Miki Kuusi on Building Wolt, Leading Through Crisis and Joining DoorDash

Miki Kuusi says Wolt did not begin with one sudden revelation. Starting university after the 2008 financial crisis exposed him to a group excited by startups and the internet. In this 2022 conversation, he suggests that downturns can also make talent available for new companies, though that is his assessment of the climate at the time.

The idea that captured him was that industries would be reorganized online and the smartphone could become a remote control for everyday life. Wolt began with the question of what a button for food, and eventually local services, would look like.

The original vision was broad: discovery, ordering, payments, reservations, takeaway and delivery. The team first built a pickup app, with an iPad in the restaurant and the transaction handled in the app. Some customers were loyal, but it did not produce the explosive product-market fit they hoped for.

Delivery proved the decisive experience in Kuusi's account. Rather than bringing the customer to a restaurant, Wolt brought restaurants that had not previously delivered to the customer. Quick, reliable service and support when things went wrong made that experience more useful.

Harry Stebbings asks whether ever-rising consumer expectations make the business harder. Kuusi says customers will continue to demand better selection, affordability, quality and reliability. A company in this market has to improve alongside those expectations to remain relevant.

For Kuusi, high performance begins with focus. He recalls working at Supercell when Clash of Clans looked promising in testing. CEO Ilkka Paananen chose to concentrate a small team on one platform rather than split its effort immediately across iPhone and Android.

Kuusi says focus means making hard choices about a small number of things to get right. Wolt's long-term ambition included groceries, clothing, electronics and other local services, but for its first five years it concentrated on restaurant delivery after discovering that it worked.

Stebbings asks when to expand a product or customer segment. Kuusi recalls investor Petri's warning that splitting a tiny team is like dividing a raisin: each half is even smaller. His view is that many companies spread themselves too thin too early.

Wolt expanded more broadly into groceries when COVID-19 began, earlier than originally planned because Kuusi saw an unusual opportunity. He says the company had by then raised close to a quarter-billion in financing and had several hundred employees; at the interview he describes a company of about 7,000 people.

To prioritize, he looks first for product-market fit, which he says should be visible in the pull of customers and growth. If it is absent, the team has to change something. This is his rule of thumb, not a precise diagnostic test.

Kuusi tries to spend 80–90% of his time on activities whose connection to company success he can see. He initially treats interviews and talks as distractions, but Stebbings points out that a candidate might hear him and become a transformative hire.

Kuusi agrees there can be indirect recruiting value: candidates have watched his talks before interviews. He reserves the remaining 10–20% of his time for serendipity and initiatives such as brand building whose effect is difficult to measure in advance.

A former board chair taught him to reconsider the heroic CEO: the measure of a scalable leader is whether the company can succeed without them. A CEO who insists on personally approving every hire may not have built a team trusted to recruit well on its own.

Stebbings confesses frustration that employees do not care as much as a founder and asks how to make them care about details. Kuusi responds that culture, incentives and actual responsibility matter. He says Wolt offered broad equity participation, including paths for customer-support employees to become option holders.

Financial ownership is not the only form of ownership. Slush, the nonprofit technology event Kuusi previously led, has no employee equity, yet its teams make decisions and take responsibility for what they build. Giving someone a meaningful area to own can make its details matter to them.

The host worries that delegating important work invites mistakes. Kuusi says leaders need to hire carefully, support newcomers while they learn, and have patience before expecting them to perform as well as the person who previously did the job.

He borrows Supercell's sports analogy: a company can be a supportive team without being a family whose membership is unconditional. A team must make difficult personnel decisions when a role is not working; his emphasis on performance is a management philosophy, not a universal finding about employees.

Stebbings challenges him with the argument that safety and even long-term job security can bring out people's best work. Kuusi distinguishes his idea of trust from guaranteed employment: people should be treated fairly, supported through personal difficulty, and given opportunities to learn, even if a role eventually ends.

He says a fair departure can include support beyond the legal minimum, such as salary for a period or equity consideration. He does not believe employment should be unconditional, but says a high-performance environment still needs trust and room to make mistakes.

For Kuusi, individual mistakes are not normally the reason to part ways; the deeper issue is whether he can trust someone to take responsibility without constant supervision. He says he generally starts by assuming good intentions, while taking more time to trust others with areas especially close to him, such as product and brand.

Stebbings raises the founder's attachment to the company and asks about personal identity. Kuusi says his greatest sacrifice has been mental space and freedom: competitive threats, perceived unfairness and the next challenge remain in his thoughts even outside working hours.

