{audio:0:00:01} Adrian, could you just provide some context to the time when you first joined Just Eat?

{audio:0:01:29} I joined Just Eat in early 2011. We were a 300-person company, doing around £25 million of revenue a year. We already had international operations. We’d, effectively, moved our headquarters from Denmark, where the business was founded, to the UK. I was brought in, in 2011, to bring some coherence to the different international businesses that Just Eat operated in. All of the country managers, the managing directors of our international markets, reported into me. My job was to take all of those international businesses and make them work as more of a unit. Also, to help them to grow faster and make sure that we had teams in all the local markets that could scale and take the company to the next level.

{audio:0:02:23} The big change, for me, was a couple of years later, in 2013, when I was promoted and given responsibility for the UK market, which was our biggest market globally, about two-thirds of Just Eat’s global business, in addition to all the international markets. From that point, I became responsible for the whole, global P&L of the business.

{audio:0:02:44} What was the biggest challenge in scaling Just Eat, at that early stage?

{audio:0:02:48} The biggest challenge is a very human one. You’ve got people who are good at running a small company and that are very comfortable in a small company. But we had ambitions to be a very big company. You often find that the right people for the early stage of a company’s growth and development are not the right people for later stages. Certainly, the most difficult thing I had to do was to make those difficult judgment calls.

{audio:0:03:18} The reason it’s so hard is, partly, because these are quite subjective judgments, so you can’t just type a formula into Excel that will tell you who you should keep and who you shouldn’t keep. It’s also a very human challenge because you get to know people, you get to like people, you become friends with people. Being in a start-up, it’s very intense and when you go through a very intense experience, with a bunch of other people, you become friends. You are bonded through that and you’ve then got to step back and make tough decisions about who should stay and who should go.

{audio:0:03:59} If you don’t do that, the company won’t scale. It’s a really important ability to have, at a senior level, in these sorts of companies.

{audio:0:04:09} What principles do you use, in making those really tough decisions and how do you deliver the news to people that you have a relationship with?

{audio:0:04:19} Every case is different. There is no script that I would follow. Of course, it’s also a really positive thing. I don’t want to dwell on the downside of people who don’t want to stay the course or aren’t right, because most of what you are doing, is actually developing people to do more. The company is growing all the time. Everybody is becoming responsible for more things, because the business is bigger.

{audio:0:04:55} You might not get promoted, your title might not change, but instead of looking after 10 customers, you’re now looking after 100 customers. Instead of managing a marketing budget of £1 million, you’re now managing a marketing budget of £10 million, without anything in your job description changing. People need to develop, in order to be able to cope with that kind of scale. Most of what you are doing is actually really positive, because it’s helping people to deal with additional responsibility.

{audio:0:05:27} There are four main things that I look for, that I think help you to be successful, and I think of them in pairs. The first pair of things is intelligence and integrity. Intellectual ability, ability to assimilate new information fast and understand and think across different disciplines. Integrity, I don’t define in a minimal way, such as don’t steal money and don’t do unethical things. I define it as being able to stare the truth in the face and being very straightforward about facts. It’s just so much simpler and more efficient to work with people who operate in that way. If you have people who want to tell big stories and paint the facts in different ways, it just takes time to get under the skin of the issues and figure out what’s really going on. Whereas if you have people who have super high integrity, they say, “Look, here’s the situation; this is the problem. I did this wrong or this thing happened on my watch and it shouldn’t have done. Now, here’s my proposed solution to the problem.” It’s so much simpler to work with people who operate in that kind of transparent way. When I talk about integrity, I really mean just people who are truth tellers.

{audio:0:06:58} How do you test for that?

{audio:0:07:00} You can ask for examples of when people have done it before. You can listen, very carefully, to how people talk about their background. We’ve all made a lot of mistakes in our lives, so if you are interviewing somebody and it sounds like everything was perfect and they never made a mistake, they’re probably not one of those people. I think you can really probe when you are meeting people and listen, very carefully, to what they’re saying and the sort of words that they use to describe things, in order to figure out if they are that sort of person or not.

