XA Podcast 024 | From Inception To Acquisition: Tracking The Journey Of A Successful Start-Up With Max Bittner

Starting and building a successful start-up is no mean feat. And Max Bittner has seen it all—from founding and building the Lazada Group to seeing its rapid growth across a span of just 4 years to it finally being acquired by Alibaba. Listen to his conversation with host Michele Ferrario to know about his journey.

Discussion Topics: From Inception to Acquisition: Tracking the Journey of a Successful Start-Up with Max Bittner

• An overview of Max’s professional journey
• Running an early-stage startup as a CEO
• How funding affects company growth
• The optimal time to sell your startup
• Lessons from building Max’s startup, Lazada

Transcript: From Inception to Acquisition: Tracking the Journey of a Successful Start-Up with Max Bittner

Belinda Ong: Hi everyone, it is our honour to host Max Bittner, as our guest speaker for this month’s XA fireside chat. Max is the CEO of the Vestiaire Collective, the leading online marketplace to buy and sell authenticated pre owned luxury fashion. Prior to Vestiaire, Max co-founded the Lazada group and served as the CEO from 2012 to 2018. He was the driving force behind the rapid growth of Lazada and the acquisition by Alibaba. Max served as Regional Partner at Rocket Internet before he launched Lazada in March 2012. We would also like to thank our interviewer, Michele Ferrario, for joining us today. Michele is an XA Member, as well as the co-founder and CEO of StashAway, a leading digital wealth manager that offers investment portfolios and wealth management solutions for both retail and accredited investors. StashAway live in Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Hong Kong, and the UAE. Before founding StashAway, Michele was the CEO of fashion ecommerce companies Zalora, and a Managing Director at Rocket Internet. He started his career at McKinsey and spend time in private equity. Max and Michele thank you for joining us today to lead a discussion on Max’s founder journey. Without further ado, Michele, the floor is yours.

Michele Ferrario: Thank you, Belinda and thank you very much Max, for finding the time for this chat. Now, the goal of today is to learn from you, and both for our XA Members that are today listening, and then also for the podcast listener’s. So let’s jump into it. If I look at your incredible career, you started between investment banking, you spend time in private equity, you were in consulting. And then in early 2012, you kind of joined Rocket Internet, and then quite immediately, quite quickly took the role of CEO of Lazada. So how did it happen? Can you tell us this story of kind of moving from, again, professional services into such a much more entrepreneurial career?

Max Bittner: Sure, and firstly, nice to meet everyone on the call, I recognize some faces I’ve seen before. So hello to those and nice to meet everyone else. You know, the journey, which started back in Singapore more than 10 years ago now, sometimes seems like a lifetime away. And I was actually fortunate enough last week to visit to Singapore. So it brought a lot of memories back. So, this podcast is coming at the right time, with all memories, very refreshed with lots of stories being told over a beer last week. I joined Rocket Internet, after quite a long period of discussions with one of the Rocket Internet CEOs, Oliver Samwer, we actually, by pure coincidence, live literally on the same block in Munich for several years before and had a lot of contact points and he tried to convince me to join Rocket quite a few times. And then around late 2011, I had some of these life changing events, like my wife giving birth to our first daughter, and me having quite a bad sport accident. So I’ve had several weeks where I was sitting at home doing nothing. And I decided that, you know, the time where I was flying around preparing PowerPoint slides, and building excellent models was over for me. And then at 33 at the time, it was either now or never where I was going to take a different change. But to be fair, I didn’t have a great idea to start anything by myself. I’m one of these believers that if you’re going to do something as entrepreneurial as building a new company, you need to have absolute conviction, how big it can be. Because if you don’t believe in how big it can be, how can you make the sacrifice that is required to make this successful. And so I’ve took that intermediary step to join Rocket Internet initially, which at least cut me out of what was a very cozy McKenzie life, but exposed me then very quickly, to a world where I was not particularly comfortable with that the actual Rocket Internet model, or the role at Rocket Internet was not particularly enjoyable for me because it was very much about looking at ideas and then finding a team to get it off the ground with very little involvement afterwards.

