I consulted for Deliverance a bit later than Y2K (probably in 2004/5). They were a very strange company internally at the time.
First I want to say they weren't really like Deliveroo because they had their own kitchens. Or to be specific, one kitchen in Bloomsbury which made every major style of food. It was actually quite an amazing kitchen, with a Japanese sushi chef working next to an Indian curry cook and a pizza oven and a load more. (The quality of the food was top notch.) They also had their own salaried call centre and delivery staff.
At the time I was consulting they had been losing money hand over fist for years and their investors had parachuted in a "high powered executive" to sort everything out. She had not the first clue about the business, or the Internet, or much else, but everyone in the company deferred to her because she was the new big boss and shouted a lot. She used to turn up in a massive silver car late, order the sushi chef to make her a meal (for free obviously), and then leave early every day. Most of our work involved explaining why her ideas for the website and online advertising couldn't possibly work, which was very painful for me and everyone else. I pushed really hard to introduce a mobile-friendly website and did all the work on it, making the food menus work on the terrible web browser on some high end phone (of the time). It was all canned because the investors couldn't see why anyone would use a phone to order food.
The company folded or was sold for parts soon afterwards.
Thanks for this recap. I'd heard much about their demise over the years, so it's good to hear it first hand!
> investors couldn't see why anyone would use a phone to order food.
Was pizza delivery a joke to them?
Their model at the time was a heavyweight desktop-only website where you could look at the menus, then call their call centre (visible through a large glass window right next to the kitchens) where a human would pick up and take the order.
I wanted to explore a simpler website that would have worked on the very limited phones of the time. I'd just come back from Japan where I'd used i-mode phones. You could sort of see that it was going to happen soon. However apps as we know them now, and always-on mobile internet in general, were not a thing at that point in the UK, and it's very difficult to explain why this stuff might be important to less than clueful people.
(I don't want this to sound like I had some amazing insight that no one else could see. It could be equally valid to say that I didn't have a clear idea myself and/or didn't explain it well.)