The Ledger, every show

“And the sidewalk and the bike lane. And so it's the only vehicle in the world that does that.”

“I remember services, you know, Google food ordering launched in, I forget, 2015 or 16, and they allowed you to order delivery, for example from various Google services, you know, Google Maps, Google Search, et cetera, and while on the one hand it was low frict…”

“And we're the only platform today to take care of Dashers when there is, you know, these increasing gas prices and making sure that, you know, we have their back and that we're actually trying to help them save a dollar 40 to a dollar 90 per gallon for Dashers…”

“Or in COVID, we were the only company to cut commissions by 50%. When we were not yet profitable as a company, that was an expense over a hundred million dollars.”

“It used to be that in the, you know, these are rough numbers, but in the 19 fifties when the government was measuring this, we would spend in this country, in America, maybe 75 to 80 cents on the dollar on groceries versus restaurants. In present day, you know…”

“Within minutes of a Dasher seeing the shooter walk in to the building, you know, we have an alert system that doesn't just alert all Dasher's and consumers and merchants within that vicinity, but also all local law enforcement. And actually we were the first t…”

“And then if you look at it today, there's almost no overlap, very little overlap between ride sharing drivers and delivery drivers, and the Dashers, more than half of them are women today. They come from Dozens of industries. Literally, I mean every place. The…”

“One was running a national TV campaign where we spent millions of dollars advertising on behalf of the industry, basically saying whether you order on us or any of our peers, just order.”

“And the other decision, which we were the only platform to do, we cut our commissions by half, which cost us over a hundred million dollars.”

“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…”

“We've been the fastest growing service in the space for the past year, and we're actually the biggest service in about 60% of the population in the U.S.”

“In fact, you know, between 2016, 1718, we barely were able to raise a dollar, you know, relative to our peers.”

“This was a Stanford football game in 2013, and I had trouble raising the seed round. We made the decision to refund everyone that cost us over 40% of the bank account.”

“COVID, you know, the first week actually the business, you know, tanked 80%. It tanked massively because everything was shut down. And then, you know, the next week, you know, Everything all of the dining rooms were closed, but the kitchens were open. And so, …”

“Eating out in China is about as affordable as cooking, you know, at home.”

“In China there are many dozens of cities over a million in population, and the population density is even perhaps higher than that of Manhattan.”

“If you looked in, in, in America, in the last 60 years, I think there's only a couple years where the number of restaurants in the current year Didn't exceed that in the previous year.”

“I think in general, kind of similar to building things, they've gotten largely worse on average, right?”

“Yeah, in the U.K., in Germany, in France, in a lot of European countries actually, this is more the norm than the exception, whereas in the U.S. You have, you know, maybe hundreds of different big brands that, that, that, that are strong in certain regions, bu…”

“They were mostly honestly faxing orders, believe it or not. So they would be a website that would receive orders, if you can believe it. They would fax the orders literally into machines that would sit Near the kitchen or the payment systems inside these resta…”

“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 and we…”

“We were, Maybe two or three weeks of cash out, and this refund would have cost us about 40% of the bank account, so it would have 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 refund…”

“Christopher Payne, our first Chief Operating Officer, I didn't ask him a single interview question, 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 did…”

“I stopped counting after 50, but it was over a hundred.”

“One of the earliest tests we ran was we recruited two groups of drivers. Roughly speaking, 20 drivers who drove for UberX at the time and 20 who deliver for DoorDash. The control, if you will, variable was that they both earned 20 dollars. An hour, each group.…”

“Today, DoorDash has over seven million drivers in on the platform. Of these dashers, the drivers on the platform, almost 60% are women.”

“There were 20,000 maybe restaurants offering delivery at the time, and that's who Incumbents would work with, you know, the Grubhubs or the Seamlesses. They would partner with these restaurants that had their own delivery fleet, and they would, you know, just …”

“And there were a couple, there were a few years actually in a row, three years in a row, 2016, 1718, where I continued to struggle to raise capital. And I think this was the part that was quite difficult for us, where you have a company whose product seems to …”

“Because DoorDash always had superior retention and frequency. Every dollar that we spent would just go a lot farther for us than anyone else.”

“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.”

“When you look at the, our current industry, the restaurant industry, it is not yet even online. 95% of orders still happen through a phone call or an in-person visit. Only five percent occurs through an internet connection.”

“We then, on top of that, spent, you know, millions of dollars buying national TV campaigns to tell people to order, whether it's on us or our competitors because restaurants have on average, 17 days of cash on hand.”

“China has a lot of restaurants, you know, six, over seven million restaurants, you know, versus what we have here in the U.S. At about a million restaurants in, in comparison, for example.”

“Some of these large brands, you know the big QSRs that you've heard of which, you know, represents almost 50 cents on the dollar of restaurant spend in, in, in, in a place like the US.”

“Our product with now, you know, over a hundred million plus annual customers, tens of millions of, ah, monthly customers, they shop at various frequencies”

“Chick-fil-A has extremely high retention of staff and it has, you know, so many repeatable stories of where, you know, it gives somebody who comes from not a lot of means, frankly, to become the general manager of one of these stores, and earns a really health…”

“You know, we predominantly are non-autos in, in the city of London which is very different in, in, in the States as an example.”

“Where there were about a million restaurants in the States, and maybe 20 to 25,000 of them offered deliveries.”

“And the second thing is 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 want to cook, you know, every single meal, who wanted just look for a…”

“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 stude…”

“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, paloelto.com, but we had to build like four things. We had to build this website for c…”

“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. It's a much smaller form factor. It doesn't go as fast but it has the ability to actually get to the last 10 fee…”

“We now operate in over 35 countries.”

“You know, in 2013, only about 10 to 15% of restaurants offered their own delivery.”

“I mean, the earliest days, all four of us did all the deliveries.”

“Yeah, we shipped paloaltodelivery.com Under an hour. I don't remember exactly, but maybe 45, 50 minutes, because all it was a static HTML page with eight PDF menus, and these were menus of restaurants in Palo Alto that we frequented often as students. It had a…”

“I mean, the company almost went out of business because you know, we didn't raise a lot of money from Y Combinator with the initial grant, and so we were looking for seed financing, and we were a couple weeks away from going to zero.”

“My co-founders and I looking at what the refund cost would be because we thought the right thing to do would be to refund everybody. But that would take away about 40% of the bank account, which was already quite low. We took maybe 10 seconds to make the decis…”