{audio:0:07:37} There’s a second pair of things that I look for, which is energy and emotional stability. Here I’m talking about leadership roles. I’m not saying that every person in your company needs to have all these things; it depends on the job. I’m talking about general managers, who you expect to lead big groups of people. Energy, you’ve got to have a high work rate, you’ve got to be up for it every day, even when there are lots of different challenges. You’ve also got to be able to energize others. You need to be able to transmit that energy to the team that you are with and help them to get excited about whatever it is that the company’s doing.

{audio:0:08:36} Emotional stability means resilience. There are always challenges; things always go wrong. You find some people who are elated one moment and then despondent the next. That’s pretty harmful if you are managing groups of people. No one wants to see their manager come into work one morning, with their head under their hands, not knowing what to do. Just having that kind of resilience and stability, to keep your wits about you, even when things aren’t going well, which they often don’t, is really important.

{audio:0:09:15} The reason I pair those things is because, if you think about those four attributes, intelligence, integrity, energy and emotional stability, you will, undoubtedly, find that each of those attributes are fairly common. There are lots of people who are intelligent; there are lots of people who have got energy. But it’s actually quite rare to find all of those four things in the same individual. I group energy and emotional stability as a pair, because you sometimes find people who are super energetic and passionate, but they also have a tendency to be up and down. You have people who are completely level and very stable, but they are low energy. That’s an opposing pair that you need to find in the same person.

{audio:0:10:09} Do you look to live those values yourself, as a leader, to encourage young leaders to use those principles?

{audio:0:10:19} To be clear, these aren’t values. These are behavioral traits that are part of an individual and may be as a result of some of your values and your upbringing. But they are things that are quite hard to change. There’s no point giving someone the feedback that you would like them to be a more energetic person. You are who you are. It’s difficult to change these things, which is why it’s so important to screen for them, early on.

{audio:0:10:59} It is important to know that I’m talking about senior leadership roles. I’m not talking about when you are hiring someone to manage your AdWords campaigns or an Android engineer. In those cases, you are looking for a very different set of things.

{audio:0:11:16} How do think about culture and maintaining culture, as you are scaling a high-growth business?

{audio:0:11:24} It’s really hard work. There is lots of material out there on how great companies do this. I’ve been fortunate in working in places that do this incredibly well. Google, where I worked for six years, had an incredibly strong culture and went to great lengths to build that into the way we did things. For me, personally, I learnt a lot from that. The sort of things I learnt from Google were, they codified their culture. They didn’t just let it happen to them. They wrote it down, they had values and principles that were very carefully thought through and were talked about often inside the organization and were very public, inside the company.  We used those values to hire people and to reward people.

{audio:0:12:29} I think that’s a really important part of what companies need to do, as they scale. Be clear about what your values are; don’t just let it happen to you. Document them and communicate them, regularly. But the most difficult thing to do is to have a leadership team that actually follow the values and whose behaviors embody them. That is something that is really challenging, to call people out where their behaviors are inconsistent with the values. As a leadership group, you need to be working on that all the time.

{audio:0:13:12} How do you think about matching the culture to the go-to-market strategy and the business strategy?

{audio:0:13:21} I think it starts from thinking about the commercial and products’ objectives of the business and what we need to be like? What are we going to need to be really good at, to do this? If I just compare and contrast between Google’s culture and Just Eat’s culture, they were completely different places. Utterly different. But the culture of both was very well suited to the purpose and strategy of the organization.

{audio:0:13:54} If I think of the Google culture, in some ways, it was a bit like a university. I can’t say that it’s still like this but, certainly, when I joined Google in 2004, Google would only hire from the elite academic backgrounds. You had to have gone to a certain university, you had to have a certain type of degree. They were, unashamedly, elitist about, academically, who they brought in. This was right across functions; it wasn’t just particular roles. If you think about what Google was looking to achieve, it was really pioneering what technology was capable of. It was at the very cutting edge of computer science and how to commercialize it. This is, inherently, highly academic activity which, if you get it right, you can end up building huge businesses off the back of it.

