Foody joined Delivery Hero in 2019. The announcement said the founders would continue in their leadership roles and the team would keep operating the business.
The company had been sold. There was still a product to run.
That is a useful place to begin an account of what came afterwards. Customers still expected their orders to work. Colleagues needed to understand what had changed. The acquiring company needed context that had previously lived inside a small local team.
The public announcement set out the opportunity: access to a larger group’s experience, technology and processes. Turning that access into useful work required people on both sides to understand each other.
A larger group needed the local context
The decision brought knowledge, capital, systems and a wider network. It also brought more people into decisions that had once been local.
An acquiring company has its planning cycles, controls and ways of describing the work. A local team has its own shortcuts and market knowledge. A familiar phrase on one side can conceal a different assumption on the other.
Explaining that context is part of integration. A shortcut might contain useful local knowledge, or it might be something the small team had never found time to fix. The larger organisation needs enough information to tell the difference. The local team needs to understand what the shared system makes possible and what it requires.
That is work after the sale, even when it does not look much like the work that made the company worth buying.
The team needs usable answers
If I were preparing another founder for that point, I would spend time on the first hundred days before polishing the announcement.
Who can make which decisions? What needs to stay local? What can the larger organisation improve? What can the team be told while some answers are still being worked out?
Those are practical questions. A colleague needs to know who owns a decision in order to get on with it. A new partner needs to understand why something works as it does before trying to replace it. Neither benefits from pretending the announcement settled every detail.
A plan for that period should be specific enough to help people act and honest about what remains unresolved.
The announcement and the transition have different lengths
The sale did not erase the work that came before it. It also did not complete the work that came afterwards.
The longer change in responsibility belongs in my account of the earnout years. There is a separate story about learning to work at Delivery Hero’s scale.
For the immediate period after the sale, the point is simpler. The announcement could describe the new arrangement in a page. The people running the company still had to make that arrangement work.