Tony Xu, DoorDash

Tony Xu is the co-founder and CEO of DoorDash, the largest food delivery platform in the United States. Before he was a tech executive, he was a dishwasher. Xu was born in Nanjing, China, and immigrated to the U. S. at age four with parents who arrived with $200 in the bank. His mother had been a licensed doctor in China. In America, she waited tables at a Chinese restaurant in Illinois. Xu worked beside her, washing dishes. That experience became the animating idea behind everything he built. At Stanford, he and three classmates noticed that restaurants in Palo Alto had no good way to handle delivery. They built a basic website, called restaurants, and started driving orders themselves — skipping class to fulfill them. That crude experiment became DoorDash. They went through Y Combinator in 2013 with $120,000 in seed funding and a product that barely existed. What followed was a decade of improbable dominance. DoorDash entered a market that Grubhub had largely defined, absorbed punishing losses to win share city by city, and eventually surpassed every rival in the U. S. In December 2020, the company went public on the NYSE at a $32 billion valuation, making Xu a billionaire at 36. In 2022, DoorDash acquired the Finnish delivery platform Wolt for $8.1 billion, expanding the business from four countries to more than two dozen overnight. Xu has always insisted DoorDash is a logistics company, not a food app — a platform for local commerce that starts with restaurants but doesn't end there. Show notes: https://www.davidsenra.com/episode/tony-xu Made possible by Ramp: ⁠https://ramp.com Deel: https://deel.com/senra Axon by AppLovin: https://axon.ai/senra Chapters (00:00:00) DoorDash MVP in 43 Minutes (00:01:39) How Delivery Worked in 2013 (00:03:17) Small Business Roots and Insight (00:05:48) Why Restaurants First (00:08:24) Palo Alto vs San Francisco (00:11:03) Early Customers and Unit Economics (00:15:22) YC Summer Three Questions (00:19:50) The Hidden Complexity of Delivery (00:22:02) Competing on Invisible Details (00:23:54) Chaos Data and Experiment Loops (00:30:58) Trust Reset Every Day (00:31:30) Stanford Game Meltdown and Refunds (00:34:41) Scaling Through Experiments (00:37:37) Customer North Star Metrics (00:40:10) CEO Customer Support Habit (00:42:55) Anecdotes Versus Data (00:46:52) Eternal Mission Local Economies (00:50:09) Turning Data Into Merchant Growth (00:59:12) New Products Beyond Delivery (01:01:14) Autonomous Delivery Strategy (01:05:06) Hiring Rhodes Scholar Navy SEALs (01:12:46) Driver Switch Experiment (01:13:42) Who Delivers and Why (01:15:33) Hiring for Action (01:18:07) Earned Secrets via Experiments (01:20:01) Money vs Problem Solving (01:21:18) Thousand Days of Hell (01:26:04) Staying Sane as CEO (01:30:07) Ignore the Stock Price (01:31:44) Two Operating Systems (01:35:17) Internal Venture Stage Gates (01:38:17) Learning from Founder Peers (01:42:29) Jiu Jitsu Lessons (01:44:37) AI Changes the Loop (01:47:01) Data Needs Action (01:48:24) Closing Thoughts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02David Senra?

  So I want to start with the fact that you said that Palo Alto Delivery.com, which was DoorDash or 4 DoorDash,

• 0:08Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 0:08David Senra?

  was the most minimal version of a minimal viable product. Can you explain how you built it?

• 0:14Speaker 01

  Well, whenever you can ship something in 43 minutes to test your idea, I think that's pretty good. And certainly, this is 12, 13 years before the rise of LLMs and AI tools to make it so easy to do that. But basically, the four of us wanted to test this idea that if you wanted to offer delivery from places that never offered delivery before, what is the fastest way to see whether or not consumers would care? I mean, at the end of the day, delivery is not a new idea. And so we thought, actually, one of the reasons why maybe delivery in 2013 hadn't been around yet was just because nobody wanted it. So we shipped Palo Alto Delivery.com. That alias was available for $9. And so that's why we got it. Not a super scalable URL, but we were able to get it.

• 0:58Speaker 01

  It was a static page where you saw eight PDF menus of restaurants that we frequented in Palo Alto. And the only way in which you can order is you can read through the menus, you can call a Google Voice number that would ring the cell phones of the four founders, and one of us would pick up. We would take your order, place the order on your behalf, go and get the order, deliver it to you. And I used to be an intern at Square, and so I had these card readers, which was one of their earliest products, these white dongles that you could stick into the audio jacks of iPhones, and that's how we would collect payment.

• 1:33David Senra?

  Something I didn't remember until... Because it feels like DoorDash and Uber Eats and everything else has been around forever. But there wasn't... What was the state of... There was other delivery companies, but you essentially created the market for this. Can you explain? When I was telling people, "Oh, I'm coming. I'm really excited. I'm going to go speak to Tony for DoorDash." They were like, "I can't believe he survived in this competitive market." But they just assumed that all... There was other apps out there that were already delivering for restaurants that didn't have a delivery fleet. That didn't exist then.

• 2:00Speaker 01

  No. Actually, yeah. I think one of the biggest misconceptions when we were founded was just how wide open the space was, where there were about a million restaurants in the States, and maybe 20,000 to 25,000 of them offered deliveries. Most of them are pizza shops, places in New York City, some in Chicago, some in big city centers. But outside of pizza places, maybe a few Chinese restaurants, nobody offered delivery. And so the real grand question or experiment of DoorDash, Palo Alto Delivery.com, was... Okay, what about everyone else? What if you can enable everyone to actually offer delivery? What would that take? And first of all, would people care? And that's really why we ship something so quickly, just to see if people would actually come and place orders.

• 2:42David Senra?

  So what were the existing companies doing then?

• 2:44Speaker 01

  They were mostly, honestly, faxing orders, believe it or not. So they would be a website that would receive orders, if you can believe it. They would fax the orders literally into machines that would sit near the kitchen or the payment systems inside these restaurants. Then the restaurants would actually go out and do the deliveries themselves. So they were lead gen companies at the time.

• 3:05David Senra?

  I've heard you talk about developing this last mile logistics network. Did you think about that back then? Or you're just like, hey, I'm just going to try to expand the market for food delivery?

• 3:16Speaker 01

  No, we did. So when we started, I guess to take a step back before we shipped PalauToDelivery.com or even how we got there, my co-founders and I really got connected because of an interest in small businesses. I think my story I've told publicly, which is really, I mean, I grew up coming to the States as an immigrant from China. And my mom put food on the table by working three jobs a day for 12 years. One of those jobs happened to be at a Chinese restaurant where she was a waitress. I got to hang out with her, wash a few dishes when she allowed me to. That's kind of how I grew up while my dad was getting his PhD at the University of Illinois. That was the first 10 years or so of childhood, growing up in the States.

• 3:59Speaker 01

  And that moment and experience always just gave me a deep appreciation for what small business owners represent. I mean, to them, there's no such thing as work. Work, life, it's all the same thing. There's no concept of a weekend or a Saturday. It's Saturdays and Tuesdays are exactly the same days. And you just kind of get into this process where that becomes your identity. And it's actually one of the most fascinating things I find about the great experiment That's America, where because it becomes this all-consuming thing, one of the nice positive derivatives is actually... Just create great experiences like a restaurant or a bar or a furniture store

• 4:43Speaker 01

  or a T-shirt shop. They actually create the GDP for all the cities that we live in. That GDP is what allows us to have great neighborhoods, schools, all the positive things that happen from a local community. And that was always my fascination with it. We had no idea, though, when we're looking at starting DoorDash, about anything related to what these business owners' problems were. And so my co-founders and I, we spoke with 300, maybe, businesses up and down the Bay Area, from San Jose to San Francisco, restaurants, retailers, service businesses. And it was actually a baker who showed us a booklet, a three-inch minder of delivery orders she had turned down.

• 5:25Speaker 01

  She was a one-person shop who had no ability to fulfill, or desire frankly, to fulfill all those orders. And that was just a very strange moment for us, where I said, "Delivery's not a new idea. It's 2013. No one offers delivery. Why?" And that's really what prompted us to think about launching Palau to Delivery.com to see if people cared. But to your question on logistics networks, we said, "Okay, well, if the first place in which we can help local businesses is by building a logistics network, we have to pick a place to start." And this is where, I guess, the math brain comes in for me, where when we studied every category of local retail of where we would start, whether it was deliveries for restaurants,

• 6:10Speaker 01

  grocery stores, convenience stores, retail shops. All those are all options. We looked at all of them. Okay. And we had this hypothesis that if you wanted a chance of creating a logistics network that could actually be successful, that can be very fast, that can be very flexible, meaning it can deliver in 30 minutes, or it can deliver longer than that, you needed network density. You needed the most number of connections between consumers and stores. We kind of targeted restaurants because there were a million restaurants. If you compare that to the number of grocery stores, there's maybe a couple hundred thousand grocery stores.

• 6:51Speaker 01

  And you looked at other categories of retail, restaurants had the highest count of stores. And so, very quickly, we made the assumption that if there's any vertical to get started in doing deliveries... It would be restaurants and prepared meals to give us a chance to build the highest density network so that one day we can deliver everything else.

• 7:16David Senra?

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• 8:01David Senra?

  massive competitive advantage that compounds over time. Ramp is the only platform designed to make your finance team faster and happier. Many of the top founders and CEOs that I know run their business on Ramp. I run my business on Ramp, and you should, too. Go to ramp.com today to learn how they can help your business save time, save money, and grow revenue. That is ramp.com. There was other people that had maybe a similar idea, but I heard you tell the story one time where you're like, well, they actually went into like city centers. And one advantage you had, I don't even think this might have been accidental, is you started in Palo Alto instead of like New York City. Can you talk about why that was important?

• 8:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, starting in Palo Alto was, I mean, not a conscious choice. I mean, it was just where we were students at the time. But one of the earliest experiments we ran at DoorDash was doing deliveries in Palo Alto versus doing deliveries in San Francisco. So a city center, if you will, that was close to where we started the company. And one of the fascinating things we found out, and we didn't understand why initially, was we were actually completing deliveries faster inside Palo Alto than we were inside San Francisco. Obviously, San Francisco is a more dense place. But one of the things we learned early on, though, was that, obviously, you know, in Palo Alto, you had much easier parking. You had a lot fewer apartment complexes where you had to go up and down the stairs

• 9:21Speaker 01

  and figure out where the lobby was, or the right elevator entrance, things like that. Palo Alto had the following, which is, if you looked at places like Palo Alto, it's really, you know, represents, I think, most cities in the US or a lot of the world, where you have main streets, and then you kind of have, you know, in the spokes, outside of this main street hub of commerce, you have where the people live. And if you actually thought intelligently about what that really told you, you can actually build a very efficient logistics system if you just, you know, understood how to manipulate some of these hubs and spokes. And so, this was one of the earliest hypotheses we had,

• 10:04Speaker 01

  that you can actually make a logistics business as efficient, you know, in a place like a Palo Alto versus San Francisco. That was guided by that experiment. But the second thing was, actually, just in talking to customers. What customers told us was, they said, "Look, in San Francisco, I can just walk down, you know, the elevator and head out the lobby, and we could probably find a few places to go and eat." In Palo Alto, you'd be walking for miles before you could achieve something like that. You know, the closest, you know, set of restaurants near Stanford University, where we started this, was two miles away on University Avenue, as an example. And that's true in a lot of places in America. And so, if there was any place, we thought, where there would be

• 10:44Speaker 01

  the highest interest from consumers, and a possibility where you can actually make the math work, it was places like Palo Alto. And the question, you know, to us was just, how many of them are there?

• 10:55David Senra?

  And the only people doing deliveries at this time are the four founders?

• 10:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, in the very beginning, it was just the four founders.

• 11:03David Senra?

  Okay, so you had a line about this where it says, "It became obvious that the need was higher outside of the cities. We did not have the data to prove it at the time. We had the conviction that because we were doing the deliveries ourselves, that this could be true."

