About four years ago, Jan Harley led an investment running to tens of millions of euro in Instacart for Unilever Ventures, the venture capital arm of the consumer goods giant where he worked at the time. The grocery delivery business was a unicorn but only just.

By March 2021, Instacart was worth $39 billion. Its valuation doubled repeatedly as millions of consumers in North America started using its services during Covid-19.

Instacart is now hotly tipped for a potential IPO and is being advised by Goldman Sachs. While not quite at the level of the Collison brothers’ Stripe or Elon Musk’s space start-up SpaceX, it is in that league.

“I invested in Instacart around when Amazon bought Whole Foods [an organic food chain for $13.7 billion in cash] in America. Before that deal, all of the retailers in America were pretty comfortable that they were doing just fine,” Harley recalled.

“But when Amazon bought Whole Foods, it was like a declaration of war on the consumer goods market in North America. Within six months of that deal, nine of the top ten US retailers had partnered with Instacart. It became sort of the anti-Amazon if you like, the solution that helped them to compete with it.”

Around the same time that Harley was backing Instacart, a tiny start-up called Buymie, which had gone live the year before, was running out of money. Led by its charismatic chief executive Devan Hughes, Buymie had managed to keep going by convincing Unilever’s Irish unit to put €100,000 into the company, and that in turn had helped convince a group of angels including Superquinn scion Eammon Quinn to put up some more – buying it breathing space.

“The investment wasn’t done by Unilever Ventures, which ruffled a few feathers,” Harley said. “But as I was the Unilever Ventures person who knew most about the e-commerce space, I was sent to meet the team in Ireland.”

From the off, Harley hit it off with Hughes. “Devan is an amazing character and personality,” Harley said.

But he wasn’t entirely convinced that Europe was ready for an Instacart-type business model. “At the time we had the most developed e-commerce grocery market in the world with Tesco.com, Ocado.com, and Sainsbury.com so I wasn’t sure the proposition might work.”

Harley liked Hughes, however, and Unilever Ventures stayed supportive. “I could give Devan pointers about how the market evolved in the US,” Harley said. “We became friends and would catch up on a regular basis.”

Gradually, Harley was won over by the indomitable Hughes, and Unilever Ventures became an investor. “By the time I left Unilever Ventures (January 2019) and joined the board of Buymie, I became convinced, absolutely, that what consumers in Europe wanted was their shopping today done by someone else, not next week done by someone else. That Buymie model has massive potential. The catalyst to make that happen is that Amazon is coming and retailers in Europe can’t ignore that.”

Harley initially planned to advise Buymie as one of a number of things he might do post-Unilever, but within months Hughes had convinced him to go deeper. By the summer of 2019, he was its chief operating officer and determined to help Buymie realise its multibillion potential.

From Motörhead to Gousto

Jan Harley was sitting in his living room in Surrey, southwest of London when we spoke earlier this year. He is both a problem solver and a thinker. He is also a committed scout leader and a fan of Ray Kurzweil, the American inventor and futurist who has written books on artificial intelligence and the idea of the “singularity”, when machines become more intelligent than humans.

This character combination could be seen in Harley early on when he studied electronic engineering at Cambridge University in the late 1980s while acting as an entertainment officer for thousands of students in the university. “I loved hosting gigs, parties, and events,” Harley recalled. “It got me really into business, marketing, and understanding customers and that really drove my career.”

One of his challenges as Ents Officer was bringing Motörhead, an English heavy metal band then fronted by Ian ‘Lemmy’ Kilmister, to play Freshers’ Week for new students. It was an event that nearly went horribly wrong. 

“The week before my concert, somebody had crawled into one of their giant speakers and died,” Harley said. “The police were really worried about it so they put up this scaffolding in front of the stage to stop fans climbing up them.”

As Motörhead started playing their hits from albums like the Ace of Spades, a crowd of thousands of students surged forward.

“It became really dangerous,” Harley said. “We had to try and hold up all the scaffolding and prevent it from falling onto people. Thankfully, nobody was hurt, and it was great fun. Motörhead was really cool and a lovely bunch of guys to work with.”

After university, Harley got a job as a brand manager with Unilever. “I got sold on the dream that the best way of learning about business is to get a marketing job as you’re responsible for everything,” he said.

By 1994, he was promoted to regional brand manager based in Dubai in the United Arab Emirates. The products he was working with were household stalwarts like fabric conditioner Comfort, household cleaner Cif, and dishwashing detergent Sunlight.

By 1998, he was ready for an even bigger job as a European marketing manager for Persil, a move which brought him back to England.

Harley had now spent over a decade working with big established brands which were used by many millions of people every day. He was restless and wanted a new challenge.

“Unilever has got some fantastic brands, most of which have been bought by Unilever,” Harley said. “It was always, however, looking for the next big thing.”

