Adapted from Chapter 14 of my book Chasing Black Unicorns. It covers my last year running Jovago, the hotel booking company I built inside Rocket Internet’s African group, and it is told from my side of the table.

During my first two years at Rocket Internet I felt like Charlie in the chocolate factory. An enormous theme park, with the most wonderful carousels and rollercoasters spread over a thousand hectares. I was grateful that Rocket had bet on a lunatic from Poland rather than hiring an egghead from McKinsey or PricewaterhouseCoopers, as they usually did. I was doing what I love in a region I had fallen in love with, with a huge amount of freedom to make decisions. And I had produced results.

We had opened branches in seventeen countries and hired about four hundred people. Twenty thousand hotels across Africa had signed contracts with us and we were making a thousand reservations a day. Nigeria, the apple of my eye, generated about 70% of Jovago’s income. Twice in a row I received the highest possible grade in Rocket’s internal audit of partners, and Rocket used our growth as a case study for other regions.

The freedom, and the Coca-Cola lesson

What I valued most in working with Paris and Berlin was the freedom. Some things have to be built from scratch and from the outside: vision, leadership, culture. That can’t be bought, not even for a lot of money. We produced the results we had agreed on, and how we did it was our business. I take no credit for the approach. The leader is Coca-Cola. I studied its strategy until the penny dropped: Coca-Cola is not a global firm but a “multi-local” one. In every country a different board, a different bottling plant, different logistics, different sales. Everything made to suit local circumstances.

Samwer, the poster and the silent office

Oliver Samwer visited us once, a year after Jovago went live. Our monthly video calls with him followed a pattern: he opened the Excel file we worked on daily, with several dozen financial and operational indicators updated weekly, picked one KPI and went so deep into its nuances that the manager responsible could no longer recall enough detail to defend himself. The other boys were scared before those calls. I was as excited as a kid waiting for a ride at a funfair.

His visit to Lagos was another matter. He arrived at 4 a.m. and I found him at 7 a.m. already working at a free desk in the corner. (He flew economy, even as a billionaire. That impressed me.)

Before his visit I had briefed the hundred-strong Lagos team to look completely engaged and put aside the joshing around, because someone used to German coldness might read it as laziness. The open space was quiet as mice, headsets on, no chit-chat, total focus. At the end of the day he took me aside.

“You know, it seems everything here is fine. Work is efficient, people are disciplined. But there’s no energy here. A company has to live, people have to talk, walk around the office, run for coffee. I don’t feel the excitement that this team is building something big together.”

I had dropped myself in it by telling everyone to be quiet. Then he looked at the poster in our conference room: four drops of liquid on a white background, labeled blood, sweat, tears and champagne. It was my motto, and I explained it at every induction. To drink champagne you have to open your blood vessels, work up a real sweat and cry an ocean of tears. He looked at it with a smile and said: “Maybe you’ve only been concentrating on the last one, right Marek?”

The hole in the strategy

My marriage to Rocket started to fall apart around two years after the wedding. The honeymoon had lasted very long. The differences were over how our child, Jovago, should be raised.

Rocket’s strategy is to enter an emerging market, bet on long-term growth, build a business from scratch in a market that’s still small, and become the leader, so that you grow because the whole sector grows, not only from what you take from competitors. But if you command an army hacking its way through the jungle, once in a while you have to send a scout up the highest tree, so you don’t find out you’re clearing a path where you shouldn’t, because the enemy has moved. The scout has a thankless job, since nobody wants to hear that his efforts were wasted.

Online travel was new for Rocket, and by the time we entered it, hundreds of players on five continents were already there. The Samwers had less time to notice the global changes. I was closer to them, and I had started to see gaps.

Online shopping is mostly local: sellers and customers in the same country. Amazon would struggle to fight for a Nigerian who wants to buy from another Nigerian. In Nigeria, Jumia’s real competitor was the habit of not buying online. Travel is different. Nothing has to be delivered, and even if every Nigerian knew “if you need a hotel, book only with Jovago”, we would still lose about 30% of the market, the inbound travelers flying in from abroad. In Nigeria that’s a small share, but in Kenya or Tanzania foreign visitors were two-thirds of the market. To compete for them we would be competing for customers from the States, Europe, India and China, against Booking.com and Expedia, which control over 80% of global online travel and had so far been busy with South-East Asia and Latin America.

Sooner or later they would open an office in Lagos and start meeting hotels, and they would always have more to offer, namely customers from their markets. We still needed some humility. Jovago made a thousand bookings a day. Booking.com made almost two million.

Booking.com and Expedia were also buying software companies that serve hotels. Hotels aren’t loyal to travel agencies, but software, once sold, stays for years, so the enemy was securing a new field: B2B. In five or ten years hotels would look for their own solutions and Jovago would have serious problems.

I had also watched African hotels go through stages with technology:

• Stage 1. You have to explain what the internet is. A hotel agrees to pay a commission on customers you send, and is surprised when more and more arrive.
• Stage 2. The hotel invests in its own website and looks for as many online agents as possible. The more agencies it works with, the less it wants to pay us.
• Stage 3. Having maximized income, it looks at costs: property management systems, channel managers.
• Stage 4. It hires its own IT and online marketing people.

A side effect of Jovago’s success was moving hotels from Stage 1 to Stage 2, which made them easier for competitors to find. Expedia wouldn’t have to hire a motorbike-taxi driver to lie to a customer. It would just send an email. Jovago had cut off the branch it was sitting on.

