My career has basically been about platforms. I started in the early days of the internet, building Global Media’s digital portal, then helping flesh out Orange’s web and WAP portals. Yep – I’m that old!
After that I shifted into higher-growth environments. I helped build Travelzoo’s answer to Groupon across North America, taking the business to a valuation of nearly $2bn. Then I joined Deliveroo and ran the UK market from the early days – when we were delivering a couple of hundred orders a day – through to a few hundred thousand orders a day and a multi-billion-dollar valuation from Amazon.
What I’ve always loved about platforms is that, whatever I was building, it really came down to three things.
First, value. I know it’s obvious, but if you want to build something that actually lasts, it has to be good value for money. That means the quality and convenience need to stack up relative to the price you’re paying – simple. And that’s quite a fun challenge. Do you make it faster and higher quality but charge more? Cheaper but slower? Or do you find the real unlock and make it cheaper, faster and high quality at the same time? A lot of people obsess over platforms because they offer material scale to the merchant – which they do – but that’s not the sole point. Their real job is to engineer consumer value, which the next two points – diversity and scale – enable. That challenge is what I enjoy.
Second, diversification. Platforms have more built-in longevity than single brands because, by definition, they host lots of brands. That’s not to say single brands can’t be wildly successful – many of the best businesses in the world are exactly that. But the odds are tougher. Platforms get the advantage of being able to back the next winner, not just bet everything on one horse. And again, that’s fun… getting to work with lots of great businesses.
Third, scale – the bit the internet was basically invented for when it comes to consumer businesses. Massive reach. You’re no longer limited to serving customers from a single bricks-and-mortar location. You can offer your thing to everyone, everywhere. That’s pretty cool, and it’s only got better over time.
So that’s what I’m doing again now – another platform business. Same same. But this time in a sector that’s never really unlocked the full power of the internet – restaurants.
At Sessions, we see ourselves as the fourth stage of restaurant delivery. We enable nationwide distribution for what might otherwise be a single-site restaurant brand.
If stage one was phoning your local takeaway, stage two was ordering online, and stage three was ordering online with delivery handled through a logistics algorithm – then stage four is letting a restaurant deliver everywhere regardless of how far the customer is away.
That’s obviously a big challenge. You can’t deliver from Soho to Glasgow in 30 minutes. So if you want nationwide reach, you need a hub in Glasgow that can cook the food locally for that restaurant in Soho. That means the last mile isn’t just a rider anymore – it’s a hub kitchen that facilitates the order. That’s what we do.
That’s also why we call it the record-label for food. Like music, an artist starts by playing gigs in a local venue. Then one day they get scouted by someone who can distribute them everywhere. Suddenly they’re riding a much bigger wave – unlocking much more value.
This is pretty fundamental for an industry that’s struggling. Restaurants can no longer afford to be defined by the economics of a single site.
If you can build a brand, then frankly – the site economics become less important, provided you can sweat the brand elsewhere. Sessions lets you generate passive income nationwide. That’s what we’re enabling – the operating model for the future of restaurants at a time when it badly needs to adapt.
But for that to work, the hubs need to be brand-agnostic. They need to be able to serve any brand, at any time, and switch dynamically as demand changes. That speaks not just to distribution power, but to agility in a fast-moving consumer market. And that, again, is what a platform really is.
So that’s what I enjoy, and that’s what Sessions is. Great consumer value through the right balance of price, speed and quality. Broad diversification to reflect how promiscuous consumers are. And finally – and probably most importantly – meaningful, rapid scale for an industry that’s never really had it.