“What I have learned over the years is that incredible people attract incredible people around them and they create incredible businesses.”

Jan Harley

Up until about 2002, rising brands tended to be identified by individual country chairmen working for Unilever. The consumer goods giant was doing well, so individual countries were making investments in start-ups with mixed results.

“It was a bit of a pig’s ear,” Harley said. “They had no experience in investing in start-ups as it is completely different to running a $1 billion or $200 million turnover business.”

At a corporate level, Unilever decided it was time to get better at investing in start-ups so it set up a new unit called Unilever Ventures.

This venture arm was set up to foster not just the next generation of brands, but also to work on new technologies on everything from analytics to digital reward schemes. “Unilever decided to do things professionally so they put a team together, of which I was one, to create a structure to invest €250 million into the venture capital system,” he said.

Harley was a founding member of Unilever Ventures, tasked with figuring out what start-ups the business should be investing in. Over the next 17 years, he learned a lot.

“When I started in venture capital, I thought it was about being the smartest guy in the room and us knowing more than anybody else and us having the best strategy,” Harley explained.

“What I realised over a period of time was that it was about investing in brilliant people who have a brilliant vision for the future.”

In 2014, he led Unilever’s investment in Gousto. A former analyst at Rothschild called Timo Schmidt had set up the tiny DIY meals online business two years earlier to deliver boxes of ingredients with recipe solutions to consumers.

At the time, Gousto was raising £5 million to get going. “We were the first institutional investor in Gousto,” Harley recalled. Harley admits he wasn’t sure about Gousto as a business at the start, but Schmidt won him over. “What stood out about Gousto was that its CEO (Schmidt) was an incredible individual. What I have learned over the years is that incredible people attract incredible people around them and they create incredible businesses,” he said.

“A big thing I learned was I used to meet hundreds of CEOs every year, and the thing to do was invest in the most outstanding people who also happen to have ideas in the right sort of areas. For a lot of my investments, that was the key thesis.”

In Gousto’s case, the business went on to raise £25 million in November 2020, giving it a valuation of $1 billion.

Accelerating retail

Two years ago, Harley stepped down from Unilever Ventures to set up his own business called Singularity Venture Advisors. The plan was to work with a handful of start-ups working in the areas of consumer goods and artificial intelligence, but he kept being drawn back to Buymie.

“I just fell in love with the Buymie business and team, so I decided to go full-time about the middle of last year, and I’ve been winding down my other commitments as a result,” he said.

As in Kurzweil’s writing, the term “singularity” refers to the moment when machines become more intelligent than humans. Harley believes artificial intelligence is changing the way we work.

“I have been involved with a number of businesses where we have seen massive disruption as a result of AI,” he said. “In time it is going to be a problem for humanity that it is even bigger than Amazon – how we survive when computers are smarter than us.”

This isn’t due to happen until 2045 so there is still some way to go. “It is happening in patches. We are being slowly boiled in that water and we won’t realise until it is too late that our intelligence has been completely surpassed, but it is happening around us.”

How is artificial intelligence impacting Buymie? “AI is quite a fat word,” Harley replied. “We use a lot of machine learning, which is one part of AI, in Buymie to improve the way we do things and improve processes. That can be as simple as figuring out the route with which we send a shopper around a store or the way we place items (before sending them to customers),” he explained.

This allows Buymie to do simple things like making sure its team shop in a way that ensures they don’t place eggs at the bottom of a big bag – preventing breakage – before handing groceries over to customers. “It is all about improving shoppers’ experience and saving time,” Harley said.

Covid-19 has caused an unprecedented switch towards online shopping, but will it be a permanent change? “I think Covid has accelerated habits that were expected but made them happen much faster,” Harley replied.

“What we know in Buymie is that any customer who tries us a few times really realises and appreciates what a great time saving we give them in their lives. It is hard to go back afterward,” he said. “It is a bit like having a washing machine and the thought of getting rid of it…”

Shopping centre groups have invested heavily in property, car parks, and customer experience. Does Harley think companies like Buymie will lead to a need for fewer supermarkets?

“What we can do with Buymie is help retailers sweat their assets really well,” he said. “What you don’t need is warehouses miles and miles away to be a really efficient food business. We know that people don’t want to have to wait a week for their food to be delivered.

“They want it today. And actually, the locations of the stores we have in Ireland and the UK are in good locations, so we can make existing infrastructure work for retailers really well. “We are giving them something that can allow them to compete with Amazon and provide a service that consumers want.”

Amazon after Bezos

In February, one of the world’s greatest entrepreneurs, Jeff Bezos, announced that he would soon step down as Amazon’s chief executive, having relentlessly taken it from a start-up to one of the world’s biggest companies. As someone who has studied Amazon, and backed companies that compete with it, I ask Harley what he thinks this will mean for the technology giant.

