Postmates founder Bastian Lehmann joined Startup Grind in San Francisco to talk about his seemingly overnight success - success he earned over the course of 5 years. He grew up with a dream of becoming a firm director - so how did he become the owner of a company valued at $500 million?
Postmates delivers just about any retail/grocery product imaginable in 30 cities, from San Francisco and Seattle, to New York City, and everywhere in between. With 14,000 messengers working for Postmates, the Postmates app is one of the most popular delivery apps in the US. He dropped out of college to found an earlier company (Seven a Day), which ultimately failed. During the run of the flash sale site - one of the first of its kind - he offered seven products per day that were available in limited stock. The company lasted just one year as a bootstrap attempt.
While networking aggressively, he met his co-founders over shared interests. Postmates was born out of a desire to build a life in California, going back to his early days wishing to be a director. The shift from Hollywood to Silicon Valley was a natural one.
Postmates at Work
Postmates was worked on for six months before Lehmann pitched the same VC who funded Uber. There was only a working prototype which showcased the basic idea of how it worked. In that meeting, it was enough to secure a check for $250,000.
This freak stroke of luck is the source of Lehmann’s "overnight success" story, but missing is the fact that it was just the beginning of an era of very hard work.
Lehmann says there are constantly ideas that haunt you, and Postmates was one of them. After moving from Germany to London years ago, he was tossing around the basics of Postmates in his head. He had forgotten his snowboard at home, and he couldn’t afford the prices of traditional shipping. Local courier companies gave him strange quotes, and that’s where the logistics of Postmates began. Like many great startups, it was solving a problem that kick-started the idea.
Watch the full interview conducted by Derek Andersen, founder and CEO of Startup Grind: