Payne: Leaders must ring-fence 10% of resources to protect new initiatives
Christopher Payne · Scaling DoorDash to market dominance | Christopher Payne (Former COO, DoorDash) · Apr 17, 2026 · at 5:17
Former DoorDash COO Christopher Payne discusses executive playbooks for launching and protecting new growth curves from internal corporate resistance.
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“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 the new thing. They just try to kill it because it's taking resources away from the main thing. And I always say, if you find yourself in a conversation where it's like, what's more important, the little thing or the main thing, you've lost the battle already. So what I tend to do is I reserve resources for the 10, I call it 10%, put it on the new S curves, protect those, don't let those in. And I say, you guys can deal with the 90%, but you can't touch the 10, right?”
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