Pod Insights The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch 20VC: Rappi Founder Simón Borrero on Growth vs Profitability, Capital Efficiency, Raising $1.7Bn as a LATAM Company and Why Uber Eats Did More To Help Than To Hurt Rappi About this episode Simón Borrero is the Founder & CEO @ Rappi, the startup that has become a cornerstone of the Latin American mobile ecosystem, coined as "the next Everything Store of Latin America". To date, Simon has raised over $1.7Bn for the company from the likes of Sequoia Capital, a16z, Softbank, DST Global, Y Combinator and more. Prior to Rappi, Simon was the founder of multiple former companies including Imaginamos, a software studio he grew to over 300 people. In Today’s Episode You Will Learn: 1.) How Simon made his way into the world of startups and came to found "the next Everything Store of Latin America" in Rappi? 2.) How does Simon think about the importance of zone density for a business like Rappi? What are the number of deliveries required for Rappi to make for the business to be breakeven? What is the key metric that determines the success of the business for Rappi today? 3.) How does Simon approach the balance of capital efficiency vs growth? How does one know when to pour fuel on the fire and go for growth? When is the right time to really focus on unit economics? Why does Simon believe expanding Rappi can be analogised to scaling a coffee shop? 4.) Rappi has now raised $1.7Bn from some of the best investors in the world, what does Simon believe Rappi did to enable them to be so successful fundraising? Was it a difficult shift for Simon to make moving from lean to capital abundance with the successful fundraises? What changed? How did Simon change as a leader? What is the story of Sequoia coming in? 5.) Customer acquisition: What were some of the biggest challenges when it came to initial customer acquisition for Rappi? What does Simon mean when he says "donuts for downloads"? What is the story there? 6.) Driver acquisition: In the UK and the US, driver acquisition is a big challenge, what did Rappi to do enable them to scale their driver supply so efficiently? What works? What does not work? 7.) Restaurant acquisition: What were the hardest elements of onboarding the first restaurants? How did Uber Eats entering the market actually make Rappi so much more efficient as a business and service? Item’s Mentioned In Today’s Episode Simon’s Favourite Book: The Prosperity Paradox As always you can follow Harry and The Twenty Minute VC on Twitter here! Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Harry Stebbings? We are back. This is 20 VC with me, Harry Stebbings, and I cannot believe it, but it's been five years of 20 VC and we finally have our first guest on the show from Latam, and I could not have asked for a better first guest. And so with that, I'm thrilled to welcome Simon Borrero, founder and CEO at Rappi to the hot seat today. Now, as for Rappi, Rappi is the startup that has become a cornerstone of the Latin American mobile ecosystem, coined as the next everything store of Latin America. And to date, Simon has raised over $1.7 billion for the company from the likes of Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, SoftBank, DST, Y Combinator Continuity Fund, and more. Prior to Rappi, though, Simon was also the founder of multiple former companies, including Imaginamos, a software studio who grew to over 300 people. And I do also have
0:42 Harry Stebbings? to say a huge thank you to Anu at Y C Continuity Fund for the intro and some fantastic questions and suggestions today. I really do so appreciate it, Anu, and the show wouldn't have happened without you. But before we dive into the show today, did you know that more than 80% of US public stock is owned by just 10% of Americans? This divide is even greater in the private markets. Carter makes it as easy to issue equity to your employees as it is to issue payroll, and for employees, as easy to accept it, too. More than 16,000 companies issue equity to their employees through Carter. Whether you're just getting started or getting ready to go public, the team at Carter can help. Check them out at Carter.com. And then another incredible product you have to introduce is SecureFrame. SecureFrame helps companies get enterprise-ready by
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2:09 Harry Stebbings? companies going public, head over to Cooley.com and also check out CooleyGo.com. But enough from me, and now time to dive into the show, and I'm so thrilled to welcome Simon Barraro, founder and CEO at Rappi.
2:26 Speaker 01 You have now arrived at your destination.
2:29 Harry Stebbings? Simon, it is such a joy to have you on the show today. I've heard so many good things from Anu and also from Ulas at Streamline. So thank you so much for joining me today.
2:36 Speaker 02 Thank you so much, Hari.