• 11:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, we saw, I mean, one of the benefits when you do the deliveries is, well, one, you see how hard it is to actually bring you a burrito on time, every time, correctly. And the second thing is, you get to see who the customer is. And you saw the customer actually almost always was a mom, you know, who had young children, who had not a lot of time, who didn't want to cook, you know, every single meal, who wanted, just looked for any solution to save her time. And so when we did those deliveries, we just saw, wow, well, there are a lot of young families out there. And let's go find out where they hang out. Let's go find out where they live. And that's why we had that sense that, you know, we can build a business with this audience to start.

• 11:58David Senra?

  Is that another unexpected benefit of starting in these, basically the suburbs or the cities? Think about like the typical city populations, like maybe more single people, or maybe like just a couple.

• 12:07Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 12:07David Senra?

  But it's not large families shoved in these buildings.

• 12:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I think that was probably a derivative of the discovery. But no, I think in the beginning, especially when you're looking for product market fit as an entrepreneur, you're looking for someone who actually just wants your product organically. And we could tell very quickly that someone who has young children, who maybe doesn't want to take a stroller, or pack it up, pack all the things that come with the stroller, then, you know, put that stroller and the children into the vehicle, then get it out, and then somehow get into inside of a crowded parking lot or a restaurant. Well, there are a lot of those people. And if we can solve it for that group, then we believe we could build a business that can easily grow organically. You're right. I mean, there's a second derivative, which is there are more mouths to feed when you have a family than when you have, you

• 12:53Speaker 01

  know, one or two people living inside of a city. But that wasn't the first thought we had.

• 12:57David Senra?

  But even more than a second derivative, because you were just explaining, like, okay, well, if I'm delivering to somebody's house, I know where to park. As opposed to I'm in a city, you have to navigate, where's the lobby? How do I get in this building? What floor do I get? How to access the elevator, right?

• 13:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, totally. And the presence of single-family homes made it a lot easier, for sure. That was one of the benefits of delivering to places like Palo Alto. But again, I think it just came from this very simple experiment, which had an anomalous finding, which is, why is it faster to deliver in Palo Alto than it is in San Francisco? Why is it faster to deliver in a less dense place? In other words?

• 13:32David Senra?

  Exactly. This is what is interesting to me. It almost made sense like your competitors seem to do the most obvious or like the logical thing. It's like, no, I need order density. Where are all the people? Let me just go to the cities.

• 13:42Speaker 01

  We chased where the, I think when you're starting out, the number one thing every entrepreneur is looking for is do you have something that someone else wants? And is it real? Meaning like it's not artificially inflated with discounts and marketing dollars and you know, just other ways to inorganically grow. Will people actually use it? Will they actually tell their friends about it if they actually liked the service? And that's what we found early on with places like Palo Alto.

• 14:10David Senra?

  Even when you were called PaloAltoDeliveries.com?

• 14:13Speaker 01

  Especially when we were called Palo Alto.

• 14:14David Senra?

  You had no money, right?

• 14:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, we had no, exactly. We ran this out of my bank account. And that's why I knew early on, even though, look, we didn't have any models or you know, unit economic forecast or anything like this, but even though it was running out of my bank account where I also had student debt at the time, my bank account wasn't going down, you know, every single week or every single month. So something was telling me that maybe this is a chance of working.

• 14:41David Senra?

  What were your costs at the time? Cause you have the four founders, essentially labor, you're probably not paying yourself.

• 14:45Speaker 01

  We didn't pay ourselves.

• 14:46David Senra?

  Yeah, so you're not paying yourself, so you have free labor, just your time. You built a $9 website.

• 14:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 14:52David Senra?

  I heard something that was hilarious where you're like, well, we don't have a sophisticated dispatch system, so we just use the Find My Friends app.

• 14:58Speaker 01

  We used Find My Friends. We used Find My Friends.

• 15:00David Senra?

  To attract the drivers, which just happened to be all of you.

• 15:03Speaker 01

  Our co-founders.

• 15:03David Senra?

  You have a Google voice number.

• 15:05Speaker 01

  Were you?

• 15:05David Senra?

  You're not, there's no marketing advertising, right?

• 15:07Speaker 01

  No. No, we had no money to market or advertise.

• 15:11David Senra?

  So what are the expenses did you have back then? Do you remember?

• 15:13Speaker 01

  It was all kind of like self-funded. This entire, you know, activity was self-funded until we had to start recruiting drivers and actually, you know, testing this out beyond just the four of us.

• 15:22David Senra?

  This is when you applied to Y Combinator or no?

• 15:24Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah. I mean, in that time period.

• 15:26David Senra?

  Okay. By the time you applied to Y Combinator, do you have more than drivers and just the founders or no?

• 15:31Speaker 01

  We may have had one or two.

• 15:33David Senra?

  Okay.

• 15:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, very quickly we realized, well, we're in class. And so, you know, we took turns doing deliveries while we were in class, but at some point it's tough to, you know, be a student and do the deliveries.

• 15:45David Senra?

  How many years did you have left of business school? Like how many years were you in school and running?

• 15:49Speaker 01

  We had...

• 15:52Speaker 01

  Maybe six months left before graduation. I mean, we were effectively Stanford's delivery service, you know, for the second half of, or for the first half of 2013, we were effectively Stanford's delivery service. Then we, then we get DoorDash, the URL and the company name, and then we launch out of Y Combinator in the summer, June 20.

• 16:14David Senra?

  So was it like now, once somebody starts using DoorDash, or when I start using DoorDash, right, I'm like, oh, this is very convenient, I just keep using it over and over again. Did you see that same behavior pattern back then?

• 16:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, with a very small group of users, because in the beginning, we actually did not have high volume. I mean, it was probably 10 orders a day, something like that. Maybe our high day was like 21 orders a day, something like this. Most of them, however, were done by a small group of users at Stanford. When you see that fact that the same customers are ordering over and again, even though it wasn't growing like wildfire, but our bank account also wasn't getting depleted, it gave us enough conviction to keep going.

• 16:50David Senra?

  What were the conversations amongst the founders when you guys are seeing that?