{audio:0:15:09} Google hired people like that and then the culture, internally, was one of a lot of intellectual enquiry. We regularly brought really interesting authors into the office, to give talks, because people at Google read a lot of books and were really interested in learning about what all these authors had to say. There were really lively discussion groups, internally, about all kinds of different topics, just because it was a company full of really intellectually curious people.

{audio:0:15:48} Google was this very academic culture. If you think about the purpose of the purpose, organizing the world’s information and making it accessible, that’s a very academic thing to think about. Very strong culture, very suited to the purpose and what the business was looking to.

{audio:0:16:11} Just Eat was more like a sports team. It was much more fun, in a sense, because we were mainly a group of very young people. I guess the average age in the company was about 25. What did we have to do to be successful? We had to sign up lots and lots of restaurants onto the platform. Therefore, we needed hundreds of young people, on the streets, talking to restaurant after restaurant, asking them to come onto Just Eat. It was a very repetitive activity. We had people in the call center, who had to answer the phone to hundreds of people every night, who were all, basically, asking the same question, “Where is my kebab?”

{audio:0:16:58} So what we needed was a culture where people were working together, very passionately and energetically, to get a whole load of stuff done, again and again and again. A bit like in a game of football, you are basically doing the same thing again and again. The rules of the game don’t change. You’ve got a ball, you’re kicking the ball, you score a goal. It’s just doing the same thing, over and over again.

{audio:0:17:25} We had this fantastic culture of being very energetic, being very close to each other as a group. We had a world party every year; we invited the entire company for a couple of days, to just come and party together. A completely different thing from Google, but very well suited to the commercial objectives that we had.

{audio:0:17:51} What structures did you put in place at Just Eat, to enable that team cohesion, in terms of incentives or processes, to ensure a certain standard across the business?

{audio:0:18:02} The management structure was quite a lot of delegation of power and responsibility to our general managers, in different markets. The P&L of the business was owned, locally, by a general manager in each country. Those people reported into me and we delegated significant decision-making power to those people, so that they felt true ownership and accountability of the P&L for their market. Of course, we had central functions supporting them, but I think we did a good job of not making it feel like the central functions were deciding things and were responsible for things. It was the local general managers who were making all the most important decisions for their markets. That was the key structure that we had at Just Eat.

{audio:0:19:05} At Google, it was more of a matrix structure, where the marketers in the UK would report in to the marketers in California. I think it’s a really important principle, in any organization like this, to have very clear accountability of who, ultimately, is accountable for the result and that should dictate where decision-making authority lies. As soon as you remove decision-making power from a person, they are not going to really feel accountable for the result. If it’s your plan and all your ideas and I’m just doing what you tell me, then I don’t feel like I’m the one who is accountable. It’s you, not me.

{audio:0:19:55} Do you link compensation with accountability?

{audio:0:20:00} It depends on the role. If you are doing a role where you need to deliver revenue and growth, I think it’s important that you, personally, do well when the company does well. That’s the way I always like to look at it. If the company is doing well and people have worked incredibly hard to make that the case, then they and their families should also do well.

{audio:0:20:28} How would you compare the scaling or go-to-market process of Just Eat, in terms of the marketplace they have versus Receipt Bank today?

{audio:0:20:40} Very, very different businesses. I would say, the product is much more important at Receipt Bank. At Just Eat, it wasn’t really our technology we were selling. We were selling people food and our technology was a layer that they wanted to get through, as soon as possible, to get their food. At Receipt Bank, we’re a software as a service business. Our customers are paying us an average of £200 plus a month, for our software. It has to be very good software; it has to do what it says on the tin.

{audio:0:21:32} We’re bringing real time financial information to small businesses and their accountants. Historically, the cost position of a small business was a bit of a black box. How does a Just Eat restaurant owner know how much money they really have available, when they’ve got invoices from various suppliers, they’ve got their tax bill, they’ve got all these different expenses going out, they’ve got revenue coming in. It’s very hard to know, at any given point, where you stand.

