The company also started offering a $5.95 monthly subscription for delivery and began an advertising business. In Europe, it bought the delivery start-ups Fancy and Dija. That November, Gopuff acquired the California retailer BevMo! for $350 million, giving it a foothold in the state as well as the chain’s liquor licenses. Billions of dollars in new venture capital flooded in. In 2020, the pandemic sent Gopuff’s business into overdrive as people shied away from shopping in person and relied on deliveries. “We saw it in the data: customers coming back multiple times every month, very strong customer retention, customers who would stick around forever, basically,” said Jett Fein, a partner at Headline, a venture capital firm that invested in Gopuff. Starting in 2016, the company raised money from venture firms such as Anthos Capital and, later, investors including the Japanese conglomerate SoftBank. Ilishayev expanded their product offerings and set up warehouses in Boston, Washington and Austin, Texas. They also offered discounts on orders to attract customers and charged just $2.95 for delivery.Īs Gopuff gained traction beyond Drexel students, Mr. To fund the business, they sold used office furniture on Craigslist and eBay.
Ilishayev, who graduated from Drexel with a degree in legal studies, became co-chief executives of Gobrands, Gopuff’s parent company. Gola, who dropped out of college, and Mr.
New york times delivery drivers#
Its warehouse workers would be full-time employees, though its delivery drivers and bike messengers would be contractors. Ilishayev decided Gopuff would buy goods from distributors and wholesalers and have warehouses. To set themselves apart from DoorDash and Instacart, which connect customers to restaurants and grocery stores via their apps and rely on gig workers, Mr. They leaned into their college demographic with the name Gopuff and an early marketing campaign calling themselves a “one-stop puff shop.” Deliveries were available until 4:20 a.m. In their sophomore year, they founded Gopuff for college students, offering fast late-night deliveries of junk food, condoms and smoking paraphernalia. Ilishayev met as students at Drexel University in Philadelphia in 2011. The layoffs were part of a global restructuring, it said. Gopuff added that it was putting a public offering on the back burner because the stock market had been volatile and it had enough cash on hand. “Once you can execute, and obviously that’s hard, it wins in the long term,” he said. “The world has changed significantly in the past 60 days.” “These companies are fine during a very ebullient and frothy capital markets environment,” said Ken Smythe, the chief executive of Next Round Capital Partners, which advises investors buying and selling stakes in start-ups. Last month, the grocery delivery start-up Instacart cut its valuation to about $24 billion from $39 billion. And with the bump in pandemic orders tailing off, many of these companies are hitting hurdles. While delivery companies such as DoorDash and Grubhub have gone public, many of them lose money, and some have later been acquired.
Delivery - with high labor and transportation costs, stiff competition and lofty marketing expenses - is notoriously expensive and logistically complicated to provide and make money on. Gopuff faces a dismal history of failed delivery start-ups, from Webvan and in the early 2000s to Buyk, 1520 and Fridge No More in the past few months. This year, it has done two rounds of job cuts, including last month when it laid off about 450 people, or 3 percent of its 15,000 workers. The unprofitable company also lowered its drivers’ minimum pay in California. In response, Gopuff recently put off its public listing and is trying to raise $1 billion in debt that could potentially be turned into stock. In the past few months, the start-up environment has changed from boom to uncertainty, as tech stocks have cratered, inflation has risen, interest rates have increased and the economic outlook has darkened. Now the question is whether Gopuff has done delivery differently enough. Gola, 29, said in an interview last month. “We built a sustainable business that thrives and that is set up to win long term,” Mr. This year, it appeared poised to go public. And they promised speed, delivering food and other items in 30 minutes or less.īy late last year, Gopuff had amassed $3.4 billion in funding, bought the alcohol and beverage retailer BevMo! and was valued at $15 billion.
They opened warehouses and bought their own merchandise, instead of acting as middlemen who connected retailers and restaurants with customers. The start-up’s founders, Yakir Gola and Rafael Ilishayev, based the company in Philadelphia, away from other delivery ventures in Silicon Valley and New York. From its beginning in 2013, Gopuff aimed to do rapid delivery differently.
0 kommentar(er)
