The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 57 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Yandell: Domain experts are unlikely to deliver 10x breakthrough outcomes
“If you want to achieve a 10 X outcome, hiring someone that's an expert in the field It's maybe unlikely you're gonna achieve that 10 X outcome because they're likely to do things the way things have always been done. So you might achieve incremental benefits, …”
Stein: Successful product formats quickly become primitives every app must adopt
“Facebook probably created the modern feed, but there's a feed for every single product, right? And there's a LinkedIn feed and there's a feed for DoorDash. You know, it's not like these things become core primitives quickly and formats. And then at the end of …”
Winters: Delivery and catering orders are pure margin for restaurants
“Delivery orders and catering orders are basically pure margin to restaurants. The chefs are already there. The, you know, the rent is already being paid. The more things we pump out of the kitchen, the more money we make.”
Winters: Grubhub's only survival play was acquiring DoorDash early
“So I think the only play here was to buy DoorDash as early as possible and let DoorDash and their operationally heavy culture eat Grubhub from the inside out.”
Yandell: Mandatory dogfooding filters out engineering candidates who lack humility
“It's a great way to weed out people that maybe we wouldn't want to work with, right? Because not everyone wants to, every software engineer wants to hop in their Tesla and go out and deliver McDonald's to some kids. Right. It takes a certain level of humility,…”
Yandell: Kalanick and Xu mastered the law to challenge conservative lawyers
“I've had the pleasure of working with two founders who are very product driven, product first folks in Travis and Tony. And I found that the way they engage on the legal side is with a curiosity I referenced earlier, which is they're both hyper curious and the…”
Rabois: Tony Xu conducts 20 reference checks for every senior hire
“Tony at DoorDash does 20 references on every single senior hire.”
JM Nickels: DoorDash culture sometimes leaned toward 'ready, fire, aim' execution
“DoorDash in my experience would do that sometimes where we used to actually even half joke there. Some of us leaders would be like, it's like, ready, fire, aim. And it was like, people would be like, I'm just going to run through a wall. I have no idea if that…”
Nickels: Uber is to Amazon as DoorDash is to Shopify
“So the analogy I use is like Uber is to Amazon as DoorDash is to Shopify, if that makes sense, right? Amazon has been more consumer focused. Shopify is obviously very merchant focused.”
Winters: White-label restaurant delivery startups will struggle to reach massive scale
“And I would say I'm pretty skeptical of those because they're just not really building the network effects on the demand side. They're just more like SaaS businesses. And I think they'll struggle to be, you know, multi-hundred million dollar in revenue busines…”
Yandell forwarded General Counsel recruiter pitches to his own deputy
“If I get pinged for a GC job or when I would get pinged by a recruiter for a GC job, I would forward that to Tia Sheringham, who's now our general counsel, but was basically head of legal for years before she got the general counsel title. And I'd say, Hey Tia…”
Yandell: DoorDash internal surveys showed employees actually prefer operating during crises
“One thing that I found surprising is from our surveys internally, people actually like crises at DoorDash. And I dug into that recently. I was trying to figure out if people like these crises. And it's because there's singularity of focus.”
Yandell: Tony Xu cut DoorDash restaurant commissions by $100M before IPO
“Tony made a decision and I admit I was on the wrong side of history. I was arguing that this seemed extreme just to cut commissions by basically a hundred million bucks for restaurants to help them stay in business. And I'm like, hold on, we're trying to go pu…”
Yandell: Hitting conservative forecasts is worth trading equity dilution for investor trust
“We wanted to make sure that we put forth numbers that we knew we were going to hit. And that cost us some dilution upfront in the form of lower valuations, I think. And there's a trust that builds from that where when we tell people we're going to do something…”
Yandell: Helping reports find their next job prevents unexpected departures
“When you're opening in this, how to work with keep document, I say, I will help you find your next job. And what that means is number one, people are gonna be transparent with you or more transparent if they're looking for something else, or if they're not hap…”
Lachs: Solving immediate problems beats prematurely designing global orgs
“And then I think if you think about things
From first principles about what you need right now in front of you to unblock yourself or solve a problem.
