EVERY SPOKEN WORD
110 min read · 22,275 words- 0:00 – 1:39
DoorDash MVP in 43 Minutes
- DSDavid Senra
[pen scribbling] So I wanna start with the fact that you said that PaloAltoDelivery.com, which was DoorDash before DoorDash-
- SPSpeaker
Yes
- DSDavid Senra
... was the most minimal version of a minimal viable product. Can you explain how you built it?
- SPSpeaker
Well, whenever you sh- can ship something in forty-three minutes to test your idea, I think that's pretty good. And certainly this is, you know, twelve, thirteen years before the rise of LLMs and AI tools to make it so easy to do that. But basically, the four of us wanted to test this idea that if you wanted to offer delivery from places that never offered delivery before, what is the fastest way to see whether or not consumers would care? I mean, at the end of the day, delivery is not a new idea. And so we thought, actually, one of the reasons why maybe delivery in twenty thirteen hadn't been around yet was just because nobody wanted it. So we shipped PaloAltoDelivery.com. That alias was available for nine dollars, and so that's why we got it. Not a super scalable URL, but we were able to get it. Um, it was a static page, um, where you saw eight PDF menus of restaurants that we frequented in Palo Alto. And the only way you can-- [chuckles] w- in which you can order is you can read through the menus, you can call a Google Voice number that would ring the cell phones of the four founders, and one of us would pick up. We would take your order, place the order on your behalf, go and get the order, deliver it to you. And I used to be an intern at Square, and so I had these card readers, which was one of their earliest products, these white dongles that you could stick into the audio jacks of iPhones, and that's how we would collect payment.
- DSDavid Senra
Something I didn't remember until-- 'cause it feels like DoorDash and, and Uber Eats and everything else has been around forever.
- 1:39 – 3:17
How Delivery Worked in 2013
- DSDavid Senra
But there wasn't-- what was the state of-- there was other delivery companies, but you essentially created the market for this. Can you explain? Like, when I was telling people, "Oh, I'm coming-- I'm really excited, I'm gonna go speak to Tony from DoorDash," they were like, "I can't believe he survived in this, like, competitive market." But they just assumed that all-- like, there was other apps out there that were already delivering for, for restaurants that didn't have a delivery fleet. That didn't exist then, correct?
- SPSpeaker
No. Actually, yeah, I, I, I think one of the biggest misconceptions when we were founded was just how wide open the space was, where there are about a million restaurants i-in the States, and maybe twenty to twenty-five thousand of them offered deliveries. Most of them were pizza shops, places in New York City, some in, you know, Chicago, some in, you know, big city centers. But outside of pizza places, maybe a few Chinese restaurants, nobody offered delivery. And so the real grand question or experiment of DoorDash, PaloAltoDelivery.com, was, okay, w-what about everyone else? What if you can enable everyone to actually offer delivery? What would that take? Um, and first of all, would people care? And that's really why we shipped something so quickly, just to see if people would actually come and place orders.
- DSDavid Senra
So what were the existing companies doing then?
- SPSpeaker
They were mostly, um, honestly faxing orders, believe it or not. So there would be a website that would receive orders, if you can believe it. They would fax the orders literally, um, into machines that would sit near the kitchen or the payment systems inside these restaurants. Then the restaurants would actually go out and do the deliveries themselves. So they were lead gen companies at the time.
- DSDavid Senra
I've heard you talk about de-developing this, like, last mile logistics network. Did you think about that back then? Or you were just like, "Hey, I'm just going to try to expand the market for food delivery"?
- SPSpeaker
No,
- 3:17 – 5:48
Small Business Roots and Insight
- SPSpeaker
we did. So the-- When we started, um, I guess to take a, a step back before we shipped PaloAltoDelivery.com or even how we got there, you know, my co-founders and I really got connected because of an interest in small businesses. You know, I think my story I've, I've told publicly, which is really-- I mean, I grew up, uh, coming as-- to the States as an immigrant from China. And my mom, um, uh, you know, put food on the table by working three jobs a day for twelve years. One of those jobs happened to be at a Chinese restaurant where she was a waitress. I got to hang out with her, wash a few dishes when she allowed me to. That's kind of how I grew up while my dad was getting his PhD at the University of Illinois. That was, you know, the first ten years or so of childhood growing up in the States. And that moment and experience always just gave me a deep appreciation for what small business owners represent. I mean, the-- to them, it-- there's no such thing as work. It, it-- work, life, it, it's, it's all the same thing. There's no concept of a weekend or a Saturday. It's Saturdays and Tuesdays are exactly the same days. And you just kinda get into this, um, process where that becomes your identity. And it's actually one of the most fascinating things I find about the great experiment that's America, where, you know, because it becomes this all-consuming thing, one of the nice positive derivatives is actually they don't just create great experiences like a restaurant or a bar or a furniture store or a T-shirt shop. They actually create the GDP for all the cities that we live in. That GDP is what allows us to have great neighborhoods, schools, all the positive things that happen from a local community. And that was always my fascination with it. We had no idea, though, when we're looking at starting DoorDash, about anything related to what these business owners' problems were. And so my co-founders and I, we spoke with three hundred maybe, businesses up and down the Bay Area from San Jose to San Francisco, restaurants, retailers, service businesses. And it was actually a baker who showed us a booklet, a three-inch binder of delivery orders she had turned down. She was a one-person shop who had no ability to, to fulfill or desire, frankly, to fulfill all those orders. And that was just a very strange moment for us, where I said, "Delivery is not a new idea. It's twenty thirteen. No one offers delivery. Why?" And that's really what prompted us to think about, you know, launching PaloAltoDelivery.com to see if
- 5:48 – 8:24
Why Restaurants First
- SPSpeaker
people cared. But to your question on logistics networks, you know, we said, okay, well, if the first place in which we can help local businesses is by building a logistics network, we have to pick a place to start. And, and this is where I guess the math brain, you know, comes in for me, [chuckles] where when we studied every category of local retail of where we would start, whether it was deliveries forRestaurants, grocery stores, convenience stores, retail shops
- DSDavid Senra
All those are all options
- SPSpeaker
We looked at all of them
- DSDavid Senra
Okay
- SPSpeaker
And we had this hypothesis that if you wanted a chance of creating a logistics network that could actually be successful, that can be very fast, that can, uh, you know, be very flexible, meaning it can, you know, deliver in thirty minutes, uh, uh, uh, or it can deliver, you know, uh, longer than that, um, you needed network density. You needed, um, the most number of connections between consumers and stores. We kinda targeted restaurants because there were a million restaurants. You know, if you compare that to the number of grocery stores, there's maybe a couple hundred thousand grocery stores. Um, and you looked at other categories of retail, restaurants had the highest count of stores. And so very quickly, um, you know, w-we made the assumption that if there's any vertical to get started in doing deliveries, it would be restaurants and prepared meals to give us a chance to build, to build the highest density network so that one day we can deliver everything else.
- DSDavid Senra
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- 8:24 – 11:03
Palo Alto vs San Francisco
- DSDavid Senra
There was other people that had maybe a similar idea, but I heard you tell this story one time where you're like, well, they actually went into like city centers.
- SPSpeaker
Hmm.
- DSDavid Senra
And one advantage you ha-ha-- I, I don't even think, think this might've been accidental, is you started in Palo Alto instead of like New York City. Can you talk about why that was important?
- SPSpeaker
Yeah. Well, starting in Palo Alto was, um, I mean, not a conscious choice. I mean, it was just where we were students at the time. But one of the earliest experiments we ran at DoorDash was doing deliveries in Palo Alto versus doing deliveries in San Francisco, so a city center, if you will, that was close to where we started the company. And one of the fascinating things we found out, um, and we didn't understand why initially, was we were actually completing deliveries faster, um, inside Palo Alto than we were inside San Francisco. Obviously, San Francisco is a more dense place. But one of the things we learned early on, though, was that obviously, you know, in Palo Alto, you had much easier parking, you had a lot m- um, fewer apartment complexes where you had to go up and down the stairs and figure out where the lobby was or the right elevator entrance, things like that. Palo Alto had the following, which is if you looked at places like Palo Alto, it's really, um, it, it, it, you know, represents, I think, most cities in the US or a, a lot of the world where you have main streets and then you kinda have, you know, in the spokes, um, outside of this main street hub of commerce, you have where the people live. And if you actually thought intelligently about what that really told you, you can actually build a very efficient logistics system if you just, you know, understood how to, you know, manipulate some of these hubs and spokes. And so this was one of the earliest, you know, hypotheses we had that you can actually make a logistics business as efficient, you know, in a place like a Palo Alto versus San Francisco. That was, you know, guided by that experiment. But the second thing was actually just in talking to customers. What customers told us was they said, "Look, in San Francisco, I can just walk down, you know, the, the, the, the elevator from, and head out the lobby, and w-we could probably find a few places to go and eat." In Palo Alto, you'd be walking for miles before you could achieve something like that. You know, the closest, you know, set of restaurants near Stanford University, where we started this, was two miles away on University Avenue, as an example. And that's true in a lot of places, um, in, in America. And so if there was any place we thought where there would be the highest, um, interest from consumers and a possibility where you can actually make the math work, it was places like Palo Alto. And the question, you know, to us was just how many of them are there?
- DSDavid Senra
And the only people doing deliveries at this time are the four founders?
- SPSpeaker
Yeah. [laughs] In the, in the very beginning, it was just, it was just the four founders.
- 11:03 – 15:22
Early Customers and Unit Economics
- DSDavid Senra
Okay. So you had a line about this where it said, uh, "It became obvious that the need was higher outside of the cities. We did not have the data to prove it at the time. We had the conviction that because we were doing the deliveries ourselves, that this could be true."
- SPSpeaker
Yeah. I mean, we saw-- I mean, when-- one of the, um, benefits when you do the deliveries is, well, one, you see how hard it is to actually, you know, bring a burrito on time every time correctly. Um, and the second thing is y-you get to see who the customer is. And you saw the customer actually almost always was a mom, you know, who had young children, who had not a lot of time, who didn't wanna cook, you know, every single meal, who wanna just look for any solution to save her time. And so when we did those deliveries, we just saw, wow, well, there are a lot of young families out there, and let's go find out where they hang out. Let's go find out where they live. And that's why we had that sense that, you know, we can build a business, you know, with this audience to start.
- DSDavid Senra
Is that another unexpected benefit of starting in these, basically the suburbs or the cities? If I th-think about like the typical city populations, like maybe s- more single people or maybe like-
- SPSpeaker
Yeah
- DSDavid Senra
...just a couple.
- SPSpeaker
Sure.
- DSDavid Senra
But it's not large families-
- SPSpeaker
No
- DSDavid Senra
...sh-shoved in these buildings.
- SPSpeaker
Yeah. I mean, I, I, I think that was probably a derivative-
- DSDavid Senra
Yeah
- SPSpeaker
...o-o-of the discovery. But no, I think in the beginning, especially when you're looking for product market fit as an entrepreneur, you're looking forSomeone who actually just wants your product organically. And we could tell very quickly that someone who has young children who maybe doesn't wanna take a stroller, pack it up, pack all the things that come with the stroller, then you know, put that, you know, stroller and the children into the vehicle, then get it out, and then somehow get into inside of a crowded parking lot or a restaurant, well, there are a lot of those people. And if we can solve it for that group, then we believe we could build a business that can easily grow organically. You're right, I mean, there's a second derivative, which is there are more mouths to feed when you have a family than when you have, you know, one or two people living in, inside of a city, but that wasn't the first thought we had.
- DSDavid Senra
But even more than a secondary derivative, 'cause you were just explaining like, okay, well, if I'm delivering to somebody's house, I know where to park, where to park. As opposed to I'm in a city, you have to navigate where's the lobby, how do I get in this building, what floor do I get, how to access the elevator, right?
- SPSpeaker
Yeah, totally. And it, the, the presence of single-family homes made it a lot easier for sure. Um, that was one of the benefits of delivering to places like Palo Alto. But again, I think it just came from this very simple experiment which had an anomalous finding, which is why is it faster to de-deliver in Palo Alto than it is in San Francisco? Why is it faster to, to deliver in a less dense place in other, in other words?
- DSDavid Senra
Exactly. This is what is interesting to me. It almost made it sense like your competitors seem to do the, the most obvious or like the, the logical thing. It's like, no, I need order density. Where are all the people? Let me just go to the cities.
- SPSpeaker
We chased where the... I, I think when you're starting out, the number one thing every entrepreneur is looking for is do you have something that someone else wants? And is it real? Meaning, like, it's not artificially inflated with discounts and marketing dollars and, you know, just other ways to inorganically grow. Um, will people actually use it? Will they actually tell their friends about it if they actually like the service? And that's what we found early on with places like Palo Alto.
- DSDavid Senra
Even when you were called PaloAltoDelivery.com?
- SPSpeaker
Especially when we were called Palo Alto Delivery.
- DSDavid Senra
You had no money, right?
