Outsmarting Uber: Why Bolt Wins in Europe
Episode publishedPodcast: The a16z ShowThe a16z Show
Transcript preview
Preview only
The mobility market in general is the least competitive in the world. Bolt is the leading shared mobility business. We operate in more than 50 countries with a mission to replace people's private cars. A lot of the taxi companies obviously saw this as a threat, and then they started blocking their drivers from joining. When I was in Serbia, I was trying to sign up the local biggest taxi company there. I realized clearly these guys are the mafia. They don't care about the customer experience whatsoever, And that's when we pivoted back hard into just working directly with individual drivers.
You have raised, I believe, around $2,000,000,000. They raised 24,000,000,000 Mhmm. Before IPO. Do you wanna share a little bit more about what that capital efficiency taught you?
Constraints really force you to be innovative, force you to be efficient. When you're starting a business as a 19 year old in a small country with barely any VC ecosystem, obviously, you gotta make buy with being 10 or a 100 times more clever than your competition.
Bolt started in Estonia, a country of just over a million people. Today, it operates across more than 50 countries, competing in ride hailing, food delivery, scooters, grocery delivery, and increasingly autonomous mobility. In this conversation, Gabriel Vasquez speaks with Bolt founder and CEO Markus Willig about scaling globally from day one, competing against much larger rivals, and why operational excellence can become a lasting competitive advantage. They also discuss AI, self driving vehicles, building in Europe, and why Markus believes the next decade of transportation will be defined as
We're here today with Markus Velik, the founder and CEO of BOLT. Markus, welcome to the ACCC show.
Great to be here.
For those of us that haven't heard about BOLT, can you introduce what BOLT is and give us a little bit about the scale of the business?
Sure. Bolt is the leading shared mobility business coming from out of Europe. We operate in more than 50 countries with a mission to replace people's private cars. And we cover services as diverse as ride hailing, car rentals, scooters, electric bikes, restaurant delivery, grocery delivery. So it's quite a wide breadth of products across a massive geographic diversity.
Awesome. And let's get a little bit about the story of how old were you when you started the business? How did the idea came about? Where were you Mhmm. At that moment in time, and how did everything get started?
Keep exploring with a free account.
A free account preserves the short preview. Upgrade to Pro for the full transcript and episode chat.