And you just focus on that instead of thinking about like, you know, a global org that you're trying to build…”
Lachs: Centralized data orgs boost retention through internal mobility
“Number two is actually growth opportunities. So if you're siloed, you may be the most senior data person within keep picking on marketing. But you might be the most senior sort of data scientist within marketing. Where do you go from there? I think when you ha…”
Lachs: Curiosity Cannot Be Taught to Team Members
“You can't teach curiosity. Or at least I haven't found a way to do it.”
Candidate reaction to being corrected is a crucial hiring signal
“Seeing how people react to being told they're wrong is, is a really important signal in my opinion. Seeing how people respond, how they're able to take new information and kind of pivot, how they're able to make a decision”
Lachs: Standard metrics understate churn because lost future orders are not observed
“When you have things that cause churn, you're losing all of that consumer's subsequent orders and that. Is not necessarily observed. You're just seeing one bad experience. You're not seeing all of the lost orders because they're lost. And so I think that somet…”
Lachs: Non-Technical Data Leaders Keep Deep Technical Teams Focused on Business Impact
“I think that that non-traditional background has been a great thing because I'm able to hire people who have the. Technical skills that I don't have the folks with PhDs and statistics and the data scientists, machine learning and otherwise, you know, I, I'm ab…”
Teams must goal against edge cases and fail states, not just averages
“With metrics, we're often looking at the average, and I think we talked about this a little bit earlier, but making sure that you're looking at the edge cases and your fail states is also really important. And so we often will set goals actually and create met…”
Lachs: Analytics teams must set explicit goals to protect exploratory research
“You have to be very intentional to carve out time for exploratory work for deep dives, because as you mentioned, there are always more questions and more work to be done than hours in the day. And so I think being intentional about it and setting goals for you…”
Lachs: Centralized data orgs unify metrics and prevent redundant models
“The third thing is just consistency of methodologies and metrics. So you don't have sales that was as defined by one team and sales as defined by another team. You just have. Sales and everybody is using kind of the same metrics, the same methodologies, and yo…”
Lachs: Centralized data orgs maintain higher, more consistent hiring bars
“So the first thing is a consistent and high talent bar. I think this is something I saw when we would have some sort of pockets of analytics folks embedded is the having a consistent bar for talent in terms of what we're looking for. What are the technical ski…”
Lachs: Centralized data teams must share partner business teams' goals
“I think on the goal side, that is something where we have the same goals that our partner teams have. And I think that that's actually an important part of a successful central model.”
DoorDash founders regretted expanding geographically before mastering their original market
“There were definitely some themes with like a Dora Chung and Tony Zhu DoorDash, where they said they really made a mistake early on scaling into different cities before they had nailed, you know, the original city.”
Tavel: DoorDash won food delivery by targeting uncontested suburban markets
“DoorDash on the other hand, famously and very controversially went after the suburbs, right? In the beginning. And the beautiful thing about the suburbs is that there was very little competition because no one thought that you could do it economically. And the…”
Grubhub was disrupted because public market scrutiny blocked private capital tactics
“GrubHub wasn't able to, for different reasons. They were a public company. And so they couldn't, couldn't access capital in the same way that the private markets could, but they were too slow. To change the atomic unit of their supply to have delivery that the…”
Yandell: DoorDash post-Series D rounds were led by previous pass investors
“After we raised the D almost every round, or I think every round ended up being led by someone who had passed in a previous round.”
Yandell: Scalable BD platforms beat building bespoke engineering for partnership deals
“Another thing that Rajat's taught me is the importance of building platforms. And whenever you can. So what we used to do is I'd go out and negotiate a deal. We had a lot of deals around DashPass, which is our subscription product. And I'd asked the product te…”
Yandell: Test partnership theses operationally before expending product engineering resources
“Dream big, start small, use operations to test a thesis around a deal before you actually expend the product resources, I think has been super helpful.”