{audio:0:22:13} What Receipt Bank is doing, is taking in all of that financial information in real time. We just put an app on the phone, of small businesses, and they scan invoices when the invoices come in and they scan receipts when they are spending money. Our software understands all of that information and categorizes it correctly. If they work with an accountant, we pass it through to their accountant, to compile into their accounts.

{audio:0:22:43} Previously, this was all archaeology, looking at what happened long ago, to a business’s account, for compliance purposes. Now, with machine learning, it’s able to compile all this in real time and we can make all this information come to life and make it much more useful for small businesses. That is the kind of thing that Receipt Bank is doing; we’re selling people the software that does this.

{audio:0:23:09} When we’re going to market, the product itself is the real thing that we are going to market with. We’re saying, here’s the product; here’s what it does; here’s how it can help you. Education about the product is a huge piece of our go-to-market at Receipt Bank, with all that that implies. There’s a lot of marketing activity associated with that. We have to have a lot of written material that tells people about our product and what it does. Whereas, when we were going to market at Just Eat, we didn’t have to write very much about the product. You order a kebab on an app; that’s it.

{audio:0:23:57} Would you make parallels, in terms of the go-to-market strategy? I assume you’re scaling to accountants now?

{audio:0:24:04} That’s right. At Receipt Bank, we want to be used by millions of small businesses around the world. The most efficient way to do that is to get their accountants to love you, because an accountant will work with hundreds of small businesses. Now, we work with around 360,000 small businesses, around the world and we’re looking to work with millions more in the future. The most effective to do that is to go to accountants. Because we enable accountants to do so much better, to work with so many more clients and, ultimately, to make so much more money, our product is incredibly popular with them.

{audio:0:24:50} There’s some parallels, in terms of the onboarding of the restaurants?

{audio:0:24:54} Now you’re onboarding accountants?

{audio:0:24:58} Restaurants came first and we had to have a great pitch to them. They didn’t always encourage their customers to use Just Eat, but they at least took the orders from the customers who were coming through Just Eat. It’s like that at Receipt Bank. The accountant sees what we do; they push it out to their small business clients.

{audio:0:25:31} The difference here, versus Just Eat, is that people at Receipt Bank, the degree of passion they have for the product is extraordinary. I’ve literally had partners saying, “Receipt Bank has changed my life.” I had accountants saying to me that when they showed their clients what Receipt Bank could do, their clients cried tears of joy. You’ve been spending five hours a day, every day of your life, doing really boring admin and, suddenly, there’s an app that will just take care of it all for you. There’s a platform here that will connect you with your clients and make everything work far more efficiently. It’s a life-changing thing.

{audio:0:26:23} There is a difference in the degree to which people care about the product. Just Eat is great, but there are other food delivery products out there and, ultimately, I don’t spend most of my life eating takeaway food. Receipt Bank is a professional tool; this is what people use in their job. The fact that we do what we do so well, is really life changing for people who use it.

{audio:0:26:58} It’s interesting how you say that the commercial strategy or value proposition of the businesses are different. Receipt Bank is product focused and, therefore, passionate about a product and you pitch the product with written material. Whereas Just Eat is, look, we’re at scale, we have demand and we’re going to drive incremental demand?

{audio:0:27:19} At Just Eat, the sell to customers, people who eat food is, “We’ve got your favorite restaurant.” That’s the key thing. This is all about food; it’s not about technology. We’ve got the food that you want to eat. We’ve got that local chip shop that’s your favorite chip shop. That’s why people use it. Obviously, to the chip shop owner, it will make you more money and will bring you new customers that you never had before.

{audio:0:27:51} At Receipt Bank, it is an amazing product that will help you in your job, to get a lot more done and, actually, make your job a lot more enjoyable because the actions that our technology will take care of is the stuff that you, 100%, do not enjoy.

