Before launching Wolt, Elias Aalto first built a successful software consultancy, Qvik, and created an early hit game for iPhone.

How did you become an entrepreneur?

I was working as a consultant at Digia and someone showed me what they billed for my hours. It was 120 euros an hour and I was getting paid about 17.  I thought: that’s over seven times more. I was, of course, naive in thinking that – as if there were no overheads in running a business and no risk associated with it. But that kicked off the emotion for me that I could sell myself doing the things I was doing at Digia. Why not cut out the middle man? Although I’m not saying that everyone should start their own consultancy, even if they’re working in software development.

I remember, years ago, listening to you speak about your game, Wooden Labyrinth 3D, and how you struggled to make money from it.

A lot of people saw that speech because I did it a couple times. It turns out that no one understood what I was saying though. This was before in-app purchases were really happening, but we had figured out how to make money using mobile games – it was the time of premium applications. What I discussed in my talk was how I had failed to monetise through advertisements and in-app purchases. Actually, the game sold quite well through the premium site, so in the end it made about half a million euros in revenue, prizes and so on. It was downloaded about 13 million times.

How did you decide to jump into Wolt?

I had been at Qvik for over five years. When you do consultancy it can be hard. Most times the projects that you do are not really that successful. Most products in the world fail. They’re not spectacular failures, but they’re not breakout international successes either. On the other hand, if you manage to create a project that is really successful, you’re then a bit annoyed that you don’t actually own a piece of it. You think: “Oh well, that was nice. Now it’s big and great but … well, I got billed by the hour.” I was looking back on the success of the game I had made, Wooden Labyrinth 3D, and thinking how it would be cool to make something again – something where I could say: “This is mine and this is the best.” So when I was contacted by Miki Kuusi to form a company I jumped at the chance. We had a meeting over coffee and I promised to get back to him over the weekend, but I called him back 30 minutes later to say “let’s do it, let’s give it a shot.”

When did that happen?

It was early 2014. At that point it was just me, Miki and Mika, our designer. We spent the summer building the proof of concept and gathering the rest of the team, then we founded the company. It was announced at Slush 2014.

We have seen quite a boom of food delivery startups across Europe. Wolt takes food to homes. We have been doing this for a hundred years. Where’s the startup? What’s the revolution?

First of all, there are two things here. We are not, and we never were, strictly a food delivery startup. That was not the thing that we were going after, and we’re still not. We’re in the business of restaurants and creating a digital interface for restaurants. Part of that is the delivery business. A delivery business provides instant gratification. You have this magic power to get something that you couldn’t get before – having something delivered that isn’t delivered naturally. But we also feel there’s an even bigger piece of the puzzle in the rest of the restaurant business, whether eating at the place or picking it up for yourself. We are trying to look at the restaurant business as a whole and sell all of that. The restaurant partners that we work with didn’t get to the industry just to found a kitchen. During delivery, they’re essentially just the kitchen, but they wanted to be restauranteurs. They want people to enjoy not just the food but the atmosphere and the spirit of going there. We want to help with that as well.