Ruben Sosenke, Pedidos Ya | Building and Scaling an Engineering Team, From Zero to IPO [Ep. 43]

The audio and video are in Spanish. These notes are a translation.

How do you start, structure, and scale a technology team in Latin America? Given that our region’s startups ecosystem is still relatively young, few entrepreneurs can help us answer this question. Luckily, today we have one of them, Ruben Sosenke, former CTO and cofounder of Pedidos Ya.

Pedidos Ya is one of the leading food delivery platforms in Latin America, with more than 5 thousand employees, and it raised capital from venture capital funds, such as Kaszek and Atómico, before being acquired in 2015 by Delivery Hero, Europe’s leading food delivery platform. Thanks to Pedidos Ya, more than 50 thousand restaurants connect with millions of users in more than 400 cities and generate 1,500 million dollars in annual sales.

Ruben told us about his experience and the lessons learned scaling a technology and product team from one person, basically him, to hundreds of people. We also talked about how he sees the future of the delivery industry, one he pioneered in Latin America and that today is highly competitive.

What You Can Learn Today

Delivery market trends
Recommendations for building a startup’s technology team
Process for attracting, recruiting, and retaining technology talent

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Youtube Timestamps*

The Future of Delivery

[1:33] - How did Ruben arrive at the world of startups?
- Studies in Innovation Technologies
- Invitation from Ariel and Álvaro, cofounders of Pedidos Ya
[3:21] - What is Pedidos Ya?
- Business idea for a class at Universidad ORT in 2007
- Website for placing food orders
- Beginnings and first restaurants
[6:21] - Where does Ruben think the delivery market is headed?
- Pedidos Ya as one of the first players in Latin America
- Specialization of each delivery solution
- A local business with high barriers to entry and established players
- A lot of investment available for new delivery startups
- Progressive saturation of the market
[10:39] - Will there be a wave of acquisitions with so much capital raised in the sector?
- Large companies’ focus on process optimization
- Delivery Hero and Pedidos Ya’s strategy
- Highly local solutions that depend on entrepreneurial talent
- Acquisition as an expansion strategy
- There is no room for many large competitors

Scaling Pedidos Ya’s Technology Team

[16:25] - What was the initial structuring of Pedidos Ya’s technology team like?
- Scarcity of talent and specialization
- Initial team of 5 people with multiple roles
- Recruitment through contacts
[18:25] - How do the technology and product teams evolve?
- Initial split of the team into Front End and Back End
- Coordination between parts of the team with progressively more specific tasks
- Complementarity between Technology and Product (Ruben and Álvaro)
- Specialization of multidisciplinary product and technology teams
[22:01] - Recommendations for other startups that are starting to build their technology team
- Organization and planning of the company
- Definition of priorities and resources
- Communication between Technology and the other teams
- Multidisciplinary and collaborative teams
[25:19] - What does Ruben suggest to non-technical entrepreneurs who have to define the technology team’s needs, plan, and execute?
- Find a technical cofounder to lead the area
- Avoid taking charge without the right preparation or background
[27:47] - Pedidos Ya’s scalability challenges
- Lack of a benchmark
- Particularity of the delivery business
- Complexity of the information and the infrastructure
- Preparation for peaks or major campaigns

Recruiting and Attracting Talent at Pedidos Ya

[32:01] - Lessons from accelerating the growth of Pedidos Ya’s technology team
- Parallelize processes that grow together
- Be aware of the limited resources of the moment
- Structure and scale the team
- Tech people on the recruitment and training team
[36:06] - What was the recruitment process like in the middle of Pedidos Ya’s growth?
- Search for profiles and referrals across the whole company
- Team involvement in accelerating the selection and onboarding process
- Need for talent from outside Uruguay
- Opening of the Buenos Aires hub
[38:32] - What does Ruben look for in an interview with a developer?
- Match with the company’s mission, vision, and values
- Autonomy, proactivity, curiosity, and problem solving
- Fit with the culture and the existing team
[41:20] - How do you sell a developer on the company if the salary is not that attractive?
- Conviction in what the startup does
- Understanding of the person and their motivations
- Freedom to make decisions and work as a team
- Satisfaction from solving problems and challenges
[45:02] - Lessons from the Pedidos Ya and Nilus experience for retaining talent despite the rapid changes inside a startup
- Observe the personal motivations of team members
- Collaboratively build the objectives of the role for a set period
[48:00] - What other common mistakes does Ruben see in structuring and managing technology teams, especially in early stages?
- Importance of planning and defining priorities
- Every initiative is collaborative across the whole company
- Avoid improvisation and loss of focus
- Technology teams disconnected from the business or too focused on building features

Tweet Round

[53:16] -
- Recommended book: Founders at Work: Stories of Startups’ Early Days, by Jessica Livingston
- Changes in Latin America’s startup ecosystem: more education and content for learning how to build a company, and more collaboration and communication among different players
- Founder to interview: Ady Beitler, of Nilus