High Performance: The Room Where It Happened
High Performance Podcast
From Pizza to Platform: A Pod Doodle of Deliveroo’s First Ride
Picture this: Fulham Road, 2013. A Neapolitan pizza oven belches heat, a laptop dings, and outside, a nervous man straddles a scooter he barely knows how to ride. Inside the box? The first-ever Deliveroo order—and it’s vertical.
That man was Will Shu, co-founder of Deliveroo and accidental inventor of the sideways calzone. And that moment? It's the one I chose to animate for our latest Pod Doodle, drawn from The High Performance Podcast hosted by my old friend Damian Hughes and Jake Humphrey.
Every so often I get pulled into a story—hook, line and helmet strap. And Shu’s origin story had everything: DIY chaos, entrepreneurial grit, and the local-to-global magic of starting scrappy and scaling smart.
Why This One?
Founders’ stories often get polished smooth by success. But here, you can still see the fingerprints. I loved how Deliveroo didn’t begin in a boardroom—it began in a tiny restaurant with tile walls and Napoli jokes, with Shu both CEO and delivery guy. This wasn’t theory—it was boots-on-scooter testing. Can we actually make this work? That spirit resonates.
We’re always told to “think big.” But this episode reminded me: big often starts weird and wobbly and local. You experiment, you laugh, you learn—and sometimes you eat the first order yourself.
The final frame from the High Performance Pod Doodle Episode.
Drawing the Moment
The final frame (above) is built like a stage set—one scene, many threads. It’s built around a location: Rosso Pomodoro, still standing proud on Fulham Road. I wanted to capture that West London as world stage energy, where the global starts with one awkward order placed on the brand new app.
Dileveroo founder, Will Shu anchors the piece. He’s the through-line, the founder, experimenter, scooter rookie. He is the visual DNA of the story, connecting technology, environment, and emotion. It makes sense because he is narrating the story. It is from his perspective. I also like in the voiceover that he is a little bit of an unreliable narrator. He is also trying to piece together the narrative, bit-by-bit. As are we when we animate things one element after another.
And yes, I had fun with the details: making sure I had the design of the Neapolitan oven correct. I enjoyed making the pizza-as-record metaphor, spinning vertically into memory. A margarita LP on a mozzarella turntable. In my visual thinking practice, I often fuse disparate images together—this plus that equals a third, surprising thing. It's a kind of metaphorical alchemy. I call this approach “visual German,” after the way German words bolt together like Lego to form something delightfully precise (and occasionally terrifying). Einzelkind? Solo child. Zeitgeist? Time ghost. Weltanschauung? World-view. One concept piggybacks onto another until it births something larger, richer, weirder. That’s what I aim for in my drawings: compound meaning, built from parts that click.
Watch the Doodle
Click on the thumbnail below to see the full animation unfold. One scooter, one pizza, one very memorable misdelivery. And while you’re there, browse the archive—we’re building a library of ideas with strong visual backbones.
Got a podcast we should draw?
We’re always on the lookout for voices with story-rich moments, hidden metaphors, or glorious visual potential. Suggest your favourite episode—we might just sketch it next.
If you're a podcaster, author, speaker, or just someone with a story worth catching before it disappears — this is the kind of animation we live for. If you’d like one made for your idea, your podcast, or your brand, just get in touch.