The Deliveroo chief executive should know what it feels like to be a food delivery worker. When Will Shu launched the food delivery service from his London flat in 2013, the American made deliveries on his scooter for the first eight months, albeit to better understand the business’s complex logistics rather than to pay the bills.
The idea was hatched from Shu’s experience working long hours as an investment banker on Wall Street in the early 2000s. At Morgan Stanley he received a $25 dinner allowance to sustain late-night number crunching, which he and his colleagues splurged on takeaways from local restaurants.
Getting nice restaurants to deliver to your office proved to be a tougher ask when Shu transferred to the bank’s London office. “I was literally working the same hours as in New York but I had to go to Tesco’s every night ... it just became really depressing,” he told one interviewer.
Ready for something new, in 2010 Shu, who was born in Connecticut to Chinese parents, returned to the US to do an MBA. After graduating, he teamed up with his childhood friend Greg Orlowski, who had been working as a software engineer. The pair went on to launch the business in early 2013 with just three restaurants on board, one of whom was the owner of the restaurant Shu lived above on the capital’s upmarket King’s Road in Chelsea.
While Shu has been the enthusiastic public face of Deliveroo, Orlowski, a fellow American, has shunned the limelight. According to his modest LinkedIn profile, the 37-year-old was the architect of the Deliveroo logistics system and website. He left the business this year to spend more time with his wife and young family in Chicago. At that time, Shu said: “Without him, the business would not be what it is today and we remain close friends.”
Still just 36, Shu, who is single and lives in London’s trendy Notting Hill, has stayed on to lead Deliveroo’s charge for global domination. While its army of couriers are upset about being shortchanged by plans to replace an hourly wage with commission, investors cannot throw enough money at the company.
Last week, Deliveroo revealed it had raised another $275m (£212m) from investors to fund expansion. It has now raised close to $500m with some analysts saying it is close to joining the “unicorn” herd, a label given to tech startups such as Uber and Airbnb judged to be worth more than $1bn. It may yet prove to be hubris, but Shu’s old scooter has been sprayed gold and has pride of place in Deliveroo’s trendy London offices.