{audio:0:28:10} How do you compare the cultures of a product-focused business, like Receipt Bank, versus a marketplace, like Just Eat?

{audio:0:28:17} As I said, the Google culture and the Just Eat culture were polar opposites, in some ways. Again, Receipt Bank has its own distinctive way of doing things which, I think, is very well suited to what we are trying to do. One of the values that we care a lot about, at Receipt Bank, is being helpful to our clients, helping them to get more done in their lives. That is, ultimately, what people are paying us for. They’re paying us money to get our software to help them to do more.

{audio:0:29:02} Whereas at Just Eat, we never talked about helpfulness. No doubt, we tried to be helpful sometimes, but that wasn’t one of our core values inside the company. Likewise, at Google, we never talked about helpfulness. We talked about a lot of other things. It’s really important that you start with, what is the company actually trying to do and then you have values that will help you to do that.

{audio:0:29:29} What are you finding the biggest challenge is, in scaling Receipt Bank?

{audio:0:29:35} Some of the challenges are familiar. Always, in these situations, you’ve got the people challenges that I mentioned earlier. You have to make sure that you have a team that is going to scale with you. In this sort of business to business software environment, what’s very interesting and different, compared to B2C companies that I was in previously, are all the adjacencies to what you do.

{audio:0:30:10} We are providing financial management to small businesses, in a sense. There are other types of companies who do the same thing, such as a banks. All these small businesses have banks who are providing some other financial management to them. You’ve got accounting software companies, like QuikBooks, owned by Intuit and Sage and Xero, who we actually work with quite closely, at Receipt Bank. There are other businesses who are providing productivity software to companies, like Microsoft. In a business to business environment, you have all these adjacencies. You’ve got your thing that you’re doing, but you’ve got lots of other people who are doing things with some overlap, providing services to some of the same people. You need to figure out how your proposition fits with all of that and what your plan is in the next few years and how you anticipate all of that evolving.

{audio:0:31:21} That’s quite a different set of strategic issues to the sort of thing that we faced at Just Eat.

{audio:0:31:28} How do you approach partnerships with those adjacent businesses, in a B2B environment? Do you think it’s key for a partnership to get to scale, for your business?

{audio:0:31:40} There are a few basic principles of partnerships. The couple that I like to follow are, one, they should be material to the business. I’ve done a lot of partnerships in different businesses, over the years and the temptation is just to start doing partnerships. If you employ a partnerships person, they will do partnerships, because that is what their job is. But what you’ll find is, left to their own devices, they will spend half their time doing a lot of small partnerships that don’t really move the needle, that nobody really notices. Focus on a few partnerships that will make a big difference, instead of trying to do 50 partnerships that don’t move the needle. Every partnership you do, has a cost, in terms of overheads, time and energy.

{audio:0:32:35} The other thing is, both parties clearly need to win. This isn’t a trade-off between people. I always remember, one of my first meetings at Google, I was pitching a new partnership that I was proposing to do, to Larry Page, Sergey Brin and Eric Schmidt, who were the trio running Google back in 2004. I was a little nervous going into the meeting thinking, is this a good enough deal for Google? These guys are going to beat me up and ask me why I haven’t got a better deal for the company. Why are we only getting this percentage of revenue? What became apparent, in the course of the discussion, was they were coming from completely the opposite direction. They saw, immediately, that this was a good deal for Google. Their concern was, was this a good enough deal for the partner. All of the pressure from them was, are we being generous enough? Should we be doing more to make this partnership sustainable, to make it stand the test of time.

{audio:0:33:46} That win/win principle is genuinely important. What is the point of doing a partnership that is only going to last a few months? What’s the point of doing a partnership at the cost of your own reputation, as a good company for people to do business with? It has to genuinely work for both parties.

{audio:0:34:08} So the two principles that are important for partnerships are scale, so make sure it is material. The other is to make sure that it is win/win.

{audio:0:34:21} In terms of Receipt Bank, what’s the plan for hiring people, to deliver the value proposition at scale, to accountants and small businesses? Are there certain principles that you use to hire motivated people, versus what was used at Just Eat?