• 16:54Speaker 01

  Let's keep going. And let's, I think we viewed it as a project more than we viewed it as a company. In fact, we were barely incorporated. We were not incorporated when we were running this at Stanford University, and then we, you know, just got incorporated when we actually got into YC. But at the time, it was just like, let's just see what the next phase should be. I think sometimes when you start these projects, you absolutely should have a point of view on maybe where this can go in terms of going the distance. But the most important thing is to just get started and then to have a sense of what the next two or three steps are. No one is able to, you know, know everything about the future. And for us, the summer was really instructive.

• 17:37Speaker 01

  I mean, the summer, I think doing the deliveries ourselves for the first six months gave us the clarity that the summer was really about answering three questions. Would consumers want to pay us six bucks, which is what we charged? Are there restaurants who would be willing to partner with us for 15%? And, you know, could we afford a wage that we could pay dashers, the drivers for the service? That was it. That was the entirety of the YC summer. It was not about Demo Day or, you know, raising the most amount of money or becoming the most popular, you know, at some event. It was just answering those three questions. And if we had enough conviction answering those questions, then we'd keep going again.

• 18:14David Senra?

  You told this hilarious story where during the summer, some of your classmates are like, "Yeah, I'm gonna go ski in Stodd," or something like that. "What are you doing, Tony?" Like, "I'm delivering hummus in my Honda."

• 18:26Speaker 01

  Yes, yes. That was a... Yeah, look, I mean, I think we had a lot of classmates at Stanford who looked at us and just thought, "Boy, like, I thought they were, like, smart, but I guess they want to spend their time doing this." And so, look, in the beginning of a lot of these entrepreneurial ventures, nothing looks that amazing, right? We were working out of an apartment. We had dashers in that apartment. We had the co-founders live in that apartment. We worked 10:00 a.m. to 2:00 a.m. every single day. But it wasn't like this glamorous exercise. But nor did we seek that. We were just trying to answer those three questions that summer. We didn't care that much about what our friends were doing, clearly.

• 19:08Speaker 01

  We thought that it was interesting enough to keep going that if we can actually answer these questions, I think we're actually on to something.

• 19:18David Senra?

  We just had Mark Andreessen on the show, and he's got this great line where he says, "I firmly believe that people that do great things are doing them for the first time."

• 19:25Speaker 01

  Huh.

• 19:26David Senra?

  Did anybody have any restaurant or actually not even restaurant experience? Because you're not even in the restaurant. Any delivery, any of the founders have anything to do with logistics or delivery, anything?

• 19:35Speaker 01

  No. No, it's actually why we had to do the deliveries. I mean, the reason why we did so... The reason why we were so hell-bent on doing the deliveries, besides the fact that we had no idea whether we had any business recruiting other drivers, was how does this work? How should it work? And I think DoorDash, early on, even to this day, but early on, was so hard to explain because it was actually... Even to build the MVP, yes, to test it was just this website, you know, palotadilmud.com. But we had to build like four things. We had to build this website for consumers. We had to build some app for the restaurants, actually receive the orders. We had to build an app for the drivers, the dashers. And then we had to build a dispatch system that actually could oversee all of the operations. So even in the very beginning, we realized,

• 20:19Speaker 01

  "Wow, this is actually pretty interesting." It's just such a fun problem that you... In order to actually just bring you a burrito, you have to build these four things. And then to do it really, really well, I mean, that's why we did all the deliveries, to figure out how you actually do that.

• 20:33David Senra?

  So you were misunderstood back then. You just said something interesting. You think that's still the case to this day.

• 20:38Speaker 01

  Absolutely, because I think most people, and I totally get it. I mean, think of DoorDash as a consumer app. You know, most people think of us as lunch and dinner. And I think what they don't see is everything behind the scenes. I think a lot of times, I think you can look at, you know, products like ours, especially as a consumer, and you say, wow, this looks like any other product. You know, there are so many of them. But then I would ask the question, well, how come one just gets used more often than the next or the others? And it comes down to everything that you can't see. You know, one of the things we say a lot internally at the company at DoorDash is it's always the data that you can't see that kills you. Because if you can see a truck coming at you, you're just gonna dodge and get out the way. But if you can't see it, you're dead. And it's no different with our business.

• 21:21Speaker 01

  Our business is one where all of the magic, or the secret sauce, if you will, are in things that you cannot see. You know, no consumer is sitting there while they're ordering DoorDash, thinking about what the Dasher experience should look like, or what the operations should be to get the best quality experience at the most affordable price, or what are the ways in which you take out every single friction and cost with a restaurant or a retailer, and make sure that all the items are actually there, even when they're not there. You know, I think all of these things are the things that make DoorDash special and make DoorDash an end-to-end experience that's very difficult to replicate. But yeah, I think early on, we knew that because we did all the deliveries.

• 22:02David Senra?

  You know who knows it? Your competitors. So you're not gonna like this because you're, in my opinion, really humble, probably too humble for my liking. But people in your industry are afraid of you. And one, I have to tell you a personal story that I don't even think you know. And I didn't know, I've heard about you before. I didn't really, you know, obviously you used DoorDash, but I never thought about it. Exactly, what you just described is exactly my experience. I was just like, I have a magic button that brings me a burrito.

• 22:29Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 22:29David Senra?

  Okay? I love that magic button. Don't take that magic button away from me, whatever you do. But I was in Stockholm about a year and a half ago. And Daniel Ek was very kind to host me and like a handful of European founders. And one of the European founders that was sitting next to me and Daniel at dinner was somebody I had never met before, and it's Micky from Volt.

• 22:50Speaker 01

  Okay, cool.

• 22:51David Senra?

  But he told me something interesting, because you know, basically the story was, he's just like, listen, I built the DoorDash of Europe, I guess is how Volt was described. And he's like, I always thought of myself as an entrepreneur. I never thought I would work for anybody. And he's just like, we were in a head-to-head battle, right? And he's like, I had a term sheet in front of me. If I remember the number correctly, he was getting like a billion. He had the ability to raise another fresh billion dollars of capital.

• 23:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 23:17David Senra?

