Dave Shoemack, from big beer brands to beautiful bikes
When we decided to move home I resigned from VanMoof (pronounced Van-Molf for us Kiwis). We’d been in Amsterdam almost a decade and carrying this growing feeling we were keeping our wider family away from us and our kids. My wife Frances (founder of Abel fragrances) and I loved it over there and we both loved our work, but the boys were three and five and the balance had started to shift, so the time felt right.
The thing was, we had this big launch in 6 months time so the founders asked me to stay on and lead that from NZ then come back for the launch. We agreed it would be a beautiful way to finish...with a successful launch then a massive party to neatly draw a line under the journey. Then Covid happened. The launch and everything went virtual in a matter of days. We realised then that me being here could work on a permanent basis. We sort of became a 24 hour business. I’d click in with them in their morning and evenings and work when they were asleep. We became so efficient.
It’s not easy though. I’m a morning person. I wake up full of energy and charge into the day. By night I like to wind down but I have to work pretty late to catch the team in Europe.
I never thought I’d be working for a startup. In Amsterdam I’d landed a job with Heineken. I was managing Sol beer globally which was a pretty cool role. Unlike the flagship brand, we had lots of freedom and grabbed it with both hands. Me and the global brand managers called ourselves ‘the pirates within the navy’! We grew sales like crazy. But in my last year there, if I’m honest, every day I’d go to work with this feeling in my stomach. ‘Does the world really need another beer?’ And of course I knew the answer was ‘no’. That guilt started to grow. I don’t regret anything but I thought if I’m 80 and talking to my grandkids, I didn’t want my story to be about being at Heineken my whole life. I care about the world, I care about people and I want to make a difference. I didn’t go through any process to figure that out. It was literally a gut feeling and it was so physical.
We were running a local heroes campaign for Sol. One of the first ones was Taco, the co-founder of @VanMoof. They’d been going for 6 years. Their bikes were beautiful but they weren't growing. We had a coffee and just clicked.
I believe massively in the product and in their design philosophy of integration and stripping off the crap you typically find on city bikes. I believed that it could be huge globally and that it could, in a small way, change the world. It’s about getting everyday people moving and cars off the road. I was ready to take a risk and so were they.
They oversold the job and I underdid the research a little! I got there and it was much smaller than I imagined. We sat around one long table together, which in hindsight was vertical integration in its simplest form. But we were far too reactive back then; if there was a problem everyone would swarm to solve it. I was like “I don’t know if I can do this?!” I’d only worked in big organisations with all that infrastructure. So after a 3-month, paralysing, internal freak out, I thought if I don’t act now I’ll fail anyway so I started bringing in structure. I created role clarity for the team. I spent hours with the founders, digging into what the core of the brand was. Then I played it back to them - the DNA, the positioning, the choices we could make about where to play and how to win. This enabled us to give our 18 people a sense of a bold, future direction.
What I hated in the first year has become the thing I love most about my job. It’s the feeling of being out of control. It was so scary at the start. But over time it went from terrifying to exhilarating. I’ve learned that in most startups no one knows what they’re doing and no one has all the answers. There is no sure bet and the best way to make a startup fail is to play it safe. You have to take risks and feel on the edge.
I’m really proud of what the team has achieved. At the start of the pandemic we were 250 people. Now we’re 800 and growing.
There’s a great book we give to new hires at VanMoof, that I’d recommend for anyone in a startup environment, Shoe Dog by Phil Knight, the founder of Nike. It’s the early Nike story we’ve never heard. Their first 19 years were damn hard and damn scary. He finishes it by saying “my only regret is that I can’t do it all over again”.
Related stories