{audio:0:34:39} The key thing, as CEO, is that you can’t make all the hiring decisions yourself. It starts with having a great executive team, who you trust, to make a lot of these decisions. When I’m hiring executives, I look for people who have a track record of hiring other great people, because they’re going to have to do a lot of that in a fast-growing business.

{audio:0:35:14} I’m not personally making all these hires; I’m making sure that we’ve got people who are good at this and who I trust to get it right, most of the time. It really depends on the role. At any given time, we’re hiring product managers, sales people, software engineers. The attributes needed to do these roles well are very different. It’s important to hire to the attributes required for success in the job.
The human temptation is always, particularly when you are interviewing someone and you’re meeting them, to hire the people that you like, to hire the people that you, personally, will have the most fun with. While you don’t want to build a company of people who hate each other, that’s not really the thing that you’re solving for. You are really solving for, what do you need to do this job really well and does this person, sitting in front of me, have what it takes to do that?

{audio:0:36:20} I’m very curious about how you think about incentivization and compensation, for a B2B SaaS business, when you have the product team, who are the engineers in driving the product, and the sales team, who are driving increments in revenue. How do you balance the structures and incentivization for both teams, given the profit call of the whole business?

{audio:0:36:47} Typically, compensation looks very different for those two groups. You want a sales team which is heavily driven off the growth that they are driving and are rewarded when they deliver that growth. You need them to be motivated, every month, to go after more growth, because that’s how they, personally, will do well.

{audio:0:37:17} Engineers tend to have different motivations and their work will not have such a dramatic impact, this month. It will have a long-term impact on the success of the company, but it’s not work that will make or break this month’s numbers. Typically, you don’t have such a bonus-driven, revenue-driven compensation structure in those functions.

{audio:0:37:44} So a higher base salary for the engineers and longer-term vision and development, versus higher variable and drive to growth?

{audio:0:37:56} Above a certain level in the organization, we give equity, so you own a chunk of the company.

{audio:0:38:04} How do you look at employing your values, personally, on a business, as a CEO and leading others? How do you feel about the way you carry yourself and the culture you look to infuse in the business? For example, as CEO of Receipt Bank, do have certain rituals or processes that you use, to ensure that you are leading in a certain way?

{audio:0:38:33} I guess, I’m not one to wear all my values on my sleeve. I think, as CEO, you should be mostly thinking about the company values that we talked about earlier and the behaviors needed, in the company, to make the company successful. But they do need to be authentic, in the sense that they can’t contradict your own values.

{audio:0:39:03} One of the most important things for me, is just working for a company where I feel as if, fundamentally, we are helping the world, somehow, by growing and doing more of what we do. I couldn’t work for a tobacco company, where the only way that we are going to grow is by making more people die. That’s just not going to get me out of bed in the morning. At Just Eat, what I found incredibly motivating was that we worked with 100,000 entrepreneurs, around the world; small takeaway restaurant owners, typically immigrants, who weren’t particularly well off. We paid £3 billion a year into their bank accounts, by the time I left the business.

{audio:0:39:57} We were using digital technology to make serious money for 100,000 different businesses around the world, run by immigrants. I thought that was a great thing to be doing. Not least, giving people a nice night in, when they didn’t have to cook.

{audio:0:40:19} At Receipt Bank, we’re working on a huge problem in the world, which is basically, big companies are more productive than small companies. The biggest thing holding back the economy is low productivity. Governments are always wracking their brains about what they can do to increase productivity, because that’s the only way they are going to get more to spend on public services, without having to raise taxes.

{audio:0:40:48} Most people in the economy work in small businesses; 99% of businesses are small. So if you are not addressing small business productivity, you are not going to address a nation’s productivity. Small business people spend crazy amounts of time on basic admin that, frankly, technology and professionals, like accountants, can do a lot better. I think Receipt Bank is going right to the heart of what it takes to increase productivity, which isn’t a very sexy word, but anyone listening to this, who studies economics, will know that it’s fundamental to prosperity and having resources to do all the things that we care about.

