In a freshly renovated office building in central Berlin, dozens of employees gathered on a late August afternoon to celebrate the opening of Helpling’s new headquarters.
For the most part, it was a scene right of a screenplay about Silicon Valley. Long wooden tables were covered with empty beer bottles. Employees wearing T-shirts and hoodies of green and blue, the company’s official colors, milled around nibbling on food, wearing big smiles and congratulating each other.
What was remarkable about this moment was not what was happening but rather when it was happening.
In early January, Helpling was an idea in the head of two guys walking into a meeting at Berlin-based Rocket Internet. Now, Helpling has 200 employees and operates in 140 cities spread across eight countries. In less than nine months, Rocket built Helpling from nothing into a global e-commerce company.
In Silicon Valley, Rocket is often dismissed as a copy-cat artist, making half-baked versions of other people’s ideas. But that misses the point of what Rocket has become and what it cares about. Its real claim to innovation is its methodical approach to identifying digital business models, launching startups, and then growing them quickly. In the last few years, Rocket has created 65 businesses, fueling its own growth that resulted in its recent $1.8 billion IPO in early October.
While Silicon Valley cherishes originality and the romantic notion of the lone founder conjuring innovative ideas, Rocket is focused on speed and size in order to seize opportunities in less sexy markets. Where entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley search for ideas to dazzle their peers, Rocket pursues what it calls “butter and beer” businesses that aim to fill simple, everyday needs of consumers in places where online services are not quite as commonplace as they are in an area like San Francisco.
As the short, high-velocity history of Helpling shows, Rocket does it all with a staggering speed and efficiency that would be hard to find even in a place like Silicon Valley.
“What Rocket is doing is providing scale on tap,” said David Kohler, an e-commerce analyst for Gartner based in Paris. “They just kind of crank it out. If you look at the secret of what they do, it’s being able to provide the same organized growth over and over, but also doing it at a pace that just bulldozes everyone else.”
via venturebeat.com
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