- SPSpeaker
Yeah, we had no-- Exactly. We were, we were, we ran this out of my bank account, and that's why I knew early on, even though, look, we didn't have any models or, you know, unit economic forecasts or anything like this, but even though it was running out of my bank account where I also had student debt at the time, my bank account wasn't going down, you know, every single week or every single month. So something was telling me that maybe this is a chance of working.
- DSDavid Senra
What were your costs at the time? 'Cause you have the four founders la- essentially labor. You're probably not paying yourself.
- SPSpeaker
We didn't pay ourselves anything.
- DSDavid Senra
Yeah, so you're not paying yourself, so free labor.
- SPSpeaker
Yeah.
- DSDavid Senra
Just your time. You built a, a eight, nine dollar website.
- SPSpeaker
Yeah.
- DSDavid Senra
I heard something that was hilarious where you're like, "Well, we, we don't have a sophisticated dispatch system, so we just use the Find My Friends app."
- SPSpeaker
We used Find My Friends. We used Find My Friends. We used-
- DSDavid Senra
To track the drivers, which just happened to be all of you
- SPSpeaker
... our co-founders. Yeah.
- 15:22 – 19:50
YC Summer Three Questions
- SPSpeaker
the four of us.
- DSDavid Senra
This is when you applied to Y Combinator or no?
- SPSpeaker
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, in, in, in that time period.
- DSDavid Senra
Okay. By the time you apply to Y Combinator, do you have more than drivers than just the founders or no?
- SPSpeaker
We may have had one or two.
- DSDavid Senra
Okay.
- SPSpeaker
Yeah. Very quickly we realized, well, we're, we're in class, and so, you know, we took turns doing deliveries while we were in class, but at some point it's tough to, you know, be a student and do the deliveries.
- DSDavid Senra
How many years did you have left of business school? Like, how many years were you in school and running?
- SPSpeaker
We had maybe six months left before graduation. I mean, we were effectively Stanford's delivery service, you know, for the second half of, or for the first half of twenty thirteen. We were effectively Stanford's delivery service. Then we, then we, um, um, get DoorDash lo- uh, uh, uh, um, the URL and, and, and the company name, and then we launch out of Y Combinator in the summer, June twenty.
- DSDavid Senra
So was it, like now, once somebody starts using DoorDash or when I start using DoorDash, right, I'm like, "Ooh, this is very convenient," I just keep using it over and over again.
- SPSpeaker
Yeah.
- DSDavid Senra
Did you see that same behavior pattern back then?
- SPSpeaker
Yeah, with a very small group of users because in the beginning we actually did not have high volume. I mean, it was probably ten orders a day, something like that, and maybe our high day was like twenty-one orders a day, something like this. Most of them, uh, however, were done by a small group of users at Stanford. When you see that fact that the same customers are ordering over and again, uh, even though it wasn't growing like wildfire, um, but our bank account also wasn't getting depleted, um, it gave us enough conviction to keep going.
- DSDavid Senra
What were the conversations amongst the founders when you guys are seeing that?
- SPSpeaker
Let's keep going a-and let's... I, I, I think we viewed it as a project more than we viewed it as a company. In fact, we w-were barely incorporated. We were not incorporated when we were running this, um, at Stanford University, and then we, you know, just got incorporated when we actually, um, uh, got into YC, but at the time it was just like, let's just see what the next phase should be. I think sometimes when you start these projects, you absolutely should have a point of view on maybe where this can go in terms of going the distance, but the most important thing is to just get started and then to have a sense of what the next two or three steps are. No one is able to, you know, know everything about the future. And for us, it, it, the summer was really instructive. I mean, the summer, I think doing the deliveries ourselves for the first six months gave us the clarity that the summer was really about answering three questions: Would consumers wanna pay us six bucks, which is what we charged, um, are there restaurants who would be willing to partner with us for fifteen percent, and, you know, could we afford a wage that we could pay Dashers, the drivers for the service? That was it. That was the entirety of the YC summer. It was not about demo day or s- you know, raising the most amount of money or becoming the most popular, you know, at some event. Um, it was just answering those three questions. And if we had enough conviction answering those questions, then we'd keep going again.
- DSDavid Senra
You told this hilarious story, um, where, you know, a- during the summer some of your classmates are like, "Yeah, I'm gonna go, you know, ski in Gstaad" or something like that. [laughs] "What are you doing, Tony?" You're like, "I'm delivering hummus in my Honda." [laughs]
- SPSpeaker
Yes. Yes. That was, uh... Yeah, look, I mean, I think we had a lot of classmates at Stanford who looked at us and just thought-Boy, like I thought they were like, you know, smart, but you know, I, I guess they w-want to spend their time doing this. Um, and so look, in the beginning of a lot of these entrepreneurial ventures, nothing looks that amazing, right? We were working out of an apartment. We had dashers in that apartment. We had the co-founders live in that apartment. We w-worked ten AM to two AM every single day. But it wasn't like this glamorous exercise and but nor did we seek that. [laughs] You know, w-we were just trying to answer those three questions that summer. We didn't care that much about what our friends were doing, clearly. We thought that, um, it was, um, interesting enough to keep going, that if we can actually answer these questions, I think we're actually onto something.
- DSDavid Senra
We just had, uh, Marc Andreessen on the show, and he's got this great line where he says, "I firmly believe that people that do great things are doing them for the first time."
- SPSpeaker
Huh.
- DSDavid Senra
Did anybody have any restaurant or, or actually not even restaurant experience 'cause you're not even in the restaurant. Any delivery? Any of the founders have anything to do with logistics or delivery, anything?
- SPSpeaker
No. No, it's actually why we had to do the deliveries. I mean, I mean, the reason why we did so-- uh, the reason why we were so hell-bent on doing the deliveries, besides the fact that we had no idea whether we had any business recruiting other drivers, was how does this work? How should it work?
- 19:50 – 22:02
The Hidden Complexity of Delivery
- SPSpeaker
And I think DoorDash early on, even to this day, but early on, it was so hard to explain because it was actually even to build the MVP, yes, to test it was just this website, you know, paloaltodelivery.com, but we had to build like four things. We had to build this website for consumers. We had to build some app for the restaurants to actually receive the orders. We had to build an app for the drivers, the dashers, and then we had to build a dispatch system, you know, that actually could oversee all of the operations. So even in the very beginning, we realized, wow, this is actually pretty interesting. It's just such a fun problem that you, in order to actually just bring you a burrito, you have to build these four things. And then to do it really, really well, I mean, that's why we did all the deliveries to figure out how you actually do that.
- DSDavid Senra
So you were misunderstood back then. You just said something interesting. You think that's still the case to this day?
- SPSpeaker
Absolutely. Because I think most people, and I totally get it, I mean, think of DoorDash as a consumer app. You know, most people think of us as lunch and dinner, and I think what they don't see is everything behind the scenes. I think a lot of times, I think you can look at, you know, products like ours, especially as a consumer, and you say, "Wow, this looks like any other product." You know, there are so many of them. But then I would ask the question, well, how come one just gets used more often than the next or the others? And it comes down to everything that you can't see. You know, one of the things we say a lot internally at the company at DoorDash is it's always the data that you can't see that kills you. Because if you can see a truck coming at you, you're just gonna dodge and get out the way. But if you can't see it, you're dead. And it's no different with our business. Our business is one where all of the magic or the secret sauce, if you will, are in things that you cannot see. You know, no consumer is sitting there while they're ordering DoorDash, thinking about what the dasher experience should look like or what the operations should be to get the best quality experience at the most affordable price, or what are the ways in which you take out every single friction and cost with a restaurant or a retailer and make sure that all the items are actually there even when they're not there. You know, I think all of these things are the things that make DoorDash special and make DoorDash an end-to-end experience that's very difficult to replicate. But yeah, I think early on we knew that because we had-- we did all the deliveries.
- 22:02 – 23:54
Competing on Invisible Details
- DSDavid Senra
You know who knows it? Your competitors. So you're not gonna like this 'cause you're ex-- uh, in my opinion, really humble. Probably too humble, uh, for my liking. [laughs] Uh, but, uh, people in, in your industry are afraid of you. And, uh, one, I, I have to tell you a personal story that I don't even think you know, and, um, I didn't know. I, I've heard about you before. I didn't real-- you know, obviously, u-use DoorDash, but I never thought about it. Exact- what you just described is exactly my experience. I was just like, I have a magic button that brings me-
- SPSpeaker
Yeah
- DSDavid Senra
... a burrito.
- SPSpeaker
Exactly.
- DSDavid Senra
Okay. I love that magic button. Don't take that magic button away from me, whatever you do. But I was in Stockholm-
- SPSpeaker
Okay
- DSDavid Senra
... uh, about a year and a half ago, and, uh, Daniel Ek was very kind to host, uh, me and like a handful of European founders. And one of the European founders that was sitting next to me and Daniel at dinner was somebody I had never met before, and it's Mikki from Wolt.
- SPSpeaker
Okay.
- DSDavid Senra
Right.
- SPSpeaker
Cool.
- DSDavid Senra
But he told me something interesting 'cause, you know, uh, basically the story was, he's just like, "Listen, I built the DoorDash of Europe," I guess is how-
- SPSpeaker
Yeah
- DSDavid Senra
... Wolt was described. And, uh, he's like, "I always thought of myself as an entrepreneur. I never thought I would work for anybody." And he's just like, we were in a head-to-head battle, right? And he's like, "I had a term sheet in front of me." If I remember the number correctly, he was getting like a bill-- he had the ability to raise a-another fresh billion dollars of capital.
- SPSpeaker
Yeah.
- DSDavid Senra
And he was looking at the term sheet, thinking about signing it, and then he said involuntarily something came out of his mouth, and he says, "I can't beat him." He's like, "I can't beat him." And he's like, "I cannot believe that came out of my mouth." And he's like, and then he looked down, and he's like, "I can either light this money on fire, or I could sell my company for life-changing money and go work for Tony and learn a lot." And I, I think to this day, he still directly reports to you, correct?
- SPSpeaker
Yeah.
- DSDavid Senra
Yeah.
- SPSpeaker
He runs all of our European business.
- DSDavid Senra
And he was trying to explain to me and Daniel about just you don't s-- it's all the magic is very similar. What the stuff that you don't see, how hard he is to, to compete against.
- 23:54 – 30:58
Chaos Data and Experiment Loops
- DSDavid Senra
Y-you had some... An-another interesting quote I want to read to you. You say the way that DoorDash has achieved so much success is tens of thousands of experiments, ninety-five percent of which never even make it to the customer before they fail. The way to get a more, to get more accurate on a delivery probably requires some level of detail that is lower and deeper than you realize. Can you explain what you meant behind that statement?
- SPSpeaker
This again, starts from actually doing the work ourselves and realizing that if you actually wanna get something on time, um, I think it's very easy to think about, uh, wh-when you're just intellectualizing it, you know, o-o-o-on the outside when we're getting started, oh, maybe there's a traffic issue, or maybe, oh, the food is taking longer than ex-- uh, th-than it should, whatever the reasons might be.But you actually have no idea actually what are all the sources of delay i-in an order until you actually go and do the work. Sure, there might be some of the issues that y- I, I think you can think about on the outside, but then very, very quickly you realize that there's a lot of seconds of delay in every motion. In fact, there's about twenty steps you can decompose a delivery into, and there's delays at each one of those moments. And that's, you know, even more complicated if, you know, the delivery today is, uh, uh, they happen outside of restaurants, they happen inside shopping contexts like groceries or retail items, or if they happen inside malls that are multi-story, sometimes below ground, sometimes above ground. And one of the things you start realizing is, wow, actually there are a lot of causes for delays, and there's no way that you're gonna know about all of them until you literally actually encounter it for the first time. A lot of what's difficult about DoorDash is we're trying to build a structured data set in a world that is chaos. That's the physical world. [laughs] Th-the one of the reasons why there's all these sources for mistakes, for delays, for costs that ultimately, you know, yield into costs and good or bad, um, you know, experiences for customers is because there is no data that exists. There is no nice data set that a company like a Google or somebody else has organized for you, um, because it's all physical information, and it's also changing all the time. When you go into a grocery store and somebody moves an apple from aisle six to aisle eight, is that always gonna get documented? Of course not. Uh, those are the kinds of things we have to work on every single day, and, and, and you wouldn't know that. You know, what if I told you the, the cause for a delay was because actually somebody was home sick that day? How would you know that actually, you know, until that event actually transpired, and what would you do to respond, you know, to that event if that were to occur, which happens every single day. You know, when we're doing millions of orders every single day, the one in a million event happens a lot, and the one in a thousand event happens way more than that. And so building a system that can ideally detect and prevent these issues, but then also a very fast twitch muscle to actually be able to build this, I mean, almost like an emergency response system when something actually goes awry to fix it, that requires doing the work over and again and building the system that can learn over time to get better and better and better. Most of the time we have no idea. We start with the, these experiments, and that's why most experiments fail. But when you get enough goodness out of it, if you can get the five percent out of tens of thousands of experiments to work, you know, in one year, that has the benefit on all of your audience for the next year, and then you just keep going, and that adds compounding surplus for all of the audiences.