“Amazon has the culture of the founder being at its heart a bit like Apple did,” Harley said. “It is really difficult to step into someone’s shoes like his. For an organisation like Unilever, it was more like a way of being and thinking and approaching the market… It is a lot easier for organisations who don’t have celebratory CEOs to replace them and move forwards.”

Harley said he was a shareholder in Amazon, and he didn’t want to see it fail. “I believe it is going to keep growing and become more and more powerful,” he said. “As an individual, it is going to be quite scary to think they’re bigger than some countries and they are more powerful than some countries and they are only getting bigger and more powerful. As a consumer, I want to make sure there remain lots of alternatives. I don’t want the whole world to be Amazon.

“I think my story as an investor is of David and Goliath… It is the story of start-ups. There are always new opportunities, often at the edges, that just grow and grow and become big opportunities. With Amazon, there is the opportunity to create powerful businesses that are better than Amazon and there will be lots of these kinds of businesses coming through.”

Buymie, he feels, can be one a challenger.

Life in VC

The board of Buymie is chaired by Eamonn Quinn, who spent the first two decades of his career working with his father, the late Feargal Quinn, creating Superquinn. He knows better than anyone what traditional retailers and consumers want. “It is in his DNA,” Harley said. “He helps us stay focused on what is really important, which is serving our partners really well. If our partners win, then we win.”

Quinn, like Harley, is a serial investor, so knows there are more misses than hits in venture capital. I ask Harley what was his greatest miss.

“We used to have a wall of shame in Unilever Ventures with all the great businesses that became massive but we didn’t invest in,” Harley said. “I didn’t invest in a business called Rappi (a sort of Latin American super app which can be used for everything from ordering food deliveries to sending money) which is a billion-dollar business now. I could have made an absolute killing from that for our group.

“I’ve invested just over €100 million directly as a professional,” Harley said. “My investments are currently worth north of €200 million so I’ve had more successes than failures, but you have got to take some risks in venture capital. It’s all about blending those risks and having more winners than losers overall.”

A lot of people are fascinated by venture capital, but it is a hard industry to break into. I ask Harley what advice he would give. “It is a small industry, so moving up through the ranks is a lot about who you know. There is definitely an entry point if you’ve sold your business for north of €100 million,” he laughs.

“Having €20 million to get started in venture capital helps. But that does require you to have a very successful first career before you can try VC as a second.”

From a Duke to a unicorn

In June 2020, Hugh Grosvenor, the billionaire Duke of Westminster, became an investor in Buymie via Wheatsheaf Group, his agri-tech fund. Harley knew the fund from being in the European venture capital scene so he helped introduce it to Buymie. Katrin Burt, the fund’s executive director, joined the board of Buymie following the investment.

“When I started in venture capital, I thought my job was to beat all of the other VCs in Europ,e when actually the VC market in Europe is a network of people trying to help each other make businesses work,” he said.

Buymie entered the British market in May 2020, when it agreed on a grocery delivery partnership with Co-Op, a UK supermarket chain, and launched first in Bristol. Harley knows this market well from his time with Unilever, so I ask him how this geography is going. “It has gone really well so far,” he said. “From Bristol where we launched, we can think about scaling up for London, but also how to launch in other cities like Birmingham and Manchester.”

The retail market in Britain, he said, had turned out to be similar to Ireland. “We thought consumers had similar needs and desires, but we needed to prove it,” he said. “Since we launched in the UK, we have grown much faster than our business grew in Ireland to start with. We are really excited about the growth and thinking about where we take it beyond there.”

He said Buymie had between 30,000 and 40,000 families using its services currently. “In Ireland, we are a huge business but if we can be successful in Ireland and the UK we are going to be massive. And then if we launch in other markets there is so much more opportunity.”

Harley said Buymie had thought about other markets but didn’t want to say where it was going next. “We will go where the opportunity leads us, really,” he said.

Buymie is certainly growing fast. “What Buymie has been able to do over the last year is grow sixfold which is insanely rapid growth,” Harley said. “I am not sure we can sustain that forever but we have a great team and the right people around the board to do that now.”

Can Buymie become a billion-dollar business? “We have certainly got the opportunity to be a very substantial business. But we can’t forget who we serve. We serve our partners and our retail customers… we don’t want to get too big for our boots and think about the billion-dollar exit. I think, actually, if we focus on serving our stakeholders really well and doing a great job, the rest will come.”

Instacart has raised more than $500 million in less than a year. Will Buymie need to do a huge raise? “We don’t need that level of capital in Buymie but there is certainly a big opportunity to grow rapidly in the European market. We will be very mindful of that. For us, it is always about investing our shareholders’ money wisely and thinking about the next milestone rather than trying to be too big too soon. It is about thinking about what we can do and what kind of return we can offer our investors. We are on a good track and I hope our investors believe that too.”