  And he was looking at the term sheet, thinking about signing it. And then he said involuntarily, something came out of his mouth. And he says, I can't beat him. He's like, I can't beat him. And he's like, I cannot believe that came out of my mouth. And he's like, and then he looked down, he's like, I could either light this money on fire, or I could sell my company for life-changing money and go work for Tony and learn a lot. And I think to this day, he still directly reports to you, correct?

• 23:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 23:42David Senra?

  Yeah.

• 23:43Speaker 01

  He runs all of our European business.

• 23:45David Senra?

  And he was trying to explain to me and Daniel about just, you don't, it's all, the magic is very similar, what the stuff that you don't see, how hard he is to compete against. You had some, another interesting quote I want to read to you. You say, "The way that DoorDash has achieved someone's success is tens of thousands of experience, 95% of which never even make it to the customer before they fail. The way to get more accurate on a delivery probably requires some level of detail that is lower and deeper than you realize." Can you explain what you meant behind that statement?

• 24:15Speaker 01

  This again, starts from actually doing the work ourselves and realizing that if you actually want to get something on time, I think it's very easy to think about, when you're just intellectualizing it, you know, on the outside, when we're getting started. Oh, maybe there's a traffic issue, or maybe, oh, the food is taking longer than it should, whatever the reasons might be. But you actually have no idea actually what are all the sources of delay in an order until you actually go and do the work. Sure, there might be some of the issues that I think you can think about on the outside, but then very, very quickly you realize that there's a lot of seconds of delay in every motion.

• 25:00Speaker 01

  In fact, there's about 20 steps you can decompose a delivery into. And there's delays at each one of those moments. And that's, you know, Even more complicated if, you know, the delivery today's, they happen outside of restaurants. They happen inside shopping contexts like groceries or retail items. Or if they happen inside malls that are multi-story, sometimes below ground, sometimes above ground. And one of the things you start realizing is, wow, actually, there are a lot of causes for delays. And there's no way that you're going to know about all of them until you literally actually encounter it for the first time.

• 25:37Speaker 01

  A lot of what's difficult about DoorDash is we're trying to build a structured data set in a world that is chaos. That's the physical world. One of the reasons why there's all these sources for mistakes, for delays, for costs, that ultimately, you know, yield into costs and good or bad, you know, experiences for customers is because there is no data that exists. There is no nice data set that a company like a Google or somebody else has organized for you. Because it's all physical information and it's also changing all the time. When you go into a grocery store and somebody moves an apple from aisle six to aisle eight, is that always going to get documented? Of course not. Those are the kinds of things we have to work on every single day.

• 26:22Speaker 01

  And you wouldn't know that, you know? What if I told you the cause for a delay was because actually somebody was homesick that day? How would you know that actually, you know, until that event actually transpired? And what would you do to respond, you know, to that event if that were to occur? Which happens every single day, you know, when we're doing millions of orders every single day. The one in a million event happens a lot. And the one in a thousand event happens way more than that. And so, building a system that can ideally detect and prevent these issues, but then also a very fast twitch muscle to actually be able to build this, I mean, almost like an emergency response system when something actually goes awry to fix it,

• 27:03Speaker 01

  that requires doing the work over and again and building the system that can learn over time to get better and better and better. Most of the time, we have no idea. We start with these experiments. And that's why most experiments fail. But when you get enough goodness out of it, if you can get the 5% out of tens of thousands of experiments to work, you know, in one year, that has the benefit on all of your audience for the next year. And then you just keep going. And that adds compounding surplus for all of the audiences.

• 27:33David Senra?

  Deal will help your business hire, pay, and manage any worker anywhere in the world. Deal is the best company in the world at building infrastructure for global hiring. Deal is one platform for payroll, HR, benefits, and device management across 150 countries. Deal gets you everything you need to run a high-performing global workforce on a single AI-native platform. From first offer to final offboarding, Deal handles the complexity so you can stay focused on your business. The best founders and operators in the world have one thing in common. They control as much of their business as possible, and the founders of Deal do exactly this. When you use Deal, you aren't using a third-party payroll processor or a messy network of in-country providers. Deal built and owns the rails.

• 28:18David Senra?

  That means faster speed, better service, and total accountability. The founder of 11 Labs, who I use to make transcripts for this podcast, has a great description of the value that Deal can give your company. He said, "We built 11 Labs to break down language and communication barriers. With Deal enabling us to hire and support exceptional talent anywhere, we can accelerate our innovation and bring more voices, stories, and ideas to every corner of the world." Deal is trusted by over 40,000 customers and growing fast. Learn how they can help your business by going to deal.com/cenra. That is deal.com/cenra. How do you do that many experiments, though? And is this a yearly basis? Is this like over the history of DoorDash?

• 29:02David Senra?

  Like, you're running thousands of experiments every year?

• 29:04Speaker 01

  Ideally, yeah, yes. I think when we are at our best, that's what's happening. But it starts with actually building a system that actually wants to learn. If you think about, like, why do we have to learn? It's because the physical world, A, is not structured. It's not documented anywhere. You can't scrape it. It's constantly changing. I mean, there's a winter storm right now, for example, in the Northeast. These are all things that happen differently.

• 29:31David Senra?

  It's beautiful here in California.

• 29:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, I know. We'd have no idea here. We're spoiled here in the Bay Area. But like, but in general, all these things are happening every single hour of the day. Okay, there's going to be some missing item today. There's going to be some order that took a lot longer today. There's going to be some incorrect gate we entered at an apartment complex. There's going to be some dasher who's going to get lost coming up the stairs of this office building. There will be, guaranteed. And so the question is like, well, it would be impossible to try to, you know, figure out all of that if you can't build a system to learn how to do this. So the most important thing is actually building systems. And building a system that, you know, at DoorDash really starts with testing things

• 30:18Speaker 01

  in a very operational, hacky, do things that don't scale kind of way. And to then taking the things that ultimately work, the ideas, and actually building products around them. And then engineering the ones that actually work so that you're actually very efficient with this learning loop. So that you can go from learning to shipping something that actually works, because, you know, it's a resource constraint with, you know, how many engineers we have and how many things that we can actually ship, especially when the stakes are high. And you want to make that loop as tight and as fast as possible. That's how you build a system in which you can learn thousands of things. And you just have to keep doing it over and over. You know, our business is one where we believe we have to earn, you know, the right to serve you the next day.

