Will Shu, founder and CEO of the takeaway delivery app Deliveroo, started the business in February 2013 with his childhood friend Greg Orlowski.
Originally launched in London, Deliveroo now serves food and drink from restaurants and grocery partners all over the world.
Here, Shu talks about his appetite for risk and explains why leaders should spend as much time on the shop floor as in the boardroom.
Did you always want to be a CEO?
I definitely didn’t think I would be a CEO. My first job out of college was working as an investment banking analyst in New York. Those were rough days where I had to work 100 hours a week. The best part of the job was actually getting food delivered for dinner, where we had a generous $25 allowance even back in 2001.
New York had it all, burgers, sushi, cheap and expensive. I was then transferred to London. London had such great restaurants but paled in comparison to New York when it came to delivery. We would eat meals at Tesco in Canary Wharf. I wanted something better.
Greg and I started Deliveroo to solve that problem and that’s where my journey as a CEO began: out of a love of good food!
What do you think makes a good leader?
It’s different for different people. I have a sense of what works for me.
Setting an example through primary research is important at Deliveroo. Doing deliveries, talking to customers, talking to merchants – seeing everything first-hand and obsessing about the experience. Hopefully I do that well.
Secondly, being resilient. You go through a lot building a business and I think, fundamentally, the most important thing is the ability to deal with the ups and downs. At some level, everyone is smart, everyone is competitive, everyone is creative. But not everyone is tough enough. Very few people are. And your team will look to you for that.
What do you think your staff think of you?
That I’m food obsessed, which I suppose isn’t a bad thing when you’re in a business like Deliveroo. I’m always wanting to try out the exciting new restaurants that we sign up to the platform and share my favourites with my team.
But, more generally, I hope they see me as someone who rolls up their sleeves and gets stuck into growing Deliveroo. I think this attitude comes from our very early days when I worked as a rider full-time for the first year of the business, alongside actually running the business – taking customer care calls, making product decisions, signing up restaurants and delivering orders.
I still complete deliveries today, which gives me the truest experience of how our business works – it lets me hear from our riders, restaurant, grocery and retail partners, I can test our latest tech developments myself and interact with our customers directly.
What do you look for when hiring, particularly among your leadership team?
I look for a few traits. I want people to be relentless, competitive and, above all, consumer-focused. They have to be people you want to work with, so they cannot take themselves too seriously and cannot set their personal goals above the company’s.
What’s the best business advice you’ve received?
To go all in. When it comes to entrepreneurship especially, you can’t hedge yourself. You have to dedicate yourself 100% to your one idea and be the person that cares about it the most. As part of that, you also have to step outside your comfort zone and take risks. You will learn from the successes and failures and hone your ability to improvise on the fly, which is one of the most important qualities in any entrepreneur.
What is the biggest challenge in business right now?
If you asked founders and CEOs across London right now, the vast majority would say it’s the challenging economic environment. The last few years have meant that businesses of all sizes have had to be agile and plan for what might be coming round the corner. So, for me, the main challenge is working with my team to spot that next bump in the road and making sure we’ve got the right plans in place not only to overcome it, but to emerge stronger as a result.
What’s the main driver of change in your business?
The evolving expectations of our consumers. Increasingly, they want a one-stop shop so we expanded into retail with ‘Deliveroo Shopping’. This was a really big moment. It is both a significant change and a natural evolution of our offering based on everything we’ve learnt from scaling our grocery business. We’re excited to be adding major retail brands like Screwfix onto the platform as well as independent retailers.
For over a decade we’ve become a part of people’s lives for their food, and now we can support customers in new ways whether they require something urgently for a DIY project, want to surprise a friend with a gift on demand or send their partner some flowers. We’re only just at the start of our retail journey, and I’m really excited about the growth potential here.
What’s been your proudest achievement in your current role?
I’m not a very retrospective person. I’m always looking forward to the next step in Deliveroo’s journey. Over the last 11 years there have been some important milestones, such as seeing great restaurants grow alongside Deliveroo, launching Edition kitchens, launching grocery, launching retail. But business moves fast, and I prefer to keep my eye on the big moments yet to come.
Which book should every business leader read?
It’s got to be From Third World to First: Singapore and the Asian Economic Boom written by Singapore’s first Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew. He was in post for over 30 years and, whatever your opinion of Lee is, it’s an incredible account of how he almost single-handedly took a third-world country and built it into a first-world country in one generation. Certainly, there are a few lessons in there that business leaders could learn from him and his nation’s journey. He’s the ultimate founder.
What one piece of advice would you give your successor?
Don’t mess this up. And I say that only partly in jest! I care deeply about this business, about supporting our restaurants, grocers, and retailers and about the quality experience we deliver to our customers. So my one piece of advice to my successor is you don’t need to do everything, but make sure you care about everything.
