconnected, right? So first of all, I think it's a cultural thing, which I observe more actually in Western Europe than Eastern Europe. And as you mentioned, it's about ambition. So it's not very common to see that you have these young entrepreneurs coming up from Western Europe who want to build the biggest company in the world and are willing to say it out publicly that they have that level of ambition and take on more ambitious projects. So it's gradually starting to happen, but it's still, I think, 1/10 of what it could be. And oddly enough, actually, then when you start to zoom in, like who is building these bigger success stories? I mean, even in Western European countries like the UK, generally not local people. So, I mean, you look at the biggest tech companies in London, you know, Revolut, Wise, et cetera, it's generally done by people from Eastern Europe oftentimes. So actually it's quite odd that like for some reason, like just this sort of ambition, this sort of work ethic of just grinding it really hard in the first couple of years, getting it done. Like, how do we just manifest more of that in Europe? I think that's the first cultural block we need to solve.

How do you start to decode or debug rather, like those aspects of European culture? Because, you know, I've sort of split my life rather evenly between the US and America, half American, half Italian. The things that I would point to is that like, it seems very fundamentally uncool in Europe to work too hard, whereas in America, it's almost performative in the other way where you want to be the most hardcore one? Like, I don't know, what would you point to as the things that make the biggest difference there?

There's obviously some people who just in general have different values in life and they want to enjoy their lifestyle and not work hard. And okay, it's hard to change that. But then I think that for a lot of people, they are willing to work much harder if they see that there's value attached to that. So if they see that their hard work is making a difference, so they see career progression, they see they're changing the world, it's having a meaningful impact on their financial status, then I think people are willing to put in a lot more hours. And unfortunately, many parts of the European economy do not offer that. So, Derek, if you work as an engineer in Volkswagen, like, I mean, it's quite capped what you can achieve there. So I don't think you're sort of feeling the same level of ownership as an engineer would have in Tesla or, you know, maybe like a more meritocratic, faster-moving company. So I do think that we have this great talent. They're smart. They have the willingness to work hard, but you just got to put them in the right structure.

Some of the things that you'd like to talk about with regards to Europe are also sort of related to the And, you know, we are currently in a period of history where things are shifting very intensely and it seems like Europe is going to have to, you know, take sort of more responsibility in that respect. What would you like to see happen and how did that interest originate in you? Is it sort of natural given your history and of course the invasion of Ukraine? But yeah, would love to hear sort of how that came together. Yeah, I

mean, Well, um, I actually did not want to get involved in defense, uh, in the first place because I was thinking I'm going to stick to my lane and build Bolt and I'll, you know, contribute to Estonia and then Europe that way economically. But then actually, um, a few people from the Estonian defense forces reached out about a year into the war and, um, they were quite concerned because they said that, hey, we were expecting there's going to be an influx of new talent who will want to build these new generation defense companies that we desperately need. But that hasn't really happened. So maybe you can come and advise and give us some input effectively, like what should we do? And then we devised a plan of a couple of steps and then we just executed on that in about 6 months in Estonia. Oh, wow. And I think that's a good blueprint for most other countries to follow. So effectively what we did was that first of all, we realized there's a big funding bottleneck. So there's on paper plenty of easy money in Europe, but then you look at what fraction of that can actually go into building any type of lethal products in terms of rockets or, you know, Modern armaments that are needed, it's almost zero. There's basically no capital available. At least that was the case 3 years ago. So we went to the Estonian government and we asked that, hey, let's set up a $100 million defense tech fund that exclusively does these type of investments that most other funds can't do. And we think that's going to be obviously great for building up this new defense ecosystem, but we actually think there's a great investment opportunity here as well because it's sort of an underappreciated sector. So we actually got the Estonian PM to say yes to that after 2 meetings. We set it up. That fund is active. We're deploying money for the last couple of years and that fund is actually now rapidly growing in size. So that was the first thing we did. The other thing was that we realized that defense is such a peculiar sector that most people in tech have no idea what to do there. So they have no idea how to get going. What are the problems? How does the procurement work? And so on. So what we did was we created this defense technology meetup. At first we thought, let's see how popular it's going to be. We just threw it out there. Um, wanted to invite, um, investors, uh, entrepreneurs, engineers, people from the defense space. And it was so popular the first time it was immediately oversubscribed. So, so we could fit a couple of hundred people into the room, but we couldn't take half. Uh, and now that's become a recurring monthly event and it's grown into quite a big, effectively conference by now where every month we're getting people on the Eastern Flank together. We're hosting them in Estonia and other countries as well. And then that's great. So we're just building this sort of new ecosystem of connecting people across these different disciplines. And then when you bundle that with the funding, it works really well. And then maybe the third, last small thing we did was that we realized that at the end of the day, all the innovation is happening in Ukraine because they have the biggest pain, of course. It's closest to the front line. So they can have these rapid development cycles of building something that day, sending it to the front line the next day. And obviously if you're a Western company building somewhere in a lab, you don't have any connection to reality, you're going to be that far behind. Yeah. So what we did was, was try to get as many of these Ukrainian companies to set up in Estonia as possible. And now we've been able to get dozens of them to register there, um, set up in Estonia, and then they can start to sell those products into other NATO allies as well. So that was our 3-pronged approach, and I'd recommend more European countries to look into that as well.

Yeah, that last piece is something that, uh, at least from an observer's perspective, talking to some of the founders of these different companies, You do see, I think, a really tangible difference when I've talked to folks that have been deploying stuff on the front lines versus those who are in more of a lab environment where often it's the, you know, the ones that are building in a lab that can attract the most money and, you know, get the most buzz and people can be really great with the narratives. But then often those are also the ones that seem to have almost no impact on the battlefield from folks I've spoken to. And so sort of bridging that, that is sort of pivotal, right?

Absolutely. And I've personally been to Ukraine to meet some of these teams. And I mean, the resourcefulness these people have is off the charts. What they're able to do with just a couple of million of funding is build extremely advanced technology, whether it's drones or counter-drone technology and so on. And it's extremely impressive. And then at the same time, you look at some of these Western companies who are raising tens of millions, hundreds of millions, and the hype is great. But then you look at like actual real-world effectiveness, there's, there's It's not proportional. So I do think that we gotta go where the actual best companies are, and today they are in Ukraine, and we're gonna learn from them.

You are clearly so interested in this and obviously see the importance of it. Is there a version of Bolt in the future that like has a very different aspect to it that is more about Western security, more about defense in some capacity? Because you've often said, you know, we're only 1% done. I could imagine the 99% could have many, many different form factors.

I'd say that, I mean, even though it's a passionate area for me, and I think it's extremely important for Europe, just frankly, I don't think we should do everything through the vehicle of Bolt. I think that we have so much to do there, and I don't want that to be sort of a distraction there. So for the time being, I'm on the sidelines advising, investing in these companies. And, you know, one day, who knows? I mean, maybe there's going to be a great opportunity to build a new company in the defense space. But for the time being, I see that my time is probably best spent in this role.

