Go-Go-Gorillas!
A new app, with a new worker’s model?
It’s lockdown, you’re at home and most of Berlin has been limited to only letting close people into your immediate circle. Lethargy sets in, money is tight for some, and the job-seeking market has been turned upside down.
As 2020 had shown us, going outside can be troublesome and anxiety-ridden at times, the smallest and most mundane exercises can feel restrictive. Such a restriction is not felt in most of the start-up scene in Berlin, and Gorillas had made a mark this scene.
The pandemic had set a way of new possibilities of collecting your lebensmittel, as the Germans call it. In May 2020, Kağan Sümer, Jörg Kattner and Ronny Shibley founded the company and raised $44 million in Series A funding in the same year.
A grocery app that delivers your food within minutes seemed like a cool idea at the time — just like a späti on wheels. But what’s the catch?
The Q-commerce app gives you access to everyday necessities. Currently, only in the Berlin region, the way things are going, there is a high change for regional expansion — and more funding. What a better place to see 2020 lockdown trends reveal themselves than on our smartphones and the applications that come ready with it?
The app’s design is flat and minimal. The application design gives it a modern, minimalist edge and is easy to use, it has a seamless user journey and a simplified process of getting groceries to your door within 10 mins. Yes, in just 10 minutes! And if you’re a Berlin resident, you will also be happy to know that they deliver to your door on Sundays too, before noon, for now…
Why I say for now, is that while start-ups are super excited with their financial lift-offs, sometimes their company culture and employees suffer for the race to the finish, Unicorn🦄 line — and this could have dire consequences for employers.
What consequences?
In the fall of 2016, Paul Polman & CB Bhattacharaya wrote an article about Engaging Employees to Create a Sustainable Business. The key to such success is to create an environment where all employees feel valued. This doesn’t change in the current pandemic.
While financial benefits are important, there are other factors that need to be considered, more so now because of COVID, like health concerns, employee benefits & satisfaction, flat hierarchies, and an active co-creation with employees to ensure that benefits resonate with their expectations.
Strart-ups have a tricky task in adhering to these wants and needs while meeting funders’ expectations and quarterly targets. This could trickle down and dismiss the balance of customer vs. employee satisfaction. Polman & Bhattacharaya says that most employees use a rational cost-benefit calculus — this means they ask: “What’s in it for me?” This doesn’t stop when interacting with the superiors at work, a true-to-form capitalist exchange.
But this relationship is reciprocal, and while startups preach transparency in their company culture. There is a reciprocity of mutual commitments and obligations that one needs to acquire to make a company culture work — and with the current demand for lebensmittel in Berlin, let’s hope that the winter months aren’t too harsh for the riders…