He recalls Ben Horowitz's distinction between a peacetime CEO and a wartime CEO. Kuusi sees delivery as an intensely competitive market and says he has learned to live a little better with the pressure, though it has not disappeared.

A CEO can feel like the single point between two pyramids: investors and the board look down for answers, while employees and cofounders look up. Kuusi says he reduced that isolation by sharing his concerns and information with cofounders, management and the board rather than trying to shield them.

Transparency also gives the team the information to propose solutions he might not find alone. Stebbings notes that this relies on having the right people in place and turns the discussion to how Kuusi finds them.

Kuusi credits former Booking.com CEO Kees Koolen with a hiring lesson: a person who has already achieved a particular feat may not repeat it. Look instead for the qualities that person had before doing it, and hire people with the potential to grow into the challenge for the first time.

Stebbings asks how an unknown company persuades promising candidates who have never heard of it. Kuusi calls a growth company a recruiting operation: senior leaders must find people and make them excited about the opportunity, especially when applications do not arrive on their own.

In new countries Wolt kept a low profile, including not announcing a funding round for years, which made hiring harder. Kuusi says outreach from his LinkedIn profile got better responses, so recruiters sometimes used his account to introduce opportunities and connect candidates with the team.

Stebbings challenges the decision not to announce fundraising, arguing that a press article is unlikely to redirect a serious competitor. Kuusi says Wolt raised a €10 million Series A in January 2016 and a €27 million Series B in January 2018; it announced the B alongside its Series C in June 2019.

Kuusi says the lack of international publicity reduced distractions: consumers, merchants and couriers cared more about the service than technology press coverage. He also says the team could selectively reach out to recruits. He recalls four competitors following Wolt into Japan within six months of its move, as his example of a closely watched market.

Wolt initially stayed close to Europe partly because time zones and long flights impose costs on a small team. Japan later looked difficult but underpenetrated. Kuusi says the expansion principle was to find places where the company could create value efficiently relative to its investment.

His biggest hiring mistakes, he says, came from being dazzled by familiar company logos and impressive résumés. After meeting a prospective acquirer's team, a cofounder observed that some strong Helsinki candidates were comparable even if their employers were less famous. Kuusi learned to evaluate capability rather than brand alone.

As Wolt grew from an idea to approximately 7,000 people, Kuusi repeatedly felt out of his depth. After Koolen advised him to hire a great recruiter, he realized he had never met one and did not know how to evaluate the role. He learned by meeting recruiters and eventually made the hire.

He recalls a similarly uncomfortable Series B process: with roughly six months of money left, the team did not know how to raise a growth round and stumbled in early meetings. They learned through the process and eventually assembled financing.

Stebbings asks whether companies generally need fewer people than they employ. Kuusi says staffing is easier to size when the connection between a worker and immediate output is clear, as in restaurant shifts or customer support. Engineering is harder because future products and their value are uncertain.

During rapid growth, a company may hire aggressively to avoid missing an opportunity, then reassess when the market changes. Kuusi says Wolt had not undertaken layoffs in the current downturn as of the interview and attributes its caution partly to repeated funding constraints. This statement concerns that period, not its earlier history.

He rejects “hire fast, fire fast.” A hire should be a commitment in both directions, even though difficult separations sometimes remain necessary. In his view, deliberately hiring ten people expecting to fire half would undermine trust and integrity.

On compensation, Kuusi prefers generosity and simple terms over trying to optimize every provision. He says all employees were eligible for options while Wolt had hundreds of staff, and even part-time customer-support workers later had a route to option ownership.

He recalls a restaurant partner manager traveling from another market to help onboard a colleague in Prague. If the employee were paid only for restaurants acquired in their home city, Kuusi asks, what incentive would they have to help elsewhere? He wants compensation to support company-wide ownership rather than only local metrics.

The two disagree about the value of a CEO's public presence on Twitter. Kuusi sees limited direct benefit for building a company, while Stebbings argues that increasingly visible leaders can gain from it. Kuusi notes that entrepreneurs can succeed with very different approaches.

Scaling changes whom a company can attract. Kuusi jokes that the younger founder version of himself might qualify only for customer support at the later Wolt. Early teams take bets on one another; as the company grows, it can recruit people with different experience and credentials.

He says leaders should accept that people's roles may change. Some grow with the company, some remain valuable individual contributors or team leads, and others leave or have managers hired above them. Each stage demands a different configuration rather than one permanent organization.

