"There’s nothing better than punching above your weight": How the founder of Postmates is challenging Amazon

Bastian Lehmann is one of the founders of Postmates, the startup that delivers everything you might need in life – from art supplies to dinner ­– right to your door step. Postmates has raised around $280m so far, at a valuation of $600m for his latest round.

But how does the company cope with Amazon ramping up its same-day delivery efforts? And do you really have to be in the Bay Area to be successful with your startup – or can you also make it big in Europe or even Germany, where Bastian is from? I hopped on Skype with Bastian to find out.

Bastian, a born German, on coming to the US:

Look, I always felt that I had a calling to be here. I wanted to be in the US for as long as I can remember, even when I was just a little guy. I always thought it was a land where you could do crazier things than you can do at home and where people would take you more seriously even though you probably have an idea that is somewhat out of the norm. I also thought it was a place where it was easier to fail.

I was working in London at PA Consulting, a big consulting firm. John Moynihan was the CEO at the time, and I was working in a division that dealt with innovation. I was there for 3,5 or 4 years, and quit my job on 9 September 2009 and said: “I want to do something else!”

So I founded a company in the UK and said: “You don't know what that's good for, at some point you may have an idea.” We started working on a couple of ideas – by the time my friend Sam had joined me – and I got a phone call. It was a guy called Thomas Korte who runs AngelPad. He's German and was an early employee at Google. He said: "I'm looking for people to join the inaugural AngelPad class and your name came up because I talked to people and said that I'd love someone who's German."

At the time, I had a pretty strong network in the startup scene in the UK, because of the work that I did, so he said: "Look, I can't guarantee you success but I can give you I think it was $25,000 as seed money, and I can promise to introduce you to some interesting people and if you want to take that opportunity, let me know." And we said, let's do it!

That was basically the first step, we took the money and joined AngelPad, it was like a 3-month-bootcamp or whatever you want to call it, like Y Combinator. The program itself I wasn't really interested in, but he introduced me to great people that I could learn from and that's how I got to the US.

Click here to read a version of this interview in German.

Bastian on pivoting from curated.by to Postmates:

Then we changed the idea. The initial idea was just horrible, it was called curated.by and it basically – nowadays it makes a bit more sense – looked like Twitter Moments, but curated by humans. So you could have a curation curated by Sara Weber, it would be around a specific topic and we would call these bundles, bundles of interest. You would manually put tweets or articles in it. I guess it's a neat idea but there was so much manual labour involved that it felt almost like blogging, but with more effort. And then we pivoted to Postmates.

Bastian on product-market-fit:

Very often, you're not at the right point at the right time. Even with Postmates, when we started at the end of 2010, beginning of 2011, our growth curve was flat for ages and then the hockey stick kicked in.

For two years, we were out there and nobody cared about it. Everyone I met said, “you're crazy,” and I said: “No, no, no, people will use this app, they will press a button and get stuff delivered, this will totally change commerce, this will have an impact on the way people live in cities, they can live further outside the city center, but have access to all the stores” – and people just thought I was a crazy person.

But then the world kind of shifted with all the companies in that space moving closer in that direction: Uber and Lyft and ride-sharing, and Amazon realised that their customers want access to stuff faster, and then suddenly it takes off. It’s like surfing: You wait for that wave for a long time but if you're not out there, you will never catch it. I think it's a very valid metaphor for companies when they start and the moment in time they take off. Sometimes you just got to wait it out!

Bastian on the competition aka Amazon:

We love competition. I would much rather have a company in a highly competitive space than a company nobody cares about. You can't have one or the other. If you do something that's popular, you have to be aware of the fact that other people want a piece of that. It's just the nature of it. 

When it comes to how to deal with the competition, I think it's a great motivator for everybody here internally at Postmates. We know what we're good at and we know how large we are. We're growing extremely fast and we love the fact that we can rub ourselves against some big guys.

There's nothing better than punching above your weight because it gives you a lot of opportunities to do things smarter and to focus on what's right.

It's allows us to have someone that we can look at that's kind of a competitor that nobody minds if you talk shit about them because they are so big. So we love that and it also validates the space a lot: If customers have this demand, ultimately the idea of Postmates was we want to help local retailers compete with companies like Amazon – and that is still true. Amazon may try to explore ways how they can get products to the customers faster, but at Postmates, we really believe that we can use the city as our warehouse and drive sales to local merchants.

We don't want the cities to be deserted, we don't want our friends out of a job and I think that we have a shot at competing with a decentralised infrastructure against Amazon's centralised infrastructure and that's something that we enjoy and we have the support of the merchants – and quite frankly, at least in the food space, our product is just superior. 

Bastian on the European start-up scene:

There are amazing startups in Berlin and throughout Europe, amazing startups in Spain which I think could be a very interesting hub now that they got themselves out of the really bad economy crisis that they were in. If they get out of that, they're in a beautiful space because property prices are down and the employment laws are very friendly right now, so I think this could be a very interesting boom for Spain.

I love everything that's happening in Europe, but I think the number one ingredient is still missing, and that has been my beef with European entrepreneurs all the time: If you are successful, you HAVE to massively give back to the ecosystem. Yes, of course, there are the one or two names, everybody knows the Samwers and then there's one or two other exceptions, but in general I don't think it happens enough.

There isn’t enough knowledge transfer or money going back to startups, and I mean money that is easily accessible, not money in the stage where everybody wants to invest in that one company. There has to be a lot more money that goes to companies that are at the seed stage, pre-Series A stage, so that people can play around and have ideas and not be afraid to risk everything they have just because they are trying a business.

I think it's awesome that it changes. Advice is important, knowledge transfer is important. But I think literally putting your money where your mouth is, that's even more important! If I'm sitting in a room here and there's 10 people in it, I know that 8 or 9 have invested in startups from friends or startups they are excited about.

That happens because you realise that part of your own success may depend on this as well and it may also be a good investment and if it's not a good investment, then it helps another company. It's great that you say we're seeing it in Europe, but I would love to see this at ten, twenty times the pace that it's at, because I think money is the absolutely most important thing. People who say that money is not the most important thing – they say that because they don't have the money. It is the most important thing. It allows you to do things very independently and it should come with very little strings attached so you can really try to figure out how to run this business.

Bastian on his potential next play:

I'd love to own a restaurant somewhere in Europe. I don't know [what cuisine], something where I would be in the kitchen, I would totally love that, something that's a bit smaller, very sustainable and maybe something that uses some food tech to create food or food experiences where no one gets harmed and that you can still enjoy.

The interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.