2:38 Harry Stebbings? But I do want to start with a little bit on you. So tell me, you know, we see the behemoth that is Rappi today, but how did it start? And what was that founding moment for you with Rappi?
2:46 Speaker 02 Yeah, Rappi started five years ago. We were working in a B two B startup called Rappi Little, where we license software to the largest supermarkets all around the world. And we were seeing that users were super happy with that experience inside the app, but not with the logistics and they hated groceries that take 24 hours or 48 hours to get there. So we said, hey, why don't we try to do everything ourselves via this on-demand model? We started in a small neighborhood in corner shops, delivered in 20 minutes and that was it. That was all Rappi.
3:21 Speaker 02 So we started, we thought it was going to be amazing. We had no users, so we had to go to the streets and we actually started giving away donuts for downloads. And that's how we started to gain traction in a very small neighborhood in Bogota. And we started not only acquiring users, but of course, giving away donuts to them gave us the opportunity to listen to them. And they started asking for a lot of more stuff. And that's why Rappi started to have also restaurants, pharmacy and everything that it has today.
3:52 Harry Stebbings? I mean, I absolutely love that. Can I ask, when did you know it was working when you were giving out donuts? Or at what point were you like, aha, this is working?
3:59 Speaker 02 At the beginning, we raised money from friends and family and they asked me, okay, for how long is this money going to be enough? And my honest answer was if we kill it, I'm gonna need money very soon again. And if it's not working, I think this money is going to be good for a while. After a month and a half of launch, I was asking my investors to give me more money. So in that moment, I think that we were all getting into the idea that this was going to be big.
4:27 Harry Stebbings? I love it. I love the fact that if it does well, you need more money. And if it doesn't, you're fine, actually. You mentioned there about being very strict on your zones that you started with. How important do you think it is to have very tight geographic boundaries when you're starting something like Rappi?
4:42 Speaker 02 Yeah, super important because this business has hyper-local network effects. You need to make a specific user fall in love with your service. So that specific user in a specific neighborhood in Bogota or in Sao Paulo, she or he gives a shit if you have a hundred thousand restaurants in other cities. She or he only cares about the important restaurants in that neighborhood and that the service is amazing in that neighborhood. And for that, you have to have a lot of density in terms of numbers of merchants and couriers concentrated in a small radius for the service to be great. So if you started to launch all around, you would have a crappy service
5:24 Speaker 02 with not an amazing offer or assortment for users. And I think that's what Rappi did well at the beginning. We focused in very small zones until we got funds. And after we cracked that zone and we cracked that unit economics, then we went to the following zone.
5:40 Harry Stebbings? Can I ask, before we talk about the funds, what did cracking unit economics like? Is that like breaking even on every order? What was cracking it for you?
5:49 Speaker 02 Yeah, cracking unit economics was breaking even in every order. And it has a lot to do with the efficiency of the fleet. So how many orders per hour can a courier deliver in a certain zone that's key?
6:02 Harry Stebbings? Got you. How do you drive efficiency on the driver's side to deliver as many as possible? And what is that kind of break-even number in terms of the amount of drops?
6:11 Speaker 02 So for us in America, it's two. If you're doing two orders per hour, you're good. And it's all about concentration of restaurants and CPG stores in a certain microzone and concentration of users. So to get the flywheel moving, you have a lot of users ordering from a lot of restaurants that are very near from them. So if you're a courier, your delivery time goes down because users are very near to the restaurants. And they can go and deliver one order and then pick up the next one very close. To where they delivered that pass order and everything starts to work well.
6:46 Harry Stebbings? Can I ask, you mentioned donuts for downloads on the consumer side. It's a new model for restaurants to adopt as well. So how did the restaurant adoption process look for you?
6:55 Speaker 02 It was hard, mostly for the premium restaurants, because they didn't conceive the idea of their amazing plates travelling in a bag of someone riding a bike, because these chefs put so much energy and love into each detail that for them it was almost impossible. So we had to work with them and work in the packaging. I remember that we used to do trials. So we went and we picked up the food and then we delivered the food and we took the temperature of the food and we checked every detail and we videotaped that, then go back to the chef. And it was super hard, but thankfully it's now obvious that you can order from a Michelin star restaurant and with good packaging, you can have a fabulous meal at home.