And that was for me felt very much again, like, consulting in some sort of way, and almost three, four weeks within being at Rocket, I discussed with Oliver at the time that this was not really something for me, and he actually want to convince me to do the role that then Michele ended up doing a few years later, myself, I wasn’t as convinced about just building a vertical at the time and was very focused on the overall Amazon model. But funnily enough, Oliver and most people at Rocket, were not that convinced in Amazon at all at the time. And just to put that in perspective, this is late 2011, you know, Amazon was not even, you know, I think it was worth 60 70 billion, we’re still losing a lot of money, there was still a lot of questions about whether Amazon could ever make money. And the Amazon model was very unsexy at the time. So we’ve had a few discussions back and forth. And then at some point, late 2011, or early 2012, I decided to just fly to Southeast Asia, I look at the is Elaura business where by this time, we had installed the first CEO, which was actually a close friend of mine from McKinsey, who used to be my engagement manager. And Arnor, who became CEO, I visited him and there was in a few countries, Rocket was testing what was at the time a pure electronics ecommerce website. And after that visit, after about two, three days, I called Oliver and said, I would like to do that role. But only if we build an Amazon out of it, you know, a real everything store and that was pretty much it. I think me and him decided within the next hour, and then I have to call my wife and say we’re moving to Singapore, and I think we literally moved to Singapore, two weeks later. And so it was a very fast decision, because I really felt this was the monster to go after with 600 million people and if at all, it was going to be an everything store model and that’s history.

Michele Ferrario: That’s a great story and obviously, as you mentioned, kind of interconnects a little bit with my own, but we’re talking about you today. So this was kind of in late 2011, early 2012. And then the Alibaba sale, if I get it right up in 2016. Let’s maybe kind of look at it in phases. So there was, I guess, the early days, like in early 2012 what was exciting back then, what was difficult, what kept you up at night during those days, and how did you spend your time as the CEO of very early stage business, but going incredibly fast, with a very high ambition?

Max Bittner: The early stages was really around building a team, because we were from day one, extremely ambitious to launch what was at the time, only five markets being Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, Philippines and Vietnam. Singapore, funnily enough, only came about two years later, the decision to launch or the decision to launch came a year later and then we launched two years later. So it was really about building a team. And as I mentioned, the before Elora was about three, four months ahead of Lazada when it was built. So by the time we tried to hire people, you know, the typical recruiting grounds at McKinsey, and BCG and banks were very much emptied. So, both from a reputation perspective and also just from a talent perspective, there was almost nothing left or no one at least wanted to work for rocket at the time anymore, because Elora and I had quite a choppy beginning. So I had to get very creative in the way I convinced talent to move southeast Asia and one of the legacies of Lazada was always that initially, it was a very European team and that was less by choice but much more by the pure nature that I really struggled to recruit in the local market at the time. So we built put together what I think was an outstanding team over the last next three to six months, including some of those core central founders like Yong who then later on became also CEO of Lazada, and Stein, and others. And those early days was very much around defining what is the right winning model for us in Southeast Asia. And Lazada originally, was built as a retail model, where you buy and sell, like I said, mainly electronics. But we realized very quickly that that was across these five markets, which have no common custom agreement where you could trade in between markets or have one centralized warehouse. The challenge of scaling assortment became very quickly obvious to be only addressed through a marketplace model. So that first year was really around defining the business model, being hybrid initially between one P and three P, having a huge amount of focus on logistics from day one, because a lot of the basics of logistics just didn’t exist at the time.

I think especially when I came back last week to Southeast Asia, you see how big some of these ecommerce companies have been, and how big some of the logistics companies that are out there now, but all of this in 2011, 2012 just did not exist. So building logistics company was there from the beginning, but the third part which I think made Lazada different in many ways, but also incredibly scalable because we were very centralized company from day one, and we really tried to make all decision making and product and technology very centralized with a very strong headquarter in Singapore at the time. And I think we really benefited from that. So that first year 2012, early 2013 was figuring out business model, building team, but also fighting for survival, because we pretty much from day one went all or nothing. And or burn developed in line very, very fast. I mean, we clearly benefited from what was a very healthy funding environment. But the tickets that we needed to raise work very quickly, some’s that were at least in the region, but also globally, almost unheard of. And that kind of race of having to raise money, and then with growth and burn growing in sync, became in a very defining step in what would be then phase two of the business, which started around mid-2013, where we got our first real break from a fundraising perspective, by convincing at the time Tesco PLC, so the UK retailer, which had actually a big presence in both Thailand and Korea at the time, and a smaller presence in Malaysia, we convinced them to be very, very sizeable shareholder investing, what at the time was, I think, close to 150 million euros, which was, again, one of the biggest rounds ever, or I think it was by far the biggest round ever in Southeast Asia at the time, but with that, for the first time, had just unlimited resources for us at the time. So I think that kind of kicked off to the phase two of what was then real hyper growth environment where in the years of like, 2013, 2014, we’re growing 400, 500%, year over year. And in any growth approaching even below 200%, was almost catastrophic. So it was a pretty wild ride at the moment where we also increased headcount from zero to probably 5, 6, 7,000 people within 18 months of launching the business.

