Interview with Sacha Michaud, Co-founder of Glovo

Glovo is a leading multi-category delivery service that lets you buy, collect, and send any product within your city in around thirty minutes or less. We connect users with local stores and couriers, making it all possible through a simple, user-friendly app. Glovo now has more than 2.5 million monthly active users, 50,000 active couriers and over 50,000 associated partners worldwide. Last year we achieved unicorn status and we are now one of the world’s fastest on-demand delivery players.
 
 

 

How did you come up with the idea for the company?

 
Founded in 2015, Glovo was born with one idea in mind: to create a platform that makes city life easier and more accessible, all while remaining sustainable. Both Oscar [Pierre], Glovo’s CEO and co-founder, and I believe strongly in tech as a way of improving people’s lives, having your city in the palm of your hand will give you access to more opportunities and save you valuable time. Using the latest technologies including predictive analytics and local dark stores, we’re turning our vision of convenience combined with sustainability into reality by reducing the distance goods need to travel to reach the consumer.
 

What advice would you give to other aspiring entrepreneurs?

 
The most crucial thing is to remember the reason why you started your business in the first place. The faster the company grows, the easier it is to lose sight of the values at its heart and for the company ethos to start chipping away at the edges of what made it unique and worthwhile to begin with. We had to face this issue when the company grew significantly: as new responsibilities piled up, we had to actively remind ourselves of the mission we had initially set out to focus on, like social impact, helping local communities and becoming a useful daily tool for our customers.

For Oscar and me, it was our conviction that through smartphones and a society that is always connected, consumer behaviour would change and the way we interact with our city, environment and local stores would be part of this disruption.
 

 
We always envisioned Glovo as a global brand and this was key when building the initial management team, this has helped us stay connected to our most valued beliefs, despite our team growing and operations expanding. Navigating scale-ups begins with finding the best people. Once you have a strong team in place, the only thing left to do is to stay focused on the key drivers of your business, timing of if and when to do things is crucial.
 

What can we hope to see from Glovo in the future?

 
Society is moving away from rigid, constrained ways of working, a trend which has only been accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic. While we welcome this rapid transition, we believe it must be supported by regulations that guarantee the best possible circumstances and most of all optimal rights for workers in the gig economy. We’re currently in discussions with local stakeholders and the Italian and Spanish governments – our two largest markets – to secure our workers’ social rights while maintaining the flexibility of their position.

This year, we’ve made a stand to make tangible efforts towards sustainability in all 19 markets we operate in. Our partnership with Pachama was a key step in this direction: this has helped us lessen our carbon footprint considerably, and we’re committed to being fully carbon-neutral by the end of 2021. In terms of the future, we’re continuing to work towards becoming industry leaders in sustainability with more implemented practices – handling food waste, bundling orders, providing partners with sustainable packaging and supplying couriers with backpacks made from recycled and recyclable materials.

Our wider business plan is to continue to focus on the markets where Glovo is the top on-demand delivery platform. This will allow us to continue to provide the fastest and most convenient service for all our users across the globe.