EE505 - Mentor Moment: Timo Boldt: Why Great Businesses Embrace Complexity

Welcome to this week's Mentor Moment. Today, your mentor is Timo Bolt. He's the founder of Gousto. If you've ever looked at a simple product or business and thought, "How hard can it be?" This mentor will reset your expectations of what's possible and how it can be achieved. This is this week's mentor, Timo. How did you finance all this?

So I definitely feel like I played the game on hard modus for, like, 13 years now, and it's been, like, the hardest. Fresh food, shipping it across the entire country, building supply chains, building AI. We have 17 AI products that power everything. Physical factories, hundreds of people working in a physical, cold environment, packing stuff. Um, marketing teams, finance teams, you name it. You can't be good at two things. You have to be great at, like, seven things, whereas the world is telling you to double down on one thing. Um, and so yeah, it's about high standards. It's about really kind of embracing complexity. Now, I see kind of the complexity, the vertical integration as our mote and our opportunity to, like s- you know, squeeze value for the customer, really deliver for the customer in a way no one else can. And so we have the world's kind of leading proposition in our space, the most choice, shortest lead time, best price point, but we really had to fight for this.

Mm.

And on the way to where we are now, you know, we had to raise hundreds of millions of pounds to make this a reality.

There we go. [laughs]

Yeah. [laughs]

That's the answer.

It's, it's a capital-intense business.

Yeah. Like, even as you're-- There's g- there's loads of things I hadn't even thought of as you were listing them out there. I'm going, "Oh, yeah, all the, all this other stuff, like the cold units, the things like that." So at what point did you do your first raise?

I think... So I invested my life savings. You know, not much, not much, but I in- I managed to invest, like, £70,000 saved from working in finance. All I had. Um, left, like, the tiniest amount to just survive. Um, and then I, we, you know, we raised from friends and family. Back then, I didn't know a single VC fund. I didn't know what VC funds do. I didn't know professional angel investors, and so I had to convince friends, family, um, some people I knew from banking who had too much cash, invested 5K, 10K, small tickets. We raised 100K initially. Um, and then we found these angels, CFO, COO of a massive food business, and they, after, like, six months of negotiation, invested 250K and it felt like, you know, we made it. 250K, amazing. Um, but most importantly, they, they brought so much knowledge to the operation, the supply chain. They literally looked at us saying, "Team..." He, he always said, "Timo," in his accent, like, "Timo-

Timo [laughs]

... you're wasting so much money. Like, a- any idiot could give out free food on the street, right? You're not making any margin. This is stupid." And he really kind of got me to think differently about margin and supply chain, and initially, we just thought we, we just need traction and margin will come, and then we build it foundationally, right, with their help. Um, and so they've been an amazing kind of influence on us