I moved to Berlin for a while in 2014, and so I ended up interviewing at a couple Rocket Internet companies.
I'm by no means an expert in any of this but the impression I took away was that while they did some really impressive things, all their companies had a fatal flaw.
The impressive things were:
- They had a common tech stack that while no means elegant was at least effective at getting to decent scale quickly
- They clearly had marketing and growth talent to also scale up businesses quickly
- They had expertise in specific geographies that are often difficult like South America, Europe, and China (these are difficult at least from the perspective of an American :) )
But the fatal flaw all their companies have, by design, is that they are really good at cloning a product and not good at actually creating one. Every company was clearly designed to be acquired before that problem became insurmountable.
If the acquisition didn't happen, turning a several hundred person organization into one good at figuring out what changes to make to a product to make it successful is...messy.
I'm by no means an expert in any of this but the impression I took away was that while they did some really impressive things, all their companies had a fatal flaw.
The impressive things were:
- They had a common tech stack that while no means elegant was at least effective at getting to decent scale quickly
- They clearly had marketing and growth talent to also scale up businesses quickly
- They had expertise in specific geographies that are often difficult like South America, Europe, and China (these are difficult at least from the perspective of an American :) )
But the fatal flaw all their companies have, by design, is that they are really good at cloning a product and not good at actually creating one. Every company was clearly designed to be acquired before that problem became insurmountable.
If the acquisition didn't happen, turning a several hundred person organization into one good at figuring out what changes to make to a product to make it successful is...messy.