Óscar Pierre’s Message to Glovo Employees
CEO and co-founder of Glovo, Óscar Pierre, just sent the following e-mail to Glovo employees.
Team,
Today, I have difficult news to share. We are reducing the size of our team by 6.5% and have to say goodbye to approximately 250 of our talented colleagues. I and the management team deeply regret that this is necessary and take full responsibility for the decisions that led us here.
To many of you, today’s news may come as a surprise. This wasn’t in our plans six months ago. We’ve tried to avoid layoffs at all costs by evaluating various scenarios, decreasing costs & improving unit economics over the last nine months to pave the way forward.
The layoff decision largely impacts the company’s headquarters in Barcelona in areas such as business support functions, recruitment and data. No couriers, pickers or front-line employees will be affected. The process will adhere strictly to local laws and practices in all impacted countries.
It will be tough and hard to say goodbye to so many who have worked hard to build Glovo over the last years and are directly affected. I’m deeply sorry for that, and this is why I believe it’s important for me to explain how we arrived at this decision, as well as how I see the future of Glovo and our industry. I will cover these two points more extensively during our All-Hands later today at 6 pm CET. You will receive an invitation shortly. I’m sure you already have many questions about the process and how we’ll move forward.
How we got here
Since we started in 2015, Glovo has seen triple or high-double-digit yearly growth. When you are growing that fast, there is a need to scale the team as fast as possible to cope with the situation. And while we have always been frugal in our spending and how we managed our operational costs, our rapid growth consequently created inefficiencies in our operations.
This is something we identified in early 2022, and we were planning to correct those inefficiencies gradually over the course of this year by carrying out an in-depth analysis of each department.
During each of the first three quarters of 2022, we beat our topline growth targets. These results got us optimistic about our forecasts for 2023. However, in October, we started seeing a slowdown in our topline yearly growth rates. Recently published results from other delivery companies also show a slowdown in demand in Q4, which confirms that external factors are impacting the performance of the industry. The current macroeconomic situation, with rising interest rates and inflation, lowers the purchasing power of consumers, and some choose to order less often.
Although we still expect strong double-digit growth for 2023, we have needed to adjust our forecast to reflect this new reality. With so much economic uncertainty in the short-term future, it will be even more important to keep our costs low and streamline our business.
While the industry faces these challenging times, we are on track to deliver on our targets.
What will happen next?
We have colleagues in 25 countries with different local laws and practices. And while the process may differ by country, we have been thoughtful with planning, so rest assured that all of you will receive more information from your team leader or manager later today. For our Headquarters in Spain, a separate email with additional guidance and timings will follow from our VP of People, Cristina de la Rosa.
Being laid off and going through the process as an organisation is traumatic for everybody. And as a team, we will need time to process it all. And while I know this is the right decision for the future of Glovo, it is emotionally upsetting for all of us, especially those impacted. Some of them I know very well and share great memories with, and it is sad that we won’t be able to keep building Glovo together.
While this is not easy for any of us, we will make it our priority to handle this process with the maximum care and dignity. I want to ensure everybody is treated with the utmost care, so if you feel this is not the case, please bring this to our attention and reach out to Cris or me directly.
Trust that eventually, we will come out of this as a leaner and more dynamic team setup. This decision will leave Glovo in a better place.
Our industry has a bright future. Our platform has changed the consumption habits of millions of users and digitized over 100,000 small businesses, and there’s still so much to grow. Food delivery is at a very nascent stage in all of our markets, with so much opportunity for higher penetration and frequency. I would not be surprised to see food orders grow above 10-fold before the end of this decade.
On top of that, we are just scratching the surface in many categories in our marketplace, such as groceries, retail, or pharma, and adjacent opportunities like Ads, Gas and Fintech. I believe that our on-demand capabilities will revolutionize how people access any product in their cities, and the scale of our platform will unlock many opportunities to increase the value proposition for our entire ecosystem.
Our vision and strategy have not changed. We remain committed to caring for our communities, environment, and local economies no matter where we operate. Our platform impacts millions of people daily, most importantly small businesses and couriers whose economies rely on us. Our obsession is to guarantee Glovo will keep empowering and supporting them on their growth journeys for many decades to come.
I want you to know that we are making decisions to ensure our future is bright.
Today is a difficult day. Everyone’s priority during the coming days are our colleagues to whom we are saying goodbye. Please take good care of yourselves and your colleagues as you absorb this difficult news.
For those leaving, I want to thank each and every one of you for your work in helping us build Glovo. Thank you for your hard work. We truly appreciate your time with Glovo and wish you all the best.
Oscar