- DSDavid Senra
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- SPSpeaker
Ideally, yeah. Yes. Yeah, um, I, I think when we are at our best, that's, that's, that's what's happening. But, but, but it starts with actually building a system that actually wants to learn. If you think about... Like, like, like why do we have to learn? It's because the physical world, A, is not structured. It's not documented anywhere. It's-- You, you can't scrape it. Um, it's constantly changing. It's ca-- I mean, there's a winter storm right now, for example, in the Northeast [laughs] .
- DSDavid Senra
Yeah.
- SPSpeaker
I m- I mean, these are all things that happen differently, you know?
- DSDavid Senra
It's, it's beautiful here in California.
- SPSpeaker
Yeah, I know. We, we would have no idea here. We're spoiled here in the Bay Area. But like, but in general, all these things are happening every single, you know, hour of the day, okay? There's gonna be some missing item today. There's gonna be some order that took a lot longer today. There's gonna be some incorrect gate we entered at an apartment complex. There's gonna be some dasher who's gonna get lost coming up s- the stairs of this office building. There will be, guaranteed. And so the question is like, well, it would be impossible to try to, you know, figure out all of that if you can't build a system to learn how to do this. So the most important thing is actually building systems and building a system that, you know, at DoorDash really starts with testing things in a very operational, hacky, do things that don't scale kind of way, and to then taking the things that ultimately work, the ideas, and actually building products around them, and then engineering the ones that actually work so that you're actually very efficient with this learning loop, so that you can go fromLearning to shipping something that actually works because, you know, it's a resource constraint with, you know, how many engineers we have and how many things that we can actually ship, especially when the stakes are high, and you wanna make that loop as tight and as fast as possible. That's how you build a system in which you can learn thousands of things, and you just have to keep doing it over and over.
- 30:58 – 31:30
Trust Reset Every Day
- SPSpeaker
You know, our business is one where we believe we have to earn, you know, the right to serve you the next day. Even though you ordered with us today, thank you very much for your business, we have to earn it again. You know, the scoreboard goes back down to zero tomorrow, and we have to just do that all over again.
- DSDavid Senra
Where did you learn the importance of that?
- SPSpeaker
Of what?
- DSDavid Senra
Of starting over again every day. I've heard you say that before, and I love that idea.
- SPSpeaker
Very early at DoorDash, um, we learned, um, how, how hard it is to keep someone's trust and how easy it is to lose it. And, you know, I, I think I may have said this before, but there was, um,
- 31:30 – 34:41
Stanford Game Meltdown and Refunds
- SPSpeaker
there was a Stanford football game in which we lost, um, a lot of trust where we were late on every single delivery because we didn't have enough drivers on the road. We had no ability to shut down the website, but we had a lot of those kinds of days.
- DSDavid Senra
Wait, wait, pause, pause there. So where in DoorDash history is this, this game?
- SPSpeaker
This is the third month of our operation, September of twenty thirteen, where it was a Saturday. We had no ability to fulfill the orders that came in. We had no ability to even shut down the website, so we couldn't even, like, stop the floodgates. And usually-
- DSDavid Senra
Why, why were you having floodgates three months in?
- SPSpeaker
We had floodgates not three months in. On that day specifically-
- DSDavid Senra
Okay
- SPSpeaker
... for whatever reason, because of when the game ended, people wanted to order DoorDash for dinner in Palo Alto. And for whatever reason, um, you know, that volume s-spiked pretty hard. We had no ability to turn it off and no ability to, to fulfill. So we were late by at least an hour on every single delivery. I think when you go through experiences like that, but not just once, but we've had a lot of those kinds of experiences at DoorDash. I mean, you know, I still do customer support every day. I see them literally every single day. When you see that you can lose someone's trust, um, on one order, you realize that you gotta earn it again the next day, and there is no such thing as this, you know, just set it and forget it kind of mentality. Yeah, that came a lot from the early days, but I think this daily reminder when I do s-customer support is also another great reinforcing function.
- DSDavid Senra
So what happened that night of the game?
- SPSpeaker
We were late on every single delivery, um, and I think it was probably somewhere around ten PM or something where we're tallying up all the refunds that it would, you know, cost us if, uh, we wanted to make right and kinda give back everybody their money.
- DSDavid Senra
Were the customers asking for the refunds? Or you-
- SPSpeaker
No. No one was asking. No one was asking for anything. We were-- The, the night was over. We finished our last delivery, and we said, "Okay, that was a terrible night. What are we gonna do about it?" We could complain about, you know, the orders or, or, or something. But at the end of the day, I, I think within a very short period of time, fifteen seconds, we decided, okay, we gotta m-make right by the customer, so we gotta refund everybody. Now, the complication is we had no money at the time. I was having [laughs] a hard time raising... I, I, I mean, this is a pattern for me. I, I, I've had a hard time raising capital for the company in the earliest years, uh, and, and that started right from the beginning. I mean, like, we were maybe two or three weeks of cash out, and this refund would've cost us about forty percent of the bank account. So it would've just made the two or three weeks and just shrunk that into even fewer days. But yeah, you're right, nobody asked us for the refunds. I'm sure they were pissed, but nobody asked. We did, we, we did the refund right away, and then we stayed up that night actually baking cookies, and we delivered those cookies at around five AM, uh, before we thought when customers would wake. And the idea was we'd rather die trying to be excellent or at least die trying to do the thing that we wanna stand for than to live to be mediocre and not something that we'd be proud of, and that's what we did.
- 34:41 – 37:37
Scaling Through Experiments
- DSDavid Senra
That's excellent. So tell me more about building the system, this self-reinforcing, like, learning system.
- SPSpeaker
Look, these things kinda happen, um, in, in, in steps, right? So it started with the four of us doing the deliveries. And okay, well, we can keep doing the deliveries, um, but at some point we're gonna start, um, running into scale issues. I mean, four people can only do so many deliveries, so of course, we're gonna start recruiting Dashers, we're gonna start recruit- uh, um, recruiting consumers, um, selling restaurants. Um, and you start noticing, uh, a-a-as you do the deliveries, well, you have to build products to scale yourself. That's one. Two, you also just start noticing all the problems, and when you-- whenever you see a problem recur more than once, you would say to yourself, "Aha, maybe that's, you know, an example of a problem that we should actually build something for or actually run an experiment to see if we could actually solve." So I think very early on, um, the bias for action turned into this experimentation mentality. Now, we didn't have, like, any organizations at the time or anything like that. It was just, like, a few of us in my apartment. It wasn't like, okay, there's this, like, rigorous system that I'm talking about. That's probably the earliest inklings, though, of how we thought about, okay, you can go from doing things that don't scale to identifying hypotheses to test, to then running experiments and then to shipping products. That was probably the earliest, like, time, the first year of the company. You fast-forward maybe a year as we started launching into multiple cities. All of the general managers of different cities, so you could be running Boston, someone else is running Dallas, someone else is running, you know, a different city, uh, they would be reporting into me. Um, and you start seeing that, oh, okay, well, patterns actually emerge, you know, from city A to city B to city C, but they are still quite local, um, th-they're slightly... You know, you know, for example, in Boston, there's not a lot of cars.Um, car ownership is one of the lowest in Boston, you know, in the United States versus other places. There's, there's some strange setups because of the historic nature of the city in terms of that hub and spoke nature I was describing that, that actually violate that, uh, that, that setup. So th-there, there are like local nuances, and you start realizing, well, okay, well, how do I actually, you know, teach this way of doing things that don't scale all the way to shipping, you know, some feature that we know is gonna work to each one of these people so that we could run more experiments at the same time? And then we would just build more products that would actually, um, you know, go across all of these different patterns. So that's kinda how this thing, you know, has morphed over the years, where you basically start with some basic scientific, you know, process, if you will. You meet some point in which you have to figure out the next iteration in order to scale that process, and then you just keep that going, and you're always testing, you know, against whether or not you're delivering better for customers.
- 37:37 – 40:10
Customer North Star Metrics
- SPSpeaker
That's always gonna be the North Star metric of whether or not this process is actually making a difference or not.
- DSDavid Senra
Is it better for customers if it's faster, cheaper, more efficient? Like, what are the-
- SPSpeaker
Yeah, it's all of the above. So look, customers-- I mean, this business is tough because customers unfortunately don't just judge us on one dimension. Some customers ... All customers want the widest available selection. They want every item they can get, you know, delivered. They want the lowest possible price. They want the fastest possible delivery. They want, obviously, no mistakes. They absolutely, y-you know, expect it to be on time, and then if something were to go wrong, of course, they deserve to be treated correctly. We get judged on all of those things on every single order.
- DSDavid Senra
So this is this idea of, like, you can build a business around things that don't change.
- SPSpeaker
Yes.
- DSDavid Senra
What are the things that don't change from the customer's perspective for DoorDash then?
- SPSpeaker
Customers are always gonna want more and more selection. They're gonna always want more and more affordability. They're gonna want faster deliveries.
- DSDavid Senra
This is like Amazon, almost the exact, like, mirror of what Amazon-
- SPSpeaker
Well, I think when you ex- when you just think about what people want, I, I, I actually think it, it's pretty easy because we can play that role ourselves, and yeah, I, I, I, I, I think you just ask the q- you can ask very basic questions about what's the direction of travel of certain things? Like for example, like, do you think people are gonna expect more convenience or less convenience? E-e-especially in a world where you think that people are earning more, um, you know, whether it's today versus the past, tomorrow versus today, what do you think they're gonna do with those dollars? I-is it gonna go more towards consumption? Are they gonna expect or demand more convenience or less? I think when you start asking questions just out loud, y-y-you get the common sense answers in which you can build a business around.
- DSDavid Senra
We were talking about this with the crew at breakfast. It's just like, well, they're cornerstone in their businesses, some, a trait in human nature that's never gonna change, which is, like, we want more convenience. [laughs]
- SPSpeaker
Yeah. Always. I, I, I, it's not, um, it's not rocket science, I think. S- uh, it... The rocket science is actually how do you make it happen?
- DSDavid Senra
Yeah, I love this idea of, like, y- you're hiding the complexity. I, I spent a, a, a several hours with Bezos-
- SPSpeaker
Okay
- DSDavid Senra
... uh, one-on-one, and, um, I'm obviously a massive fan of his. I've done, like, fifteen episodes on him, and he, he listens to my other podcast, and I told him, I was like, "Dude, do you know how cra- how crazy it is that they put a guillotine in front of your house in Washington?" I go, "You made a magic button I can press that, [laughs] that anything I want in the world shows up to my house in two days, and now it's, like, a few hours, and all I do is press the button, and you handle all the other complexity behind it." I was like, "You deserve all the money. I hope you have all the money." [laughs] He just laughed and laughed and laughed.
- 40:10 – 42:55
CEO Customer Support Habit
- DSDavid Senra
You said something, you're doing customer support every day. Is this customer support emails? What is this?
- SPSpeaker
Emails or chats, sometimes phone calls.
- DSDavid Senra
Every day?
- SPSpeaker
Yeah.
- DSDavid Senra
Say more about this.
- SPSpeaker
Well-
- DSDavid Senra
Why do you do this?
- SPSpeaker
You know, I, I was saying earlier that for a few reasons. You know, one of the things that, uh, uh, we were talking about earlier is that so much of the magic or the difficulty of building a company like DoorDash is in all the things you can't see. And so the first thing you gotta do is you gotta build observability everywhere. You know, of course, there's observability with dashboards and systems and, um, you know, in-increasingly, you know, AI tools, but, but also I can see the inbound, you know, of, of, of customers who write us, whether it's a consumer, a merchant, a dasher, an advertiser, and I can choose to ignore them, [laughs] but th-th-th-those are freebies. I mean, like, how lucky am I to actually have a product in which people care enough, you know, even... I mean, usually the, the, y-usually the-they're not very positive emails, but I mean, like, but to care enough to actually let me know. You know, I think the greatest killer of a business is usually silence, and, and here they're actually-- they care enough to actually let me know something went wrong in their experience. I owe them, you know, uh, certainly not just a response, but actually I, I, I think the, and not the courtesy, but I, I, I owe them the responsibility of actually solving that problem ultimately. And so first, it's an obligation to the, the, the customers. Second, it's actually something that I want the rest of the company to do. You know, I think one of the easiest things as companies get a little bit bigger, perhaps earn a little bit more success, is there are more obstacles between them and the, uh, the, the, the customers or the jobs to be done. You know, for example, y-when you become a company, you know, all of a sudden there are... The, the only things that kinda get spotlighted are the financial metrics, your revenue, your profits, um, none of which are metrics that customers care about, that there are no metrics i-i-in what we report, [laughs] uh, you know, to, to a-as a public company that customers know about probably or care about frankly. And that always is quite bothersome to me because it's because of our ability to serve customers that can hopefully achieve, you know, strong financial metrics that, uh, investors care about. And so a lot of what I'm trying to do is building as many reinforcing and repetitive mechanisms and motions, including things that I do individually-That will allow this company to always recognize that the number one job and the only religion at this company is to solve problems for customers.
