DoorDash

“I just don't think there's a way that a public company that raised like a hundred million in IPO is going to outcompete. Companies that have raised four billion dollars each, I think, in Uber and DoorDash like to crush you.”

“The only thing they could have done was buy DoorDash as early as possible, and then basically let Tony run the company and build a delivery network.”

“Tony at DoorDash was delivering the meals himself. For like the first year, right? Cause he didn't know how to acquire drivers yet. And he didn't want to work on that until he validated that there was a real product there.”

“Then the pandemic hits and all the unit economics of DoorDash flipped positive because everyone's all of a sudden ordering online and all the drivers are much more busy, which means all the latency in the model that was creating the losses went away.”

“It's not just 30% that these delivery apps take from the restaurant. It's also 20% on average that they're charging the consumer.”

“It's still not DoorDash or Uber Eats. The vast majority of restaurant discovery still happens on Google, but that was especially true eight years ago.”

“Like one of the first things I did at DoorDash, cause I had a lot of experience with this is I, even though DoorDash was very young, I founded the first new S curve at DoorDash, which was The platform business.”

“If I'm tackling a problem, if I can break it down into sub parts where I can work on a problem, DoorDash was great for this because you, instead of trying to launch everything across the United States all at once, you're like, no, I'm going to start this proje…”

“If you just try to run to the end, you won't have the lessons that are necessary to be successful because the problem is not homogenous.”

“There were periods where DoorDash was running out of money and couldn't raise money in 17”

“And DoorDash cracked that. That was our, we figured out how to expand economically remotely. And that, that allowed us to expand across the country. Everybody calls it the suburb strategy, but it really was an expansion strategy.”

“I decided I don't want to be a CEO. Like I was a CEO of my little company, but the truth is I watched Tony and I was like, holy cow. Like, I don't really like this job that he has. Right. I like my job. Right. And so one of the things for me is like, I've been…”

“I think the thing that people get wrong though, about details is that you need to be able to go down to the detail. But you must be able to then generalize that and then look at the data to find out whether that detail is interesting or important or not.”

“So you have to hit six months of volume to get the gross margin positive, and then you have to get to 12 months at a certain volume to get what we call contribution margin profit. To flow through the bottom line.”

“It's a strategy I've used in my career to scale myself. And so every quarter I might have two or three of those special areas that I'm going deep on with the hope that I can kind of scale myself. And to your question, I'm hoping I'm, while I'm doing that and h…”

“Tony and I, who was showing up at the Cheesecake Factory selling the Cheesecake Factory? It was Tony and me, right? We were the little engine that could, right? We, and we were like, we're not in Rideshare. We're in food delivery. We're gonna, we're in, so the…”

“I say the thing you're doing now is guaranteed to not work six months from now, right? Guaranteed.”

“For a while, there was a narrative like, oh, we're giving away dollars for 90 cents. Absolutely not. You couldn't do that because you would lose money very, very rapidly. Too fast for a company that didn't have a lot of money.”

“So if you look at DoorDash, you'll say, okay, it's restaurants, it's grocery, it's alcohol, it's retail, right? It's DoorDash Drive, our platform business. All of these now are multi-billion dollar businesses that are, and so you have to have that.”

“As an executive that starts these new S curves, one of the things I've learned is that it's my job to protect those S curves, because what's gonna happen is even in a small organization like DoorDash and really in a large organization, Everybody tries to kill …”

“One of the things that I do is I tend to be very initially tops down in goal setting. A lot of companies are in teams are bottoms up in goal setting. And I found that that is not a great way to have ambition.”