Food-delivery platforms are on the front lines during the coronavirus crisis, with major spikes in demand as communities are confined at home, likely with more time to cook than usual. And while some restaurants have opted to shut down, others have turned to takeout as a lifeline. Yet physical contact between suppliers, couriers and customers must be more tightly managed than ever to reduce the risk of spreading COVID-19.
The gig economy has also come under renewed scrutiny due to a lack of worker protections that have left many facing a stark choice between earning a living or sheltering in place. In the best of times, operating a delivery platform is a balancing act — and these are certainly not the best of times.
We talked to Delivery Hero CEO Niklas Östberg to find out what helearned about managing a global logistics business in the midst of a pandemic.
The Berlin-based company operates a variety of delivery brands across more than 40 markets and 300+ cities globally, employing 22,000 people directly — with a much larger army of self-employed platform workers who hit the streets and make the actual deliveries.
Food remains a core focus — Delivery Hero says it has some 500,000+ restaurants on its platform, making it the largest global food network outside of China — though in recent years it has branched out into other areas, including groceries and pharmaceuticals. An expansion thatproven to be timely.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
TechCrunch: How is the coronavirus impacting your business?
Niklas Östberg: It has an enormous amount of impact in different ways and different regions. We are heavily impacted in some areas, in some a little bit less. In some we have positive impact and in some negative.
What goes for almost everyone except for those who are under complete curfew is that the number of new customers have significantly increased.
We have a lot of new customer segments who didn&t order food before — they now urgently need food and they&ve realized the value of food delivery. And of course there are some [existing] customers who have changed their behavior — now they might not need it as much as before. But definitely one thing that is true for almost every market is that we get a lot of new users and we get a lot of new restaurants.
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Read more: Shipment Hero CEO shares what he's discovered managing logistics throughout a pandemic
Write comment (99 Comments)Whenever a system bursts out, companies emerge to take on its reach by building their product or services atop it. It happened with Twitter and facebook as well as Slack. Now, it&& s occurring with Zoom, the video clip conferencing firm that took the world by storm earlier this year as the coronavirus sent individuals around the globe inside your home as well as right into self-imposed seclusion. It&& s not a brand-new trend. A lot of business are marketing their items through the Zoom Application Marketplace, which released in the loss of 2018 and also now includes 18 pages of service providers. However Grain, founded in 2018 in San Francisco, is amongst the very first to build its whole business around it, at least as a beginning factor. What is that service? According to founder as well as Chief Executive Officer Mike Adams, the concept is to catch web content in Zoom calls that can be saved and shared throughout systems, including Twitter, Dissonance, Notion, Slack as well as iMessages. Say a pupil intends to make note; she or he can tape component of what an instructor is saying to conserve or show to schoolmates, without having to rewatch a whole lecture. The same is real in work settings. By utilizing Grain, a colleague can flag the most crucial little bits of information that was conveyed, after that share simply those little bits using a clip that has its own unique URL. Grain also records material in clips and also permits individuals to transform on shut subtitles if they select. The video can range from 30 secs as much as 10 minutes. They can likewise be strung with each other right into reels to create recap highlights. (These have no time limit.) Not last, customers can cut or adjust the size of the highlight after it has been tape-recorded, along with control who else can modify the video clip afterward to protect against wicked stars from controling the bits. Adams claims he as well as his brother, Jake —-- a previous software designer at Branch Metrics with whom he co-founded the business —-- are also utilizing Grain to conserve bits of precious minutes on Zoom including nieces and also nephews, though the focus is quite on the firms as well as schools that will certainly pay on a per-seat basis for the software. Indeed, Adams states the idea for Grain was really birthed at the last business he co-founded: MissionU, a Zoom-based one-year alternative to a standard university whose trainees weren&& t requested for tuition however rather consented to turn over approximately 15% of their incomes for 3 years once they landed a job that paid$ 50,000 or more. MissionU-- which was founded in 2016 and also raised $11.5 million from investors —-- marketed to WeWork in 2018 in a stock deal before its trainees gained anything (they were released from their income-sharing arrangements). Still, the experiment was long sufficient that Adams, that left MissionU at the time of the sale, says he saw firsthand the requirement for much better devices to assist pupils capture what&& s crucial in their on-line web content. The question, obviously, is whether Zoom additionally sees the opportunity. Counting so greatly on one more firm is always a danger. (See Facebook and Twitter and the long list of third-party designers that have been melted by both companies.). If Zoom, which is beginning to make venture-like bets, were a financier in Grain, it might help inoculate it from prospective competition later on. Still, that it isn&& t didn & t dissuade other investors that are wagering that Zoom will show close friend as well as not adversary. As a matter of fact, late in 2014, Grain raised$ 4 million over two seed rounds from a lengthy checklist of notable investors, including Acrew Capital, Founder Collective, Peterson Partners, Slack Fund, Scott Belsky, Sriram Krishnan, Andreas Klinger, Scooter Braun as well as others. Now its 11-person team is ready to take the wraps off what they & ve been integrating in beta with some of that capital. Definitely, Grain-- which intends to eventually integrate with numerous other firms-- could do worse as springboards go than Zoom, one of the unusual new outbreak system firms in memory as well as a tool that, early this week, Oracle founder Larry Ellison called an && crucial solution & that will transform how job is done. Zoom has long been powered by viral end individual fostering, taking pleasure in growth inside and on the surface as a result of the nature of video clip conferencing throughout companies. Currently, its pick-up as a customer business is following a comparable trajectory, with a high percentage of brand-new customers who are invited to Zoom calls eventually authorizing up for the solution to ensure that they can themselves organize a phone call. If Grain obtains fortunate, some percentage of that percent will additionally discover Grain.
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