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Markus Villig founded Bolt, a vehicle company in Tallinn, in 2013 at the age of 19. Seven years later, his company is worth 1.7 million euros.
It hasn’t been a smooth ride. Villig launched a budget of 5,000 euros and went ahead when investors told him to give up, just as Uber was collecting billions dollars. He says getting the passenger company off the ground was “the hardest six months I’ve ever had.”
The company survived the first few months because his team was “so convinced that we were doing something special and better,” Villig says in a call to Zoom in Tallinn. Bolt, which offers electronic scooters and electronic bicycles, as well as the delivery of food and packages, has just passed another undoubted period – the pandemic. In the first close of last year, businesses fell 85 percent overnight.
Villig co-founded the company with his older brother, who already had experience working in the technology industry. Markus Villig, however, remained in high school and had to work hard to convince Tallinn taxi drivers to sign up for his application.
He saw a gap in the transport market in the Estonian capital (where Uber was slow to start up), the city’s taxi services were “tremendous”. The case of consumers launching Taxify, as it was known before the new brand in 2019, was obvious. Taxi drivers, Villig says, had dirty cars and “needed ages to get there.” In the spring of 2013, after an investigation after finishing school, he went to the taxi ranks to find out how things were working.
According to Villig, drivers were stuck in old taxi companies, often having to pay high monthly fees and not earning much in return. But Villig cut his job short by convincing drivers to hand it over to a 19-year-old who had no app yet to work. “When… You’re raising an idea, 90 percent of them will tell you to F-off,” he laughs.
Meanwhile, a freelance developer convinced him to build a prototype platform, but it would cost € 5,000. Villig spent months convincing his parents to lend him money.
Over time he gathered about 100 drivers ready to take the opportunity. But, when he launched it in August 2013, not all of them were supposed to be online, and he realized that many had provided false relationship data. “Actually, I only had a few dozen,” he says.
He started going to taxi booths and getting into cars: “So I went there, I took it [their] phone, signed [them] up in place. . . and open this app every time you come to work. ”
It had hundreds of drivers that winter and provided operational service. About nine months later he raised 70,000 euros. Six months later, it raised another 1.4 million euros, mainly from local investors. By 2014, “we had good traction, and we had a product that worked well in Estonia,” he says.
Villig then had to figure out how to move into other markets, but in 2015 and 2016, “Uber became a player to raise more money than any tech company.” “It was unprecedented. No one raised that number. Not Google, not Facebook, no one ”.
In May 2016, for example, Uber grew $ 5.6 million, valued at $ 66,000n (although its current capitalization is $ 91 billion after the initial public offering in 2019).
The result: “Not a single VC would touch us,” Villig added. “The next two years were very hard for us because you might think we have a lack of funding and resources against the company with billions of dollars. It wasn’t really a direct fight,” he says.
He responded by running as fast as he could as a beginner and believes “those two or three years have really made us”. With limited resources, Bolt spent the money carefully. This culture persists and gives the company an advantage, Villig says.
When I give him the capital-intensive transportation business model, he noted that while Bolt raised the most funding he has had so far last year, “it’s still much less than most of our members, yet the business model is still viable and the company is working and it’s growing at a pace we’re happy with. ”
He condemns the tendency of new Silicon Valley companies to be “blitzscale,” where they raise large sums of money and then spend what they need to “win the market”. According to this theory, “when you win the market you are a monopoly and you will always get that money back.”
While acknowledging that the US trend is becoming more widespread, it contrasts with what he believes is a cautious approach in Europe. “It makes sense to take your time, build things on the right foundation and in the long run, that’s the way to earn, not just spend it all in the first few years,” he says.
Prudence has borne fruit. Investors returned to Bolter after proving that the strategy was effective and that there was room for multiple winners in the transportation industry.
Although the investment can be repaid, Villig says “we are still very careful”. Bolts can spend less on the market, for example, and lower driver commission rates so they can make more money.
Bolt uses e-bikes in five cities and 130,000 electric scooters in more than 100 cities in 15 countries © Jose Sena Goulao / EPA-EFE
A biased view of the company – more than that 50m customer and 1.5m driver Across 40 countries, mostly in Europe and Africa, it also served to prepare for the coronavirus pandemic. Although business collapsed dramatically, Villig believed it was essential to tackle the crisis from a long-term perspective. How to reduce costs without creating online problems?
Bolt now decided not to cut 2,000 workers. “We didn’t see the point in going to people we would have to re-hire in six months,” Villig says. Instead, “we asked who was there to reduce the salary by 30% and – to me, surprisingly – he took a large number of people happy [it]. That helped us get through the tough times. “
In contrast, Uber has almost cut it 6,700 employees – About 23 percent his staff.
In the last report by the author University of OxfordHowever, Bolt was one of the worst because of the working conditions he offers for workers in the concert economy. But he declined to comment on the findings.
Three questions for Markus Villig
Who is your leadership hero?
I don’t think there is an individual. But what I’ve tried over the years is to study all the CEOs who have come before me – so Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates and Elon Musk and so on. But I try to make the most of them and practice them in my daily life. There is not a single idol.
What was the first leadership lesson you learned?
Clarity is everything. What I often see is that people get into that way of over-thinking, to engage in very complex ways [with] how people and goals should be turned on and what they should do. In the end, humans are relatively simple creatures; the more things you can simplify the better they work. So every time we have a goal, we actually reduce it to a couple of sentences. It’s easier than ever to be a junior leader [it would be for] top leader.
What would you do if you weren’t a creator?
I was doing another scientific career that I was thinking about as a kid, so I would probably do something in physics or math. I have always been very passionate about it. I went to the Olympics in high school [competitions] and so on. But unfortunately I haven’t had time to deal with it [those] passions in the last decade.
Bolt’s revenue in 2019 was € 148 million. It was announced in May 2020 Capital raising of 100 million euros, as a convertible note, said the company would allow it in due course keep climbing Development of transport, micromobility and food distribution businesses in Europe and Africa.
The money came from a single investor in Naya Capital Management, which was a major investor in the company in July 2019 for a round of $ 67 million in Series C financing. Bolt An additional 150 million euros it received 20 million euros in December and March International Finance Corporation, Part of the World Bank.
Last summer, when the city began to move again, Villig says it was “faster than we expected.” And the growth of micro-mobility and food delivery services accelerated as a result of the pandemic. “We quickly surpassed our goal of offering scooter sharing in 45 cities, and now we aim to be the largest micromobility operator in Europe by 2021,” says Villig.
Bolt currently has 130,000 electric scooters in more than 100 cities in 15 countries.
He hasn’t always been a fan of electronic scooters, admitting that the economy is becoming a “difficult vertical business to run”. In his view, Bolt has a unique focus because it produces its own hardware, Villig says, enabling a scooter that is faster and cheaper to fix. And by providing skateboards, rides and food distribution services, technology and marketing costs are shared and savings are passed on to customers.
It has come a long way for someone who wanted to “get into technology” for his company, but had no idea how to start a business. “I started talking about‘ how to start, ’” Villig says.
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