Adam Kolesa (Foodora): Czechs feel they can do things better than everyone else

In this episode of the CEO na ostří nože podcast, we talk to Adam Kolesa, CEO of Foodora in the Czech Republic. He took over from Filip Fingl at a time when the company no longer had a few dozen people but several hundred employees, around six thousand partner businesses and eight thousand couriers. While his predecessor led the company through growth and the move to a global platform, Kolesa’s main task is to keep and strengthen its position as market leader amid growing competition. That means improving service quality, launching new projects such as subscriptions and Foodora markets, and building a strong team.

The Dáme jídlo brand was founded in 2012 by Tomáš Čupr, who sold it to Delivery Hero in 2014. The group grew by buying companies in individual countries, so in Europe alone it ended up with several different brands. According to Kolesa, running them in parallel made no sense: it split the marketing budget and the product design. The switch to Foodora took just a few months. People embraced it quickly, partly because the company is dynamic and has a lot of staff turnover. Kolesa says the new, modern brand brought fresh energy.

Building a shared European culture, he says, is much harder than changing the brand. Countries used to operate independently. Now they are joining forces so that each market doesn’t need its own specialist for everything. The challenge is to set up collaboration so that the company doesn’t drown in admin and status meetings, and so that “most people aren’t just reporting while few actually get things done”. That’s why Kolesa tries to shield his team from headquarters to some extent. He also admits local weaknesses. Czechs, he says, sometimes feel they know better than others, and their English isn’t always at Scandinavian levels. The shared team also brings together consensus-driven Scandinavian culture, more directive German culture and more emotional South American culture. For a long time, the company lacked clear rules on who decides what and who is responsible for what. It was assumed that senior people would sort it out among themselves, and at that scale it didn’t work. European leadership is therefore now openly discussing mutual expectations and principles of collaboration.

Kolesa tries to stay as close as possible to all three sides of the platform: customers, couriers and restaurants. He tried delivering on an e-bike himself and was surprised by how easy it was to start, and by how many customers in central Prague were foreigners. He estimates it was around 30%. As a result, the company sped up translating the app, including dish descriptions. He describes company culture as how people behave every day, and especially in difficult moments, when things aren’t going well or conflicts arise.

What else will you learn in the podcast?

• Why Delivery Hero brought its European brands together under Foodora

• Why building a shared culture is harder than changing a brand

• How to stop headquarters from burying a local team in admin

• Where Czech, Scandinavian, German and South American work cultures clash

• What the CEO learned from delivering food himself

• Why there’s no point waiting on reversible decisions

Adam Kolesa’s biggest lesson of the past year is not to be afraid of deciding faster. One simple question helps: can the decision be reversed? If it can, there’s no point waiting. If it turns out not to work, you can change it. And, in his view, far fewer decisions are irreversible than we think.