The Anti-Uber

While the world's leading ride-sharing business was blowing billions of dollars trying to buy global domination, MARKUS VILLIG was busy doing the opposite with BOLT. Working on a shoestring budget, he built an $8.4 billion operation-and a $700 million fortuneby focusing on overlooked markets in Africa and Europe

- lain Martin

A gun convinced Markus Villig that he was in the wrong business. It was 2015, and the then-21-year-old founder of Bolt was in Belgrade, Serbia, pitching a local taxicab capo on using his app as a digital dispatcher for drivers. The revolver casually left on the boss's desk sent a clear message: These were rough customers in a brutal business. Villig, who had cofounded Bolt with his older brother Martin two years earlier, was suddenly sure he wanted nothing to do with them. "These were not very nice people to try to do business with," he recalls.

Rather than working with traditional taxi companies, Villig decided to go directly to drivers and riders. That path put Estonia-based Bolt, which had just $2 million in funding, into direct competition with Uber, which a year earlier had raised $1.2 billion at a $17 billion valuation. That was scary. But it was less scary than the wrong end of a gun.

Given that Villig had just 0.01% of Uber's funding, it was clear he needed a very different playbook. A miser's eye for expenses, for starters. And rather than going toe-to-toe with Uber in developed markets, Bolt began targeting countries like Poland, where initially there was little, or no, competition.

It was a slog. Between 2015 and 2019, Villig white-knuckled Bolt from $730,000 in revenue to $142 million. He couldn't afford big losses, so he operated the company close to break-even. Uber, by contrast, burned through $19.8 billion, almost $6.3 million a day, before going public in 2019.