The sister that fed on us

I had another problem: Jumia, Jovago’s sister company, the first and most capital-intensive business Rocket built in Africa. In 2015 Rocket had seven businesses in Africa, all under one entity, Africa Internet Group, which raised money for everyone at once. Jumia generated 85% of the group’s costs and was always the decisive element in investor conversations. The rest of us got money “by the way”, which suited us while it worked.

Trouble began when Jumia stopped growing, partly because of the 2015 economic crisis in Nigeria. The easiest way to save Jumia’s growth was to cut the budgets of the other companies, including ours. At one point we had to pull a TV campaign because the budget had “moved” to Jumia. Jovago had the healthiest indicators in the group. I wanted a big VC fund that invests in travel tech, and I wanted Jovago to leave the Jumia nest.

In summer 2015, at the board meeting in Paris, I presented the threats and my recommendations.

“Marek, it seems you want to direct attention away from building the largest online booking website in Africa,” said Ezra, one of Rocket’s investment bosses. “Software for hotels looks interesting. But remember what Steve Jobs said? Focus like a laser. Let’s return to this in six months or so.”

I knew that “six months or so” means never. I asked about finding outside investors just for Jovago: when Jumia sneezes, Jovago catches a cold.

“Don’t worry, Jumia’s problems are temporary. Concentrate on managing and growth. Leave the investors to us.”

That evening, drinking wine alone in a Paris hotel, I understood my adventure with Rocket was coming to an end. I didn’t yet know they already had concrete plans for Jovago that they didn’t want to share.

Org chart with a new box on top

The call came from Ezra, who doesn’t really call so much as watch for your reaction. Jovago was growing, Pakistan was launching (a joint venture with Rocket’s Middle East group that I had helped set up), there were over five hundred people in several countries, and it was time to unify processes. “For this job someone strong on finance is needed, a kind of engineering leader and less a visionary leader.” They had decided to create a head office, Jovago Global, in Paris, and had already hired its CEO. I was to stay in Lagos and keep building Jovago Africa. I tried to hear the rest. I didn’t.

Each stage of a company demands different traits from its leader, and few founders have all of them; aware of their limits, they hire strong deputies. I would have done that. Rocket did not give me the chance. As I experienced it, I was to be a puppet boss while key decisions moved to Paris. Nobody asked for my thoughts or proposed finding a solution together.

When I introduced the new head of Jovago Global, Pierre, who had spent ten years at McKinsey, to the team of over a hundred, I explained how wonderful it was that Paris would support us. He finished with “we have bright prospects before us. Any questions?” A hand went up at the back: “Why is Marek not doing your job? Someone from our local team could have been promoted to take Marek’s place.” The room hummed with approval. That was the start of my conflict with Pierre: I had all of Jovago on my side, and he had Rocket on his.

For every middle-management position in every country, a central position was created in Paris, to which the local equivalents had to report. None of the ten roles went to someone from our local teams, who knew the company and Africa from the bottom up. They went to young guns from consulting firms, black belts in Excel who “couldn’t do Africa”. Training them was to last six months and absorb half a million dollars. My personnel costs tripled, and my people lost the power to decide.

My marketing manager, who had been with me from the start, said: “A month ago I ran a huge TV and radio campaign that generated 10,000 extra bookings. Now I can’t put a photo on our Facebook page without permission from Paris. They treat us like schoolkids.” She left, in spite of my assurances that this was temporary, which I didn’t believe myself.

The day Jovago became a category

My last meeting with Pierre: together with Rocket’s board he had decided to unify all African companies under one brand, Jumia. Jovago would become Jumia Travel and its entire budget would go to the group.

I realized Rocket had done the opposite of what I wanted. Instead of taking Jovago out from under Jumia’s supervision, they had buried it deeper. I told him a company meant to be the Expedia of Africa would now be a category in an online store, and that I would not save Jumia at the expense of the project I had spent three years on. I also pointed out that with finance moved to another continent, we had financing two months ahead, and that you cannot plan much in two months. I did not choose my words diplomatically. It was the last time we met face to face.

The same day I sent Paris my notice. Ezra tried to change my mind and offered other projects. I had come to build a business and had done it.

Paris wanted a smooth departure, with no media drama. We agreed the terms of my bonus and shares, and my one condition: my successor would not be another European sent from Paris but someone from our local team, nominated by me.

I invited my ten managers to the small room with the view of the mosque. When I explained things, I broke down, and so did they. At the farewell I told them: “The measure of a manager’s success is that the company works well after he leaves. Work for the company, not the boss. If you leave, it means I haven’t built a great place to work.”

I turned out to be a hopeless manager. During the first week after my departure, over a dozen people left.

What happened next

The cost optimization didn’t help much. In 2016 a report came out that Jumia’s income had fallen by 40%, and it had by then absorbed Jovago and five other smaller brands. The potential of those brands was wasted, and so was a whole army of capable people. Pierre was eventually moved elsewhere and left Rocket soon after. At the very end, my contacts at Expedia told me Jovago Africa had been offered to them for sale.

Everything I feared if we didn’t change our attitude had happened. It was a sad victory.

What I took from it

• Build for local reality: the Coca-Cola model of a multi-local company beats imposing a central template.
• Send a scout up the tree. The model that works at home (a local marketplace) may not work in your next sector (travel).

---

This is from Chapter 14, “Houston, we have a problem”, of Chasing Black Unicorns. This is my account of events; the book has more, including the Pakistan launch and what I did next. All of my income from the book goes to the MaYa Foundation.

Listen to this chapter: Polish audiobook on YouTube (English version coming soon) · Spotify