DoorDash

“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…”

“I think the greatest killer of a business is usually silence, and here, they're actually, they care enough to actually let me know something went wrong in their experience.”

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

“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…”

“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…”

“Within something like coding, the things that you could do today where anyone actually, frankly, it doesn't have to be anyone of any function. Anyone can come up with an idea, run the prototype, run the experimentation and the analysis, and then actually ship …”

“There are no metrics in what we report, you know, to 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…”

“Those edges of the distribution are almost always where the anecdotes are that are the most valuable that you have to pay the most attention to because they almost always will disagree with the data, and they are probably worth the most in terms of improving y…”

“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…”

“Actually, when we started the autonomous project, the autonomous vehicle project, we started with the belief that we did not have to build the vehicles. And in partnering with a lot of different companies We ultimately realized that nobody actually wanted to b…”

“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…”

“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 …”

“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. One of the reasons why there's all these sources for mistakes, for delays, for costs that ultimately, you know, yield i…”

“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…”

“I still do customer support every day. I see them literally every single day.”

“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, …”

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

“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…”

“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…”

“Most of the information to run, you know, DoorDash to be a great service you know, are things that we use for ourselves. And the reason why we use them for ourselves is because it's not just that simple like, oh, we just give away information, and then somehow…”

“In the world of autonomous vehicles, you have 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 in our opinion than what you need for last mile delive…”

“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 going to do on a daily basis knowing what the stock price is? Like, am I going to behave? No, I'm not. Going to behave any differently.”

“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…”

“Most of the time, we have no idea. We start with these experiments, and that's why most experiments fail. 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 t…”

“I would literally ask you, I said, well, this could be a really long or really short interview where I'm going to give you 20 minutes and you can ask me any question that you want. But after the 20 minutes expires, I'm going to give you 20 dollars that you can…”

“If I remember the number correctly, he was getting like a bill, he had the ability to raise another fresh billion dollars of capital. Yeah. And he was looking at the term sheet, thinking about signing it, and then he said, involuntarily, something came out of …”

“Our goal over time is to be the first phone call for any business any business for any issue.”

“And it's hard to just scrape it. 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. Well, A, that data is always changing. B, it's n…”

“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…”