- 42:55 – 46:52
Anecdotes vs Data
- DSDavid Senra
What do you do when the data and the anecdotes conflict?
- SPSpeaker
It's a tough one. Um, I think that, um, usually there's always an element of truth in what customers are saying, and, and it usually becomes a trade-off, you know, discussion, uh, you know, for, for different teams. The, the reason why it's a tough de-decision is because it is so easy to always just veer on the side of the data. Because almost always when a customer notices something that is wrong, um, or, or, or there's an anecdote, um, uh, that may be a quote unquote edge case, it's usually at some tail of a distribution. Um, a distribution of the wait times for customer support, a distribution of how friendly we were when we actually took the call, a, a distribution of how on time we were, or how late we were, or how accurate we were, or what are the number of items of the types of SKUs you care about in a particular category of lettuce. Just lettuce [laughs] , not vegetables, but just lettuce, right? Uh, uh, so it's always some tail example, and so the data's probably always gonna win when it comes to a, some sort of a prioritization discussion. But when you actually think about how to make a product better, it's gonna almost always by definition be in improving the edges, you know? And that's why a lot of times what I like to do personally is I love to spend time, um, uh, you know, with a lot of our power users, whether it's, you know, the, the, the top dashers or, um, uh, the consumers who order the most often or the merchants who we've been doing a, um, you know, business with for a very long period of time, and also the new users. They're at the tails of the distribution of almost every outcome. A new user, you know, who's never touched DoorDash before and, you know, for the thirteen years that we've been around will absolutely, you know, tell us about how easy or difficult it is to place their first order in a way that, you know, someone who's been used to all the things that, you know, we've been training together with customers on, uh, have figured out. A power user also f- you know f- you know, sees all the issues too because they have the most shots on goal for some chaotic event to happen in the real world that we couldn't capture. And so those edges of the distribution are almost always where the anecdotes are that are the most valuable, um, that you have to pay the most attention to because they almost always will disagree with the data, and they're probably worth the most in terms of improving your product.
- DSDavid Senra
So let's say you find one of these edge cases i-as you're doing customer support every day.
- SPSpeaker
Yeah.
- DSDavid Senra
What's your next step?
- SPSpeaker
So the ones I love the most are actually, um, the really long ones, actually. The ones where there's a lot of gold. It's probably like, you know, uh, the, the research you do on founders, which is the longer almost the better because you get to study the distributions. When it's a short, uh, you know, email about something you already know about, there's not as much, you know, perhaps, uh, interesting material in it. But what-- You know, I love the two thousand-word emails, especially from dashers who will give many use cases of why the logistics algorithm broke for them. And it becomes almost like a debugging exercise, right? Of both physical world things that have occurred, things about our systems that, you know, probably broke, um, and things in our products that couldn't interface well enough between the physical world and our systems. And so then I go into our debugging tools, and I actually literally track the order and every single step I'm watching and, and-
- DSDavid Senra
Personally. You're doing this personally?
- SPSpeaker
Yeah.
- DSDavid Senra
Okay.
- SPSpeaker
And, and, you know, once I start figuring a, a, a out potentially where, you know, the sources of error are, you know, I'll either generate the hypothesis and call the dasher or email the dasher, you know, depending on the best way to reach them, um, or, or the consumer, um, and then actually find out whether or not there's a nugget of insight there of something we actually could improve. So put a different way, can we put a spotlight on an anecdote that improves the product? That's the opportunity I'm looking for.
- 46:52 – 50:09
Eternal Mission Local Economies
- DSDavid Senra
I've heard you describe this as like this inter-eternal mission, right?
- SPSpeaker
Yes.
- DSDavid Senra
How would you describe what the eternal mission of DoorDash is?
- SPSpeaker
Yeah. Well, the eternal mission of DoorDash is to grow and empower local economies. We say this a lot, and the reason why it's eternal is because I think it's a f- it, it, it's a fight worth fighting for or a cause worth fighting for forever, which is the best way to grow the GDP or the happiness or the safety, um, of a city is by making the small, medium, and large businesses in that city successful. They produce the vast majority of jobs and, you know, consumption dollars for the economy and f- the, the monies for the police department, the fire department, the parks, the schools, etc., the hospitals. So the question is like, well, how do you actually make them successful? One of the m-most positive tailwinds of why this could be a very fruitful eternal mission is because the physical world is always changing, right? And, and, and it's hard to just scrape it, um, and it's one of the things I love the most about it. It's hard to just, you know, scrape all that information, say job is finished, and then put it through some LLM or something. The... Well, A, that data is always changing, B, it, it's not organized as all, a-at all, and C, it's not just an... It, it's not like some relationship between a text, you know, editor and a, a person. I mean, there's a lot of peop-- There's, there are three people involved on every single order at DoorDash, [chuckles] at least. There is a consumer, there's a dasher, there's a merchant, at least three people. Um, now given that we do more complicated things, there's even more sometimes. And, you know, for those people, this is, this could be their identity. Back to, you know, what I was saying about small business owners and how they believe that what they do, it's not a office job or something, you know, that they just use to earn money so that they could spend consumption dollars or something else. This is like their livelihood. This is like who they are.When I think about those kinds of people, I want those people to win. And so if we have to eternally always look for the edges of the distribution to keep improving the product, of course we will. And if we can do that and we can make them successful, then they're gonna make many things, you know, a-about the cities and the neighborhoods that we live in continue to be sustainable and very, very thriving.
- DSDavid Senra
And the alternative is terrifying. You have one or two big players.
- SPSpeaker
Yeah. I don't even wanna think about the alternative. You're totally right. I mean, the alternative is n- it's a very robotic world where maybe w-we buy things in one or two ways or from one or two places. That's not a world in which you're gonna grow, you know, the GDP of these cities, and, and actually, that's a world in which you may take away some of the identity, I would argue, of some of the neighborhoods. I think one of the reasons why people love neighborhoods or that there's certain neighborhoods that they, you know, maybe preference is because there's a personality to it. A l- so much of the personality is given by who the businesses are, and therefore, you and your friends wanna go frequent and go hang out in those places in addition to, you know, your homes and things like that, and that's what makes it tick. That's what makes a place feel awesome, um, a city feel awesome. And so I think that's an eternal mission worth fighting for.
- DSDavid Senra
Yeah, 'cause this is not something that you can accomplish in a year, five years-
- SPSpeaker
No
- DSDavid Senra
... ten years. It's
- 50:09 – 59:12
Turning Data Into Merchant Growth
- DSDavid Senra
constantly changing. What do you do with all this data that you're collecting?
- SPSpeaker
Well, I mean, the first is we have to structure it. So i- um, you know, one of the things that I think, um, Google, uh, you know, so brilliantly did was they did organize a lot of the information on the internet, and they made it searchable, you know, to everybody. Right now, the first thing we're doing is we're still collecting lots of information, and then right now, we're trying to do two things with it. You know, the first thing is we're certainly trying to grow a merchant's business by allowing to search for their stuff through our app, and, you know, we'll bring them incremental business that way. The other way is we're actually trying to make it useful for them, so we're giving data back to them, telling them when-
- DSDavid Senra
Data about their own business.
- SPSpeaker
Yeah. Like when you're out of stock of certain items or that did you know that, you know, you are underpriced in this particular, you know, menu item versus what, you know, uh, what you could be pricing at, or that there's an opportunity to bundle certain, um, uh, or, or to create certain, you know, SKUs or new, uh, um, items on your, on, on your menu or on your catalog if you're a retailer that we think would grow your actual business.
- DSDavid Senra
This is like w- Bezos had that line about Amazon Prime. He's like, "We wanna make it so valuable that it's irresponsible if you're not a member." Like, it's just insane. So if you can g- have data for small businesses, medium businesses, big, even large businesses that they didn't know, like that pricing thing is interesting to me, where it's like, well, you're charging, you know, fifteen dollars for this plate of chicken-
- SPSpeaker
Yeah
- DSDavid Senra
... where we see all these other... I assume you're getting the data from all the other merchants on your platform where it's like you could be-- people are willing to pay twenty-five dollars for that thing. Essentially, it'd be irresponsible not to partner with you-
- SPSpeaker
Yeah
- DSDavid Senra
... if you have all those insights.
- SPSpeaker
We can also take the same approach that we've built for ourselves, you know, the scientific process from doing things that don't scale to shipping things at scale on your behalf. Like, you as a merchant can be running experiments too. Now maybe you can't because you're a single person. You're sing- you're literally one person like the baker that I was telling you about that inspired a lot of our discovery of delivery, who doesn't have all the capabilities to run all these. But why can't we do those things for you? Why can't we, for instance-
- DSDavid Senra
What do you mean do them for me?
- SPSpeaker
We can talk about simple things to more difficult things. The simple things we can, you know, change menu prices on your behalf. We can buy different kind of promotions for you based on what return thresholds you want to achieve. We can talk about more complicated things. You know, for example, you know, there's, there's certain merchants who want to actually grow, um, tremendously. They w- why not, right? They don't just... They want their identity, their, I mean, their passion project to be exposed to as many people as possible. Some of those businesses, for example, um, find it very hard though to grow, you know, from one store to two stores to then somehow two thousand stores. But imagine if you baked cookies, as an example, and you wanted everyone to have your cookies. Why can't we match your products with businesses that don't sell your product and actually create a supply chain in which you can actually, you know, sell those products in more places? And you can literally make everyone win. You know, the, the, the new business who's selling your product now has a new menu item called a cookie. [laughs] You get to maximally, you know, increase your, um, your exposure. There's a range of things in which we can do with the information, um, and make it productive if we knew what your goals were. And so a lot of what we're doing with a lot of businesses is at scale, how do we maximally increase, you know, your exposure, your identity, and achieve whatever goal you may have?
- DSDavid Senra
So that's with restaurants. Tell me some of the stuff-
- SPSpeaker
Or retailers.
- DSDavid Senra
Yeah, ex- like this gets really interesting when you expand out to every physical business.
- SPSpeaker
W-when I think about restaurateurs, retailers, to me, they are, they are no different from me in the sense that they are entrepreneurs. They wanna create something. They want something that they have, an idea they may have, um, a passion they may have, and they want it to be exposed into the world. That gives them fulfillment of a, a variety of sort, uh, uh, of ways. Okay, so let's say that you wanna, um, make T-shirts and sell T-shirts. That's a passion, um, project of yours. There should be no reason why you can't do that today from, you know, testing that idea with the audiences that we have, with the warehousing and logistics inventory that we have, with the ability very quickly to test in any neighborhood, any city in the tens of thousands of, you know, different neighborhoods that we serve or cities that we serve and operate in and see whether or not you may have something before you actually go out and try to spend a lot of money to open up a store or something like that. There's no reason why we can't be your business partner for any future creation.
- DSDavid Senra
Dude, this is blowing my mind because-I just think about DoorDash as a way to get food.
- SPSpeaker
Yeah.
- DSDavid Senra
I love the idea behind this.
- SPSpeaker
It's all about where you start and how you keep going, right? And by the way, a lot of these ideas, um, came to us from our customers. You know, back to y-y-your question about why do I do customer support, I learn a ton, too. Yeah, of course, I learn about all the edges of the distribution.
- DSDavid Senra
What, what are some examples of things that customers have asked?
- SPSpeaker
Okay, so one customer in twenty fourteen I'll never forget was a farmer, um, who runs one of the largest farms in the state of California, and they run hundreds of trucks every day up and down the state of California, okay, distributing their produce and their, uh, meats and other products to a variety of grocers, restaurants, hotels, et cetera, and they, and they've been doing this for three generations as a family. They did not start their farm to drive a bunch of trucks. That is not the business that they aspire to be in or are passionate about. And literally i-i, um, in our second year of operation, they called me, or they wrote in actually, and then we had a conversation on the phone about, um, what they were interested in. They were in... They were curious whether we could solve that problem for them.
- DSDavid Senra
That's wild they even asked you that.
- SPSpeaker
Yeah. And, and, and this was the second year of the business. And, and so, you know, I, I, I said not yet at the time. You know, perhaps I should... You know, I, I, I almost feel like I owe him a call, so this conversation's a good reminder. But the, the, the... When I, I think you've earned... You know, our goal over time is to be the first phone call for any business, um, th- um, any business for any issue. Yes, today the number one calls we get about are about delivery. Totally get it. Totally understood. Increasingly, they've been about other things. Can you actually help us build our app? Can you help us acquire customers? Can you help us analyze customers, retain customers, customer support customers? Can you help us store inventory? So th-those questions are more and more coming inbound, and that's why we've shipped a lot of the products that we have at DoorDash. Um, but I think if done right, DoorDash can be your first phone call to start any business. I mean, that's really what we wanted. And, and, and we can do it in a way that is very low cost that, you know, doesn't have to scale if you don't want it to, you know, some people are very happy with o-one or two locations, or if you wanna become the next McDonald's or you wanna become the next Walmart.
