Christopher Payne, former COO of DoorDash, discusses executive hiring strategy and why over-engineering interviews is less effective than assessing on-the-job performance.
Insight
Payne: Leaders who cannot improve their own tools lack customer empathy
“And my theory there is if you can't be empathetic about yourself and knowing you and how you use that thing, you say this is your most frequently used AI product and you can't make a feature for that. Like, you know, come on. Right? You're, there's no chance y…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Payne: DoorDash never subsidized expansion by selling dollars for 90 cents
“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.”
Insight
Payne: Leaders must ring-fence 10% of resources to protect new initiatives
“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 …”
Assertion Not publicly verifiable
Payne: DoorDash grocery, retail, alcohol, and Drive are each multi-billion dollar businesses
“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.”
Opinion
Payne: Undergrads show far more innovation than MBA students
“The innovation level for the undergrads was like off the hook. Like it was like, they were so cool. The ideas were so cool. And, but the business school students had the polished, like, yeah, here's the plan. Here's the, But the ideas had been like somehow wat…”
Insight
Payne: Bottom-up goal setting suppresses corporate ambition
“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.”