Expanding globally has become a core operational requirement for any European startup aiming for a billion-dollar valuation. Yet, the transition from a domestic startup to a global contender remains the most high-stakes phase of a founder’s journey.

Some of the barriers to international expansion are lower than they've ever been. AI has compressed localisation work that used to take months. Remote infrastructure means presence in a new market is easier to establish. But as some barriers come down, others stay stubbornly in place - the right market timing, the right hires, and regulatory barriers. Getting those wrong is still as costly as it's ever been.

Supporting founders through international expansion is one of Cherry's core areas of focus, with particular emphasis on the US but also across European and regional markets. 

We asked four Cherry partners who collectively scaled Spotify, Uber, and Zalando across 47+ markets what they'd tell founders about going global.

The people who did it

Four Cherry partners who scaled Spotify, Uber & Zalando across 47+ markets.

Sophia Bendz

Cherry Partner

Spearheaded Spotify's early international expansion across the US and key global markets.

Spotify

Dinika Mahtani

Cherry Partner

Global Expansion Lead at Uber Eats, launching across Europe, the Middle East and Asia.

Uber Eats

Filip Dames

Cherry Partner

Scaled Zalando from Germany into 17 European markets, nine of them in a single year.

Zalando

Christian Meermann

Cherry Partner

Scaled Zalando from Germany into 17 European markets alongside Filip.

Zalando

1. The Map Most Founders Are Using Is Wrong

DINIKA "It's when you have enough money and a product that's working. You should always have a hero market and a hero product. Of course there are exceptions - if you're building something like Stripe, pure software, you can build an EMEA hub and have five countries light up at once. But for most companies: one at a time."

FILIP "Every new market adds complexity to your business. Be very aware of how much you're adding. Define very clear KPIs for success and be ready to pull back if a market isn't working. For our founders today, there is more pressure on the US."

CHRISTIAN "Right now, I wouldn't spend too much time on smaller European markets. The market is the US. Go for it. Rent a WeWork, put a sticker on the door - that establishes a home office. It's easier than it's ever been. But if you do it, do it right."

SOPHIA "Launching in the US as a European company is always harder, takes longer, and is more expensive than you think. Count on it being twice as long and twice as expensive."

CHERRY

The pattern we often see across Europe is founders adding location by location after a Series A e.g. Amsterdam, then Paris, then Stockholm. 18 months later, they have operations in three markets but haven't meaningfully advanced their position.

One of the reasons we often encourage companies to focus on the US is because it forces more exponential growth. Typically, the US is where customer density, capital, and ecosystem depth are most concentrated, and where the outcome that justifies the expansion effort lives.

Christian puts it plainly: for most B2B and SaaS companies, when it's time to expand internationally, the US is the right answer.

The capital environment in 2026 sharpens this. With less room for exploratory bets, the cost of expanding into the wrong market - or multiple markets simultaneously - is higher than it has ever been. Picking the right one matters more now, not less.

But going to the US means going prepared. Sophia's rule is simple and worth taking literally: whatever you've budgeted, double it, and give yourself twice as long. If you've planned for €2M over one year, plan for €4M over two. 

2. International Expansion Is Starting a New Company

DINIKA "Embrace the chaos. International expansion requires a mode shift. In operations, what's most important is the people. It's all about your team rowing in the right direction. Like a symphony."

FILIP "Pick your battles. It doesn't make sense to do everything at once. Have boots on the ground early - a local sales team - so you can see how sticky the market actually is and how fast you get to adoption. No company is a straight line up and to the right. Be patient, aggressive, and ambitious."

CHRISTIAN "Don't do it half-assed. It's the biggest project of the year. Full commitment. Usually it needs one of the founders to lead it. Too often founders think they can commute there. It's not possible."

CHERRY

The mistake most founders make is treating expansion as a scaling exercise - taking a working machine and plugging it into a new outlet. In reality, moving into a new territory is closer to a seed-stage reboot. You are starting from a position of disadvantage, with zero brand equity and a team that lacks local intuition. 

This requires a fundamental "mode shift" in how the company operates. Success in a home market is often a result of osmosis; the team understands the mission because they are sitting next to the founders. In a new market, that clarity vanishes. Dinika’s experience at Uber highlights that international growth is less about following a checklist and more about managing a "symphony" of new hires who must all learn to row in the same direction amidst total chaos.

The most common failure mode is attempting to manage this chaos from a distance. Founders often convince themselves that a commuter strategy - flying in for key meetings and managing the rest remotely sufficient. Our experience is that it isn't. Christian and Sophia both point to the "decision tax" that distance imposes. When a founder isn't on the ground, a pivot that should take 10 minutes can take weeks of synchronizing. 

Filip’s approach at Zalando suggests a way to mitigate this risk without over-committing too early. He advocates for "boots on the ground" early - not to build infrastructure, but to test stickiness. A small, local sales team provides the sensory input. They can tell you if the product is resonating before you’ve committed the capital to build a full-scale operation. 

The ultimate test of whether you are expanding vs just adding a remote office, is autonomy.

If your local lead cannot make a high-stakes decision without an approval from the home office, you are still trying to scale an old company instead of building a new one.

3. Hire Networks, Not Resumes

DINIKA "Hire for intent, dedication, and slope - especially in the launch and expansion role, because experience doesn't matter. You have to hire well. It's all about your team."