7:39 Harry Stebbings? Totally agree with you in terms of that. I've had Alfred Lin from Sequoia, one of your investors on the show. And when we spoke about DoorDash recently, me and him on the show, he said that chasing GMV can really make for bad habits and bad behaviours. What did you measure as your North Star metric in the early days? Was it GMV or was it another metric?
7:58 Speaker 02 For us, a key metric has been frequency of use, because we're a multi-vertical app. And what makes Rappi amazing is to be able to really make your life better, not only with restaurants, but with pharmacy, with diapers, with liquors, with anything you want. If you want to change your shirt, you can send a courier to Sada and get a new shirt. So it's everything that is in your city in minutes. And frequency is that North metric for us that shows that users are using us and seeing us as we think that they should. So users that use Rappi one or two times per month are not yet engaged as they should. Power users that order 20 times per month are what shows that we are doing a good job.
8:40 Harry Stebbings? Okay, I totally get it. You mentioned there the diversity of products that you serve in terms of diapers or shirts or food. The question I have, and Ulas at Streamlined asks this to you, how do you know when's the right time to? Expand your product offering because it's one thing to do food, but to do diapers and pharmacy and clothes is another. How did you know you were okay to expand the product offering?
9:02 Speaker 02 For us, it was just listening to users because again, Rappi wasn't an amazing idea from any of the founders. Rappi launched as only groceries on demand, but then we were lucky enough, we had a blank field where users could order anything. And that blank field started to become for us a great way of listening to users and move fast and get them what they wanted. So they started asking for restaurants. We got an order from a user in this blank field that said, "Hey, I need the equivalent in pesos of a hundred dollars and I need it in my house because I need to pay someone." And any other company, I believe, at least in Latin America, would say, "Okay, this is a joke. Let's don't look at that and let's continue working."
9:45 Speaker 02 After forty-eight hours after reading that message, we implemented an on-demand ATM where users could order the equivalent to a hundred dollars or two hundred dollars and a courier will deliver the cash for them. Latin America, everyone uses cash. We would deliver cash for them in fifteen minutes to their home or to a restaurant or whatever. And that grew amazingly well. It became five percent of our orders in year two. So it was about listening to users and moving fast. So to be super clear, when was the right time when users started asking for it?
10:20 Harry Stebbings? I love it and I love the way I had a schedule and we just completely left it behind, but this is so interesting. The final kind of part of it is we've had the consumers, downloads for donuts, we've got the restaurants, which I love, and the service providers. In terms of the drivers, in London in particular, I know that your deliveries and many of the big competitors struggle on driver acquisition. How did you approach driver acquisition and what worked well for you?
10:42 Speaker 02 Yeah, here is the opposite. We don't struggle at all because there's a lot of unemployment in Latin America and underemployment also. So these are a lot of people that either they don't have a job or have a job that pays less than the legal minimum wage. So there's a lot of people looking for opportunities and most of our Couriers are, students are paying their careers because of working a weekend in wrapping. And there's another very important point for Latin America and it's that if you connect and do orders for an hour in wrapping, you'll earn in average twice the minimum wage of Latin America. So that's very different to Europe where sometimes it's kind of the same, but not with benefits.
11:26 Speaker 02 And there's this big issue. Here, these guys are making twice the equivalent to twice of the minimum wage per hour. Of course, there are independent contractors. They can connect and disconnect at any time. But the amazing thing, Harry, is that in countries like Colombia, seventy percent of the population, seven zero percent, earn less than two minimum wages per hour. So we are unfortunately poor countries, so it's an amazing opportunities. And we have thousands and thousands of stories of guys that had paid for school, guys that have learned how to code. And now work in startups coding because they had this opportunity, people that have paid for the education of their family.
12:08 Speaker 02 So it's super powerful for us and it's something that gives us a lot of purpose to be able to give these opportunities in Latin America.
12:15 Harry Stebbings? No, that's amazing. I mean, you must be very proud when you see people graduate and do things like that. I do want to touch on the funny thing because you mentioned it earlier in terms of if it goes well, you know, you'll need more money quickly. It didn't go very well. And, you know, I spoke to Anu before the show from Y C. And she said, no, and she meant it nicely, no one thought wrapping could raise this much capital sitting in Las Am. So she said, how did you do it? And why do you think you succeeded so well?
