One London Deliveroo courier could be lucking out and receiving the tip of all tips, if they accept the order to the aggregator app’s departing CEO Will Shu’s home tonight.

Shu announced this morning he was to relinquish the role he’s held for 13 years, deciding the company’s £2.9bn acquisition by DoorDash – expected to be a done deal by early October – was “the right time for me to step down” and “contemplate my next challenge”.

Tonight’s takeaway (Wingstop, a favourite of his, and champagne from Waitrose perhaps) will likely go down with mixed emotions.

There will no doubt be sadness for the ending of his leadership at the company he founded: he was Deliveroo’s first delivery rider and “begged” friends to order through the app, initially from its first restaurant partner The Stockpot on King’s Road, London, located below the flat Shu was living at the time.

“For the first year I was doing the deliveries,” he recalled to The Grocer in 2023. “I would say ‘hey I’m Will, I founded the company’. No one ever cared. Because they just wanted their food, right? So they just shut the door in my face.”

Quickly, the demand for Deliveroo’s proposition became clear. 

The Deliveroo effect

There will surely be pride for, as Shu put it today, having “pioneered and then redefined a new category”. While Uber Eats and Just Eat were burgeoning around the same time as Deliveroo’s launch, arguably the idea of using aggregator apps for grocery (and increasingly other retail categories too) was spearheaded by Shu’s Deliveroo.

As early as 2019, hundreds of London convenience stores were listed on the app. And while Sainsbury’s launched a pizza delivery service with the platform that year, it was Deliveroo’s early nationwide partnership with Co-op that provided the blueprint for supermarkets on aggregator apps that seems such standard fare today.

And it’s Deliveroo Hop model – in partnership with Waitrose and Morrisons – that proved rapid delivery could be made to work, despite the catastrophic failures of well-funded upstarts like Getir and Gorillas.

As his colleague Claudia Arney, chair of Deliveroo, said today, Shu brought “a unique mix of passion, vision and commitment to the creation and growth of Deliveroo”.

And there will be excitement about what the future holds for Shu. As the 45-year-old previously told The Grocer, he is “kind of the same person” as when he started the company, one that doesn’t “take things too seriously” and is prone to being “very disorganised”.

But he is changed too. He weathered in 2021 what was dubbed “the worst IPO in London’s history” when the company made its long-awaited debut on the London Stock Exchange in a £7.6bn float, followed by an immediate crashing of the share price – but responded in the years since by leading the company to achieve its first-ever annual profit in 2024, and backed up this turnaround in the first six months of 2025 by posting a profit of £31.8m.

It’s made him a “much more resilient person”. One that turned a consumer problem and a bike into a global business that’s just sold for £2.9bn. It’s surely the end of the chapter, not the story, for Shu.

As Arney put it, the American “has created a British success story”. Let’s hope there’s another in him to come. But not before some hot wings.

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