I worked at Foodpanda, which was one of the Rocket Internet flagship companies for a time. Foodpanda was a mess, and the people from Rocket Internet were saying it was 10x better than Rocket Internet. Which I can believe since Foodpanda outsourced work to Rocket Internet because Rocket Internet said so. They literally assigned me to make sure they didn't screw the project up, they wouldn't take any feedback really. I ended up not caring about the project because it wasn't actually within my offical responsibilites. At the end of the project I was included in the email threads between the two CTOs where the Foodpanda CTO repeatedly pointed out that they were warned about all the shortcoming in the project way before the end and that they needed fixed. Rocket Internet responded saying that was a lot of work and they would need developer resources from Foodpanda. Me and one of the guys I worked with at Foodpanda decided a way to tell if a developer was worthwhile in Berlin was how long they stayed at rocket. Majority in Berlin would have worked for them at some point, so working there wasn't a sign they were bad. But if they stayed there for more than a year, that was.
From my experience Foodpanda's biggest problem was tech. They literally had hundreds of servers be knocked off line because one redis server with session data went down. This was considered acceptable within the company. There was a culture of failure. And the business side had these issues too. There was a write up in an Indian newspaper where they basically got tore to shreads for all their failures publically. Turned out half of the company didn't realise how bad things were.
Foodpanda was Rocket's attempt at buying up competitors and dominating India. They literally bought everyone and still lost the war to dominate food ordering in India.
From my experience Foodpanda's biggest problem was tech. They literally had hundreds of servers be knocked off line because one redis server with session data went down. This was considered acceptable within the company. There was a culture of failure. And the business side had these issues too. There was a write up in an Indian newspaper where they basically got tore to shreads for all their failures publically. Turned out half of the company didn't realise how bad things were.
Foodpanda was Rocket's attempt at buying up competitors and dominating India. They literally bought everyone and still lost the war to dominate food ordering in India.