4 ms·

I moved to Berlin for a while in 2014, and so I ended up interviewing at a couple Rocket Internet companies. I'm by no means an expert in any of this but the i

I moved to Berlin for a while in 2014, and so I ended up interviewing at a couple Rocket Internet companies. I'm by no means an expert in any of this but the impression I took away was that while they did some really impressive things, all their companies had a fatal flaw. The impressive things were: - They had a common tech stack that while no means elegant was at least effective at getting to decent scale quickly - They clearly had marketing and growth talent to also scale up businesses quickly - They had expertise in specific geographies that are often difficult like South America, Europe, and China (these are difficult at least from the perspective of an American :) ) But the fatal flaw all their companies have, by design, is that they are really good at cloning a product and not good at actually creating one. Every company was clearly designed to be acquired before that problem became insurmountable. If the acquisition didn't happen, turning a several hundred person organization into one good at figuring out what changes to make to a product to make it successful is...messy.

johnnyfaehell 6y ago
I worked at Foodpanda, which was one of the Rocket Internet flagship companies for a time. Foodpanda was a mess, and the people from Rocket Internet were saying it was 10x better than Rocket Internet. Which I can believe since Foodpanda outsourced work to Rocket Internet because Rocket Internet said so. They literally assigned me to make sure they didn't screw the project up, they wouldn't take any feedback really. I ended up not caring about the project because it wasn't actually within my offical responsibilites. At the end of the project I was included in the email threads between the two CTOs where the Foodpanda CTO repeatedly pointed out that they were warned about all the shortcoming in the project way before the end and that they needed fixed. Rocket Internet responded saying that was a lot of work and they would need developer resources from Foodpanda. Me and one of the guys I worked with at Foodpanda decided a way to tell if a developer was worthwhile in Berlin was how long they stayed at rocket. Majority in Berlin would have worked for them at some point, so working there wasn't a sign they were bad. But if they stayed there for more than a year, that was. From my experience Foodpanda's biggest problem was tech. They literally had hundreds of servers be knocked off line because one redis server with session data went down. This was considered acceptable within the company. There was a culture of failure. And the business side had these issues too. There was a write up in an Indian newspaper where they basically got tore to shreads for all their failures publically. Turned out half of the company didn't realise how bad things were. Foodpanda was Rocket's attempt at buying up competitors and dominating India. They literally bought everyone and still lost the war to dominate food ordering in India.
- juliansimioni 6y ago
  First of all I'll admit I was trying to err on the side of generosity when describing Rocket. Maybe that's a mistake. They definitely seemed to have a culture of well...internal chaos. But that jives with their "copy fast" mentality. It's worked at least a couple times, right?
  - johnnyfaehell 6y ago
    > It's worked at least a couple times, right? Yea, HelloFresh seems to be doing well and Zalando dominates in fashion. There are probably a few others doing well too.
    - fs111 6y ago
      Delivery Hero too, they just entered the DAX
      - johnnyfaehell 6y ago
        I am not too sure about them. They sold the German companies and pulled Foodora out of a few countries.
        deusex_ 6y ago
        Look at their global results, Europe is largely irrelevant compared to APAC and MENA. Germany exit was loss of prestige losing home market but also not a major loss of revenue compared to gains elsewhere in the world.
        johnnyfaehell 6y ago
        Globally, it's mostly Foodpanda that was doing soo poorly they had to be sold to Delivery Hero, no?
        6y ago
danjac 6y ago
Out of interest, what was their tech stack based on?
- dkarp 6y ago
  I worked there for a while. They used PHP and had a sort of framework called Alice and Bob which I think was built in Symphony. It was designed specifically to allow quickly rolling out to many different countries each having possibly different business logic.
  - jakearmitage 6y ago
    Bob & Alice is ZF1

johnnyfaehell 6y ago

I worked at Foodpanda, which was one of the Rocket Internet flagship companies for a time. Foodpanda was a mess, and the people from Rocket Internet were saying it was 10x better than Rocket Internet. Which I can believe since Foodpanda outsourced work to Rocket Internet because Rocket Internet said so. They literally assigned me to make sure they didn't screw the project up, they wouldn't take any feedback really. I ended up not caring about the project because it wasn't actually within my offical responsibilites. At the end of the project I was included in the email threads between the two CTOs where the Foodpanda CTO repeatedly pointed out that they were warned about all the shortcoming in the project way before the end and that they needed fixed. Rocket Internet responded saying that was a lot of work and they would need developer resources from Foodpanda. Me and one of the guys I worked with at Foodpanda decided a way to tell if a developer was worthwhile in Berlin was how long they stayed at rocket. Majority in Berlin would have worked for them at some point, so working there wasn't a sign they were bad. But if they stayed there for more than a year, that was. From my experience Foodpanda's biggest problem was tech. They literally had hundreds of servers be knocked off line because one redis server with session data went down. This was considered acceptable within the company. There was a culture of failure. And the business side had these issues too. There was a write up in an Indian newspaper where they basically got tore to shreads for all their failures publically. Turned out half of the company didn't realise how bad things were. Foodpanda was Rocket's attempt at buying up competitors and dominating India. They literally bought everyone and still lost the war to dominate food ordering in India.

juliansimioni 6y ago
First of all I'll admit I was trying to err on the side of generosity when describing Rocket. Maybe that's a mistake. They definitely seemed to have a culture of well...internal chaos. But that jives with their "copy fast" mentality. It's worked at least a couple times, right?
- johnnyfaehell 6y ago
  > It's worked at least a couple times, right? Yea, HelloFresh seems to be doing well and Zalando dominates in fashion. There are probably a few others doing well too.
  - fs111 6y ago
    Delivery Hero too, they just entered the DAX
    - johnnyfaehell 6y ago
      I am not too sure about them. They sold the German companies and pulled Foodora out of a few countries.
      - deusex_ 6y ago
        Look at their global results, Europe is largely irrelevant compared to APAC and MENA. Germany exit was loss of prestige losing home market but also not a major loss of revenue compared to gains elsewhere in the world.
        johnnyfaehell 6y ago
        Globally, it's mostly Foodpanda that was doing soo poorly they had to be sold to Delivery Hero, no?
        6y ago

danjac 6y ago

Out of interest, what was their tech stack based on?

dkarp 6y ago
I worked there for a while. They used PHP and had a sort of framework called Alice and Bob which I think was built in Symphony. It was designed specifically to allow quickly rolling out to many different countries each having possibly different business logic.
- jakearmitage 6y ago
  Bob & Alice is ZF1