FILIP "We kept the structure central in Berlin but had local country managers with teams underneath. A matrix: central marketing and product at HQ, with country managers reporting directly into functions and a dotted line to the CMO. Functions sharing knowledge, flags on the desk. The key was: always manage centrally, but make sure local adoption is real."

CHRISTIAN "We had 500 people in country teams. Local adoption is super important, otherwise you come across as the foreign brand that hasn't adjusted. You need people who understand that country - not just smart operators who can learn it. And on the sales side: be ruthless about performance. If you hire the wrong people, fire them and keep going."

SOPHIA "The first four or five people you hire in a market are incredibly important. Hire people with existing networks so you can tap into their already built-up, trusted relationships. For Spotify, it was all about media, sales and industry relationships - you need someone already in that network. The hardest part was convincing people to join this random Swedish company. My pitch: you can go to Google or Meta, or you can actually reshape the music industry. Get people crazy enough to jump on the train before it's a success."

CHERRY

The first hire in a new market is a forcing function. Whoever you put in that room first sets the ceiling on what's possible - which relationships you can access, which customers will take a meeting, which partners will give you the time of day. Getting it wrong becomes a market problem, not just a hiring problem.

The instinct when resources are tight is to send someone trusted from HQ and have them figure it out. That person knows the product, knows the company culture, knows how decisions get made internally. What they don't know is the market. In your home territory, they can learn it over time. In expansion, you usually don't have that time.

The common instinct is to transplant a trusted "culture carrier" from HQ. This person understands the product and the internal politics, but they are an outsider. In a high-stakes expansion, you rarely have the luxury of letting a generalist spend six months learning the local landscape. You need what Sophia calls "network hires" - people who already belong to the industry you are trying to disrupt. At Spotify, this meant hiring people who didn't just understand the industry, but who were already deeply embedded with the most relevant players. You aren't just buying their time; you are buying their trusted relationships..

AI has changed the localisation side of this equation. Copy, customer communications, and parts of the product can now be localised faster and cheaper than ever. Relationships still require a person already in the room, which means the local hire's existing network remains the clearest edge.

The structure question - central versus local, matrix versus country-led - matters and is worth getting right. It's also secondary to the people's question. It's a framework for managing people who are already in the right rooms. The framework doesn't put you there.

4. You Won't Know What You Don't Know Until You're There

DINIKA "Be humble. Always listen to the customer, no matter where they are. If the customer is in a factory in Texas, you have to be there. The best advice I ever received: get your hands dirty and understand how to manage every part of the business. Nothing is ever too small."

FILIP "Think of every market you enter like it's your home market. Europe is very diverse. Germans have an extremely high return rate: they buy by invoice and only pay for what they keep. In France, that model doesn't exist. Payment methods, logistics, local carrier contracts - all of it has to be localised. From a marketing perspective, it's a playbook. Here's the core team you hire, the logistics setup, the contracts you need, and the product localisation. Spin out country by country. Full steam execution."

CHRISTIAN "In France, we completely underestimated taste - the assortment didn't work at all. In the Netherlands, we made a TV spot in English with Dutch subtitles and tried to lip-sync it to Dutch. No one does that. We won the Golden Raspberry - the award for the worst TV spot in the Netherlands. Every market is different. Do the work before you go in. And once you're in, be aggressive."

SOPHIA "You can create a playbook but reality looks different. Try to stick to the plan but be open to situations that will change things. See it as an adventure and be ready to be flexible and grab the opportunities coming your way. Different cultures require different solutions."

CHERRY

Every one of these partners built a playbook. Every one of them had it break on contact with a real market - and found something more valuable on the other side of that.

Zalando went into France with a full assortment and discovered that French taste operates by entirely different rules; the product mix that worked everywhere else didn't land there. They made a TV spot for the Netherlands in English with Dutch subtitles, lip-synced to Dutch, and won the award for the worst ad in the country. Both times, they thought they'd understood the market before going in. When the Uber Eats team ran a free donut campaign as a GTM activation, it worked so far beyond what anyone had planned for that the global app broke under the demand and made the news for the wrong reasons. The lesson: when you're planning a launch, plan for the scenario where it actually works, because the infrastructure has to match the ambition.

The stories that stayed with all four partners are the ones they didn't anticipate. Dinika spent weeks in council buildings in Islington, sitting across from officials who'd held their posts for decades, making the case for why Uber should bring bikes to London. The kind of lobbying nobody pictures: municipal buildings, long-tenured bureaucrats, a product they'd never heard of and had no reason to approve. She described it as life-sucking work. She also said it was the most important thing she did. The lesson she took was simpler than the experience: never be too proud to be in the room that doesn't feel like it should require you.

Christian's focus group did something similar for Zalando's marketing assumptions. The team had spent years building campaigns around their idea of a typical Zalando customer. They sat behind the glass and saw who actually showed up. It completely changed what they thought they knew, and it only happened because someone decided to be in the room rather than read a report about it.

The positive case is Filip's Switzerland story. Zalando found that nobody was handling cross-border customs routing properly for deliveries into Switzerland - the duties, the paperwork, the customer experience of it. They built the infrastructure to do it themselves and priced it into the product. Nobody else bothered. Switzerland became one of Zalando's strongest markets; around 40% of Swiss residents have a Zalando account today. That opportunity existed because someone was close enough to the operational detail to notice what no competitor had.

All four stories describe the same underlying advantage. The things that determine whether a market works - the customer who isn't who you thought, the logistics detail no one else has solved, the campaign that breaks the app - only become visible when someone is close enough to see them. Proximity is the mechanism.