Michele Ferrario: And so if you look at kind of the early days that you briefly described earlier, and kind of this second phase, the ramp up after the $150 million Euro round, maybe two questions one is did the way you spend time change, you mentioned a lot of focus on talent in early days, a lot of focus on kind of understanding the strategy, and maybe fundraising. And secondly, did you have to change, like, because of your responsibility change in US, as the kind of the leader of the company, do you have to change something?

Max Bittner: I mean, that’s a very philosophical question. I think fundamentally, I’ve not changed who I am. I’ve been always a very intense, very driven, very ambitious person who always put the opportunity for the business, at number one, and I think the only way I was able to do that is a by leading from the front and not asking anyone to do something I was not willing to do myself, which meant a huge amount of sacrifice with regards to hard work, travel and also spending much less time with my family than I would have hoped, or at least my family would have hoped. But also, I think focusing a huge amount of time on just remembering and explaining to people how big the opportunity is, I mean, it’s really around being very vision led from the perspective of how big this can be, how big the opportunity is, and as a result, very much think about not incremental improvement. 10, 20% but thinking about 10x 20x or 100x growth and what are the solutions we need to build around that. Did my personal time spend change over time? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it clearly went in phases, where at times, I had to focus on strengthening and growing the team, in phases I had to focus on fundraising and in phases, I had to focus on big strategic drives which would then have to be rolled out across every single country. So I think that would go more in waves. But the overall time split today, even 10 years later, versus back then has not changed that much. I would always say it I would spend 30, 40% on people topics that includes hiring, replacing, also, sadly firing people. But mainly, when I talk about HR topics is just hand holding, being a brother, father figure, you know, sometimes being the strict teacher, just spending time understanding what’s driving people’s motivations, what driving people’s problems and frustrations and trying to bring people together. So I think that would be bucket number 30, 40%. then a big part is just on execution, following up individual functions, country’s performance, and being quite relentless in just continuously seeing, you know, are we doing, what we can do and what can we do to grow faster and smarter. And then finally, it’s, of course, that external role, which is another 30%, towards external stakeholders being both investors, brands that we would have worked with at the time and, of course, press and the like.

Michele Ferrario: Great. And so maybe let’s move to the third phase, let’s call it so, we talked about the beginning, we talked about the build-up kind of the crazy growth, and everything that went with it. At a certain point, you sold to Alibaba, and it happened in two tranches, if I remember correctly, but I guess the, the question is, is the question that I think many founders face over their time as building the companies how did you decide that it was the right time to sell? Maybe can you give us some of the stories of how this unfolded and if you have any, so what do you like to share with entrepreneurs or want to be entrepreneurs on this process you know, I’m assuming this was an interesting process.

Max Bittner: Yeah, absolutely. I think what’s really important, and what was very rarely even mentioned is that I didn’t really want to sell Lazada. I think that was never something which wasn’t any shape or form my intention, and that was first and foremost because what I said from the very beginning, is that I fundamentally believed in the not just 1 billion or 10 billion, but 100 billion opportunity that ecommerce across Southeast Asia was. I’m someone who’s either 100% or 0%. And I need to really believe in that mega opportunity, and that mega opportunity doesn’t tend to materialize in one or two or five years, it materializes over 10 to 20 or 30 years even, and needs to be really big. So from my perspective even back in 2015, 2016, when we started talking to Alibaba, in no shape or form, was I ready to sell because I’ve fundamentally felt this was $100 billion company, and you fast forward now and look at what, largely SCA group what Sharpie has done, I don’t think I was in any shape or form wrong, and about how big that opportunity can be. But the reality of the situation was that in 2015, there was a period of about six to nine months, where the fundraising environment had slightly changed, you know, from those earlier, crazy days 2012, 2013 into 2014, our growth was just spectacular. And on the back of that, at the end of 2014, we raised again, what was the biggest round at the time, I think, from Temasek, which was around 250 million in which made us at the time, I think, the first unicorn in Southeast Asia. But like I said before, with the growing cash burn, and growth it became a very ongoing story, that we will always need to raise more to grow more, because that’s what the market and the whole building ecosystem required. So in 2015, there was this period of uncertainty around fundraising, there were not that many pockets of money you could go to at the time, as even today, even in this kind of cooling off period. I mean, the fundraising environment is just a fundamentally different one back then. And there was a lot of noise at the time already, that Amazon was looking at Southeast Asia and starting to hire around Southeast Asia, which didn’t happen in 2016, 2017.