Yes, that makes sense. You've also talked a decent amount before about sort of the need for capital market reform in Europe. You know, that's not a space that I'm as familiar with, certainly. What are the structures that need to change there? You know, how would you like to see that start to play out?

Well, we can start off just from the outputs at first, right? So purely, if you look at retail trading activity, regular people, the difference between how much US retail people are buying stocks versus Europe, The delta is more than 10x.

Wow, really?

It's absolutely massive in terms of net new inflows, of how much capital is coming in, how much people are trading. It is incomparable. And obviously that has trickle effects down the line, right? So if you have more money coming in, the cost of capital is much lower. There's much more liquidity in these markets, and that's great for the local ecosystem. So you have more companies benefiting from this and then more entrepreneurship. And also it's actually better for the investor because alternatively, if you don't do that, then your money is just sitting in savings accounts, which is the case in Europe. you actually end up making way lower yields. So you typically make like a 2% or 3% yield on that money versus something much greater in the stock market. Yeah. So I think in Europe today, we're in a lose-lose situation. It's bad for our people and it's bad for the companies. And unlike some of these other things, I think this is actually one of the easiest things to get fixed. It's just like not that controversial that we should be adjusting these rules. And, uh, we've been studying which European countries are doing it the best. And actually, I think Sweden is top of the list. Sweden has actually done these reforms over the last decade, and with those reforms, they've boosted their activity to a similar level as the US. So clearly it is doable if you do the right reforms. And effectively what they did was they just made it extremely easy for anybody to buy stock. So they cut all the red tape and they reduced the tax burden massively. So it's very affordable for people to do these stock trades. And clearly it works. There's now many, many years of evidence of this, and we should just replicate that all around Europe and get $10 trillion of money to be invested into public markets and technology and entrepreneurship. And I think that would completely revolutionize the landscape we see in Europe today.

That's fascinating. Let's talk a little bit about Bolt and the history of this company, because it is a fascinating business. And it's one that, you know, I think is very unique. I don't, I can't imagine there are many stories quite like this that start in Estonia and really go globally. There are obviously precursors, but you're doing it in a very different way. In studying your story, you began with a €5,000 loan from your parents. Is that right? What was the pitch like to your parents for Bolt?

I went to them. I said, hey, I have this idea. I think that there's a fantastic opportunity to build an app that aggregates all the taxis in the city. You can hail them at the tap of a button. It's going to be great in terms of prices, quality, pickup times. They had like no idea what I'm talking about because back then they didn't even have a smartphone. So, so the pitch wasn't the easiest, but after some debate they said, hey, we're fine to give you $5,000 out of your university funds if you're gonna go for it. That's at your own risk. You gotta then cover your own rent because we didn't come from, from that wealthy of a family. And then looking back, I mean, I realized like, why were they even willing to take this risk in the first place was because by that time I had probably 5 years of some type of entrepreneurial experience already.

I see.

So, so I think they'd seen from the sidelines how I was building websites, learning to code. Trying to do some e-commerce and so on. So they sort of already saw that I wasn't just a regular teenager who had no idea what I was talking about.

So what were the first entrepreneurial things that you were doing and what was the first, I don't know if you'll forgive me, was it a euro at that time? What was the first euro you made over the internet?

Actually, the very first one was the most plain. We were just building websites for local companies. So somehow I got some first inbounds of people telling me, hey, my cousin is doing a restaurant, he needs a website. I heard you can do that. So that's how it got going. And then at some point it was extremely lucrative because these small companies in Estonia had no idea how to do that. They were paying me maybe €500 or €1,000 per page. So, you know, for me as a teenager, that was a lot of money.

Totally.

And then at some point they recruited a couple of my classmates to do the websites. And then I was even sort of just sort of trying to bring in the customers. So it became this sort of small agency.

You were the manager at that point.

Yeah. So I was sort of learning how to manage customers, get my first employees, you know, manage the payments, figure out how to produce the a great experience. So yeah, and I always knew this was just a stepping stone and the way for me to learn because I always at heart know I wanted to be a tech entrepreneur and then build a product.

Not that many children know I want to be a tech entrepreneur. You know, I went from my first one was zookeeper, then a trader in the stock market. You know, so there were some jumps in there, but where did that come from for you? Like, why was that even a tangible goal?

For me, it's always been crystal clear. Started thinking that I wanted to be a scientist when I was probably 5 years old. I was so passionate about technology, reading all all these sci-fi books and encyclopedias and then so on. And then when I was about 10, I flipped. I was like, okay, I can be a good scientist, but I think my superpower is rather not to do that, but to bring people together and then build something commercial around that as well. So not just invent the technology, but make sure you commercialize it and productize it. And that vision has never shifted. I mean, now been on that path for about 20 years.

You're clearly a very competitive person. Where did that sort of first manifest for you as a kid? You know, I think your father was like a very serious athlete. Were you, you know, a serious athlete yourself? Like, where Where did that show up first?

Actually, for me, it's quite a contrast because I only apply this competitiveness in business. So I actually try to, in the rest of the time, actually be relatively chill and sort of decompress and then take the stress off. Oh, really? So usually in sports or personal life, I'm not that competitive at all, but anytime it gets to anything related to Bolt, then I'm all in.

Wow, it's amazing that you can sort of switch it off. I imagine there must be always a temptation, but clearly you've figured it out for yourself.

Yeah, and I think overall, I mean, you gotta find what's the right balance for you so you sort of keep yourself sane and then high energy. And at least for me, I realized that if I'm sort of obsessing too much over being my best at sports, then, you know, it doesn't really give the sort of anti-stress and health benefits that I would be expecting to get from it. So.

Yes, that makes sense. Yeah, you're optimizing for performance in a specific lane rather than, you know.

Well, that's at the end of the day what gives me the most joy. And then I sort of see sports more as a means to an end. So that keeps me healthy. It's obviously sometimes fun, but I don't see that as something that sort of defines me, and I want to be at my best there all the time.

Your brother Martin had also had an experience at Skype, and so you had seen maybe some of that. What were the pieces that maybe you took from him or learned from him? What were the pieces that maybe you were like, yeah, you keep telling me about this is how Skype did it, but I don't care. I'm going to do it my way.

We actually have an interesting dynamic with my brother and co-founder Martin. So he's 15 years older. So we didn't have this typical sibling relationship of growing up together because by the time I was 3, he already moved out.

Yeah.

So in that sense, we actually sort of got together again after he had already been at Skype and a number of other tech companies. And then we started Bolt together. But it was very clear that he said, hey, I've already been through this many, many times. I'm going to be an advisor and do the roles we need. But again, this is your show. You need to make the decisions. You need to drive the ship. And then it was sort of a very good, actually, like not combative relationship at all, because like he was giving me advice, but it was always clear that at the end of the day, I had to be the one to make the decision.

