Outsmarting Uber: Why Bolt Wins in Europe

**Markus Villig** (0:00)
The mobility market in general is the least competitive in the world. Bolt is the leading shared mobility business. We operate in more than 50 countries with a mission to replace people's private cars. A lot of the taxi companies obviously saw this as a threat, and then they started blocking their drivers from joining. When I was in Serbia, I was trying to sign up the local biggest taxi company there.
I realized clearly these guys are the mafia. They don't care about the customer experience whatsoever. And that's when we pivoted back hard into just working directly with individual drivers.

**Gabriel Vasquez** (0:30)
You have raised, I believe, around $2 billion. They raised $24 billion before IPO. Do you want to share a little bit more about what that capital efficiency taught you?

**Markus Villig** (0:41)
Constraints really force you to be innovative, force you to be efficient. When you're starting a business as a 19-year-old in a small country with barely any VC ecosystem, obviously you gotta make by with being 10 or 100 times more clever than your competition.

**SPEAKER_3** (0:57)
Bolt started in Estonia, a country of just over a million people. Today, it operates across more than 50 countries, competing in ride hailing, food delivery, scooters, grocery delivery, and increasingly, autonomous mobility.
In this conversation, Gabriel Vazquez speaks with Bolt founder and CEO, Markus Villig, about scaling globally from day one, competing against much larger rivals, and why operational excellence can become a lasting competitive advantage. They also discuss AI, self-driving vehicles, building in Europe, and why Markus believes the next decade of transportation will be defined as much by execution as by technology.

**Gabriel Vasquez** (1:39)
We're here today with Markus Villig, the founder and CEO of Bolt. Markus, welcome to The a16z Show.

**Markus Villig** (1:44)
Great to be here.

**Gabriel Vasquez** (1:45)
For those of us that haven't heard about Bolt, can you introduce what Bolt is and give us a little bit about the scale of the business?

**Markus Villig** (1:52)
Sure. Bolt is the leading shared mobility business coming from out of Europe. We operate in more than 50 countries with a mission to replace people's private cars.
And we cover services as diverse as ride hailing, car rentals, scooters, electric bikes, restaurant delivery, grocery delivery. So it's quite a wide breadth of products across a massive geographic diversity.

**Gabriel Vasquez** (2:15)
Awesome. And let's get a little bit about the story of how old were you when you started the business? How did the idea came about? Where were you at that moment in time? And how did everything get started?

**Markus Villig** (2:28)
Sure, I was born on a tiny island in Estonia with about 30,000 people. So I was growing up there, passionate about science, technology, reading up on all the science fiction literature as a kid, and the real dreams of becoming a scientist and an entrepreneur. And then Estonia was very lucky. So in 2003, Skype was founded there, with the main product headquarters being placed in Tallinn.
And my older brother was one of the early employees there. So I was about 10 years old, and I was already ambitious about getting into tech. And then seeing that journey, how Skype became one of the biggest tech success stories, not just in Europe, but around the world, gave me a lot of confidence that I want to get started in the space as quickly as possible.
So as a teenager, I learned to code, started building websites for local companies to make some money and get some experience. And then I did my first startup when I was 15 years old in education tech. That was a funny experience, because I mean, I was in sort of what, seventh, eighth grade and going to headmasters and trying to sell them like a new system to run their schools. Eventually I realized it's very hard to make money there, especially as a kid. So I pivoted a couple of years later to looking at the next idea. And then when I was just wrapping up high school, I realized transportation is the best place to be where you can make a massive impact in the next 10 years. And that's how I got into Bolt and I've been doing that ever since.

**Gabriel Vasquez** (3:45)
That's awesome story. It's very interesting to hear, obviously, that you've always been into entrepreneurship at such an early age.
This became one of the most competitive markets, but we did a lot of research on how you started the business. And there was this dynamic at the beginning where you were dealing with the taxi operators. And then there was this incident that happened that kind of changed your perspective. And you decided to go direct with the drivers. So you want to talk a little bit more about that and how that affected both the very early leadings.