So I felt at the time, I would need some support with someone that has really, really deep pockets and Temasek, who had just joined at the end of 2014 was also the biggest shareholder outside of the founders of Alibaba, and that’s where at some point, the suggestion was made that I should meet with Joseph Tsai, at the time the number two at Alibaba, to see if there’s any way that we can find some sort of strategic alignment between the companies. And I met Joe, I think it was a summertime 2015 in Hong Kong, and for them global expansion started becoming a big strategic topic. And I got on incredibly well with Joe, at the time. And he basically suggested why don’t we help you guys grow, and initially, those discussions very much revolved around being a minority investment with them being a meaningful, but minority shareholder in the business. But as the transaction unfolded, or that investment unfolded between what was the summer of 2015, and then, until the deal closing, which was, I think, around April 2016 we saw how complex this deal was, I mean, the whole negotiation lasted almost, I think, nine months, which was, by all means of the imagination, pretty brutal, because you had on the one side, me and Stein, and a fairly small legal support team. On the other side, you had Alibaba with, you know, I don’t know how many hundreds of lawyers and over time, given who our existing shareholders were given who Alibaba was that deal just morphed into what, maybe we go directly into minority position with a put call option over the next 12 to 18 months. And given where a lot of our existing shareholders were, you know, rocker just did its IPO, Tesco had now a minority position, which was not strategic anymore, and several of the other investors were supportive of this kind of a deal, you know, I didn’t feel empowered enough to go against the stream with everyone else. So, we ended up what was a majority deal, but I didn’t really want to leave at the time, you know, I still thought that Alibaba was an incredible strengthening of our position as Lazada, and then, I was still very much driven by the vision of building this monster in Southeast Asia. So I was very supportive nonetheless, and very committed to the deal and stayed quite a bit longer for the next two years working together with Alibaba on continuing driving the growth across the region.

Michele Ferrario: Thanks, Max. So before I move on to kind of the what happened after you left Lazada, kind of couple of questions to close this chapter. One is, if you look back at this, four, four and a half years of kind of building Lazada, from nothing to sell it to Alibaba, what are you most proud of? If there is one thing,

Max Bittner: I think, obviously, the culture of Lazada. And, you know, a lot has been said about that culture, it was an aggressive culture. It was true male culture. Like I said, at the beginning, when we hired the teams, by need, I sadly hired too many Europeans, too many men, because it was very hard to convince people to move to Indonesia, in Jakarta at the time, and there’s absolutely things that I should have done better there. And then we realized that but probably a bit too late, and then changing the composition of a team is harder. But nonetheless, the culture of the team, the drive, the ambition, the winning culture, the hunger and the ability to push ourselves was, I think, pretty unique and still is today, and I was reminded of it again, last week, when I saw a lot of my x peers, I was there only for less than 24 hours in Singapore, when I met 40, 50, people who came to some drinks, and you see the passion and the loyalty, people still have to today’s back, then it’s pretty unique. And I even see it today with Vestiaire, I think 40, 50 people from Lazada have joined Vestiaire because they just want to build an awesome company. I think if the vision is right, and the mission is clear, of how you’re going to get there, you know, people are incredibly capable to go through walls to go there. And it’s less about me driving them and then being tough, which, of course, I can be, and have been many times in the past, but it’s really about them showing what is possible and what they’re capable of. So fundamentally, I think it’s the culture of Lazada that I’m the most proud of. Of course, there’s some negative sides to it, but it was an amazing team and it was an amazing group of people who’ve done in hindsight, amazing work and I’m very proud to be part of that team. I don’t see myself as the CEO, or the founder, who sits on top and achieved all that I really felt part of an amazing group of colleagues.