12:39 Speaker 02 So a lot of things. People always ask me, because we've raised a lot of money, so they ask me, hey, what's tips or? And the real answer is you have to understand in what game you're playing. And this game is called growth. And what's important for early stage investors is number one, growth, number two, growth, number three, growth. And that's it. We were growing like hell and that made it easy because we went to a meeting. And American investors say it's like, oh shit, like we love the team, we love the mission, we love the traction, but this feels. Very far from us. This is like Bogota is the same as Zimbabwe or it's like super far away from what's normal for Americans, but traction and growth made them say like,
13:24 Speaker 02 we're gonna follow this. We had amazing cohorts and our dollar retention is world class. DoorDash just published their dollar retention cohorts and are amazing. Rappies are twice as good as them because of the multi-vertical approach. So the numbers speak by themselves and that's what really helped us accelerate and be able to fund this.
13:45 Harry Stebbings? I'm totally with you. I hear so many like, what are the tips? And you're like, fuck tips. It's about numbers and growth. So I'm totally with you there. Can I ask, I heard that the Sequoia story is a really interesting one. So Sequoia led the A round. How did that come together? And how did Sequoia come to invest in the Series A? What's the story there?
14:02 Speaker 02 Yeah, lots of stories there, but to tell you a funny anecdote, we were at another investor and we had the partner meeting in Sequoia and we're at another investor very close by in Palo Alto, but we were very tight. We tried to order a car and there were no cars available. So we had started like jogging to the meeting, but we were not going to make it. And then a truck, like a sewage truck stopped by and we tell him, hey, please help us take us to the meeting. And it was a Latino-American guy, so we made a great connection. And the guy took us to the meeting and this big sewage truck said, service you can trust. And we got to the front door of Sequoia in that truck and we have a beautiful photo with that with the truck and we got there
14:47 Speaker 02 in time for the partner meeting. So it was super stressful, but then thankfully it went well and we made it.
14:54 Harry Stebbings? I mean, it went incredibly well. You made it and you also got the check from them. I guess a question that I have is like, when you do raise a lot of money, it takes a little bit of a mindset shift in terms of how you allocate the capital that you've raised. Was that a difficult mindset shift for you to make in terms of suddenly having a lot more money? And how did you embrace that?
15:12 Speaker 02 Yeah, first of all, with a lot of responsibility because we were the first ones to be raising these amounts of money in Latin America and we knew that if we fucked up, there Wasn't gonna be a lot of money for the continent. So a lot of responsibility, not only from us, but from all of the team. And of course, we've made a lot of mistakes. But the right mindset for us has been, it's all about building long-term value. So if you can spend a lot of money today to accelerate acquisition of high-value users, don't spend that money in three months. If you have the opportunity to bring them all in one month, go for it. Because these companies are expensive companies to run. And every single month of burn, you never get that money back.
15:56 Speaker 02 So that mindset of let's bring all of that future value as fast as we can, it has been like the mindset for us.
16:03 Harry Stebbings? Totally get you in terms of building that long-term value. Can I ask, you mentioned growth, growth, growth. And I'm totally with you in terms of the emphasis there. There is a time when it has to switch to more profitability or a bigger focus on unit economics. How do you think about growth versus profitability in unit economics? And when does that switch happen, do you think? And where are you now as well?
16:24 Speaker 02 That's a very good point, Harry. And it's growth, growth, growth when you've cracked unit economics. If you haven't cracked unit economics, it's unsustainable to scale. So you have to crack unit economics and then go as fast as you can, knowing that you're gonna be burning a lot of money to grow. The perfect analogy for Rappi is think about like a store for a coffee shop. You open a coffee shop and you make it work. So you are making money in that coffee shop. So then you go to an investor and you tell him, hey, I wanna scale faster. In the past, you had to wait till you made a lot of money in that one store. And with the savings of that store, you go and open the second and the third store.
