For eight years Tim Steiner bought and sold bonds. He joined Goldman Sachs in 1992, and the job took him from London to New York to Hong Kong. Then in 2000 he walked out of it to start a company that would deliver milk and bread.
He had grown up in North London and gone to Haberdashers' Boys' School in Elstree, then studied economics at the University of Manchester. Nothing in that path points to a warehouse floor. The idea belonged to three men, not one: Steiner, Jason Gissing and Jonathan Faiman, all Goldman bankers, who began as a small outfit called L. M. Solutions in the year the dot-com bubble burst.
Online grocery loses money on every van trip unless the warehouse is clever.
That timing is the part people forget. They were building an online grocer just as the internet money dried up. Their first real customer did not arrive until January 2002, when Waitrose agreed to let them deliver its food. John Lewis later held a stake in the company, and sold it in 2011.
What almost nobody notices is how unglamorous the bet was. Online grocery loses money on every van trip unless the warehouse is clever. So Ocado kept building its own robots and software, and went public in London in July 2010. Years later that decision became the company. Casino signed in 2017. Sobeys and Kroger followed in 2018, Coles in 2020. The grocer had become a technology licensor.
The price came in February 2019, when a fire destroyed much of its Andover warehouse. The rebuilt site did not reopen until August 2021. In the same period M&S agreed to pay GBP 750m for half of the retail business, a deal that has since turned into a payment dispute. By mid-2026 the shares were reported to be below the IPO price, and some shareholders wanted Steiner replaced. Steiner had also been paid GBP 58.7m for the year to December 2019, a number critics noticed.
For FY2025 the group reported revenue of GBP 1,361.5m, an operating loss of GBP 241.4m and net income of GBP 395.2m.
Steiner's story is a reminder that a trader's habit, taking a long position and waiting, can look like genius or stubbornness depending on the year. The sources say little about how he felt on the day he left Goldman. What they show is a man who stayed with one unfashionable bet for twenty-six years.