BBC NewsBorrowing was £17.4bn last month, the second highest October figure since monthly records began in 1993.
Finito World
By all accounts, Will Shu was a man with an appetite.
New Haven-born, Yale-educated, and City-polished, he came to London not, as so many before him, to reinvent himself in Soho bars or fall into a short-lived romance with Marylebone. He simply wanted better takeaway.
The story, now apocryphal, has him noticing — sometime around 2012 — that Londoners could access complex derivatives faster than they could a half-decent chicken katsu. And thus Deliveroo was born.
It was Shu himself who first donned the turquoise box and pedalled down Cheapside. As origin stories go, it has all the requisite ingredients of the modern tech founder mythos: the unglamorous graft, the problem-solving genius, the hint of quirk (he preferred flat whites to spreadsheets).
But now, in that peculiarly British twist, the company he built is no longer his. Nor, indeed, ours.
DoorDash — a shinier, brasher, West Coast cousin — has gobbled it up for £2.9 billion. For context: less than what Microsoft earns in about two weeks. It’s the latest in a string of quiet partings between British ambition and British ownership — a phenomenon that increasingly resembles a pattern, if not a pathology.
Shu, to his credit, has not hidden his view. In a 2023 interview with the BBC, he hinted that if he had his time again, he might have floated Deliveroo in the US. It’s not hard to see why.
When Deliveroo listed on the London Stock Exchange in 2021, it was met with a reception only marginally warmer than one might expect if one tried to deliver kebabs to the boardroom of BlackRock. The stock promptly fell 26% on day one. Amazon was a backer; Goldman Sachs was the underwriter; and still the market said no, thank you.
Meanwhile, DoorDash — listed on the NYSE — surged. It now enjoys a market cap 35 times Deliveroo’s, despite starting with roughly the same business model: restaurants, riders, rainy weather. The key difference? Access to capital.
As Danny Rimer of Index Ventures (one of Deliveroo’s early investors) put it, “The capital markets here just didn’t get it.” You sense that “here” means not just London but a wider British approach to risk: cautious, credentialed, and ever-so-slightly allergic to ambition.
It’s not that the UK lacks brains. It has Cambridge and Oxford (and Oxfordshire, for that matter), a great thrum of brilliant immigrants, and more fintech startups than France, Germany and Italy combined. What it doesn’t have — or hasn’t had, for some time — is the appetite for scale.
Take the stats: over the past five years, total returns (including dividends) on US shares have hit 116%. In the UK? 45%. UK pension funds now own less than 5% of the UK stock market — down from 50% in the 1990s. As the Treasury dithers, the capital goes elsewhere.
Or as one seasoned investor put it to me last week, with a sort of mournful chuckle: “In the UK, we’re still more comfortable buying a pub than backing a platform.”
Deliveroo, for a moment, gave Britain a taste of Silicon Valley swagger. It employed thousands, reshaped how people eat, and — at its peak — was worth nearly £7bn. And Shu himself cut an unusual figure: not a hoodie-wearing tech messiah, but a shy, thoughtful figure who genuinely believed in customer service. “I wanted to solve a problem,” he once said, “not build an empire.”
He had help, of course. Greg Orlowski, his co-founder, was the technical wizard behind the scenes before bowing out in 2016 to focus on family. Investors like Index Ventures and Accel saw early potential. But the most enduring lesson may be that solving a problem is not the same as building a system to sustain it.
Because the system — in the UK, at least — hasn’t kept pace. And so, one by one, our unicorns are quietly rehomed: Arm Holdings to Nasdaq, CRH to Wall Street, Morrisons to Clayton, Dubilier & Rice. The question is not so much why Deliveroo was sold, but why it never stood a chance of staying.
The government is trying. The Edinburgh Reforms aim to coax more founders to list locally. There is, we are told, “new momentum”. Jamie Dimon thinks UK stocks are undervalued. Larry Fink agrees. But so far, these endorsements feel like watching Americans compliment our weather: nice, flattering, and ultimately not very useful.
Perhaps what we need is not better policy but a shift in temperament — a willingness to value potential over precedent, to celebrate failure when it follows boldness, and to be less squeamish about scale.
Because if we don’t, we may keep raising promising companies, only to watch them grow up, move to California, and never call.
