It’s a busy time for Postmates. The logistics and delivery company is prepping for its IPO on the back of a fresh $100 million raise in February. However, founder and CEO Bastian Lehmann is still carving out some time from his schedule to join us at Disrupt San Francisco in October.
Before Postmates, Lehmann co-founded Curated.by, a real-time tweet curation platform based out of London. The German native founded Postmates in March 2011 and turned the brand into a household name.
The logistics and food delivery market is clearly growing, particularly when you look at the sheer amount of cash flowing into startups like Postmates ($678 million) and competitors DoorDash ($1.4 billion) and Deliveroo ($1.5 billion). That said, the business of on-demand delivery has its challenges. The fact that humans are delivering real-world products using actual transportation in the physical world creates a lot of opportunity for things to go wrong.
But Postmates has never played it safe.
The startup continues to iterate and experiment with new types of products and models. In 2017, Postmates took on a handful of new competitors with the launch of alcohol delivery. The company tried its hand at grocery delivery in a number of ways, including launching its own grocery delivery service, as well as partnerships with Instacart and Walmart.
The company has also continued to evolve its Postmates Unlimited product, a subscription that allows power-users to pay $9.99/month to skip the delivery fees.
Postmates even introduced its own autonomous delivery robot called Serve in December 2018.
But perhaps most impressive is the fact that Postmates was able to keep the product fresh while expanding… rapidly.
Seven months ago, Postmates was available in 550 cities across the country. Now the service is operational in 3,500 cities nationally, available to 70% of the people in the U.S., with more than 500K merchants on the platform.
We’re thrilled to sit down with Lehmann at Disrupt to discuss lessons learned and what happens next. Disrupt SF runs October 2 to October 4 at the Moscone Center in SF. Tickets are available here.