• 31:03Speaker 01

  Even though you ordered with us today, thank you very much for your business. We have to earn it again. You know, the scoreboard goes back down to zero tomorrow, and we have to just do that all over again.

• 31:11David Senra?

  Where did you learn the importance of that?

• 31:13Speaker 01

  Of what?

• 31:13David Senra?

  Of starting over again every day. I've heard you say that before, and I love that idea.

• 31:17Speaker 01

  Very early at DoorDash, we learned how hard it is to keep someone's trust and how easy it is to lose it. And, you know, I think I may have said this before, but there was, um, there was a Stanford football game in which we lost a lot of trust, where we were late on every single delivery because we didn't have enough drivers on the road. We had no ability to shut down the website. But we had a lot of those kinds of days.

• 31:42David Senra?

  Wait, pause there. So where in DoorDash's history is this game?

• 31:45Speaker 01

  This is the third month of our operation, September of 2013, where it was a Saturday. We had no ability to fulfill the orders that came in. We had no ability to even shut down the website. So we couldn't even like stop the floodgates. And usually this-

• 32:00David Senra?

  Why were you having floodgates three months in?

• 32:03Speaker 01

  We had floodgates, not three months, and on that day specifically,

• 32:06David Senra?

  Okay.

• 32:07Speaker 01

  For whatever reason, because of when the game ended, people wanted to order DoorDash for dinner in Palo Alto. And for whatever reason, you know, that volume spiked pretty hard. We had no ability to turn it off and no ability to fulfill. So we were late by at least an hour on every single delivery. I think when you go through experiences like that, but not just once, but we've had a lot of those kinds of experiences at DoorDash. I mean, you know, I still do customer support every day. I see them literally every single day. When you see that you can lose someone's trust on one order, you realize that you gotta earn it again the next day. And there is no such thing as this, you know, just set it and forget it kind of mentality. Yeah, that came a lot from the early days,

• 32:52Speaker 01

  but I think this daily reminder when I do customer support is also another great reinforcing function.

• 32:57David Senra?

  So what happened that night of the game?

• 33:00Speaker 01

  We were late on every single delivery. And I think it was probably somewhere around 10:00 PM or something where we're tallying up all the refunds that it would, you know, cost us if we wanted to make right and kind of give back everybody their money.

• 33:17David Senra?

  Were the customers asking for the refunds?

• 33:19Speaker 01

  No, no one was asking. No one was asking for anything. We were, the night it was over, we finished our last delivery and we said, okay, that was a terrible night. What are we gonna do about it? We could complain about, you know, the orders or something, but at the end of the day, I think, within a very short period of time, 15 seconds, we decided, okay, we gotta make right by the customer. So we gotta refund everybody. Now, the complication is we had no money at the time. I was having a hard time raising, I mean, this is a pattern for me. I've had a hard time raising capital for the company in the earliest years, and that started right from the beginning. I mean, like, we were maybe two or three weeks of cash out

• 34:02Speaker 01

  and this refund would have cost us about 40% of the bank account. So it would have just made the two or three weeks and just shrunk that into even fewer days. But yeah, you're right, nobody asked us for the refunds. I'm sure they were pissed, but nobody asked. We did, we did the refund right away and then we stayed up that night, actually baking cookies. And we delivered those cookies at around 5:00 AM before we thought when customers would wake. And the idea was We'd rather die trying to be excellent, or at least die trying to do the thing that we want to stand for, than to live to be mediocre and not something that we'd be proud of. And that's what we did.

• 34:41David Senra?

  That's excellent. So tell me more about building the system, this self-reinforcing learning system.

• 34:45Speaker 01

  Look, these things kind of happen in steps. So it started with the four of us doing the deliveries. And, OK, well, we can keep doing the deliveries, but at some point, we're going to start running into scale issues. I mean, four people can only do so many deliveries. So of course, we're going to start recruiting dashers. We're going to start recruiting consumers, selling restaurants. And you start noticing, as you do the deliveries, well, you have to build products to scale yourself. That's one. Two, you also just start noticing all the problems. And whenever you see a problem recur more than once, you would say to yourself, aha, maybe that's an example of a problem

• 35:29Speaker 01

  that we should actually build something for, or actually run an experiment to see if we could actually solve. So I think very early on, the bias for action turned into this experimentation mentality. Now, we didn't have any organizations at the time or anything like that. It was just like a few of us in my apartment. It wasn't like, OK, there's this rigorous system that I'm talking about. That's probably the earliest inklings, though, of how we thought about, OK, you can go from doing things that don't scale to identifying hypotheses to test, to then running experiments, and then to shipping products. That was probably the earliest time, the first year of the company. You fast-forward maybe a year as we started launching into multiple cities. All of the general managers of different cities, so you could be running Boston,

• 36:14Speaker 01

  someone else is running Dallas, someone else is running a different city, they would be reporting them to me. And you start seeing that, oh, okay, well, patterns actually emerge, you know, from city A to city B to city C, but they're still quite local. They're slightly, you know, for example, in Boston, there's not a lot of cars. Car ownership is one of the lowest in Boston, you know, in the United States versus other places. There's some strange setups because of the historic nature of the city in terms of that hub and spoke nature I was describing that actually violate that setup. So there are like local nuances and you start realizing, well, okay, well, how do I actually,

• 36:58Speaker 01

  you know, teach this way of doing things that don't scale all the way to shipping, you know, some feature that we know is going to work to each one of these people so that we could run more experiments at the same time? And then we would just build more products that would actually, you know, go across all of these different patterns. So that's kind of how this thing, you know, has morphed over the years where you basically start with some basic scientific, you know, process, if you will. You meet some point in which you have to figure out the next iteration in order to scale that process and then you just keep that going. And you're always testing, you know, against whether or not you're delivering better for customers. That's always going to be the North Star metric of whether or not this process is actually making a difference or not.

• 37:41David Senra?

  Is it better for customers if it's faster, cheaper, more efficient? Like, what are the?

