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Comment by johnnyfaehell | Hacker News Reader

> It's worked at least a couple times, right?

Yea, HelloFresh seems to be doing well and Zalando dominates in fashion. There are probably a few others doing well too.

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Zalando were publicly hung out to dry by Rocket Internet as they were sure they would fail. After the turn around they are now the poster company of Rocket Internet despite Rocket having done nothing to help them.

Zalando seems really nice. I have no connections at all, but they really won me as a loyal customer because I really prefer the experience over all alternatives (especially including Amazon and local stores for everything except really pricy clothing).

More importantly though, I am really impressed and surprised by some of the research coming out of Zalando. Flair[1] has some great ideas (especially at the time of release, when there weren't pretrained huggingface models for everything to build upon) and a really well-written paper. Colleagues also have had a good experience using the software and achieved very results with adapted NED tasks.

[1] https://research.zalando.com/welcome/mission/research-projec...

Delivery Hero too, they just entered the DAX

I am not too sure about them. They sold the German companies and pulled Foodora out of a few countries.

Look at their global results, Europe is largely irrelevant compared to APAC and MENA. Germany exit was loss of prestige losing home market but also not a major loss of revenue compared to gains elsewhere in the world.

Globally, it's mostly Foodpanda that was doing soo poorly they had to be sold to Delivery Hero, no?

All Rocket ventures were designed to be sold. Most of them did poorly. There is a cost/benefit ratio at which it doesn't make sense to dump money on the business, but the business itself still has value, so selling is a good strategy to cut your losses and/or make some profit.

I think you missed the fact that Foodpanda and Delivery Hero were both Rocket companies. It was that Foodpanda was doing soo poorly they gave it to Delivery Hero which was for Europe. Overall, Delivery Hero/Foodpanda are pulling out of markets repeatedly. And not small markets either.

Also, Foodpanda's plan when I was there was IPO.

DeliveryHero isn't a Rocket company. They invested heavily in it at some point in time - and they seem to still hold a position in the company, but DeliveryHero started outside of Rocket. Foodpanda was always pretty much a "rocket venture".

When rocket invests heavily, it becomes a rocket venture. That's how VC pretty much works.

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