- DSDavid Senra
One of my all-time favorite quotes is from the book Zero to One. It says, "The single most powerful pattern I have noticed is that successful people find value in unexpected places, and they do this by thinking about business from first principles instead of formulas." This is exactly what AppLovin has done with their new advertising platform, Axon. Axon is the most powerful advertising platform in a generation. Axon allows you to capture undivided attention. Axon ads are full-screen videos that are watched for an average of thirty-five seconds, retention that blows other ad platforms out of the water. And you can launch in minutes. You set the goal, and Axon achieves it. No complex setup, no expertise needed. And Axon scales quickly. They can put your ads in front of over a billion potential customers. Other businesses have seen immediate results, scaled to hundreds of thousands of dollars of spend per day, and increased their revenue by millions. And most advertisers aren't even thinking about this channel yet. Less than one percent of advertisers have access to Axon, so you want to get started quickly. And you can do that by going to axon.ai/senra. That is axon.ai/senra. Something, again, I wanna compare your story to Bezos because I just think every time I hear you speak, I hear a lot of, uh, Bezos. He obviously did a ton of customer support at the very beginning of Amazon. He publishized, publicized his email and, like, made it public, like, email me all the time. And one, um... He, he tells this great story in one of the books that when he realized, you know, they were selling, I think, at the time, I think, just books, CDs, and, like, VH-- maybe DVDs.
- SPSpeaker
Okay.
- DSDavid Senra
And somebody's like, he would ask... I think he would send an email to, like, a thousand customers a day or something like that. And he's like, "What else would you buy?" And one guy's like, "Will you sell me windshield wipers?" [laughs]
- SPSpeaker
Okay.
- DSDavid Senra
And Bezos was like, "Oh my God, we're gonna be able to sell anything."
- SPSpeaker
Yeah.
- 59:12 – 1:01:14
New Products Beyond Delivery
- DSDavid Senra
What are these other products that you're building? Okay. We have to, like, educate me now 'cause I've heard you need... First of all, you need to do more podcasts-
- SPSpeaker
Okay. [laughs]
- DSDavid Senra
-because I've listened to all of them, and I didn't know some of the stuff you're telling me right now. But I know you've launched a bunch of different products-
- SPSpeaker
Sure.
- DSDavid Senra
-in the last six, twelve months. Tell me about one that you're really excited about.
- SPSpeaker
Well, one of the things that we're trying to do is we're trying to obviously deliver everything inside the city, okay? In order to... A-and just to put some, you know, context behind it, there are tens of millions of items inside of a city that you could deliver. DoorDash delivers a fraction of those items to-
- DSDavid Senra
What fraction do you deliver today?
- SPSpeaker
A very small fraction.
- DSDavid Senra
Okay.
- SPSpeaker
Very, very small fraction. There are many times the amount of things to deliver than what we currently offer, but there are challenges in, in, in, in making these deliveries, right? For instance, you know, how do you actually know what the catalog looks like for what, uh, for each city? How do you know if the catalog's actually accurate? What if the items are not available in store but are available in a warehouse somewhere far, far away? There are a lot of these challenges in order to actually, you know, address before you can actually do something like deliver everything inside of a city. So one of the things that we launched, um-
- DSDavid Senra
Do you talk about like that internally? We're gonna deliver everything in a city?
- SPSpeaker
Yeah. But one of the things that we launched last, uh, fall, it was actually in September, we announced DashMart Fulfillment Solutions, where, you know, for companies like a Kroger or, um, companies, um, like a CVS, we'll actually carry their items, and you can order their items, you know, directly from our site. But sometimes they'll actually come from a warehouse that we're operating on their behalf.
- DSDavid Senra
Mm-hmm.
- SPSpeaker
That is an example of a product of, of a warehousing and inventory management and a logistics solution in which we are offering, you know, perfect accuracy, fast delivery in a way that retailers don't have access to or the capabilities to do so today.That's part of how you can deliver, you know, all of a city by actually bringing and aggregating and making closer some of the inventory to where someone lives.
- 1:01:14 – 1:05:06
Autonomous Delivery Strategy
- SPSpeaker
We're building, um, uh, autonomous vehicles. Uh, uh, uh, uh, that's something else that, um, we announced, um, last year, uh, where actually... I mean, it, it was a fascinating journey where [chuckles] candidly mostly, uh, pain and suffering. But most of the journey was recognizing that you actually have to build a purpose, um, uh, built or intentional product to do last mile delivery in a way that's very different from, say, robotaxis or delivering humans. You have to solve problems of getting products, for example, inside and out from the vehicle in a way that passengers naturally can do in a robotaxi that items cannot do on their own. You have to think about what types of, you know, vehicles you may need for shorter distance deliveries versus longer distance deliveries, heavier deliveries versus lighter packages. When I kind of think about some of those products, for example, that's all part of this mission of trying to bring you everything inside the city and giving every business a chance to win.
- DSDavid Senra
And are you making the hardware yourself?
- SPSpeaker
Yeah. So, uh, as in some of the cases we are, and so we don't have, a-again, like the, the only religion we really subscribe to is making customers win. Uh, we don't have a religion about whether or not we have to build, you know, the product or someone else has to build the product. Actually, when we started the autonomous project, the autonomous vehicle project, we started with the, um, belief that we did not have to build, um, the vehicles. And in partnering with a lot of different companies, um, we ultimately realized that nobody [chuckles] actually wanted to build what we wanted to build, and that's ultimately why we decided to, you know, um, start, um, our own project in twenty nineteen and, and, you know, shipped it, uh, last year.
- DSDavid Senra
So that's what, six years... Se- um, seven years. Almost seven years of development-
- SPSpeaker
Six years. Six, six years to get to-
- DSDavid Senra
Why did they not wanna build... They just didn't wanna build what you wanted?
- SPSpeaker
Yeah. Well, i-i-if you think about it, um, in the world of autonomous vehicles, you have, um, a lot of the projects and a lot of the capital and a lot of the attention are going towards robotaxi, and that's just a very different solution and form factor, um, i-in our opinion, than what you need for last mile delivery. You know, when you're... It's very hard, for example, to drive a robotaxi into a crowded, um, hub of merchants, you know, whether it's a mall or, you know, a main streets, um, and actually somehow find parking and actually, you know, get access to, you know, the products by itself somehow. You know, I think that's a, that's a, that's a difficult endeavor to, to accomplish. Um, we built actually DoorDash Dot, which actually will... Yes, it will travel on the road, but it also can travel on the sidewalk and in the bike lanes. Um, it's a much smaller form factor. It doesn't go as fast, um, but it h-has the ability to actually get to the last ten feet of actually, you know, solving the problem of last mile delivery, which really is a last ten feet problem.
- DSDavid Senra
Is this live, like right now?
- SPSpeaker
It's in Arizona, so it's, it's in, it's in the Phoenix, uh, Scottsdale area.
- DSDavid Senra
Is it true, I heard that Waymo, you guys have partnered with Waymo to, for, to close the doors of... [chuckles] Is that true?
- SPSpeaker
We do, we do partner with Waymo, um, and we do lots of things together.
- DSDavid Senra
Is it people just not shutting the door when they get out of a Waymo? Is that true?
- SPSpeaker
One of the things that I think is fascinating about, um, uh, the problems that a company like a Waymo or a problem like DoorDa-- or a company like DoorDash has to solve is there's always these, uh, funny edge cases in the real world that are very hard to predict.
- DSDavid Senra
Yeah. [chuckles]
- SPSpeaker
Um, uh, shutting doors may be one of those examples, right? But you actually wouldn't know about that until literally you read the logs of these customer transcripts of, you know, these things. Look, I, I, I think there's gonna be lots of things that we could do together over time, but I, I, I think it starts with just building the foundation. I, I think the foundations you need to build one of these companies for the physical world are just very, very different, um, from the, uh, from the digital world. And, you know, that's kinda the fun part of the exercise at
- 1:05:06 – 1:12:46
Hiring Rhodes Scholar Navy SEALs
- SPSpeaker
DoorDash.
- DSDavid Senra
Okay. So let's talk about the talent needed to do-
- SPSpeaker
Sure
- DSDavid Senra
... all the things that you're describing. I heard you say that when you were recruiting, you looked for Rhodes Scholars, uh, to meet Navy SEALs. What does that mean?
- SPSpeaker
[laughs] Yeah. This was, uh, this was a shorthand, I suppose, early on, um, when we were looking for, I think, the types of people that we thought would do well at DoorDash. Um, and I think it started f- um, first from by, because we did every job as ourselves, whether it was the deliveries, customer support, making menus, selling restaurants, we recognized the personality type, if you will. Yes, you needed to be smart and, and you needed to be able to, you know, have high processing power, um, in terms of, uh, um, you know, analyzing all the information, especially, um, i-in a world that's very unstructured. But one of the things you really needed was you needed to just do things. So much I, I, I, I think, uh, that that's challenging is, um, that's very different about the physical world than, say, building software is you have no control in the physical world. We don't get to control when you hit that order button. We don't get to control whether or not a Dasher accepts or rejects an order. We don't get to control how, how, how slow or how fast somebody makes an item or how in stock or out of stock some item is. You have to be able to do things to go figure those things out. So one of the earliest things I did, I remember, was, um, the interview question. If you made it to the interview with me, um, your final round interview was most likely a surprise because, you know, our, our teams would, you know, ask you to, you know, answer some prompt about fixing some problem in a city or something like that. And you probably would go out and do your analyses and, um, you know, um, come ready, uh, with a one pager of notes or something, and then you would come to me, and you thought... You might think that the interview is to present that to me. I would literally ask you, I said, "Well, this could be a really long or really short interview, um, where I'm gonna give you, um,20 minutes, and you can ask me any question that you want, um, but after the 20 minutes expires, I'm gonna give you twenty dollars that you can use to go and acquire a hundred customers for us. Um, and you have eight hours to do so. But here's also a plane ticket. I know you traveled far to come to this interview, in case you wanna quit the interview now and just move on [laughs] and find somewhere else to work. And, and, and, and, and that was the interview because that's the action part, right? So much of, um, what we were trying to test for, um, early on is someone who's going to do something to go and collect information as opposed to someone who's gonna collect data, scrape information from some, uh, you know, internet protocol and then do some magical analysis on it and then ship code. Okay. I mean, uh, but what if none of that information existed? You have to go and do things in order to actually collect information. That was one big kind of behavior bias for action that we were testing for.
- DSDavid Senra
So it's the Navy SEAL part.
- SPSpeaker
That's the Navy SEAL part, where you have to be willing to do things and be accountable, uh, you, you know, for things. A lot of that was on the, you know, the, the non-engineering front. On the engineering front, we looked for engineers who certainly were great at coding, but we looked for engineers who would be willing to do deliveries with us. In fact, the interview with me, if you're an engineer, is the final round interview, was we would go and do deliveries together. So the interview would literally take place in my Honda.
- DSDavid Senra
[laughs]
- SPSpeaker
And we would be doing deliveries for maybe an hour or two, or something like that, and I'm walking you through the flow of literally the order and asking your opinion of how we could productize this. In Silicon Valley, uh, I, I think sometimes there's the, um, mythical obsession with the 10X engineer, right? W- and, and I totally get it, and, and they do absolutely exist. But a lot of times, that is about coding prowess. Um, that's great. We have a lot of respect for that. Um, at DoorDash, we also need you to have problem-solving prowess or the coding prowess in quotes at DoorDash is about how do you solve this end-to-end problem? And it takes a certain kind of engineer who's willing, you know, to, to do deliveries, um, and not just think about code all day or what the latest, greatest AI tools are. But is what I'm going to ship actually going to solve a real world problem? Is there gonna be a real customer benefit, yes or no? That was the type of profile and personality a-and aptitude and attitude that we're looking for for engineers.
- DSDavid Senra
Was there a specific source where you were finding people like this?
- SPSpeaker
Not really. There wasn't, um... In, in fact, to this day, I don't really l-look at people's backgrounds that much. I think one of the things I discovered along the way, you know, probably in the twenty fifteen to twenty twenty era when, especially when DoorDash was building out its team, um, there were more attributes that I was listening for than there were things on a resume that I was seeking or looking out. A bias for action, you know. A-and, and a lot of the ways I can tell in an interview is actually just what people naturally talk to me about. You know, for example, Christopher Payne, our first chief operating officer, I didn't ask him a single interview question, um, but after a two-hour discussion about our logistics algorithm, he went home that night, it was Friday, drove with his son for four hours doing deliveries. I didn't ask him to do that. I also didn't ask him the next morning to write me a three thousand word email about why our logistics algorithm sucks.
- DSDavid Senra
But he did it.
- SPSpeaker
But he did it. And that told me more than any set of interview questions-
- DSDavid Senra
You hadn't even hired him yet?
- SPSpeaker
No, hadn't hired-
- DSDavid Senra
Oh, I see.
- SPSpeaker
Hadn't hired him yet.
- DSDavid Senra
And then you immediately hired him.
- SPSpeaker
And this is certainly, this is certainly beyond the resume, right? Um, or, you know, we look for the ability to operate at the lowest level of detail. I remember my first, um, it was actually supposed to be a coffee chat, not a quote unquote interview. It was scheduled for forty-five minutes with our f- um, you know, now president, Prabheer, then CFO candidate. And he came to the coffee with his computer and this like multi-megabyte file, which was some projection of our financials somehow. I said, "What?" Like, like, uh, this was, this was supposed to be me getting-- We're, we're supposed to get to know each other and this... But, but this is how he thinks, right? Like, I don't need to watch the resume or read the resume to decipher how does this person work. He showed it to me.
- DSDavid Senra
So he built a model and then he walks you through?
- SPSpeaker
Yeah.
- DSDavid Senra
How long did that take?
- SPSpeaker
We, I think, debated it for over four hours.
- DSDavid Senra
[laughs]
- SPSpeaker
The, the, the... So it was like... And but it was literally going line by line to think through that. These kinds of examples, ultimately, and then there's like, you know, three or four other attributes that we look for, those tell me more about, I think, how you operate, what makes you tick, what's the environment in which you'd be most successful, and whether or not I think it matches, um, what's required. So there wasn't, there wasn't like a source. It wasn't like, "Oh, yeah, we discovered the secret that it's this company or this school or this background that ultimately wins."
- DSDavid Senra
But don't they have to be very different people than would be people satisfied working in like just a completely digital like software company?
- SPSpeaker
Yes, yes.
- DSDavid Senra
Like you told this story one time where you were wondering, um, let me see if I remember correctly, correct me if I'm wrong, but you're like you took like a small sample of like twenty Dasher drivers-
- SPSpeaker
Yeah
- DSDavid Senra
... and twenty UberX drivers.
- 1:12:46 – 1:13:42
Driver Switch Experiment
- SPSpeaker
Yes.
- DSDavid Senra
Right?
- SPSpeaker
Yes.
- DSDavid Senra
And what is the observation that you discovered from this experiment? Do you remember?
- SPSpeaker
Yeah. So, uh, um, yeah, they were making about twenty an hour at the time. I made a guaranteed offer of twenty-five an hour if the, uh, uh, if you switch jobs. So if the UberX-Dash, uh, drivers would go to DoorDash, DoorDash would go to Uber, and one out of two groups of twenty. So one out of forty made the move.
- DSDavid Senra
And what did you derive-
- SPSpeaker
And, and-
- DSDavid Senra
What conclusion did you derive from that?
- SPSpeaker
And this was very early. I, I, this was weeks within the companies getting f-uh, f-uh, started because at the time one of the th... One of the, um, you know, back to the three questions we're trying to answer, we're trying to figure out whether or not we could acquire enough Dashers, enough drivers, was, well, if drivers only cared about money, well, we're ultimately gonna lose because obviously it's more valuable to transport David than a burrito or a coffee. And, and so we were testing this, you know, uh, we're almost, you know, trying to y-y confirm or to deny this hypothesis. So I ran that experiment.
- 1:13:42 – 1:15:33
Who Delivers and Why
- SPSpeaker
What I learned was, well, actually there are two groups of completely different people. The DoorDash drivers, um, they were younger, or about half of them were female or women, and they had all sorts of vehicles. Some of them drove mot-motorcycles, um, scooters, bikes, uh, yes, cars, but, but, but, but, but not exclusively cars. The UberX drivers at the time were, um, usually men in their forties, um, I think almost exclusively men. Maybe there were a few women in the group, but almost exclusively men. Um, all of them drove vehicles, uh, cars, uh, sorry, four-wheelers. And, and they viewed that job almost like a full-time job. You know, in some ways, they're moving from Taxi 1.0 to Taxi 2.0, and because some of them had formerly dr- uh, drove for Taxi. The, the Dashers on the other hand came from a variety of places: schools, hospitals, restaurants, retailers, service businesses, moms. Um, a-a-and, and then if you look at it today, there's almost no overlap, very little overlap between rideshare and drivers and delivery drivers, and the Dashers, uh, uh, more than half of them are women today. They come from dozens of industries, literally, I mean, um, every place. The average Dasher only does three to four hours a week. Ninety percent do f- drive fewer than ten hours a week. And so it just became a very different setup, you know, the delivery-
- DSDavid Senra
They kinda self-selected into what-
- SPSpeaker
They self-selected, and that's what I missed.
- DSDavid Senra
I wonder if there's that insight that you derived there is like it's kinda what I'm getting to is like how do you find the people, like the engineer that is willing to go get in your shitty Honda, no offense [laughs] -
- SPSpeaker
Yeah, no, two thousand and one
- DSDavid Senra
... and do deliveries. Yeah, I feel like that, that is such a different person than-
- SPSpeaker
It is. It's a software-
- DSDavid Senra
Than a software engineer at Google. It's a super different-
- SPSpeaker
That's eating pheasant or something for lunch.
- DSDavid Senra
Yeah, it's super different.
- 1:15:33 – 1:18:07
Hiring for Action
- DSDavid Senra
Yeah, it's exactly. No, I, I think you said it yourself. I mean, if you think about, you know, the, the, the early days, it was, I mean, I remember we would at-- and it's a strange memory, but, um, we would take a coding break at ten PM to take out the trash because it was an apartment. So it wasn't like an office building where there was, you know, janitorial services. We were janitorial [laughs] and, and so we would take out the trash. It takes a certain kind of engineer. It takes a certain kind of person to actually wanna work in that environment. But I don't think there was a, like a background. If anything, it was probably like a personal background as opposed to a professional one in which, um, we were looking for. But I, I, I, I think all of these people had a bias for action. All of them cared about the details. All of them had the ability to hold opposing ideas in their brains. All of them had strong followership. They tended to move with others as they moved from one, uh, uh, uh, once they joined a company, a bunch of others followed them. Oh, that's an interesting-
- SPSpeaker
They were-
- DSDavid Senra
... trait to hire for.
- SPSpeaker
They were, um-
- DSDavid Senra
Say, wait, say, say that over, about that again.
- SPSpeaker
Yeah, it's strong followership, okay? They had the, they had this ab-ability where, um... And, and I didn't even know the why many times, but when you just look at, you know, you know, company A they worked for or organization A they started, whatever, and th-they tend to, uh, have these groups that are attracted to them, and they're tend to be quite like-minded. Um, they tend to always wanna get better. That was one trait that we discovered. And, you know, y-and you see this, and it's not always professionally, like trying to get better at some skill all the time. Sometimes it was they wanted to be the best burger maker, or they wanted to be the best karaoke singer, and they would literally, they'd like tell you about their process in which they would, on the weekends, improve every single week. But that's not that different from if you think about the scientific process that we're recruiting for or trying to institute i-i-i-in our systems here at DoorDash. It's very similar actually. Very, very, very similar. There is an obsession, uh, almost, um, to some activity, uh, and there was a system that they devised for themselves to actually get better. Those were the traits that we looked for as opposed to what company did you work for, et cetera.
- DSDavid Senra
You have a great quote where it says, uh, "DoorDash has always been a company where bias for action is the way we solve and settle debates. We don't debate a lot. We tend to ship hundreds of thousands of experiments a week." So you're not sitting in an office or that conference room behind us mapping things out and like, "Oh, I have a hypothesis." You're just like, "No, we're just gonna experiment. We're gonna get to the truth as fast as
- 1:18:07 – 1:20:01
Earned Secrets via Experiments
- DSDavid Senra
possible."
- SPSpeaker
Yeah. I, I, I, I think... Well, because so much of the phys-- A big part of this is because the physical world, so much of it is y-y there is no analysis you can run on it sometimes and, and or, or, or, or it can be very counterintuitive. Um, and, you know, for example, had we not done deliveries in both Palo Alto and San Francisco, maybe we never would have landed on the idea that you could deliver maybe faster or more economically inside of a quote unquote "suburb" than a city.
- DSDavid Senra
It's almost like an earned secret. You read, um, Sam Walton's autobiography?
- SPSpeaker
A long time ago.
- DSDavid Senra
Okay, so he has that line in there-
- SPSpeaker
Yes
- DSDavid Senra
... because h-his main competitor, Sears, Kmart, there was... People had the idea before he did, and they're like, "We're..." They're in the city center. He's like, "Well, I'm in Bentonville. I'm in like..." He's basically said, like, if we didn't-- He, he was resource-constrained, and so he's like, "I didn't have a lot of money, so I had to start out in these li-le, uh-
- SPSpeaker
Yeah
- DSDavid Senra
... these small towns, and if I did, never did that because I was forced to, because I didn't have the money that Kmart or the other competitors had, I didn't realize how much business there was out in these little towns." And then the earned secret that he had was if he could compete on his, his, you know, organizing mantra was everyday low prices. If I can
- DSDavid Senra
Actually sell this same item to you cheaper, people would drive, in human nature, vast diff- distances to save money.
- SPSpeaker
Yes.
- DSDavid Senra
And what was interesting is Bernie Marcus, founder of Home Depot, realized that same exact, uh, idea like thirty or forty years later applied to a different, um, different, different industry and how to-
- SPSpeaker
Well, constraints definitely breed, I mean, creativity. I mean, for us, because we had no money or because I was so unsuccessful, you know, raising money in the earliest years, we had to run these experiments. If you think about it, if a company has no ability to compete with budget and other companies are outspending them with marketing dollars as an example, you only have one way to compete, which is you have to build a product that has better retention, better engagement. You have to. There is no other way.
- 1:20:01 – 1:21:18
Money vs Problem Solving
- DSDavid Senra
So what do you think when you see these giant like seed rounds that we're seeing now?
- SPSpeaker
[laughs] It's impressive is what I think. I think it's really-- M-m-my encouragement to those founders is to actually find a problem, um, worth solving first, but then once you find the problem, to actually go and solve the problem. Because at the end of the day, that's gonna cover for, you know, whatever financial, you know, metrics, um, that they're gonna be solving for.
- DSDavid Senra
Yeah. One of my favorite, um-- 'cause everybody's like, "Well, I need more money, 'cause if I have more money, I win." And one of my favorite historical anecdotes, have you ever read the biography of the Wright brothers by David McCullough?
- SPSpeaker
No.
- DSDavid Senra
Oh, I know you like to read history and biographies.
- SPSpeaker
I do. I should probably, I should probably check that one out.
- DSDavid Senra
Listen to the audiobook if you-
- SPSpeaker
Okay.
- DSDavid Senra
I know you're busy. Um, it's, it's great because, you know, h-human-powered flight was a centuries-old problem. Like-
- SPSpeaker
Yes
- DSDavid Senra
... people were trying to figure it out over and over again. Uh, the Wright-- At the same exact time the Wright brothers were trying to do it, they had better funded competitors, better brand names.
- SPSpeaker
Oh, sure.
- DSDavid Senra
Uh, I think it was Samuel Langley-
- SPSpeaker
More experience for sure.
- DSDavid Senra
Samuel Langley was, I think, backed by like the Smithsonian. I think he'd raised like five hundred thousand dollars.
- SPSpeaker
Yeah.
- DSDavid Senra
This is like a crazy amount of money there. And, uh, there's a great line in the book where like, uh, essentially the Wright brothers solved the centuries-old problem with the modest profits from their bicycle business. [laughs]
- SPSpeaker
[laughs]
- DSDavid Senra
And they tallied up how much it cost them. It was like fifteen hundred dollars. [laughs]
- SPSpeaker
That's incredible.
- DSDavid Senra
Which I absolutely love.
- 1:21:18 – 1:26:04
Thousand Days of Hell
- DSDavid Senra
I wanna go back. Uh, you, you make some jokes, uh, that I-- Well, maybe they weren't jokes, but I laughed when I heard you say this, that you're like, "I must be a really bad fundraiser."
- SPSpeaker
Yeah.
- DSDavid Senra
What is this like thousand days of hell? [laughs]
- SPSpeaker
[laughs]
- DSDavid Senra
Can you talk about this where you're-
- SPSpeaker
Well-
- DSDavid Senra
You're trying to make-- Tell-- And it's weird because the, the, the metrics in the business were all trending in the positive direction, right?
- SPSpeaker
They were, yeah.
- DSDavid Senra
So explain what the hell was going on.
- SPSpeaker
Well, so one of the hardest things I think you, you learn as a founder and certainly as a CEO is you have to learn how to control your own psychology because there's lots of things that are gonna be out of your control and that won't make sense to you. And this happened very early, um, you know, with DoorDash. Um, I mentioned earlier that we had, uh, a, a difficult time raising the seed round and then this, you know, difficult, uh, uh, event at, with Stanford Football in, in, in which we, [laughs] we ran out of even, uh, our money faster. Um, but we survived that. Um, we raised the seed round. Our series A, series B were hot rounds. You know, we, uh, we, I don't know, somehow w-was able to ra-raise money in less than a week, something like that, in each one of those instances. But in the spring of, um, twenty sixteen, you know, a few things happened, and this is probably when I first started learning about the importance of dealing with your own psychology. It was actually the first time I took a vacation. Uh, I think it was-- So we started the company in Ju- uh, I guess January twenty thirteen. June-- Uh, January twenty thirteen, January of twenty sixteen, so about three years or so. So, um, first vacation, five days with my wife. We didn't go on a honeymoon, so I promised her that, uh, that we should, we should make up for that. And so we go for five days, I think, to Hawaii. And, uh, we were-- Uh, actually, we had received an inbound term sheet, actually, so things were going pretty well, um, to raise our series C in the winter of twenty fifteen and the spring of sixteen. And I asked, I remember specifically asking the investor, um, "Why don't we just close this? Like, you know, uh, why don't we just close this now, like, before the, uh, year?" He's like, "No, don't worry about it. You've never taken a vacation. Go, go take, go take your honeymoon. Everything's gonna be fine. Um, you know, we're, we're, we're good for it." And I said, "Okay. All right. I'll, I'll, I'll go with you on this one." You know, my tension and my, my, my style is usually to get things done quickly, but I said, "I'll go with you on this one. I, I owe this to my wife." So we, we, we go to Hawaii, have a great time, come back in January, and the markets actually tank, the public markets. Um, so that's the first thing that happens. You know, companies at the time, companies I remember, I think it was like LinkedIn when they were still a independent public company or Salesforce, they drop thirty, forty percent, something like that, in value in a matter of like a week or something. Um, all of a sudden, analysts and, you know, uh, uh, Twitter at the time, you know, maybe wasn't as big as X it is today, but they had all the commentary about how, oh, this is the beginning of the end, right? Finally, like, the bubble's gonna burst. And that very quickly trickles to the private sector, uh, private, uh, companies and private financings, where investors start backing out, um, including from the DoorDash series C. And so this is the start, I would say, of three years. So, you know, b-- um, where DoorDash could raise very little money, a fraction of what our peers could raise, and where we encounter several bouts of almost running out of cash. But you're right, there was this tension internally because, okay, so here we are. It's, the markets are going down. All of a sudden, the narrative for DoorDash was this, you know, really hot company now is a company that can do no right. You, you can't ever make money. You can't beat all these competitors who are better funded. At the time, there was Uber, there was Amazon, um, uh, uh, who were, who were either coming in or who already were in or announcing, you know, um, more expansion. Um, and even if you win, you're gonna lose because this is a money-losing business or a forever money-losing business. Those were kind of some of the headlines or the, the themes behind the headlines. But at the same instance, you look at, uh, the, the metrics on the inside, and you actually see everything going the direction that you would hope as an entrepreneur. You see repeatability from city A to city B to city C. You see unit economics improving.And the reason why the company was unprofitable is because we were constantly launching new markets. And new markets require investment in the beginning because you're actually paying, um, for drivers to make sure that they can stay on the road w- even when you have no business. Um, and so that was what was c- uh, happening internally. That happened for about three years [laughs] though, um, where it, it, we were kinda stuck in this, one of these cycles, macro cycles, investment cycles, where the company could do no right. The sector was viewed as toxic, and that was certainly y- you know, probably the three years in which I certainly had to learn how to deal with my own psychology.
- 1:26:04 – 1:30:07
Staying Sane as CEO
- DSDavid Senra
So how were you doing that?
- SPSpeaker
There was no one way. I, I think the first thing is y- y- y- you have to make sure that, um ... I think a lot of times it's very easy to believe in your own bullshit, and so the first thing, you know, I, I, I think a place like DoorDash, which is very intellectually honest, is, well, what's, what's actually real r- um, versus what maybe people are saying? And so we used to do this, uh, because we could fit all in one conference room, the all-hands. I would show every metric in the company, um, including our cash balance, which is obviously going towards the X-axis. And people were getting nervous, but people were asking a very good question, which is, "Tony, I don't get it. The cash balance is coming down, but the business is going the opposite direction. It's going up and to the right." And the way that i- in, in a very organic way, we weren't spending. We didn't even have a marketing team, let alone a marketing budget. We didn't have money. People were very confused. So job number one to me was actually put the company in the best possible place by focusing on what we could control because otherwise I'm gonna go crazy. I'm gonna, I'm gonna go crazy, and we're actually not gonna, you know, put the company in the best chance of success. And so we got a group of I think it was maybe 20, 25 people, the people that kinda ran a lot of different important areas, and basically brought them under the tent and said, "Look, we have to do the following. We gotta keep growing and keep taking share. We gotta get more profitable, and we can't run out of cash. And there's no or in any of these statements. It's an and function across all of these statements." And that w- was ultimately what I just kinda kept obsessing over, you know? Because if I obsessed over anything else, the markets or what people were writing about us or another rejection from an investor, if I just obsessed over what was not in my control, I think I was gonna go certainly nuts. That was, you know, certainly part one, focusing on what I can control. Part two I think is, and this is another lesson I learned during, during those years, is that I think this can be risky, but I actually think that it's really important and undervalued to have, uh, to have genuine friends at work. And meaning that this can't just be about a financial success or a commercial success or some professional success on the resume, that there's this adventure, if you will, that we're on, on this worthy, eternal mission, and that at least we're gonna die trying [laughs] right? Worst case, we're gonna die trying, kinda like the Stanford football example day. Yes, of course, we want DoorDash to make it, but what gets you through the next day isn't thinking about DoorDash as much as I just wanna make you to be successful, like, my teammate to be successful. And so this willingness to think about someone else in addition to just thinking about your own problems I think actually m- made this a bit easier to go through. And then the final thing is, you know, back to trying to find, uh, to build anything out of things that don't change, one thing that I've been able to keep throughout the DoorDash chapter so far is just my exercise routine. [laughs] So it ... Th- th- the routine itself has changed, but, you know, back then I was really into running marathons, things like that, just keeping that up, having something that was a bit of a constant in my life, whereas everything else was out of my control, extremely chaotic, usually extremely negative. And then part of the routine was also date nights with my wife. So there was no one thing to answer your question about how to manage my own psychology, and trust me, I didn't, you know, have my thing all together d- during every single period. But that was kinda when I look back, what were the things that got me through it? What were the things that I kept trying to tell myself, uh, y- you know, in my notebook o- of what to do every single day? Those were the things.
- DSDavid Senra
Yeah, you control what you control. And I love this idea of having a mission bigger than yourself.
- SPSpeaker
Yeah.
- DSDavid Senra
Because you have this great line where it's like, at some point, willpower is gonna give out. Like, your own-
- SPSpeaker
Yeah
- DSDavid Senra
... personal willpower is gonna give out, especially 'cause you're doing-
- SPSpeaker
100%
- DSDavid Senra
... this is over 1,000 days. How many rejections, how many nos are you getting from investors?
- SPSpeaker
I stopped counting after 50, but it was over 100.
- DSDavid Senra
That's incredible.
- 1:30:07 – 1:31:44
Ignore the Stock Price
- DSDavid Senra
To this day, though, you don't ... I heard ... Uh, so we have a mutual friend in Robby Gupta.
- SPSpeaker
Yeah.
- DSDavid Senra
And you went on his podcast, and, uh, you said, "I don't look at the stock price. You try to get everybody else not to pay, in the company not to pay attention to it." And he goes, "You had to remind [laughs] me of our market cap because I don't know what it is." [laughs]
- SPSpeaker
Yes. Yes. Yes.
- DSDavid Senra
That still the case today?
- SPSpeaker
Yeah. I mean, I, I, I, I ... B- back to the things that I can control, you know, well, I mean, usually our, our, our finance team will remind me of the market cap during earnings calls and things like this. But, like, but sincerely speaking, it's not something I get to control, and it's also not what is fulfilling or motivating to me. You know, what am I gonna do on a daily basis knowing what the stock price is? Like, am I gonna behave any? No, I'm not gonna behave any differently. Um, I'm probably gonna still stick to my routine, which is I'm gonna spend time with, you know, our teams that are, you know, trying to make sure that they can hit the year. There's one group, and the team that is trying to invent the future, and there's several of those teams. And then with customers. That's how I spend my time.
- DSDavid Senra
I wanna talk about that. I, I'd just be remiss not to mention this 'cause again, I don't know why, every time I hear you speak and now having this conversation with you personally, it's like there's just so much, like, Jeff Bezos-esque stuff going on here. I think you already know this, but there was a time in Amazon history where he talks about this, and I think ... I, I don't remember what the exact numbers were, but the stock price went from, like, 180 down to, like, six.
- SPSpeaker
Yeah.
- DSDavid Senra
And his whole point, I think he talks about this in his shareholders. I think it dropped, like, 90% or whatever the number was, and he's like, "Yeah, but I ... " He, they were like, "I was, I wasn't focused on the stock price. I was focused on the internal metrics of the business," and they were all gettingBetter and better and better and constantly improving. So it's like I knew this was just temp-- this was temporary. Like, I will get out of this. I will survive because I'm going in the right direction.
- 1:31:44 – 1:35:17
Two Operating Systems
- DSDavid Senra
What is this idea you, you, you had this, this saying where you're like, "As an operator, you need two management systems"?
- SPSpeaker
Yeah.
- DSDavid Senra
I think you just dropped a hint right there in what you said earlier.
- SPSpeaker
Yeah. So if you're so lucky as an entrepreneur to one day find product market fit, um, where you can organically grow now and, and, and, and build a business that's self-sustaining, that generates cash, in other words, you have the privilege now of making a choice. That choice is, you know, keep doing what I'm doing, um, or to keep, um, expanding in, in service of our mission. And when you look at, I think, um... and, and one of the reasons why I, I, I think A-A-Amazon is inspiring or, um, a lot of these big tech companies now actually, um, is they tend to do two things at the same time. One is they continue to build the core business, the business that kinda got them, you know, to their place, both in terms of their place with customers, in terms of what they're known for, as well as their financial place, where they can invest from, but they also do new things, and they, you know, launch the next thing or the next thing, or, you know, um, uh, they're trying to create the next thing, and those are two very different systems. You know, one system is about making sure that you can constantly reinvent yourself almost. You're trying to build the next version of the product to disrupt yourself, to build something that is 10 times better than what you have today, um, while you're also running the machine at the same time, right? So it's like you are flying the airplane. It's a big airplane. You're carrying lots of passengers, and you're gonna do a midair engine transplant, right? That's one type of system, um, that, that you're constantly trying to build. And then there's new stuff. They're-- it's not even an airplane. It's like a paper stick airplane. It's like a paper airplane. There are no passengers, no nothing. You're in search of product market fit all over again, and they require different ways in which you measure success. They require usually different talent. Um, they require a different amount of resourcing. They have vastly different timelines in terms of rate of progress, and they tend to have a lot larger error bounds on some of these newer areas. And, and it's really hard to do because the more successful your big airplane is, the m-more probably paper airplanes you're gonna have to have, and they may be very expensive, some of those, you know, paper airplanes that you're gonna build, um, because you need more shots on goal to keep up, you know, um, the, the kind of this, th-this big business that you're trying to move, um, in ser-- in, in service of your mission.
- DSDavid Senra
So the people scaling the, the businesses in DoorDash that are post product market fit-
- SPSpeaker
Sure
- DSDavid Senra
... right? And then the inventors, are they-- Are-- Do you separate these people in the company?
- SPSpeaker
Yeah, we try to.
- DSDavid Senra
Okay.
- SPSpeaker
Yeah, we try to.
- DSDavid Senra
Like separate buildings? How, like, how-
- SPSpeaker
Oh. Oh, oh, oh, I see
- DSDavid Senra
... do you train your-- No, no, no, I, I was just saying, like, do you even take it to that extreme, like separating, separating them-
- SPSpeaker
Yeah, you-
- DSDavid Senra
... like physically? Like, how do you do this?
- SPSpeaker
Yeah, usually that happens, but that, that's, that, that, that, that I don't know if is as important as you need very s- different goals, goaling systems and incentive systems. Um, and, you know, th-that is probably more important than physically necessarily where they are per se. Um, you know, some, you know, DoorDash today also, you know, operates in more than 40 countries, so it's, it's tough to get every single person-
- DSDavid Senra
Yeah
- SPSpeaker
... in exactly the same location. Um, but, y-you know, it's very important though to, to, to separate how you actually track, manage, measure, incentivize, um, you know, these projects, and so that, that's more
- 1:35:17 – 1:38:17
Internal Venture Stage Gates
- SPSpeaker
what I'm referring to.
- DSDavid Senra
Are you making these decisions about, like, n- we're gonna allocate this amount of resources, this amount of time, this amount of people to these experiments? Like, how do, how do you actually structure this?
- SPSpeaker
Yes and no. I mean, if I had to make every single decision, I mean, DoorDash would certainly move a lot slower than, than, th-than, than we would, um, want to move. Um, but certainly I have to set the standards and the pace, if you will. You know, that's kinda what I view a, a, a lot, um, uh, uh, uh, of my job. And, um, and so usually how it works is, um, well, first of all, anyone should be able to come up with an idea. It, it, it can't be somehow that only the leaders come up with the idea. Usually, it's the people closest to the problems that actually come up with the ideas or have the ideas. And, you know, if they can run an experiment, you know, back to, uh, th-this process that actually demonstrates some viability of success that customers actually want this product, then it starts, um, you know, entering the, the phase where we can evaluate whether or not we should actually pursue it during our planning process. And, you know, through the planning process, then we decide, you know, okay, well, how many chips should we bet in project A versus B versus C? And some projects, look, they're, they're not all starting at the same time. Some projects are older. Some pro-projects just got born. And so it's almost like an internal venture system, if you will, where it's stage gated. There is no, "Oh, you get all the money up front," and... No. Um, you kinda have to earn your right to the next stage. And, um, and that's gonna be based on how well you're solving that customer problem.
- DSDavid Senra
Where did you get that idea from, the, this internal stage gating? Like, essentially treating it as, like, internal venture capital.
- SPSpeaker
Well, I, you know, a lot of it came from DoorDash's own history where DoorDash kinda worked this way, right? And, and maybe some of it wasn't in the exact, you know, formulation we wanted, but, um, that's how DoorDash was born. You know, you started with little resources or not a lot. Um, and as we got progressively m-more, um, successful or, or, or, or discovered more product market fit, we were given more resources. And to me, when I think about the, the things that we, um, built that were the most, um, that most solved customer problems, it tended to be when we were most resource-constrained. And it, it, it's just, s-so I, I do feel like that's important to, to know whether-- b-because the most important thing, again, when you're starting something is do you really have something or, or are you just-You know, believing that you have something. And you don't get to make that call as the inventor, it's the customers that you're inventing for that ultimately are gonna tell you whether or not they're gonna buy or not. And so that's the most important thing. We're, we're trying to make sure that we actually can create something that is ten times better than the status quo. Um, and then if we can do that, yeah, of course, we'll keep scaling. Now, some projects cost more money to start, but that's just the nature of the problem. But we're still, relative to its size, giving it a small amount of budget to just
- 1:38:17 – 1:42:29
Learning from Founder Peers
- SPSpeaker
begin with.
- DSDavid Senra
Are you also learning from your peers? Like, the reason I ask is 'cause, uh, we just did-- I think one of the episodes I'm most proud of so far for this new show is the one we did with Toby Lutke.
- SPSpeaker
Okay.
- DSDavid Senra
And I was really excited to talk to Toby because I'm constantly asking world-class founders, "Who are you learning from?" Toby is like your favorite founder's favorite founder.
- SPSpeaker
[laughs]
- DSDavid Senra
And his name kept coming up over and over again, and that was the conversation I had, where it's like you ask a question, and you th-that you cannot predict what's gonna come out of his mouth next-
- SPSpeaker
Total
- DSDavid Senra
... 'cause he has all these, like, uncorrelated ideas, which makes for a very, like-
- SPSpeaker
Yes
- DSDavid Senra
... fascinating conversation. So, like, what are-- who are the people that, like, you've either built relationships with or you've, like, studied, like your peer group, uh, that you're also, like, learning from and, like, taking ideas from?
- SPSpeaker
Yeah. Well, I mean, I mean, you're right. Toby's absolutely great. Um, and, um, well, well, first of all, uh, uh, s-s-some of the peers I have are just people that I grew up with, right? Like, y-if you think, like, one of the bene- o-which we didn't get into, was one of the benefits of, you know, Y Combinator, besides just being a forcing function of whether or not, o-of testing our commitment, um, you know, to the project, uh, was actually the peer group. W-we actually never got into that part, where, you know, if you think about, like, the twenty tens, right? So the companies that grew out of Y Combinator that we kinda grew alongside with, maybe we were slightly in different batches or, you know, ki- uh, not exactly in the same, but, uh, whether it was the Airbnbs, Stripe, Coinbase, we all kinda grew up in the same era, if you will. And so as a result, got to know each other, um, through, you know, dif-different events and venues and things like this. But trading notes, you know, uh, with one another, I, I think certainly was-- a-a-and we've all had our shares of, you know, challenges and, and, and, and triumphs. Um, and then looking at companies that are ahead of us, right? Um, you know, in my not day job [chuckles] , in my other job, I play a small role in Meta's part, where I serve on the board, um, learning from, you know, founders like Mark, um, who certainly, uh, have built companies that are at a different level of scale, um, versus where DoorDash is at. Um-
- DSDavid Senra
Well, let's stay on Mark for a second, because, um, we were talking before we recorded.
- SPSpeaker
Sure.
- DSDavid Senra
I got to spend, uh, some time with him. I've had s- a few conversations with him and, and came across, like, even more impressed than I thought I would be, given the fact that for his age, he doesn't really have a peer, and I actually told him that. [laughs]
- SPSpeaker
[laughs]
- DSDavid Senra
So I was like, "I wish you did more podcasts-
- SPSpeaker
[laughs]
- DSDavid Senra
... and talked about how you built a company that no one else your age is even remotely close to." But, like, what are some things that you have-- like, you're on the board. What are some things that, like, you've learned from observing him?
- SPSpeaker
Well, I think the first thing that impresses me a lot about Mark is this willingness to always learn new things. I, I think one of the, the, the, the traps, if you will, of success or fighting your own psychology, um, is actually n-not just the challenging parts about that when things aren't going well, but it's also when after things go well and maybe you actually have achieved some milestone. Um, and one of the trappings of success is actually wanting to hold onto it. And what you see in someone like Mark and the team, I would argue, at Meta, is this willingness to reinvent themselves. Um, betting early, for example, on, um, building a different platform in the case of, you know, virtual reality, augmented reality. Um, obviously they're going all in on AI. Um, and those things take a ton of courage. There's not a lot of data, you know, early on in a either a platform shift or a new technology's arrival to know whether or not you're on the right track all the time. But you gotta place the bets, um, you know, before you can see the success. And I think that, that willingness to learn a new domain where you're the rookie, where you're gonna stumble, where you're gonna get criticized, misunderstood, you don't know the answer, um, which is the opposite, if you will, of the successes maybe that they came from in terms of the previous businesses they've created. That is really impressive. That willingness to always be the beginner, to always go in the arena and, and, and, and, and, and, and sweat and bleed and toil and, and struggle, um, that's really impressive.
- 1:42:29 – 1:44:37
Jiu Jitsu Lessons
- DSDavid Senra
You both share a love of jiu jitsu.
- SPSpeaker
[laughs]
- DSDavid Senra
Have you found anything from your jiu jitsu practice that, uh, like, you've brought back to your day job?
- SPSpeaker
Well, jiu jitsu is a, is a fascinating, um, activity. I mean, it, it, it is-- it's like some version of physical chess.
- DSDavid Senra
That's a great way to think about it.
- SPSpeaker
And it's almost like an exercise where there's so many, um, opposites that you have to hold at the same time. The best jiu jitsu athletes can both be extremely firm and strong, yet at the same time extremely relaxed. Um, they're very capable of being intentional with their game plan, but then give up and release their agenda within a nanosecond if they see that they're losing their position. I think the willingness, uh, of how to be so flexible, um, is certainly something that I, I, I think I'm trying to teach both myself in my personal life and also, um, bringing that back at, to DoorDash. I think the other thing is just, you know, no different, I think, from frankly any craft. The, the willingness to just get one percent better every day, um, in a particular position, any particular... flexibility exercise to actually just improve your balance in order to hold a position. Very small things, um, ultimately compound when you look at the elite athletes, the el-- not someone like myself, but the elite jujitsu practitioners, um, who win the world championships or who win medals at events, um, they all have that. And when you actually talk to them about their craft, it's the tiny details, it's the edges of a move. It's actually not some, you know, silver bullet that they're looking for in a match or something like... In fact, like actually these matches at the most competitive levels are decided by sometimes not even points. They're decided by like what are called advantages. And that is a, a, you know, one thing that I, I think is a just a great reminder that you always have to be trying to master that
- 1:44:37 – 1:47:01
AI Changes the Loop
- SPSpeaker
craft.
- DSDavid Senra
I have to ask you about how AI is changing the way that you guys are running the business. You have this great line where you said, "I think some of the technical advances like AI have given people new ways to run companies."
- SPSpeaker
Yes.
- DSDavid Senra
How are you using it? What are you doing? How's it affecting your work?
- SPSpeaker
Yeah. Well, um, it changes by the month. [laughs] So I, I, uh, this is a, this is a question that if we were to talk, you know, in the future, I'm, I'm not sure it'd be actually the same answer. Um, well, one of the first things I would say is, you know, I think about some of the systems that we've architected here about how you can learn from doing things that don't scale all the way to, um, shipping, especially with something like coding. Right now, I, I think where the agents are, uh, they're, they're still good at what I call, you know, functional tasks, um, for example, coding. Um, but outside of coding and looking at cross-functional areas, they're not quite there yet. They're-- for, for a lot of reasons. But, um, but within something like coding, the things that you could do today, um, where, uh, anyone, actually, frankly, uh, doesn't have to be anyone o-of any function, anyone can come up with an idea, run the prototype, run the experimentation and the an-an-analysis, and then actually ship to a small group of people all by themselves, um, that is very impressive. And, a-a-and that collapses i-if you will, um, you know, the, the amount of activity required or speeds up the, the learning loop you can have in any scientific process inside your company that touches code. That's very cool. Um, second, um, LLMs, you know, what are they good at that humans are not good at or less good at? Well, they can have almost infinite memory and infinite context and search across any sort of file. Um, okay, so then the question becomes how do you actually feed it the right information? And if you can feed it the right information, it probably can do a lot better than humans can at the same activity. So I think those are two areas in which whether it's speeding up your learning processes or actually improving, um, the same activities right now that are ef-effectively manually done, um, to be done with higher, not just efficiency, but also effectiveness.
- 1:47:01 – 1:48:24
Data Needs Action
- DSDavid Senra
Would there be any benefit for you like partnering with one of the big model companies with all the da- the physical data that you guys are collecting, or you would keep that proprietary?
- SPSpeaker
Most of the information to run, you know, DoorDash to be a great service, um, uh, you know, are things that we use for ourselves. And the reason why we use them for ourselves is because it, it, it, it's not just that simple like, oh, we just give away information and then somehow someone's gonna be able to do something positive with it. You also have to take the action that the data kind of suggests. For example, if the data says something is missing in this order, um, or the dasher is at the wrong location, um, and cannot find the customer, let's say that those are all parts of, you know, pieces of information. Some corresponding action has to take place in order to actually solve the end-to-end job in order to get the item that was missing or in order to actually find the customer, um, you know, where the dasher is. And, and so a lot of DoorDash is, sure, we have a lot of information, but we have to do something productive because it's the end-to-end job that ultimately, you know, we get judged on, um, with customers. And so i-i-if we can, um, partner with anyone, frankly, in order to solve the end-to-end problem better, of course we would do that. But I think it's very hard sometimes to just give away something, um, if there is no ability to, you know, correspond that with action that ultimately will solve some customer's problem.
- 1:48:24 – 1:49:22
Closing Thoughts
- DSDavid Senra
Think about like what a wild ride you're on. Like, you start the company and your competitors are literally using fax machines to now-
- SPSpeaker
[laughs]
- DSDavid Senra
-we're in like the age of AI. You have this great-
- SPSpeaker
It's incredible in thirteen years.
- DSDavid Senra
Yeah, and I, I, I love this quote, and we'll end here. Um, but you have this great quote where it's like there's just no way-- better way to be an expert than to just do the work. You might be surprised at how quickly you get to become the expert.
- SPSpeaker
Yeah.
- DSDavid Senra
It's beautiful. Thank you very much for the time, Tony. Uh, I think we just like scratched the surface. I think there's a lot of things that you said today that I haven't heard anywhere else. I'd love if you just come back on every, you know, few months, every year, whenever you want.
- SPSpeaker
Sure. It was fun.
- DSDavid Senra
Thanks for making the time.
- SPSpeaker
Thanks, David.
- DSDavid Senra
Bye. I hope you enjoyed this episode. Please remember to subscribe wherever you're listening and leave a review, and make sure you listen to my other podcast, Founders. For almost a decade, I've obsessively read over four hundred biographies of history's greatest entrepreneurs, searching for ideas that you can use in your work. Most of the guests you hear on this show first found me through Founders. [outro music]
Episode duration: 1:49:24
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