{audio:0:41:39} A common thread through discussions has clearly been on hiring and people management. I think the key to any business is hiring the best people you can. Do you have certain techniques or principles that you use in hiring? Or maybe, the process, in terms of meeting someone, versus actually hiring?

{audio:0:42:00} I think you do develop pattern recognition, over the years. Certainly, my success rate now, is significantly higher than it was when I first started hiring people, 15 or so years ago. If I think back to some of the people I hired early on, if I was sitting in front of them now, I would probably make better decisions.

{audio:0:42:29} There is some pattern recognition, where it’s hard to put your finger on it. I would say, the key thing is, try to remove your personal biases, as much as you can, when you are interviewing people. Try to interview people in a consistent, so that if you are meeting five candidates, you’re basically asking the same thing to each candidate. This will enable you to compare and contrast accurately. But I would say, really, really listen to what people are saying. Listen to the words that they use and the examples that they give. Seek to try and genuinely understand what makes them tick, as people.

{audio:0:43:25} I’ve really struggled interviewing people, remotely, over Skype. I actually looked, a few years ago, at Just Eat, at my success rate interviewing over Skype and in person. I found that, in person, I was getting it right about 80% of the time and, over Skype, I was getting it right, probably 50% of the time. I think it is, for whatever reason, even with great video conferencing technology, it is easier to really understand who a person is, if you are sitting in the same room as them.

{audio:0:44:14} Do you have a process? Do you have an interview, then you have a lunch or a dinner or referencing?

{audio:0:44:21} I take referencing very seriously. I’m not a big one to do lunches and dinners. I do a lot of referencing and, if I know people in companies who they work for, I will, typically, go and talk to them and try and get all the data points I can about a person.

{audio:0:44:59} Just around those personal biases, I think the hardest thing for anyone to do is actually listen. How do you try to put your personal biases aside and listen?

{audio:0:45:15} What I try to do is, just remember how diverse people have been, who have been successful. If I think of people I work with, even people in the same sorts of jobs, or any other examples you want, such as famous people who have done great things, they look really, really different. They are very different people, very different backgrounds. There isn’t a type who will always do well.

{audio:0:45:56} The one slight bias I have is, actually, if people are incredibly articulate and make an amazing first impression, I’m always a little wary. I think, have they got where they are in life, because of this, rather than because they’ve delivered amazing results and done really great things.

{audio:0:46:23} Likewise, if I see someone with a really strong CV, who’s clearly delivered a lot and they come across not particularly well or they are a bit hesitant as a communicator, I actually think, wow, you must be really, really good, because you have got where you are and you’ve done all this, despite that. Unless, of course, you are hiring someone to present and to go out and be the face of your business, in which case, all that articulate stuff is very important.

{audio:0:46:55} That’s the one slight bias I have and try is to remember not to be bamboozled by the people who are super articulate.

{audio:0:47:07} Yes; polish isn’t what, generally, makes you successful in these roles.

Just Eat: Lessons from Scaling an Online Marketplace

Former Global COO at Just Eat and Current CEO at Receipt Bank

inpractise.com/articles/just-eat-scaling-lessons

Why is this interview interesting?

Executive Bio

Adrian Blair

Former Global COO at Just Eat and Current CEO at Receipt Bank

Interview Transcript

Related Content

Just Eat: Management Structure and Incentives

Former Global COO at Just Eat and Current CEO at Receipt Bank

Hiring Talent: Removing Personal Bias

Former Global COO at Just Eat and Current CEO at Receipt Bank

B2C versus B2B Scaling Strategies

Former Global COO at Just Eat and Current CEO at Receipt Bank

Principles of Successful B2B Strategic Partnerships

Former Global COO at Just Eat and Current CEO at Receipt Bank

Audio

Just Eat: Lessons from Scaling an Online Marketplace(January 15, 2020)

PARTNER

Speak to Executive