Beer, Band-Aids And Ben & Jerry’s: Why Venture Capitalists Gave Two 27-Year-Olds $1 Billion To Build The Ultimate Online Convenience Store

Beer, Band-Aids And Ben & Jerry’s: Why Venture Capitalists Gave Two 27-Year-Olds $1 Billion To Build The Ultimate Online Convenience Store

With its flat $2 fee for 30-minute deliveries of junk food and booze, GoPuff is having a very good pandemic. Orders are up four-fold at the SoftBank-backed startup but hypergrowth comes with problems: high costs, low margins “” and thousands of unreliable drivers.

Rushing through their empty offices in a resurgent section of industrial Philadelphia, Rafael Ilishayev and Yakir Gola, the co-founders and co-CEOs of GoPuff are a blur of activity amplified by the silence of the cavernous lobby. "We're here everyday,“ says Ilishayev energetically. "A lot of people want to come back.“

Built from the bones of an Irish bar and a boxing gym, and spanning an entire city block, the 30,000 square-foot space was meant to be the buzzing new headquarters for the seven-year-old online delivery service. Instead it sits