Michele Ferrario: Fantastic. And so this obviously, was an amazing success in kind of many, many ways. And when the sales to Alibaba happened, you were still quite young, still in your 30s, I believe. So you could probably do anything from retiring to finding something new to becoming an investor or a professor or I don’t know whatever you want it I guess.

Max Bittner: I thought the professor’s what they call you.

Michele Ferrario: No, I don’t think that’s true, actually. So how did you decide were your next steps? What were the values that drove you to that decision?

Max Bittner: So like I mentioned before, I stayed another two years with Alibaba, I think then over time it became clear that Alibaba was really focused on centralizing decision making, you know, within the Alibaba ecosystem, and wanted to bring more Chinese managers into Southeast Asia to enable that centralization. So at some point, it became clear that my time and role was different to what I’ve loved doing. So it was time for me to leave. But that success as much as it was from an exit perspective and the exit evaluation I think was around 4 billion at the time, and was incredibly rewardful and also, something I’m very proud of. But it was a very bittersweet kind of situation, because you’ve put so much blood, sweat and tears into something and built it, and felt that there was so much more upside left, because I still am a huge believer of ecommerce and the way it changes consumer behaviour, and the way it’s the ultimate kind of democratizing of retail, where in Southeast Asia, for example, you’ve really challenged the big local families, which controlled retail in Indonesia, or in Philippines for decades, you know, withdrawing huge amount of economic rents for themselves I still believe in the ultimate, democratizing drive that ecommerce brings to the table to both sellers and buyers. So I was as proud as I was about the exit and where Lazada was at the time it was very bittersweet, because I felt my mission was in some sort of way, and my journey was unfulfilled. And within days, weeks of leaving my role, I was clear that I was not done yet in any shape, or form, you know, that retiring and, or going into investing, or anything of this sort was just not even for one second on the table. And I was just ready to do more, and then it came back to what do I want to do next, and there were some personal decisions to be made, where I want to continue my journey and what were the topics I would like to work on. And I was very clear, fast that I think my time in Asia was over, you know, you don’t want to kind of build a new relationship, when you see your ex-girlfriend, in every bar, and every restaurant, every time you travel, and Lazada made it pretty difficult. At some point, I think there was even a big Lazada sign when you go around the harbour. So that was just not an option. So I knew that it was time for me to go back to Europe. But I knew that I learned so much in the way that ecommerce had just developed fundamentally different in Asia, both in Southeast Asia, but also learning from Alibaba, that I wanted to continue being in that space, having a different perspective on ecommerce. And the way the community, the way that engagement gamification of the buyer and seller experience is just so different from how we know it in Europe, or also the US, you know, felt like a huge opportunity the same way, it felt like a huge opportunity, bringing best practices from Europe and US into Southeast Asia back in 2012. And I felt that that was not because Asian consumers are fundamentally different from European or American consumers, but because they’ve leapfrog the desktop era directly into the mobile app era. And I felt that this was just a huge potential opportunity, which everyone else thought Europe was absolutely boring at the time.

So I started looking around Europe and looking at how I could build the business, which is very much focused on this engagement community, gamification topic, and I was more looking at building something from scratch. And the best year, opportunity came a bit out of nowhere. You know, at the time, the person who presented it to me he didn’t even want to show it to me, because they felt it was too small an opportunity. But I obviously fell in love with the concept behind it and the core pillars, which are still the three key parts of every strategic decision I make today, which is firstly, it cannot be a massive business, is it a scalable opportunity with an exponentially scalable platform and that checks the box both on the buyer and seller side, what makes this year so unique, is it’s exponentially scalable on the buyer and seller side, because there’s pretty much unlimited supply lying in people’s wardrobes and there’s unlimited demand, you know, if you’re facing a $300 billion luxury industry, but what makes it so unique even for ecommerce, that it’s a global business model where you can buy and sell globally, because it has these very high Average Order values. The second pillar was then really around this community engagement gamification topic where I felt that the best year consumer was absolutely unique because it’s women. It’s women buying fashions, women buying luxury fashion, but more importantly, they were in second hand luxury fashion where they were just so engaged in this Treasure Hunt, finding that one piece that they always wanted, finding a product at a price that just couldn’t afford in the first hand market, it was just an incredibly engaging community with people sharing the same passion about brands, designers, individual products, that it was the perfect environment to roll out all these best practices that we’ve learned across Asia in the previous six, seven years. And then finally which was really the wild card, but it was the story around sustainability, where, in many ways, it was my time to redeem myself for the sins of driving, you know, senseless consumerism across Southeast Asia, by shipping 5, $6 dresses from China, to every corner of Southeast Asia, which is an incredible, polluting thing. I mean, it’s the bottom line is the fashion in the retail Industry is the second biggest polluter from a carbon emission perspective. And the way we consume today is just completely unsustainable.