• 37:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's all of the above. So, look, customers, I mean, this business is tough because customers unfortunately don't just judge us on one dimension. Some customers, all customers want the widest available selection. They want every item they can get, you know, delivered. They want the lowest possible price. They want the fastest possible delivery. They want, obviously, no mistakes. They absolutely, you know, expect it to be on time. And then if something were to go wrong, of course, they deserve to be treated correctly. We get judged in all of those things, on every single order.

• 38:17David Senra?

  So this is this idea of like you can build a business around things that don't change.

• 38:20Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 38:21David Senra?

  What are the things that don't change from the customer's perspective for DoorDash then?

• 38:24Speaker 01

  Customers are always gonna want more and more selection. They're gonna always want more and more affordability. They're gonna want faster deliveries.

• 38:33David Senra?

  This is like Amazon, almost the exact like mirror of what Amazon.

• 38:36Speaker 01

  Well, I think when you just think about what people want, I actually think it's pretty easy because we can play that role ourselves. And yeah, I think you just ask, you can ask very basic questions about what's the direction of travel of certain things. Like, for example, like, do you think people are gonna expect more convenience or less convenience? Especially in a world where you think that people are earning more, you know, whether it's today versus the past, tomorrow versus today, what do you think they're gonna do with those dollars? Is it gonna go more towards consumption? Are they gonna expect or demand more convenience or less? I think when you start asking questions just out loud, you get the common sense answers in which you can build a business around.

• 39:21David Senra?

  We were talking about this with the crew at breakfast. It's just like, well, their cornerstone in their business is some trait in human nature that's never gonna change, which is like, we want more convenience.

• 39:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, always. It's not rocket science, I think. The rocket science is actually how do you make it happen?

• 39:36David Senra?

  Yeah, I love this idea of like you're hiding the complexity. I spent several hours at Basis, one-on-one, and I'm obviously a massive fan of his. I've done like 15 episodes on him. And he listens to my other podcast. And I told him, I was like, dude, you know how crazy it is that they put a guillotine in front of your house in Washington? I go, you made a magic button I can press. That anything I want in the world shows up to my house in two days, and now it's like a few hours. And all I do is press the button, and you handle all the other complexity behind it. I was like, you deserve all the money. I hope you have all the money. He just laughed and laughed and laughed. You said something, you're doing customer support every day. And this customer support emails, what is this?

• 40:13Speaker 01

  Emails or chats, sometimes phone calls.

• 40:16David Senra?

  Every day?

• 40:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 40:18David Senra?

  Say more about this. Well, why do you do this?

• 40:21Speaker 01

  You know, I was saying earlier that, for a few reasons, you know. One of the things that we were talking earlier is that so much of the magic or the difficulty of building a company like DoorDash is in all the things you can't see. And so the first thing you gotta do is you gotta build observability everywhere. Of course, there's observability with dashboards and systems and increasingly AI tools. But also, I can see the inbound of customers who write us, whether it's a consumer, a merchant, a dasher, an advertiser, and I can choose to ignore them, but those are freebies. I mean, like, how lucky am I to actually have a product in which people care enough?

• 41:06Speaker 01

  Even, I mean, usually they're not very positive emails, but to care enough to actually let me know. I think the greatest killer of a business is usually silence. And here, they care enough to actually let me know something went wrong in their experience. I owe them, certainly not just a response, but actually, I think, and not the courtesy, but I owe them the responsibility of actually solving that problem ultimately. And so first, it's an obligation to the customers. Second, it's actually something that I want the rest of the company to do. I think one of the easiest things as companies get a little bit bigger, perhaps earn a little

• 41:48Speaker 01

  bit more success, is there are more obstacles between them and the customers or the jobs to be done. For example, when you become a company, all of a sudden, the only things that kind of get spotlighted are the financial metrics, your revenue, your profits, none of which are metrics that customers care about. There are no metrics in what we report as a public company that customers know about probably or care about, frankly. And that always is quite bothersome to me because it's because of our ability to serve customers that can hopefully achieve, you know, strong financial metrics that investors care about.

• 42:33Speaker 01

  And so a lot of what I'm trying to do is building as many reinforcing and repetitive mechanisms and motions, including things that I do individually, that will allow this company to always recognize that the number one job and the only religion at this company is to solve problems for customers.

• 42:54David Senra?

  What do you do when the data and anecdotes conflict?

• 42:57Speaker 01

  It's a tough one. I think that usually there's always an element of truth in what customers are saying and it usually becomes a trade-off, you know, discussion, you know, for different teams. The reason why it's a tough decision is because it is so easy to always just veer on the side of the data. Because almost always, when a customer notices something that is wrong, or there's an anecdote that may be a quote-unquote edge case, it's usually at some tail of a distribution, a distribution of the wait times for customer support, a distribution of how friendly we

• 43:41Speaker 01

  were when we actually took the call, a distribution of how on time we were, or how late we were, or how accurate we were, or what are the number of items of the types of SKUs you care about in a particular category of lettuce, just lettuce, not vegetables, but just lettuce, right? So it's always some tail example. And so the data is probably always going to win when it comes to some sort of a prioritization discussion. But when you actually think about how to make a product better, it's going to almost always by definition be an improving the edges, you know? And that's why a lot of times what I like to do personally is I love to spend time, you know, with a lot of our power users, whether it's, you know, the top dashers or

• 44:26Speaker 01

  the consumers who order the most often, or the merchants who we've been doing, you know, business with for a very long period of time. And also the new users. They're at the tails of the distribution of almost every outcome. A new user who's never touched DoorDash before for the 13 years that we've been around will absolutely tell us about how easy or difficult it is to place their first order in a way that someone who's been used to all the things that we've been training together with customers on have figured out. A power user also sees all the issues too because they have the most shots on goal for some chaotic event to happen in the real world that we couldn't capture.

• 45:06Speaker 01

  And so those edges of the distribution are almost always where the anecdotes are that are the most valuable and that you have to pay the most attention to because they almost always will disagree with the data and they are probably worth the most in terms of improving your product.

• 45:24David Senra?

  So let's say you find one of these edge cases as you're doing customer support every day. What's your next step?

