Lin: DoorDash expanded delivery market beyond Grubhub's existing-courier restaurant base
Alfred Lin · How to Win by Being Right and Contrarian: Lessons from Zappos to DoorDash · Jan 21, 2025 · at 2:01:54
Sequoia partner Alfred Lin explains how DoorDash differentiated itself from early Grubhub by providing full-stack delivery logistics to restaurants.
0:00 / 0:15exact quote · 15.8s
720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“The only restaurants that would be on Grubhub's website were all the companies that already had delivery staff available. So what DoorDash did was to expand the market. And by expanding the market, they were very focused on that problem.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Alfred Lin
Sequoia Capital prioritizes an employee's learning slope over their past experience
“At Sequoia, we hire for slope, not intercept. So experience obviously matters, but if you just hire for the experience and their slope is not fast, that's going to become a problem at some point. And so we really, really ask founders to think about what is the…”
Lin: Startups Can Scale by Making First Orders Profitable via Service
“Or in sales, and here's a company that basically raised ten million dollars, and it probably was undercapitalized, but it really did highlight that you can build a company by having CAC be profitable on the first order, by being focused on customer service, an…”
Zappos's most valuable customers also had the highest product return rates
“We then did this analysis and this is the type of analysis I really enjoy doing, like, let's take our best customers, and let's take our worst customers, and look at their return rates, and it turned out our best customers at the highest LTVs return the most”
Lin: Slightly overpaying for the right company beats buying cheap assets
“It's the same as true in the, in investing in private companies. It's still much better to pick the right company and slightly overpay than to invest in something that is cheap.”
Lin: Regulate AI applications and consumer deployment, not foundational lab research
“As an example, with the combustion engine, nobody regulated the engine. We regulated what engines can go on the streets, what can go into a plane. We regulated how it was applied. But in a lab, and people were, you know, sort of doing research and trying to ma…”