To give you a sense, Zara produces 900 million pieces a year, H&M produces billions of fashion items a day, which are worn five times, six times maximum, and then end up in landfills across Africa and other places, you know, being one of the worst polluters, both from a production perspective, but also then from a dispose and waste management perspective. So this way of consuming just seemed so unsustainable, where I felt that a business Vestiaire, which has his deep foundations in circularity, and as a result, sustainability felt like a incredible, again, business opportunity, not with a one or two-year trend, but really whether 20, 30, 40 year trend, because the one thing that is for certain is that the planet is changing. So for me Vestiaire, was really the combination of the two biggest consumer trends that the world will have seen over the last 50 and the next 50 years, which is combining the digitalization and ecommerce with the way that consumers have to change around a more sustainable way of consumerism. So it felt like a huge opportunity, which at the time, felt still far away, you know, the sustainability thing felt like a five, six-year time horizon, but luckily enough, it came much, much faster, you know, over the last two, three years, and is now so central in the way everyone, you know, both brands and consumers think about consumption. So, the Vestiaire opportunity felt massive, I felt that I could build a differentiated business model. And it felt also like something where you can really rally again, a fantastic team, who believe in one common vision and have one mission to change the way people think about consumption in many ways.

Michele Ferrario: Fascinating. And before we kind of close the podcast and open questions for XA Members, we have one last question, which is you mentioned that you were in Singapore last week, and I understand you were traveling in Asia. Can you tell us, where Vestiaire, currently available in Asia, how’s it going, where are you in that kind of internationalization effort from an Asian perspective?

Max Bittner: Yeah, it’s a great question. I mean, firstly, it was amazing to be back in Asia, the first time since pre COVID. So absolutely loved coming to my second home, where I had been so long and seeing so many friendly and familiar faces. Asia is for us still early. We’ve been there for several years, but our business is a very organic business, it grows by word of mouth which makes it so beautiful, but it just need to have some sort of level of patience. We’ve been in Asia, four or five years, with a small presence in Hong Kong, Singapore, Australia, and pretty sizable seller base, so not buyer base, but seller base coming out of Japan. And overall, that part of the business represents just around 10% of our global GMV. So, it’s not massive, but it’s a very attractive opportunity. And about last year, I decided that, Asia being representing 40, even 50% of global luxury sales, you know, when you think about the overall Asian including China, Japan, Korea, you know, the definition of it being in a massive opportunity, which I can’t ignore, you know, if 40, 50% of primary luxury sales are there over time there’s no reason why secondary luxury sales shouldn’t mirror that. So, I felt it was the opportunity and the time for me to go after that opportunity and luckily enough through my Lazada connection with Robin being now the CEO across Southeast Asia, but also a lot of other family faces from Lazada, having joined, you know, we’ve been able to scale a very, very strong, very good team built based HQ out of Singapore, which is now pushing the next boundaries for us in Asia. And as a result, of course, focusing on those three markets we’re in so far, but we also launched Korea over the summer, which is as you guys all know, an incredibly important role model for the forward thinking consumerism across not just Asia now, but the world with bands like Black Pink, having their singers being the faces of Chanel, Dior, Tiffany and the likes. So I think it’s an incredibly exciting, huge opportunity where we are barely scratching the surface, but even with just scratching the surface, we’re already represents 10% of the business. So it’s a very exciting opportunity. And I think I’m excited to have the chance in the future to come back more often in this new post COVID world, hopefully.

Our Guest: Max Bittner

Max Bittner is the CEO of the Vestiaire Collective, the leading online marketplace to buy and sell authenticated pre-owned luxury fashion. Prior to Vestiaire, he co-founded the Lazada group and served as the CEO from 2012 to 2018. He was the driving force behind the rapid growth of Lazada and the acquisition by Alibaba. Max served as Regional Partner at Rocket Internet before he launched Lazada in March 2012.