{"type":"rich","version":"1.0","provider_name":"Transistor","provider_url":"https://transistor.fm","author_name":"FWDstart","title":"Quiqup’s Bassel El Koussa on Raising $65M, Surviving Uber and Rebuilding in Dubai","html":"","width":"100%","height":180,"duration":4182,"description":"Quiqup has one of the more remarkable founder stories in the region, although it didn’t start here.\nBassel El Koussa and his co-founders launched the company in London in 2014 around a simple idea: use a mobile app to let people get almost anything delivered in under an hour.\nOver the years that followed, Quiqup raised tens of millions of dollars, worked with some of the world’s biggest retailers and found itself competing in one of the most aggressively funded corners of technology.\nThen Uber Eats arrived in London, and the environment around the company changed remarkably quickly.\nBassel talks in the episode about going from fundraising processes that could produce term sheets within weeks to spending months on the road trying to raise capital, while increasingly confronting the reality that the business they had set out to build in the UK might no longer make sense.\nWhat followed was a series of decisions that would eventually take Quiqup from London to Dubai and fundamentally change what the company was building.\nSome were forced on them, others were very deliberate.\nIn 2022, Quiqup made perhaps the most counterintuitive of all, walking away from on-demand food and grocery delivery and cutting its revenue by 50% in the process.\nToday, the company looks very different from the one Bassel started more than a decade ago, with Quiqup increasingly positioning itself as the infrastructure behind a new generation of e-commerce brands building across the GCC.\nBut the reason I enjoyed this episode so much isn’t really the logistics (although it is jam-packed full of terrific insights on this too).\nThe truth is most of the time there’s only so much a host can do to make a podcast conversation “good.” You can do the research, understand the company and hopefully ask the right questions, but eventually yo’re reliant on the person sitting opposite you being willing to be open about what actually happened.\nBassel was, and as a result this is honestly my favourite...","thumbnail_url":"https://img.transistorcdn.com/rw5tuXzSlVVTIYGhONUr8fUF7P47ZEBy7HgU8S4OYCc/rs:fill:0:0:1/w:400/h:400/q:60/mb:500000/aHR0cHM6Ly9pbWct/dXBsb2FkLXByb2R1/Y3Rpb24udHJhbnNp/c3Rvci5mbS9iY2M5/ZDg1NjgwNzY2YzM0/ODcxOTc5MGEzOWMw/Mzk0OS5wbmc.webp","thumbnail_width":300,"thumbnail_height":300}