Why Bolt is my Favourite European Tech Company
Why Bolt is my Favourite European Tech Company
Why I prefer it over DeepMind, Revolut, Klarna, Zalando and even Spotify
This article is a bit different from the other ones, as it’s not aimed at helping out European developers out there in increasing their salary or quality of life.
It might be an interesting one though, for those out there interested in entrepreneurship. In particular for those looking into starting a tech company in Europe.
Why not Spotify
First things first: saying that I prefer Bolt over Spotify is a big statement for me, since Spotify was one of the reasons why I initially got into Computer Science.
As an avid music listener and having music in general as a passion, Spotify was a company that showed me how you could combine technology, business and art to build something cool and culture shifting.
Before I learnt about the tech world in the USA - salaries, ground-breaking technologies, career opportunities -, my “dream” was to work at Spotify.
That said, after a few years of experience, today I would say that Bolt is my favourite tech company built in Europe. And here’s why.
Bolt - Intro to the company
Bolt is the fastest growing transportation company in Europe (undisputed leader in its eastern part) and Africa, operating also in the Middle East and Central America.
Headquartered in Tallinn, Estonia, Bolt is at its core a ride-hailing company, competing directly with giants like Uber. In addition to ride-hailing, it offers micro-mobility solutions such as electric scooters and bikes, as well as food and grocery delivery and even car’s rental services in some markets.
Bolt was valued at over 8 billion dollars in January 2022 when it raised €628M in its biggest round of funding til date, led by Sequoia and Fidelity Management.
To give some perspective, Lyft’s market cap as of today is around 7 billion US dollars, DoorDash 56B, Deliveroo 1.9B, Uber 160B, Delivery Hero 7.8B.
Why I like Transportation Tech
Uber (Uber Aarhus first, then also Uber Amsterdam a few years later) was the first big tech company to give me an interview in 2018, and since then I've somewhat closely followed the tech transportation and logistics space, until in 2021 I did an internship in Amazon Logistics and further expanded my knowledge in the field.
Transportation is quite cool in my opinion.
It is a trillion dollar industry (not many other industries out there are as big), and it offers the unique quality of being still very technologically unspoiled yet approachable for disruption.
It is unspoiled because a lot of things related to this business could be way more digital than they are nowadays: at the end of the day physical roads are networks, and we have tons of Computer Science theory and engineering tools for networks (the Internet? A massive, digital network, with over 20 years of science and investments carried out just for its development).
It is relatively approachable because it is less regulated than other fields like healthcare or public administration, and internet companies have already been tackling it for decades: Amazon in primis.
Cool founder story - Estonian diaries
In 2013, the 19 years old Markus Villig - now the youngest self-made European billionaire - founded the company in Tallinn, Estonia.
Estonia, occupied by Russia until 1991, wasn’t a country with a lot of tech companies, and the “new” post-occupation environment became fertile for founders, which didn’t have many options there to work as employees, and often opted to start their own businesses as a way to make money.
This is something I’ve found quite common in other post-Soviet countries, Ukraine in primis.
Skype, founded in 2003, was the first big tech company born in Estonia.
Markus's brother worked at Skype, and was instrumental in showing his younger brother about the new internet world and helping him hang out with other founders, engineers and investors. Finally, he joined his younger brother as a co-founder.
Why Bolt is the playbook of European Tech success
I think Bolt, as a company, did a lot of things right over the years, and I think that it is a prime example of how starting a company in Europe can be an advantage rather than a disadvantage if you know how to turn obstacles into features.
The USA might not be the best place to start a company in 2024
Silicon Valley might be the mecca of software startups, but what about its huge corporate tax? What about its insanely high cost of labour? Or its fierce competition for funding, given the large presence of talented founders looking to start a company there?
Also, with the USA market being so big, a lot of tech companies founded there tend to view the USA as the entire world, and encounter challenges when they try to expand into other markets. Not always of course - we all know about the success of global American tech companies -, but sometimes it happens.
Bolt’s virtues and wins
The company didn’t have access to a lot of funding initially, because of existing rivals like Uber (founded in 2008) or Lyft (founded in 2012): this led to it having a frugal culture and making clever business decisions.
Its main engineering teams were built in Estonia, Romania and Poland: this is a great choice, with Estonia being a great market to hire devs and Romania and Poland possibly being among the very best nations worldwide for hiring quality tech talent at a reasonable price. Big tech American companies in the past 5 years have all opened and expanded offices in these two countries.
Estonia, with its 0% corporate tax on reinvested profit and a very digital and lean business environment and infrastructure, is probably the best place in Europe to incorporate a high-growth startup.
Having large rivals in the USA, Bolt decided to expand in Africa instead - South-Africa in particular - and here it managed to beat the likes of Uber: they studied the local market carefully, and made sure they were solving local problems like safety (introducing an SOS button in the app) and payment methods (allowing for cash payment as well as local money-transfer services). Now 1/3 of its business is in Africa.
Didn’t expand into hyped-up ventures like self-driving cars: I did my bachelor in robotics engineering and have many friends working on autonomous driving and I am quite skeptical on its early popularisation with regards to robotaxis. While Bolt keeps an eye on this nascent technology, they deprioritise it while investing in other business expansions instead.
It rapidly expanded into micro mobility, food delivery, and even car's rental. All of them successfully.
Operational excellence: Bolt reminds me a lot of Amazon. Both are among the few tech companies to be able to conquer the physical world, and they do this by excelling in operations and technology at the same time, while staying lean and frugal, and diving deep into specific challenges of various countries and market.
Ride-hailing is a low margin business: if you’re not frugal and operationally efficient, you won’t last. Similar to Amazon, Bolt managed to succeed at this. In the above points, you can see how they’re operating at much lower costs than their competitors, which enables them to offer the services for lower prices, and ultimately scale more easily in challenging markets like Africa. Moreover, this makes them also less reliant on venture capital money, which gives the company additional stability.
A note on Central/Eastern Europe: in the past 2 years I've learnt a lot about engineering organisations throughout Europe and I’ve realised how the future of tech in Europe seems more likely to be in the Eastern part of the continent rather than in the West. This is a broader topic, with implications also for engineers looking for work, and I will treat it separately in another article. But, for now, let me just reiterate on two things mentioned above: low taxes and top quality developers for a reasonable price (if benchmarked globally), with developers being quite happy with their salaries given the low cost of living in these areas.
Conclusion
I feel like Bolt is a true champion and it’s doing everything right, and that's why I'm personally a big fan of it and I believe it is the prime example of how to build a great technology company in our days.
And I consider it as a great example and inspiration for everyone wanting to disrupt the world with technology, from and in Europe.
Cheers to Bolt's people! Edu sulle!