His hardest day at Wolt came in 2017. With Series A funds running low and investors rejecting a Series B, the company laid off about 30 people, roughly one-third of staff. He says he held each conversation individually and apologized for the company's predicament.

The cuts gave Wolt more runway, and eventually 83North agreed to invest. Kuusi says he learned from Paananen that knowing a difficult decision is necessary and actually carrying it out are different things. He does not present the experience as painless.

Stebbings asks whether letting people go becomes easier and worries about losing his humanity. Kuusi says the personal conversation does not get easier; larger organizations can delegate decisions and become more distant from the people affected, which changes the leader's experience.

The investor who said yes was Laurel Bowden of 83North. Kuusi says she knew the sector from Just Eat and had looked for a delivery-as-a-service company. In his telling, her team had studied many businesses and doubted that retention, economics and a viable proposition for merchants and couriers could coexist.

After seeing Wolt's numbers, Bowden called him and questioned whether they could be true; her firm ultimately led the Series B, he says. Kuusi recalls that Wolt also received an acquisition offer at three times the valuation of that financing. The discussion does not disclose the deal terms or independently verify the comparison.

On money, Kuusi recalls receiving a significant acquisition offer in 2015 when he was 26, after starting Wolt with a maxed-out credit card and no money in his bank account. He and his cofounders declined because they wanted to see what they could build.

He says he later sold some shares in secondary transactions and had already made money before the DoorDash deal. In his telling, the decision to combine with DoorDash turned on whether they could build something bigger together. His perspective reflects his role as Wolt founder and DoorDash executive and his financial interest in the transaction.

Asked what advice he gives founders considering a sale, Kuusi relays a secondhand account of research said to cover roughly 400 companies: successful founders may fear losing hard-won momentum and seek an exit too early. He says some secondary liquidity can reduce personal financial pressure and make that decision more rational.

Stebbings counters that his investments in Clubhouse and Hopin have shown momentum can reverse. Kuusi accepts the objection and cautions that successful founders' advice is subject to selection bias, like a lottery winner telling others to keep betting. The alleged research and its conclusion are not independently established in the interview.

The host asks whether Kuusi ever gets off the treadmill and celebrates. Kuusi remembers admiring a gaming startup with a funded office, then feeling underfunded after Wolt's own successive rounds. Each milestone, profitable city, secondary sale or acquisition seemed to reveal another mountain.

He says he has never felt that he had finally made it; instead, he sees another difficult ambition and uncertainty about reaching it. His favorite management book is Ben Horowitz's The Hard Thing About Hard Things, especially passages on struggle, firing, demotion and competitive crises.

Kuusi says he had a personal right to block a Wolt acquisition and would not have agreed to the DoorDash combination without believing it was right for shareholders, employees and his own growth. He admires DoorDash CEO Tony Xu's thoughtfulness and the way the company embeds culture in its language.

His guilty pleasure is Fortnite. He describes growing up with games and leading a 60-person Dota clan as a teenager, then returning to gaming with friends during the pandemic as a way to spend time together.

Asked what he hopes for his children, he says he wants them to choose their own path, whether unconventional or traditional, because they enjoy it rather than feel obliged by parental expectations. He values the unexpected route that brought him into startups.

His advice to his younger self is to be patient. He says hard work and ability matter, but luck also plays a role, and people who look extraordinary from a distance are still human. Meeting heroes can reveal weaknesses alongside their strengths.

Kuusi wants to see more technology companies built in Europe rather than only in the United States and China. Stebbings challenges him on regulation, citing the difficulty of doing business across several European countries.

Kuusi agrees that outdated and fragmented rules are a problem but believes firms can work through them. He sees the longer-term need for an ecosystem of experienced founders, investors and successful examples that can support the next generation; his expectation that Europe will grow into this is a view, not a guarantee.

Asked how many millionaires Wolt created, he says he does not know and has not tracked that as a key metric. What matters most to him about Slush and Wolt is the influence on people: their experience, colleagues, opportunities and future companies, with financial gains one part of that impact.

Asked where he and Wolt will be in five years, he declines a confident prediction amid the uncertainties of 2022. He says the DoorDash role is his current next chapter: he is learning inside a publicly listed US company and remains interested in building its international business.

Kuusi expects delivery platforms to expand beyond restaurant food into local commerce and services, much as Amazon moved beyond books. He anticipates faster delivery and mobile commerce, while acknowledging a difficult contemporary economy. This is a forward-looking business view from an executive with a stake in that industry.