The Exchanges

Q I feel like that's a fair statement, right? Um, how do you think about like the timing and sequencing of these very long-term bets and like we just, from a capital allocation perspective, like, When you can invest in these things?

A Yeah, I think it's, it's probably the same with how we invest in a lot of things at DoorDash is everything start out as experiments. I mean, in a way that's a, that was a founding story behind DoorDash. DoorDash was a Stanford college, like dorm room experiment. It started out as a website called politodelivery.com with eight PDF menus and a Google voice phone number. And it was only once we figured out, okay, there's something here, let's turn this into company. And, and, and that's basically, we've kind of taken that philosophy Throughout the past 13 years, and, and we've kind of applied it to autonomy as well, AI as well. I mean, when we first started in 2018, the intention wasn't, hey, let's go spin up this giant robotics program. Let's hire a roboticist, go build hardware. It was really, we put together, it was me and half an engineer's time. It was a skunkworks project. It was an experimentation to go, let's go explore like what's out there. Like we don't even know what autonomy looks like. How robotics is going to impact our space, but let's go explore. Let's go form partnerships. Let's go learn. Let's go experiment. Um, and, and, and, and I think in the beginning, the intention wasn't to build our own robot. Actually, we didn't think we needed to build any of this technology ourselves. We thought, okay, we can just partner up with a bunch of folks. Like, you know, back …

AI assessment note: “everything start out as experiments... it was me and half an engineer's time.”

Q you guys are doing, uh, a whole bunch of things on the autonomy and robotics side as well. Like, you, you're, clearly your view of DoorDash as founders is broader and more ambitious than I don't know, maybe just like the surface level view of it's a food delivery network or whatever the first, you know, one-liner for the company was. Um, how long ago did the robotics efforts start?

A Yeah. We've actually been looking into robotics and autonomy probably much longer than people thought, like since 2018, actually, uh, back when it wasn't obvious autonomy and robotics was going to be a thing. Uh, but we felt like this was going to be a technology that was going to be transform, formative to our space and potentially disruptive. And I think, I think that's the nice thing about being a founder led company is like, we are, we get to think about kind of much more Future speculative things are on the horizon and, and, and constantly think about like, how do we make sure we don't get disrupted by the next one? I think like, like Andy said, like the next DoorDash that comes along is not going to be someone that builds the exact same version of DoorDash, but maybe with a better UI is going to be.

AI assessment note: “like since 2018, actually, uh, back when it wasn't obvious”

Q Is the long term view, like, you get rid of all the dashers and it's just dots everywhere? What happens?

A Yeah. Well, my take, my prediction actually is in a world where robotics, drones, AI is, is everywhere. Uh, my guess is that in 10 years time, we're actually going to have more dashers doing, doing deliveries, not less, uh, simply just because again, I think it's just the, well, one, I think The pace at which DoorDash is growing is just, I mean, and the scale at which we're operating is, is pretty insane. I don't know if people know, but like we have over nine million Dashers doing deliveries and the business growing 25% year over year. Like fast forward, 10 years time, like, like, and we want a five X from here, 10 X from here. Well, where are the, where's the supply going to come from? Like, are you going to have half America doing, doing deliveries for us every month? Like that's probably not going to be the case. Like, like there has to be, we're going to have to find other areas of opportunity to both brand new modalities as well as improve efficiencies within our business. And I think, and I think dot robotics, drones, like, Waymo's like sidewalk robots. I think we're going to, you're going to see a world where we're going to have this multimodal fleet. Like we're going to need our hand, get our hands on every single modality we can get. So I think you're not only going to see more autonomy and more robotics, but I think you're going to see even more humans as well. And I…

AI assessment note: “we're actually going to have more dashers doing, doing deliveries, not less”

Q who, you know, know how to work on robotics or applied AI, uh, in the ecosystem for the recognition of all the different cool use cases you go after. Um, and a lot of people gravitate toward, like, the general case. Like, we can solve it once. Um, uh, I assume you're competing for some of those people. How do you convince people to work at DoorDash on these problems?

A Yeah. My pitch is really simple. It's, it's, it's basically like, do you want to go work on prototypes and demos and, and do, and be at a PhD lab? Or do you want to work on something where you can actually ship something in the real world? Uh, and I think that's kind of, you know, I think, I think, I think that's kind of really been the culture we kind of set up, you know, both At DoorDash Labs and all the AI efforts is, is like, this is, we're not just here to do pure research. Like at the end of the day, like you, we get to ship something where you have real impact. And I think people, at least in the autonomy world for the past 10 years, were just fed up just working on something for 10 years and never actually getting to a point where They actually saw their products being used in the real world. And, and I think like, like for us, like it's like, because we, like, we've always been much more focused on creating, kind of taking this much more pragmatic, practical approach. Like we're not here necessarily to do like the, it's not about, oh, let's go work on like a crazy moonshot idea. It's like, let's get something out that can be shipped in the real world and actually start learning how these technologies, um, Interact with the physical and then start iterating because again, like technology, these, these things aren't built in a vacuum. You have to put something out in the…

AI assessment note: “My pitch is really simple. It's, it's, it's basically like, do you want to go work”

Q You're making the deliveries in Phoenix. What are the challenges from here for scale up?

A I mean, we've been doing deliveries for over two years now. Uh, I mean, we went fully autonomous L four last year. Uh, I mean, it's, it's like we, I think that was a super exciting milestone. And, and really it's just a matter of like, how do you take this from, again, it's like originally it was just a couple of robots, 10 robots to a hundred. Again, it's just like, we ought to make that hill climb of like, how do you, How do you scale this? And then I think it's really a three, three components. Can we get the autonomy to scale? Five years ago, the question was like, was autonomy even possible? Like, was this, was this just a research project? Is this a science fiction? Um, you see kind of now with, especially with AI, like Waymo's kind of made that breakthrough. I think Tesla's starting to make that breakthrough. We made that breakthrough last year. Um, like our entire autonomy stack is built in house, but purposeful for, for delivery, which is again, it's, It's a little bit different. You can't, it's not just copy. I think this is the other thing people miss is you don't, you can't just copy and paste what Waymo's done and then plop it into the DoorDash dot and everything works. It's, it's again, it's the use case is a little bit different. This is a bike claim profile vehicle, but it's that's constantly navigating between the road and the sidewalks. As far as I know, this …

AI assessment note: “I think it's really a three, three components. Can we get the autonomy to scale?”