17:07 Speaker 02 But then today, of course, you go to an investor and you tell them, hey, look at this store, look at this beautiful retention, look at this beautiful economics of this one store. I wanna do a hundred. And then they give you money to do a hundred. And you start the other stores. And of course, building those stores and putting the furniture of those stores costs you a lot of money. So people tell you, hey, you're crazy, you're burning money. What about the economics? It doesn't make sense. No, dude, relax. Look at my economics in the zones that I'm already mature. I know how to replicate this. I'm just opening more stores. And I have to wait until I have finished remodeling the stores, let's say, for me to earn money in these other stores. That's the analogy.
17:49 Harry Stebbings? Can I ask you a kind of detailed question? It's like, when you think about zone maturity, how long does it take to get to zone maturity today? And how has that changed over time?
17:58 Speaker 02 Yeah, it takes about three and a half months. It's not more than that.
18:02 Harry Stebbings? Has it changed over time a lot? Was it much longer?
18:04 Speaker 02 At the beginning, it was four months. It wasn't that different. It depends on how you spread the investment. So if you go and open ten zones, but to open ten zones, you're putting a bit less money in each, then it'll take a bit longer. But if you open ten zones and you put the same investment than when you were opening only one at a time, you get there in the same three and a half months.
18:25 Harry Stebbings? Three and a half months is incredible. I'm surprised at the speed. That's fantastic.
18:29 Speaker 02 To be clear, Rappi is unit economic profitable globally, so in nine countries that we operate. So it's not acceptable for us, and I think for anyone in this world now, to have negative unit economics.
18:40 Harry Stebbings? It's interesting that you mentioned the nine countries. With every country expansion, there's always competitors, and it is a competitive market. How do you think about the right way to analyze competition today? And how do you think about competition?
18:52 Speaker 02 Yeah, so we're super grateful about competition because, for example, five years ago, we used to send the courier to the restaurant to place the order in the restaurant. So of course, that's not the most efficient way. They had to drive to the restaurant, order and wait for fifteen minutes until the burger was cooked. Thanks to competition and to Burid, for example, they came and of course, they had already the tablets for restaurants and they sent the order and our restaurant accepted the order and we had nothing when they landed. So thanks to them, we accelerated in so many ways that made our service a lot better. And it's great to have good competitors because you're always moving faster and faster.
19:35 Speaker 02 And there's a saying in Latin America that you run as fast as the Doberman that is running behind you. And that's Latin. So we have a lot of dobermans running behind us. So yeah, for us, we see it as energy and fuel to improve.
19:49 Harry Stebbings? Can I ask, when I hear you speak today, you speak with such confidence. And when you look at Rappi's Day, it's such an incredible business and it's, as you said, nine countries. When you look back and when you think today as a leader, do you ever struggle with self doubt? When you're thinking, fuck, we're competing with Uber. It is a capital intensive business to run. Do you just struggle with self doubt on a more personal leadership level?
20:08 Speaker 02 Yeah, that's a good question. So in terms of the other guys, I don't. Cause for Latin Americans, like we had a culture that we always were thinking that Americans or Asians or everyone was smarter people. But when we went to California and we worked with other Y C teams, these guys were amazing. But our Mexican Colombian engineers are at the same level as Silicon Valley guys. And the talent is there. It was a lack of mindset and a lack of believing that we could build a world-class company. And MercadoLibre has shown valuation of a hundred billion. It has shown that in Latin America, there's going to be a lot of other hundred billion dollar companies. So you have the talent.
20:53 Speaker 02 We've removed these glass ceilings of what Latin Americans can accomplish. So as a team, I think that we can compete head to head with all of these other amazing guys with the advantage that we are local and we understand that something like Rapid Cash is amazing for our users. And that's something that now after five years of we launching this, Uber is starting to talk about that idea. So I think being local is super important. Then it comes to the more personal doubts and that, well, for sure. Like I had another company before and another before and I had managed three hundred people. But now I'm managing a team of four thousand people, a hundred and fifty thousand couriers in the region. It's a challenge that of course I wasn't ready for it.
21:38 Speaker 02 So how do you compensate for the lack of experience? Getting to work and reading and asking for feedback and understanding that you're going to have to evolve as fast as your company. And that's an amazing challenge, not an easy one, but an amazing one.
21:56 Harry Stebbings? And one that you clearly embraced so well. You mentioned the team there, and this again was one from Annie, but she said, what are the biggest challenges of scaling a startup in Las Ammon? Like, you've been very successful in getting incredible seasoned operators into the business. How do you get really successful seasoned operators to move to Las Ammon and work with Rappi?
22:13 Speaker 02 The honest answer is purpose, impact, the opportunity to build something larger than all of us. And if you compare this business with the same business in other parts of the world, with the poverty and opportunities in Latino America, it's tangible impact what we're creating. And missionaries love that. So you have to convince people that are smarter than you to come to work with you. And I find that really hard. Why does someone that is smarter than me will come to work with me? And the answer is they don't come to work for me. They come to work for a mission and for a purpose that is larger than us.
22:54 Speaker 02 And Rappi is like this platform for amazing entrepreneurs to be able to explode everything they have inside them. And it's run like a pack of entrepreneurs. We're a very horizontal structure. And we're very honest. We're all or most of us are partners and stockholders. So I think it's a great culture. It's not for everyone. It looks a lot more like Amazon than Google. It's super long hours, hard work, and we love it, but there's no massages and ping pong tables or whatever. We're very committed.
23:26 Harry Stebbings? Okay, the final one. You mentioned that like no ping pong tables and, you know, no massages, et cetera. Annie told me as well that it's probably the most stressful job on the planet that you have. She asked, how do you deal with the stress? Like, what is your coping mechanism?
23:39 Speaker 02 To be honest, I don't think about stress. I imagine that I'm stressed. I'm not going to tell you that I know how to manage stress, but I don't even think about stress because there's so much energy in the team and so much things to be done that the beauty of Rappi is that you forget about yourself. And honestly, I sometimes forget about even having lunch because we are just creating stuff. Or executing and again, this is not for everyone. A normal human being that wants a bit more of balance in their life is not going to be super happy in Rappi. But as Jeff Bezos says, it's not about balance. You only have one life. It's about energy and this job gives you a lot of energy.
24:21 Speaker 02 And if you have energy, even if you only have one hour for your family, you're gonna make them laugh and you're gonna hack them and you're gonna be happy with them. So I think that's what we are trying to create here.
24:31 Harry Stebbings? Listen, I'm totally with you in terms of the energy and it's great. I can feel the energy through Zoom, so I love it. I want to move into my favorite though, which is a quick fire round. So I essentially say a short statement and then you give me your immediate thoughts. Does that sound okay?
24:44 Speaker 02 Perfect.
24:45 Harry Stebbings? Okay, so what's the favorite book for you and why is it one?
24:48 Speaker 02 The prosperity paradox that shows how via innovation you can take countries out of poverty. That's our real, real passion.
24:58 Harry Stebbings? What's the hardest element of your role with Rappi today?
25:01 Speaker 02 The hardest part is to not ever get comfortable as a boss or a leader. You can spend a lot of time just asking people to report things to you and to be able to always start your day with the difficult things, with uncomfortable things, with the things that you don't want to do day after day after day. I think that's biggest challenge.
25:23 Harry Stebbings? How did you respond to your greatest failure? When you failed at something, how did you respond and how did you pick yourself up?
25:29 Speaker 02 I think that to be able to be successful in this type of jobs, you don't have to take yourself too seriously in a sense that you don't have to feel that proud of the things that you do well or that shameful of the things that you don't. You just have to have a bit of perspective and move on and learn and keep working. So to be honest, if you tell me what's your greatest accomplishment or your greatest failure, I wouldn't be able to respond. I'm not fixed in the past in that sense.
25:57 Harry Stebbings? Okay, interesting one here. What traits would you most like your children to have?
26:01 Speaker 02 Resilience, courage, determination, curiosity, sense of humor, empathy, spirituality, I would say.
26:10 Harry Stebbings? Got it. Now, love it. Do you look up to and why Simon?