Hmm. That's amazing. I imagine there would be another brother who would try and, you know, try and enforce his will more or something like that. One of the obviously key people in the Bolt story is Oliver, and you often talk about how he sort of built the first prototype in something like, I don't know, 48 hours. What is it that makes him so special and so unusual?

There's a couple of elements that make him just an absolutely exceptional co-founder to have. First of all, he just found us completely randomly based on a post we made in a small developer forum in Estonia. And based on that, he was willing to do the meeting and then listen to this 19-year-old kid who was pitching this idea with little to show. And he got so excited about it that Literally, he went home and built this prototype in a couple of days and then came back and showed, hey, I have a customer app and the driver app and here's how it works. And obviously keep in mind, this was pre-vibe coding. So like he actually did it all. Yeah. So it was really, really impressive. And then I told him, hey, I mean, I'd love to have you as a co-founder to join the company, but I don't have any money. Like we haven't raised anything other than $5,000 from my parents. So you got to take a risk that we might not be willing or like able or willing to raise money for a year and we're just going to bootstrap this. And he was fine, let's do it. As a 19-year-old kid, I didn't think too much about it, but like now thinking back, you know, had a wife and a small kid. And so he was willing to take a lot of risk on a 19-year-old kid while being an absolutely exceptional coder, like one of the best I've ever seen, and could have easily worked in any other big tech company and taken much less risk.

Why do you think he did that?

He's told me this many times. I mean, he actually always wanted to build a product where he sees that he can make a massive impact on the world and he could actually just have autonomy to build what he wants to build and not be told by somebody, you know, that needs to fall under some corporate process. And we were just able to give him that environment that he had been waiting for for a long time.

You have many competitors in some sense, right? You have Uber. Obviously Lyft is not really in Europe except through sort of FreeNow a little bit now, right? But there has been folks who have been bigger, more public. Like, how do you balance learning the lessons from from someone like Uber and also sort of running your own race to a certain extent? And what— how has that changed over the years? Like, in the early years, were you hewing more to what you thought their playbook was or maybe less?

So, um, funny enough, when we started the business in 2013, there was more than 50 ride-hailing companies in Europe.

In Europe?

Yeah, it was absolutely insane. I think even in Estonia, we just had 2 more competitors other than us starting in the same year.

No kidding.

So I think it, uh, obviously wasn't sort of the unique idea that like only us or a few companies were pursuing. I think it became very obvious in 2012 and 2013 that you can build a smartphone-connected logistics system and apply that to so many aspects of life.

Yeah.

Whether that's ride-hailing or food delivery or many others. So clearly this was happening all around the world. And then, um, looking back, I mean, why would the 19-year-old kid from Estonia with €5,000 win and be the only one left in Europe after a decade? And I think the characteristics that made us quite special was, was a few things. So one was that we were one of the first ones to really look at these network effects in a more deep, more scientific manner. I think everybody else just plainly had a very simplistic view in their mind that network effects is a binary thing. Either you have it or you don't. And I think the investor mindset was that, hey, if it's a network effect business, then that means it's automatically a winner take all. And there's no room for anybody else. But, um, I was coming from a math background and, um, I was thinking about this problem and I was like, hey, I mean, but you can very easily plot out like how many drivers you need in a city. How is that going to impact the pickup times? Model this out. And, you know, when you plug in all the numbers, you realize quite quickly that like, I mean, the steady state of this is most likely not going to be a monopoly because just the barriers to entry are high, but they're not that high. And like, once you hit the sufficient critical mass, you can actually start to compete on the merits of having enough network density. And so, so that was sort of one thing we had in mind. So we were always very, um, sort of, um, analytically monitoring this in every city. What exactly is our market share, pickup times, how do they compare? And I think that gave us a very robust, uh, framework of how to think about market expansion and where to invest our money. And we realized that actually most companies didn't think about that the right way at all. And they were just constantly wasting their money on actually cities where they shouldn't have been investing at that time.

Interesting.

So that was one factor. Um, and then the other thing that when you start to again plot out this sort of, you make a mathematical model basically of this, you realize that the other thing that matters of course is price sensitivity. And I think we actually mainly focused on Amazon and then like what was their playbook and how they scaled and then what was the model there. And we applied that to us and we realized very quickly that sure, we're not going to have as good pickup times at first because by definition we're starting in many of the cities later. Uh, but what we can do is we can compensate that by having better economic value. So we can offer more value per trip to drivers. We can offer cheaper prices to customers. And then we effectively modeled out that, okay, but how much discount do you need to give in order to compensate for these worse pickup times? So we had like over time a very good model of how to think about the price sensitivity versus time sensitivity. I think most others just completely missed that and they've been just misallocating capital for 10 years and that's how we out-executed them.

One of the reasons Bolt has won, you know, apart from just the execution is that sort of price difference and the commission difference you take, you know, less than Uber does, for instance. And I always sort of wondered, okay, why isn't the terminal state like not 15%, but 1% or what, you know, you could just, but what you're saying, I think, is that like at a certain point, you don't need to go past a 15% because it actually doesn't move the needle. Is that right?

So effectively you can model out what's the price sensitivity in that market. What is the time sensitivity people have? And then you can plot out like, what is the diminishing return of therefore what's the optimal price to have for the driver, for the customer. And then eventually it's usually going to settle on an equilibrium with 2 networks arriving. And typically the third one over time just gets wiped out. I mean, it's extremely hard to have an economic equilibrium with 3 sustainable ride-hailing players in one city.

A big part of your culture has also been frugality. And I imagine a large part of that comes just like from the way this company was born. How do you maintain that level of discipline when you're going from, you know, a few people to 100 to 1,000 and so on?

So that's the thing where this operational excellence really comes into play. And My view of the world has always been that we need to build this company in a way that's great at software, but also great at physical real-world operations. And I think that's quite different to how most Silicon Valley companies are built, where they generally obsess over software. It's the only thing that matters. And I mean, for sure, they're great at that, best in the world. But most of them are not really, uh, really these like European type companies who are able to also manage physical assets with high level of rigor and sort of operational excellence. So we started off the company with that premise already in mind. And designed it very frugally. So how do you run your annual meetings, quarterly meetings, monthly reviews, weekly reviews? So, you know, you build up this sort of system and you really optimize it over time to be as effective as possible in terms of how do you onboard drivers? How do you look at pickup times? How do you allocate capital across these markets? How do you run your marketing? So it's all sort of this one integrated system over time that you just gotta iterate on and improve every cycle. It's very hard. Yeah. I mean, running that for 12 years on a, you know, week-by-week high-discipline basis is, is not easy. And I think that's the reason most of these companies just over time couldn't compete because these advantages also compound. If you already start to lose market share in a city, you start to get into this negative spiral, right? So you have less cars, worse pickup times, customers leave, you know, then the more cars leave. And if you don't manage this vicious spiral and you don't have the like right operational rigor to get on this very quickly, it's just going to be a disaster. Your business will be wiped out.

You have this sort of amazing way of describing the system and all the different pieces. When you look at the system and the way it runs today, like, where are the pieces where you're like, ah, there's still too much friction here, or, you know, I need to figure out something to do on this part?

Oh, everywhere, everywhere, everywhere. I think that especially now we have 3,500 people, we have 6 business lines, you know, they're all at very different stages of maturity. And even in ride-hailing, which we've been doing the longest, like, still there's so much to improve. How we run our pricing algorithms, how we do dispatching of figuring out which driver is the best match for that ride, And still so much work to do. And one core aspect of this is regulation because it's not also trivial just to manage that. So we operate in 50 countries. Regulators constantly change laws. What are the requirements for you to bring a new driver on board and so on? So just managing that alone of how do you automatically verify thousands of different types of driver documents across the world. So if a driver in Nigeria is signing up and they give you their You know, car insurance, like how do you know if it's real insurance? So like all these automated processes across these thousands of documents is quite hard to validate. And in some of these markets, the downside is massive. You let one of these issues through, you can theoretically lose your entire license to operate in that market if something bad happens. So the stakes are high and then the actually automation of this is not a trivial problem, even with current AI.

Yes. Yeah. Have you found that the application of current AI really has made a difference to that or is it still sort of In the early innings of figuring out how to best deploy it?

Well, the first results in some of these areas have been incredibly good. I think that in some of these systems, we were able to replace some particular document automation verification systems. You know, after 3 years of manually writing rules, we were able to just completely throw it out and replace with sort of a new modern LLM-based solution. At the same time, though, we're now seeing the sort of second effect of that, which is there's more fraud happening as well. So sort of drivers are figuring out that, hey, I can generate these fraudulent documents, which are so good. So it's a constant arms race of Keeping the system in balance.

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on personnel, right? I mean, And that of course makes a big difference. So if you're starting off in this extremely cash constrained environment with literally 100x less funding than your competitors, you gotta be extremely strict on, on every line item of the business of where you spend money. And of course that meant we couldn't go out and hire as experienced people as we would have liked to. But at the same time, I mean, the benefit of that was we really got missionaries on board who didn't join us for the money, but they joined us because they really deeply cared about what we do. And of course they hope the equity one day is going to be worth a lot. So they were willing to take that risk. So that, that's, that's one area. Um, the other is that, um, I, I think, um, it also meant that in the first few years we just couldn't really take much risks in terms of innovation because the product team was so small. It had so much to do. So I think we just looked at what's going on in all these other companies around the world from e-commerce, food delivery, ride-hailing, and we basically waited to see which of their ideas worked out the best. And then we're the best in the world at copying them quick. And that playbook actually, I think, works completely fine. Like if you're a small company, you can keep on doing that for quite a long time and actually be very cost effective. But then over the last 3, 4 years, obviously by now the company is in a completely different financial position. We're profitable for the last 2 years. We have a tech team of 800 people. So like now we've completely changed the culture and that allows us to do much more experimentation, innovation, like launch new things that we don't have. Yeah. But that was an interesting transition to go through.

What have been the sort of biggest dividends of taking a more experimental culture or more of a sort of R&D approach to things? Are you starting to see those things blossom yet or will they be more down the line?

I think by definition, some of these things are high risk and we don't expect most of them to work out. So obviously you'll have some waste in the system. But at the same time, of course, you take more risks, some of them might work out beautifully and then be great. So, Thinking of the last few years, I mean, one topic we haven't even talked about is hardware design. So we're also one of the largest micromobility operators in the world. We have more than 200,000 vehicles in more than 200 cities, and we custom design them. So we have our own internal hardware team. We have our own team in China for the manufacturing. And yeah, that is one area where we have taken a lot of effort to make sure that we design the best hardware we can. And actually just our new generation bike came out a month ago. I think it's the best sharing bike in the world. So yeah, those are some of these bets of this sort of more experimentation R&D culture, I think, starting to pay off.

How do you see micromobility as part of, you know, the Bolt suite, the Bolt, you know, future super app, so to say? Is it sort of more of a customer acquisition of like bringing people in the funnel and keeping, you know, them going rather than, you know, as big a revenue driver and profitability driver?

It's a bit mixed picture. And I think it's going to evolve over the next decade. So, From first principles, I think, especially in Europe, we have to use 10 times more micromobility as a society than what we use today. I think cars are completely overused. And even though, uh, popularity of bikes is growing every year, it's still very low compared to what it could be. So in that sense, big picture, I'm very optimistic. There's going to be much more all sorts of small electric vehicle form factors going around, whether that's scooters, bikes, or something else. And then of course, we want to be riding that wave and growing with At the same time though, like you look at the current market size, it's tiny. You look at the entire micromobility market today in the Western world, ballpark, it's like $2 billion.

Oh, wow. Really?

And you compare that to ride-hailing, which is like $200 billion. I mean, it's, it's incomparable. So in that sense, for now, it's a small market. It's hardware. It's heavily regulated. It's a very difficult business. You can make it work at scale. And I mean, that's what we've done. But, uh, I'd say, you know, it's, it's not something that at first, you know, seemed like this very easy business and there was Dozens of these companies trying to build their scooter sharing business. I think those days are long gone. Like there's a handful of players remaining. So in that sense, I think that this has a big role to play for us over time, uh, because fundamentally we want to replace people's private car and we got to have micromobility for short trips. And then we will be having ride-hailing, car rentals, self-driving cars for the long trips.

Yes. Yeah, I definitely want to talk about self-driving cars at some point. In terms of Bolt's sort of global span, When I was looking at the list of companies you operate in, I mean, it's pretty unbelievable at this point. How did you decide where to go into and why was Africa like a bet that you wanted to make when basically no one else has wanted to make that bet?

This actually starts off from sort of a general paradigm of how do founders or investors even think about what a company is. So our view was that we built something that was great technology. We were using the product in Estonia. It clearly worked well. It had great product market fit. And then we tried to do that in about 12 other Western countries after the Estonian success. So we raised a million, well, looking back, a million seems very small. Back then we thought it's all the money we're ever gonna need. So we tried to launch in about 12 cities and try out where we get traction and all of them completely flopped.

Oh, wow.

So we tried places from US to Netherlands to Finland to many, many others. We just couldn't get any traction. We couldn't get the network effect off the ground. We were quite puzzled by it because we were thinking that, hey, I mean, the product is so good in Estonia and then all the investors were giving us advice about But like, hey, you know, just keep on iterating on the product, adjust the product until it works. But we were thinking the product's very good. We don't want to change the product. So then let's change the market. Yeah. So then we started to look at, okay, which are other places we could go that we haven't explored? And I remember we were sitting down with the team and we made a list of top 200 or so cities in the world. We ranked them by about 15 parameters, like population, GDP, number of taxi drivers, regulation, whatnot. And then we tried to objectively rank it. And then the top of the list were all African cities. And we were quite puzzled by that because we hadn't even thought of that.

Yeah.

None of us, nobody from the team had even been to Africa in their life. So we thought, okay, what the hell, let's give it a try. But the problem was we had effectively spent our entire seed round on these other countries. So we didn't have any budget left. So we're like, okay, what's the cheapest way to validate this? So we just set up Facebook ads. in all these markets and just saying, hey, Bolt has launched. And then we just saw where we're getting the biggest signups. And then we resorted the list and still all the African cities were in the top. And then we're like, okay, like clearly this is resonating with the customers there. We have product market fit. So we quickly hired a couple of honestly like young people, people from university, basically kids to go and start training the drivers. And we launched and, you know, 6 months in Johannesburg was the biggest city we had globally. It was like— 30% of the business. And then it was obvious, we got to double down on this. We got to do all the emerging markets in the world. So we launched everywhere across Africa, in Mexico, we went as far as Azerbaijan and so on. So a lot of these relatively low-income countries, we saw the product-market fit was great.

So now that you've sort of had the benefit of running that experiment across those 15 parameters or so, like what were the decisive ones that that actually seem to be predictive of like, this is a really good fit for this sort of a place?

Number one metric, 80% of the value is number of drivers.

Number of drivers, just like the availability that you can—

Very similar. And still to this day, it's the by far biggest criteria that shows whether ride-hailing is going to be successful in that city or not. What we see is that generally, actually in most markets around the world, equilibrium over time trends to a level where you have more than 1% of everybody in the city is a driver for ride-hailing. So it's a lot of people. And that is quite consistent. The problem now is that in some other parts of the world, the number is 1/10 of that. And usually it has nothing to do with consumers' willingness to use ride-hailing. It usually just boils down to regulation. And actually, the European markets are some of the worst in the world. So places like Germany and Italy have 1/10 of the size of the ride-hailing market they should have because of the taxi lobby, which has managed to basically keep these licenses capped and it's very hard for new drivers to enter. So we actually think Europe has tremendous potential over time once these regulatory obstacles get lifted.

How do you think about competing in some of the markets that historically you haven't focused on? Like, you know, the US was a place maybe you went to begin with, but then sort of were like, hey, this isn't our race right now. You know, is that something that starts to become important at a certain point or not necessarily?

So overall, how we think about it is that the The European market can be, uh, large enough that this can sustain a company that's worth hundreds of billions of dollars. So transportation is such a large market that we don't even need to go anywhere else than just Europe. Not to mention once you add Middle East, Africa, other places on top. So again, our view more is that we want to focus on, on EMEA and then make sure we win in as many cities as possible. We build the best product we can across all these transportation needs. So everything from micromobility to ride-hailing to food delivery, and then we try to build all these categories. In that sense, it's less about spreading thin and trying to go everywhere, but really the network effects in this business matter a lot. So you rather want to go deep than thin.

There are a lot of amazing inflection points in your story when I looked back on it, of near-death moments, bloody noses, and then, you know, could have been crazy wins at the different times. Well, I'd like to talk about a few of them actually, but one of them that you tell is about essentially trying to convince someone in the Serbian mob. I'd wonder if you can take us back to that story and how you felt in that moment. And you've talked about how it changed your business, but I wonder if there was almost a sense of disappointment that you had to change your business in that circumstance.

Yeah. Absolutely. So the context is that it was Probably around 2014 or '15. So we were maybe 1.5 years into the business. It was working really well in Estonia. And the original model was actually slightly different than how we operate today in the sense that we, the first idea was let's start off with just connecting individual drivers to passengers. We tried that. That actually didn't really work in most of our markets at the time. So then we pivoted and we started working with taxi companies. So we built them dispatching software, fleet management software. So it was sort of actually like a SaaS business to some extent with a marketplace attached to it. And, uh, that worked quite well in a, in a couple of markets. But then, uh, I remember I was going to Serbia because we thought this is potentially a big market for us and everybody was using old school radios. So clearly using a smartphone-based modern software system would have been so much better. And then I remember we went into, um, the, the meeting with the biggest taxi company in the city. Which supposedly had thousands of cars with this local salesman. And then we go there and it's the Soviet-era apartment block. We're thinking like, how can the biggest taxi company in the city be here? This makes no sense. And then they take us up to like a 5th floor apartment and we go in and it's like just a random small like apartment. It's very strange. And you have somebody cooking food there and clearly some bodyguards. And so they say, hey, go to the back room. And then you have this this guy there that's sitting, you know, behind the table much larger than this and smoking a cigar, pistol on the table. And we can tell that, okay, clearly, like, I mean, our pitch is probably not going to be top of their agenda today, but what do you do, right? I mean, you're 20-something years old in Serbia. So you're like, hey, what the hell? Let's go through with the pitch and see what happens. And yeah, that was a wild experience. So of course, you know, he didn't say much other than saying that, no, we never want to see you in the city again. Hmm. And so yeah, we exit the room. I go down with our sales guy, tell him, sorry, this is what it is. You know, we're gonna, you know, stop this experiment here. We gotta let you go. There's nothing to do. And still to this day, we haven't been able to go back to Serbia because like just how violent and like regulatory captured this industry is in many places around the world.

Have there been other cities that have been similarly hard? Maybe not in that dramatic a sense, but where you're like, literally the operations in the city just don't work because it's too hard for whatever reason.

Effectively, Italy is like that.

Oh, really?

Still to this day. And, uh, it's, uh, as I was saying, I mean, it's less than 1/10 of what it could be. So you can do some level of operations on the fringes. You'll find maybe a handful of drivers willing to sign up with us, but reality is that the vast majority of them, they just don't want to compete, uh, in that same way. And then it's very regulatory captured.

Huh. How interesting. Um, you've also, I think, I think said in various points that, uh, there were periods in your life after many rejections that you never wanted to talk to a VC again. If you had to pick your worst VC meeting or the Serbian mobster, which do you pick?

Oh, I mean, the Serbian mobster, I think, was actually, I think, a good meeting because in that sense it frustrated me so much. And I think that's also necessary fuel you need to have as an entrepreneur. So if you really see that there's something so broken in the world, I think that can actually drive you for many years to go and then do something about

it. How do you survive being on Klarna's board, given that you hate to talk to VCs? Because I imagine there must be a bunch of them.

Well, actually, I mean, I don't necessarily have anything against the VCs. I think that just most VCs, especially at that time, were coming from this like very superficial herd mentality mindset. So in reality, they all just followed whatever was the latest trend. And if they were like, hey, it's a network effect business, they only wanted to invest in one company who was already clearly big in the space and they ignored everybody else, even though the metrics and the rationale could have actually been great, but they just They didn't even intellectually entertain that, or they focused on relatively boring, I think, B2B SaaS applications, which, you know, sure, somebody has to fund that as well. But I mean, I don't think that's necessarily what the original venture risk is supposed to be. So in that sense, I think on the Klaranos board and with our board, we're actually very lucky to have some of the best VCs in the world. I mean, from Sequoia, I think these guys are brilliant. And I think they were also able to see through this herd mentality and figure out that Bolt is a unique company that can still win in the space.

Yes. Thank God no VCs have a herd mentality today, right? We're past those stages. Another key moment in your story that I wanted to come back to is you had an offer to sell when you were 22 for €100 million to Daimler. How long did it take you to think about that and how seriously did you think about it? Because it's a big number.

Sure. Honestly, I didn't even entertain it seriously for a second.

Really?

So I knew that this company can be one of the biggest companies ever in the history of Europe if we get— if we play this right. There's obviously going to be a lot of risks attached and everything can go poorly, but I thought that this is once in a generation opportunity I must pursue. And then we discussed it with my 2 other co-founders and they said, hey, I mean, you know, we're obviously happy to take the money after a couple of years. Like, I mean, this seems like a fantastic, really rare outcome after a few years of work. But we trust you. So if you think that the company can be much bigger one day, then we're going to do it. And it was a very short discussion.

Was there ever a moment where, I don't know, the next time things looked really scary, they wanted to come back and say like, how could you do this to us, man? We could have been out.

No, actually, I think that like the next years after that, I mean, they were tough. We were always being the underdog with very little funding, but the business was doing really well. We constantly saw every month the metrics were going up. We've got a couple of other acquisition offers during the next few years. So yeah, I don't think we've ever had a moment where anybody's regretted not doing that.

Yes, I'm sure. That's good that there— yeah, you didn't have suddenly a big near-death moment. You had this concept around COVID and you mentioned how that period was sort of transformative for your business of overtaking in the rain, which I thought was such an exciting way of talking about it. In some sense, there's always some part of the business or the landscape that's reigning. Where are the places where you see room to overtake nowadays?

There's still so much to do in the core business, even after more than a decade, like ride-hailing is by no means done and the market is growing quickly. Um, but I think actually what's going to define the next decade is clearly self-driving cars because it's just going to be the biggest revolution of how cities are designed in the first place. Not to mention just how it's going to impact the ride-hailing business. So I think this is going to be the biggest opportunity where we need to balance How do we put our best people on the existing business, which has a long way to grow, versus do we allocate those resources into the self-driving era and then try to win in that new emerging space? So that, that's something we're working on.

Yeah, I'd love to actually dive into that more. You're sort of attacking the AV opportunity through a series of some partners that you're working with. Why was that the structure that made most sense? Why were these the partners that made most sense?

Oh, I think about the self-driving car technology stack itself. There's quite a few similarities to how you would be training any other model, like an LLM, modern one nowadays. So you need tremendous amounts of compute. You clearly need the right talent to build the right algorithms. But really the key bottleneck is data. And when we look at LLMs and why there's quite many of them in the world, so many from China included, is because you have this corpus of internet data you can train on. So that gets you quite far. That just doesn't exist for self-driving cars. Yeah. So if you're a new startup coming up in Europe, just can't go and have this like common crawl of taking this massive amount of data and training on that. And I think that's been actually inhibiting the access of more startups to enter the space and then build great self-driving or other robotics use cases in the physical world. So how we think about it is like, that is one thing where we can help. We run the biggest, um, ride-hailing network from Europe in 50 countries. Uh, we can quite easily go and help set up this data as basically sort of a base infrastructure and then give that for other companies to build on. So if we fix that, I think we're going to be enabling much more companies to succeed in the space as well.

And in terms of enabling it, what does it look like to say, hey, let's try and do the scale of data capture needed with the Bolt fleet? Is that like a massive retrofitting job? Like, yeah.

So first of all, I mean, the landscape is moving very quickly. So I mean, it's still unclear, like, What exact data will you need? And I mean, obviously Elon has his view on that, that you can go with camera only. I think the industry consensus more today is that like you still need LiDARs and radars and other sensors as well. So in that sense, what we're doing for the time being is that we're just trying to collect as much as possible. So we have some cars going with a full sensor set. We have some cars we're now planning to do with just camera only and just collect as much data as possible because our expectation is that over time you can build these multimodal models that will be able to ingest

I think you're partnered with Stellantis and Pony.ai as part of sort of this initiative. How do the different players play into it?

So our view is that over time, there's going to be many AV software providers. We don't think it's just going to be an industry dominated by one or two. And then, you know, we can go into more detail why we think that's the case. But so just Pony, we think today is one of the best in the world and they're able to move extremely quickly and then launch with us together in Europe already this year. So that's why we want to get learning as quickly as possible. But over time, if there's going to be other companies emerging from Europe that get there, then absolutely want to partner with them as well.

How have you thought about, you know, where to roll this out most? Like, are you picking city by city, starting with, you know, your home city or, you know, other places?

There's a couple of criteria how we think about it. One clearly is the economics. So the higher is the cost per kilometer, the better, because still the technology today is quite expensive. And clearly, I mean, Just, you should start from places where you get the best yield on that asset. So that's one factor. The other is that, uh, we're looking at which cities are actually open to this because clearly, especially in Europe, it's quite a heavily regulated space. So you need to find cities and countries that actually are willing to do these exceptions and then let you in. So, you know, once you sort of apply that, those, that framework to Europe, I mean, you're gonna have pretty obvious cities at the top of that list.

And, and what do you think the economics of of autonomy start to look like at maturity? Because I imagine that could be very transformative for your business.

At least how things are currently trending, we see the economics are absolutely incredible in the sense that we think that over time, the cost of one of these robotaxi cars will be in the near future in the ballpark of $50,000. Over time, it can come down even more drastically than that, closer to a regular consumer car price. But each of these cars can be theoretically doing well more than $100,000 of revenue per year. With an extremely high margin because there's no driver in there, right? So, so in that sense, we think that the unit economics in terms of CapEx to, to the yield is going to be amazing. And over time, once you have more of these AV companies, then obviously there's going to be price competition and those will be competed down. But in the meantime, it's, uh, we think there's plenty of economic value there to, to build many, many companies in this space.

You, you mentioned the industry structure of AVs. I'd love to hear more about how you think about that.

So there's a couple of ways how this can go, but why we're pretty bullish that there's going to be many companies on the AV software side, not just dominated by one winner is because fundamentally we think this is going to be a threshold-based model rather than just a winner-take-all model. And what I mean by that is that when you look at how most of these safety-related industries are regulated, whether it's cars itself or airplanes, you normally have a safety threshold that's defined by the regulator. And once you clear it, you're good to go. So it's not like that they typically just pick one or two, the best in the market, but once you clear a threshold that's sort of publicly acceptable, then, then you can enter And that's a key distinction because that means that even though Tesla theoretically or Waymo can be 5% better at first, that doesn't mean that you can't even enter the playing ground. As long as you're able to demonstrate that you're superhuman up to a certain level, you can start to compete. And then obviously once you get data, you can keep on improving and then hopefully catch up over time. That's one factor. And the other thing is that we've got to keep in mind, I think it's a very different technology than many of the others we've seen over the last couple of decades. And I think most European leaders are realizing that this is not a technology we can just import and not have sovereign technology here in Europe. So you don't want to have a future where you have tens of millions of these robotaxis going around your cities.

Yes.

And all of them are just controlled by China or US.

Yes.

And you don't have any local control. I think most EU politicians are realizing that this is not really a stable national security or, you know, data privacy situation they want to be in. So there's clearly a growing momentum of of people who say that, hey, we need to regulate this differently and we need to invest in local companies to build this competency.

How do you think about the sort of relative benefits and drawbacks of the more sort of vertically integrated player like a Waymo or a Tesla and the approach that you're taking, which is more similar to Uber's approach too at this point? Yeah, how do you see that playing out?

Generally, I'm more in favor of doing full vertical integration just in the early stages of an industry. Typically, enables you to move faster. However, I think uniqueness here is that it's such a massively complicated and capital, um, demanding industry that it's very hard for any one company to succeed there. So just if you think about the CapEx needs alone, we think there's room to have millions of robotaxis in Europe. If you apply then a $50,000 price tag to each one of them, I mean, we're talking about hundreds of billions of dollars of CapEx. So that is extremely hard for any one company to fund. We think there's going to be an ecosystem of of fleet owners, banks, et cetera, that will come together to just finance the fleet side of it. Not to mention the depots. You need to fill physical real estate to manage these cars, repair them, charge them, and so on. And that's even before we get to the software R&D, which actually I think in comparison is going to be a relatively small cost versus the CapEx of this.

You think it, the software necessary to achieve autonomy or the model necessary to achieve autonomy won't cost Tens of billions, maybe?

So historically, outside in, you look at Waymo's financials, it seems like they've invested ballpark $20 billion to get to this point.

Okay.

Really interesting. And I think they've done that over the last 15 years. And frankly, most of it is a waste because it was done in a very different era. I think now the compute is far faster, far cheaper, sensors are far cheaper. I think the models have progressed drastically. So they've actually had to rewrite their entire code base anyway, 2 or 3 times. So, you know, realistically, if they got here with $20 billion and you started today, I think you could do it with a Hmm.

Fascinating. Yeah, that, uh, I hadn't considered that, but that actually makes total sense. Maybe we can chat a little bit about the culture of the company and, um, how you come up with new ideas, how you sort of manage your, your inner game. Let's, let's say one place that maybe we can start is you, you have a concept of, uh, culture market fit, which I think is really interesting. What does that mean? And, and how is it sort of reflected in Bolt?

I think there's quite a lot of talk going on about product market fit, obviously, for the last decade. Um, however, it's equally important that you really have a company culture that fits the market needs equally well. And what I mean by that is that you should probably apply a different philosophy if you're building something that's quite low risk and then an area where you can iterate quickly versus something where you have relatively high risk thresholds, much longer cycles of development. So the approach you would probably apply to building a B2B SaaS business or maybe a consumer social app are probably going to be quite different than how you'd be building like medical devices. And at the end of the day, as a founder, I think you need to understand what are your characteristics and does that actually fit to the market that you're going to be building in? Because I'd imagine it's going to be very difficult for me to build something in sort of an enterprise software type of business. Like I much rather enjoy the dynamics of being in a more operational consumer side business. So yeah, you just got to be honest with yourself where you have the right fit.

What are the parts of, of the ride-hailing and logistics market? What do they demand of your culture most?

I'd say operational excellence. Um, it is really a business where you have to optimize the bps. So every cent that you can shave off on a trip, once you scale it up to— we're now at nearly, uh, $15 billion of volume. I mean, like, you know, once you get to that type of stage, you know, then every cent you can shave off matters a lot.

Yes.

So, so in that sense, uh, that's not something that you necessarily have to think about if you're selling an extremely high gross margin, uh, gross profit margin product. And some people enjoy that. They enjoy these efficiency gains and then tweaking the last cents off. But I think for a lot of people, they have completely different skills or priorities in life.

One of the things that I noticed when I looked through your Twitter, which is something that I do, and I always feel a little uncomfortable going back through thousands of tweets, but it was interesting to me how often you actually tweeted about writing or writing advice. You tweeted, you know, some things from Paul Graham, from Sam Altman, Jeff Bezos and his writing culture. Obviously, as a writer, I sort of immediately pick up on that. Yeah, how do you think about the importance of writing? What is the role of writing in Bolt's culture?

It's at the core. So we've actually adopted a variation of how Amazon's been doing their written meetings, probably already 6 years ago in the company. So every meeting starts off with a written document. There's no meetings without it, including one-on-ones. So we always come there, we take the first 10 to 20 minutes for a reading session. So everybody just sits in silence, reads the document. We add comments during Google Docs real time. So it's sort of a team collaborative session effective of reading. And only after that is done, then we start the discussion live. And we found that works really well for us.

Why does that fit your brain best? Like, you implemented it for some reason because it spoke to something in you, right?

I'm a big believer that writing forces people to clarify their thinking. Generally, when I find that people don't show up to a meeting with written preparation, it often turns out to be far less effective rather than forcing them to take the time upfront to write something that's really crisp and then another 20 people can read it and understand it immediately. And at least for me, I just absorb information from reading text far faster as well. So those are the 2 key benefits. But then over time, what we understood is that just having this asynchronous ability where you give this document to 10 people and everybody can read it at their own pace and focus on the paragraphs they care about the most and add comments there is far more effective. effective than you force everybody linearly to follow a person's presentation live. Because just, you know, otherwise, you know, you might be passionate about one area and not the other, and this forces you in a format that's not effective.

What are the other places where Bolt's culture maybe most reflects the way your brain works? You know, I think of the writing with Bezos. Also, you know, Jensen has his thing where he says to everyone has to write me an email at the end of the week. Like, what are the practices that reflect that

for There's, there's very many. Um, but I think, um, one area that, um, is really at the core of how we hire people is, is we try to find people who are smart generalists. So generally we look for people with high IQ, high problem-solving ability, high ambition, good team players, uh, who are not necessarily that deep and narrow domain experts, but people who can work across different fields. Because my expectation is that if I engage on, on any topic with anybody really in the company, I would expect them to understand the full problem around them and not just sort of be narrow in that. And that, of course, really changes what type of people you attract to the company and how you design the whole company and then what you expect of people.

You've talked before about how, you know, in the early days of Bolt, you Googled how to interview someone. Now that you're running this version of the interview and you're looking for these smart generalists, like, where do you find you get the most signal? And what are the things that you maybe are looking for in those moments?

It's still something we're iterating on, but clearly a historic track record of having accomplished something meaningful is a massive signal because I find this quite rare that somebody would show up to an interview being 30 years old, they haven't accomplished anything meaningful before that, and then they suddenly turn out to be a fantastic performer. Usually there's something in their childhood of, you know, they were selling Pokémon cards or whatever it is that, you know, they've started on, you know, hacking, building websites. You look at their public Git commits or whatever it is. You know, I think there's usually like some track record of these exceptional people having already done something meaningful in their early, early ages already.

I also read somewhere that you give everyone a copy of Andy Grove's book. What is it? High Output? High Management Output?

High Output Management.

High Output Management. There we go. I jumbled it all up. Why that book? Like, why is that the one that you think, like, you got to know this if you're stepping in the door?

So we actually just give it to managers because I think it's the best, most practical management And then very well resembles my stoic pragmatic view of how management should be done. So I think it's a very good just instruction manual of giving people the basics what they should do. We don't treat it religiously in the sense that if people want to adapt to that and run their own leadership style, that's fine. But at least they need to have the same common baseline.

Is Andy Grove someone that you sort of look to as a, maybe not inspiration, but as an interesting character? I imagine there's even in his personal background, there's some links there, right?

Sure, but yeah, I actually never had like one specific idol that I've looked up to. I try to learn from all the best out there. So I've probably read thousands of these business biographies from all the leaders from Nike to Amazon to Elon to many others.

Yes.

And I think all of them have strengths and weaknesses, and I try to pragmatically apply them to my life and both.

Yes. Yeah, I think there was an anecdote you've said before where when you were 24, you were at a dinner with with, I don't know, Warren Buffett, Bill Gates, and some other folks. And your response to that was like, eh, these guys are just human.

Yeah. Well, I think that these things tend to get put on this pedestal where these founders are like some magical demigods effectively. At least that's how it's often portrayed in media. But then once you actually get to know them, you understand that, you know, sure, obviously they're very impressive people and they've done something absolutely amazing. But everybody makes some mistakes. Everybody's human, and you shouldn't just copy them blindly.

Yes. When you try and reflect on your own abilities, where do you find your highest spike is? Like, where are you the top basis point or even higher?

I think that I'm generally quite good at just absorbing new information and then breaking it down into the underlying structures and really understanding what's the sort of cog in the machine that's going to make the biggest impact. And that, of course, this is something that I need to do on a daily basis at Bolt because we operate in so diverse geographies, so different business lines. So there's always something new every week that comes up. So just like having this ability to really quickly go into a topic, understand what's, what's really important here and make a quick fix is something that's sort of a prerequisite to do this job well.

You're like a constant relevancy sorter where you can sort of just calculate that.

So I think that it's very different than if I was for example, running a hardware company where you have this one product and you run that for multi-year cycle. You know, I think that would be something that I'm probably not most accustomed to. Like, I enjoy this velocity that every week you have some new problems that emerge.

You've said before that in maybe the early days of Bolt, maybe this was in response to the early days of Bolt and the number of rejections you have to face is that people can be wrong about a lot of things, which is just like a very crisp way of explaining a truth about the What do you think like people tend to be most wrong about now generally, but also with regard to the business?

So I can start how I think about like in our industry, what people get often wrong. And I see a similar pattern that I used to see actually 12 years ago in the ride-hailing space, which was people had this, again, like high-level superficial understanding that, hey, there's such a thing as a network effect. And therefore there's just going to be one company that will dominate ride-hailing all around the world. Clearly a decade later is empirically wrong. I mean, there's so many multi-billion dollar ride-hailing or transportation tech companies all around. So like, clearly that hasn't played out like this. And I think the same issue or same mistake is being applied to the self-driving era, which is that, again, I think most people have this idea that it's just going to be one or two companies that get there. Yeah. But I mean, empirically, you look at the world, there's so many self-driving car companies out there, including 3 exceptional ones from China. That we think are already serving thousands of trips per day, and like the technology is quite advanced. Then if you add on top of that all the curves we're seeing from AI in terms of GPU costs, data collection, better models, etc., you know, fast forward, like you know, it makes all the sense to me in the world that over time the cost to build this technology is going to come down, and there will be many companies operating in the space, not just one. And I think this is something where investors today have. literally hundreds of billions of dollars on this being a monopoly. And I just see empirical evidence. I don't think that's going to be the case.

What about outside of the industry? What are the things that you think people, that frustrate you most that people get wrong?

I'm starting to see this change gradually, but there's still way too much fatalism about Europe in tech. I think there's so many people who think that we shouldn't even try and it's impossible to change. And people in Europe don't want to work hard and innovate and we've lost all those values. Because my view is that's way too pessimistic. Like, that's not a world I want to live in. I'm much rather optimistic. I think we can reform these things. We can get Europe back on track and then be a winner in technology again.

Well, I'd love to ask a couple of abstract questions to end with. If you were given unlimited resources and no operational constraints, what's an experiment you wish you could run?

The first thing that comes to mind is actually we had this dinner discussion the other day with some European entrepreneurs. Which was that if we imagine that the cables were cut with the US and we wouldn't have any US technology companies left in Europe, then how long would it take for us to replicate that? Like how quickly could we build our own social networks and smartphones and all that tech that we're currently reliant on from the US? And I think that would be a very interesting era to live through. I think the consensus was we could probably get there in 3 years. I think we could maybe even do it faster.

What do you think the biggest challenge would be of that?

Probably the underlying sort of chips or semiconductors is probably like technology-wise the hardest thing. I think everything else, you know, replicating, you know, e-commerce or social media and so on, like I think like absolutely that is possible in 2 years.

But then that means you think we could in Europe create a, yeah, the TSMC, the version of TSMC here within 3 years.

Yeah, I think that's the single hardest bit.

But even 3 years seems, that's, that's Well, we

have ASML. So I mean, obviously that's, I think, the hardest part of the entire supply chain. So luckily we have that in Europe. Otherwise, I think it would be obviously way harder.

Yeah, fair. What's a tradition from another culture that you think we should adopt more widely, or indeed another era?

Ambition, I think, is really the thing that's lacking in Europe that we discussed. I think that again, we gotta make it so we start to celebrate great success and entrepreneurship again. And it's okay if people aim for the moons and then fail. I think that's a much better approach than being risk-averse and not even taking that shot in the first place.

You said you love to read sort of books about legendary CEOs. Are you a student of history in that respect?

To some extent. I mean, I still think I'm just scratching the surface of everything to learn, but doing my best.

If you were given the chance If you had to assign a book to everyone on Earth to read and understand, what would you want to give to everyone?

That's a very difficult question. What actually would make sense for 8 billion people? The Precipice is one book that comes to mind, which is talking about these existential risks we're facing as humanity, and how I think the next 50 years are going to be defining whether we make it and become the civilization that's going to explore the light cone and the stars and go multi-planetary. Or we're going to end up in some sort of a self-inflicted disaster and effectively wipe ourselves out. So I think that is something everybody on Earth should be thinking about.

I think Toby Ord is the author who, he came on the podcast actually. So I really love that book also. I think he gave it like a 1 in 6 chance of catastrophe in the next century. What's your instinct on that? Do you think that's optimistic, pessimistic?

Talking to people in the AI space, I think they give it 50-50.

Well, that's a sobering way to end, but I know you're an optimist, so we'll hope it's better than that. But thank you so much. It was really fun to chat, Markus.

Thank you. Great questions.

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