Yandell: Giving post-interview direct feedback tests candidate interpersonal fit and coachability
“Giving them tough feedback after the interview, if there's an area of concern, but you otherwise like them can be a really great way to see how they would interact with you personally, as well as how they take feedback.”
Yandell: Accelerating product roadmaps by one week compounds into lapping competitors
“He understands that by pushing a roadmap up, even by a week, if you can continuously push up what you ship by a week, you're going to end up lapping competitors who are just one week behind, because you're going to start the next thing a week sooner, and you'r…”
Yandell: DoorDash almost went out of business before Series D
“When we raised our series D funding, which was a really tough fundraise for us. We had very little runway left. We almost went out of business and it was a huge relief when we had finally gotten the funding secured.”
Yandell: Pulse surveys demotivate employees unless leadership shares concrete actions
“That's one thing I've found that can be really demotivating for folks, whether it's a lot of these companies have these pulse surveys, or they talk about what the company can do better and they put the results on the screen and we're going to work on it. And t…”
Wu: Users have used AI agent Devin to order DoorDash
“We have folks who like order their DoorDash with Devin, for example”
Lachs: DoorDash employees must do deliveries or support four times yearly
“We have a program, a WeDash program, and Keith Yandel, who's our chief business officer, did your podcast last year, and he talked about this but four times a year, all the employees go out and go dashing or do customer support”
DoorDash uses Gross Order Value and volume as common decision currency
“So, I mean, we measure things in terms of GOV so gross order value and also volume.”
Lachs: DoorDash uses real company historical problems for early interview business cases
“Our interview process has in the early stages, a coding exercise. So we do our technical screen and a shortened version of a business case. So real world problem solving. Typically it's something actually from DoorDash history, like a real problem that we had …”
Lachs: DoorDash analytics is a net importer of internal company talent
“What I didn't mention is how many folks we've actually had join the analytics team. From partner teams. So whether that was from engineering or from our ops team or marketing or finance, we've had a lot, we've actually had a lot more import. We are a net impor…”
Lachs: DoorDash has a cross-functional team tasked with eradicating 'never delivered' orders
“So we have part of our quality analytics team and we have product engineering and ops on it as well. Their goal is to eradicate never delivered.”
Lachs: Translating metrics into a common currency enables cross-functional trade-offs
“It's important to understand how metrics across the company equate to one another. And so we spend a lot of time quantifying things in terms of a common currency. So for example, if I were to lower price by a dollar, what would I get in terms of, we'll say vol…”
DoorDash structures analytics centrally while podding members directly to partner teams
“For us, we have a central analytics team, but we are, we're divided up into pods that map perfectly with how product engineering, operations, marketing are structured as well. And so our team de facto has these Folks embedded with our partner teams, even thoug…”
Lachs: DoorDash Referral Payback Was Bimodal Due to Online Fraud and Couponing
“And what we noticed was that referral as a channel was a bit misleading when you would look at the average in terms of payback and that it was really a bimodal distribution. And you had one group of really great consumers who were referring other really great …”
DoorDash builds internal AI tools to empower non-technical staff with SQL
“Working to build these tools that will help not just our team in terms of time saving, And also to be honest, folks, folks are gonna use it on our team, but really to be able to empower non-technical users to be able to do things on their own and not have to t…”
Yandell: Forcing leaders to argue the opposing case resolves executive deadlocks
“One thing I found super effective in those contexts is I try to ask the other side. So let's take the profitability side. I asked them to make the growth case. I said, tell me the three best reasons why we should actually focus on growth here. That generates i…”
Yandell: DoorDash crashed weekly as volume doubled in early pandemic
“All the support centers around the world shut down. So you're doubling volume. You have no one to serve it from a customer support perspective. And our infrastructure, we weren't planning to grow that fast. We didn't think there was a chance of two or three ex…”