David Buttress is a venture partner at 83North and the former CEO of . He joined Just Eat when it was just a tiny startup to launch its UK business following a successful career with Coca-Cola, and served as CEO from 2013-2017. In 2014, Buttress was named “Entrepreneur of the Year” at the Investor Allstars Awards and was listed as one of the London Evening Standard’s top 1,000 influential people.
We saw an opportunity, based on the back of a highly-fragmented restaurant landscape, to build a platform that could address this challenge. Digital was clearly going to change customer consumption patterns, and that applied to takeaway food as much as any other product. We started Just Eat UK in 2006 and two years later we had passed the five million order milestone.
But a few months later, I resigned from Coke because I fell in love with the business model. I thought it was something that was fantastic for restaurants and consumers and figured that someone was going to do it anyway, so it might as well be me. I signed up my first UK client by knocking on the door of my local takeaway in east London.There were some tough times, but passion and enthusiasm are absolutely crucial to any organisation’s culture.
The food we eat is changing, and the sales of healthy food in the UK are increasing. The problem we have is that people are moving less and doing less exercise. I know that to be true, because I’ve seen the data. Just Eat uses data from more than 10 million customers per month, and using that community you can build up a personalised view of cuisine preferences, order history, and more interestingly demographic predictions that can be extremely accurate.
Workday I will not tell you the story, history even if I could remember 8% of what happened!
Workday Seems interesting, how about globalisation after IPO?