26:14 Speaker 02 Well, in terms of business leaders for sure, Jeff Bezos. I think it's a super competitive industry, the one that Amazon is in. And I just read his new book, Invent and Wonder, and it's pure wisdom in every single page. So that guy is impressive. And then in terms of human beings, my grandma, she is someone that had eight kids. And I've never heard her complain in all my life. It's amazing how she always have a smile to every single situation. And I've learned a lot from that, like there's no time in life to complain.
26:49 Harry Stebbings? You can learn a lot from your grandmother. Final one there, and it's like, what do the next five years hold for you with Rappi? What does that look like?
26:56 Speaker 02 The next five years for us are going to be about extending what we can offer our power users. So we, we are a lot more focused on our high frequency users than in competing for cheap burgers, for users that only order because of a discount. We target users that have most of things in life, but they don't have time. And our real purpose is to give time back to people and to families. And to be able to do that, we are learning what else can we provide. And for example, we're now entering into pets and users are loving our services and assortment of pets. We're now going a lot deeper into all of the baby category.
27:39 Speaker 02 And we are going into fintech and banking. So in five years, Rappi is going to be this super app for people that don't have a lot of time and need help with a lot of things. And Rappi is going to be able to provide not only groceries and restaurants and pharmacy, but also everything for your pets, services, your credit cards and bank accounts. We launched last week in Mexico, we're launching in Brazil and we had tens of thousands of people already in waiting list. So it's an opportunity to, with small incremental changes, improve people's lives. And again, keep working on those retention cohorts and build this fan base. Rappi is not going to be the
28:22 Speaker 02 Largest company in terms of number of users. It's going to be the largest company in terms of strong fan base. And what we're seeing is that 70% of our GMB comes from these users that really understand wrapping. And that's where we're focusing.
28:38 Harry Stebbings? Simon, this has been such a joy to do. As you could tell, I totally threw the schedule out of the window. Unbelievably, my first guest from Latam in 2000 shows. I'm so glad that we could do this because it was a very special one for me. So thank you so much for joining me today.
28:52 Speaker 02 Thank you so much, Harry.
28:56 Harry Stebbings? I mean, as you could tell, I just loved that discussion with Simon. And all I'll say is if you saw the schedule beforehand and then heard that episode, you would see that Simon was, how do I say, incredibly accommodating in terms of satiating my curiosity there. If you'd like to see more from us behind the scenes, of course you can on Instagram at H Stebbings 1996 with two Bs. I always love to see you there. But before we leave you today, did you know that more than 80% of US public stock is owned by just 10% of Americans? This divide is even greater in the private markets. Carter makes it as easy to issue equity to your employees as it is to issue payroll and for employees as easy to accept it too. More than 16,000 companies issue equity to their employees through Carter. Whether you're just getting started or getting ready to go public, the team at Carter can help. Check them out at Carter.com.
29:41 Harry Stebbings? And then another incredible product you have to introduce is SecureFrame. SecureFrame helps companies get enterprise ready by streamlining SOC 2 and ISO 27001 compliance. SecureFrame allows companies to get compliant within weeks rather than the painful months that is today. Join companies like Stream, Husura, Benapass and unlock more sales with SecureFrame. And 20 VC listeners get 10% off at SecureFrame.com/20VC. And finally, I've always been a big history fan. And so I want to talk about Cooley, the global law firm built around startups and venture capital. Since forming the very first venture fund in Silicon Valley, Cooley's formed more venture capital funds than any other law firm in the world with 50 plus years working with VCs. They help VCs form and manage funds, make investments
30:25 Harry Stebbings? and handle the myriad of issues that arise throughout a fund's lifetime. So to learn more about the number one most active law firm representing VC-backed companies going public, head over to Cooley.com and also check out CooleyGo.com. As always, I so appreciate all your support and I can't wait to bring you an incredible set of episodes next week. Stay tuned.
Previous 20VC: Tony Fadell "The Father of The iPod" on Mentors, Self-Doubt, Vulnerability, His Relationship To Money, Why Entrepreneurs Need to Be Coachable, Why VCs Need To Be More Direct & Why The First Trillionaire Will Innovate Around Climate Change Next 20VC: Basecamp CEO Jason Fried on His Relationship To Risk, Money, Vulnerability and Self-Doubt, Fantasising About Being Fired, How To Optimise Decision-Making and Minimising Regret Page updated October 26, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated