The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
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DoorDash tested job candidates by having them acquire 100 customers for $20
“We would ask candidates to acquire a hundred new customers in eight hours with 20 dollars. And that was the entire interview.”
Tony Xu: Onboard new executives with embarrassingly small initial scopes
“But I think when the person is in the door, in order to set them up for success, you probably want to start small because of the information asymmetry of how your organization works versus how they may think your organization works is very, very large. It's al…”
DoorDash executives still perform deliveries and take customer support calls
“It's why in the earliest days, even to this day, all of the leaders at the company try to do all of the jobs in the early days. And actually, even to this day, that means doing deliveries. That means taking customer service calls. That means making menus for m…”
Tony Xu says the best recruiters only succeed 70% of the time
“If you're the Michael Jordan of recruiting, you're probably going to be right, 65 to 70% of the time, and this is coming from someone who's hired tens of thousands of people”
Many DoorDash leaders have zero direct reports
“In fact, when I think about even people at DoorDash, there are many leaders at the company that have zero direct reports, but have lots of followers because of their influence and because of how they show up and how they show their work.”
Tony Xu says scope reduction decreases complexity when solving hard problems
“The hard part is you may not be right in defining the problem at each stage or in between each mile marker, and so when you reduce the scope, you're actually reducing the complexity and the variance of outcomes, and that way, hopefully, you have a better chanc…”
High-potential hires need multiple role trials to find their superpower
“But especially with folks who have maybe more talent or hustle than experience, you may not know what that superpower is. They may not know what that superpower is. And so you may have to trial a couple of different assignments before you can kind of lock on t…”
External executives must obviously accelerate internal talent's careers to succeed
“I think the only success criteria here I've seen is you have to hire someone excellent, where it's so obvious for the person on the inside that this person on the outside can really help their careers and really grow them.”
Corporate culture should iterate continuously like a software product
“I mean, just like your product, you know, I think an organization would be embarrassed if their product looked the same a year later versus today. Why is that not true for your culture? You know, maybe it changes more slowly because, you know, you're talking a…”
DoorDash spent six years striving for decision-maker diversity parity
“We're almost there where the representation at the company and the representation of the decision makers are even, but we're, I mean, 2015, 20, 20, 21, so six years out of our eight years, we've been working on it. 75% of our lifetime history, and we're still …”
DoorDash originated from a store manager turning down hundreds of orders
“If there was one, it really happened inside of a local macaroon store in Palo Alto where the founding team met a store manager who had to turn down hundreds of deliveries. She literally showed us a notebook with payment information of customers and how she had…”
Bill Walsh's book defined DoorDash's culture of chasing excellence
“The one that has quite a lot of influence on the building of DoorDash is The Score Takes Care of Itself by Bill Walsh, and just this notion of trying to chase excellence as opposed to the scoreboard. That has been, I think, the defining history of the company …”
Tony Xu's mother worked three jobs daily for 12 years post-immigration
“My parents' journey into this country, it kind of is that classic immigrant story where dad was getting his graduate degree, mom was putting food on the table because we had a couple hundred bucks in the bank, and so she worked three jobs a day for 12 years to…”