• 45:28Speaker 01

  So the ones I love the most are actually the really long ones, actually. The ones where there's a lot of gold. It's probably like the research you do on founders, which is the longer, almost the better because you get to study the distributions. When it's a short email about something you already know about, there's not as much, perhaps, interesting material in it. But I love the 2,000-word emails, especially from dashers who will give many use cases of why the logistics algorithm broke for them. And it becomes almost like a debugging exercise, right? Of both physical world things that have occurred, things about our systems that probably

• 46:08Speaker 01

  broke, and things in our products that couldn't interface well enough between the physical world and our systems. And so then I go into our debugging tools and I actually literally track the order. And every single step I'm watching and...

• 46:23David Senra?

  Personally, you're doing this personally?

• 46:24Speaker 01

  Yeah. And once I start figuring out potentially where the sources of error are, I'll either generate the hypothesis and call the dasher or email the dasher, depending on the best way to reach them or the consumer. And then actually find out whether or not there's a nugget of insight there of something we actually could improve. So put a different way, can we put a spotlight on an anecdote that improves the product? That's the opportunity I'm looking for.

• 46:52David Senra?

  I've heard you describe this as like this eternal mission.

• 46:55Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 46:56David Senra?

  How would you describe what the eternal mission of DoorDash is?

• 46:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, the eternal mission of DoorDash is to grow and empower local economies. We say this a lot. And the reason why it's eternal is because I think it's a fight worth fighting for, or a cause worth fighting for forever, which is the best way to grow the GDP, or the happiness, or the safety of a city is by making the small, medium, and large businesses in that city successful. They produce the vast majority of jobs and, you know, consumption dollars for the economy and the monies for the police department, the fire department, the parks, the schools, etc., the hospitals. So the question is like, well, how do you actually make them successful?

• 47:39Speaker 01

  One of the most positive tailwinds of why this could be a very fruitful eternal mission is because the physical world is always changing, right? And it's hard to just scrape it. And it's one of the things I love the most about it. It's hard to just, you know, scrape all that information, say job is finished, and then put it through some LLM or something. Well, A, that data is always changing. B, it's not organized at all. And C, it's not just, it's not like some relationship between a text editor and a person. I mean, there's a lot of people, there's, there are three people involved on every single order at DoorDash, at least.

• 48:22Speaker 01

  There is a consumer, there's a dasher, there's a merchant. At least three people. Now, given that we do more complicated things, there's even more sometimes. And, you know, for those people, this is, this could be their identity. Back to, you know, what I was saying about small business owners and how they believe that what they do, it's not a office job or something, you know, that they just use to earn money so that they could spend consumption dollars or something else. This is like their livelihood. This is like who they are. When I think about those kinds of people, I want those people to win. And so if we have to eternally always look for the edges of the distribution to keep improving the product, of course we will. And if we can do that and we can make them successful,

• 49:04Speaker 01

  then they're going to make many things about the cities and the neighborhoods that we live in continue to be sustainable and very, very thriving.

• 49:12David Senra?

  And the alternative is terrifying. You have one or two big players.

• 49:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, I don't even want to think about the alternative. You're totally right. I mean, the alternative is, it's a very robotic world where maybe we buy things in one or two ways or from one or two places. That's not a world in which you're going to grow the GDP of these cities. And actually, that's a world in which you may take away some of the identity, I would argue, of some of the neighborhoods. I think one of the reasons why people love neighborhoods or there are certain neighborhoods that they maybe preference is because there's a personality to it. So much of the personality is given by who the businesses are. And therefore, you and your friends want to go frequent and go hang out in those places in addition to your homes and things like that. And that's what makes it tick. That's what makes a place feel awesome, a city feel awesome.

• 50:00Speaker 01

  And so I think that's an eternal mission worth fighting for.

• 50:04David Senra?

  Yeah, because this is not something that you can accomplish in a year, five years, 10 years. It's constantly changing. What do you do with all this data that you're collecting?

• 50:12Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, the first is we have to structure it. So one of the things that I think Google so brilliantly did was they did organize a lot of the information on the internet. And they made it searchable to everybody. Right now, the first thing we're doing is we're still collecting lots of information. And then right now, we're trying to do two things with it. You know, the first thing is we're certainly trying to grow a merchant's business by allowing to search for their stuff through our app. And we'll bring them incremental business that way. The other way is we're actually trying to make it useful for them. So we're giving data back to them, telling them when-

• 50:49David Senra?

  Data about their own business.

• 50:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, like when you're out of stock of certain items or that, did you know that you are underpriced in this particular menu item versus what you could be pricing at? Or that there's an opportunity to bundle certain or to create certain SKUs or new items on your menu or in your catalog if you're a retailer that we think would grow your actual business.

• 51:16David Senra?

  This is like, Bezos had that line about Amazon Prime. He's like, "We want to make it so valuable, it's irresponsible if you're not a member." Like, it's just insane. So if you can have data for small businesses, medium businesses, even large businesses, that they didn't know. Like, that pricing thing is interesting to me. Where it's like, "Well, you're charging $15 for this plate of chicken."

• 51:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 51:36David Senra?

  Where we see all these other... I assume you're getting the data from all the other merchants on your platform, where it's like, you could be... People are willing to pay $25 for that thing. Essentially, it'd be irresponsible not to partner with you.

• 51:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 51:47David Senra?

  If you have all those insights.

• 51:48Speaker 01

  We can also take the same approach that we built for ourselves. You know, the scientific process from doing things that don't scale to shipping things at scale on your behalf. Like, you as a merchant can be running experiments too. Now, maybe you can't because you're a single person. You're literally one person, like the baker that I was telling you about, that inspired a lot of our discovery of delivery, who doesn't have all the capabilities to run all these. But why can't we do those things for you? Why can't we, for instance...

• 52:14David Senra?

  What do you mean, "do them for me"?

• 52:15Speaker 01

  We could talk about simple things to more difficult things. The simple things, we could, you know, change menu prices on your behalf. We can buy different kind of promotions for you based on what return thresholds you want to achieve. We can talk about more complicated things. You know, for example, you know, there's certain merchants who want to actually grow tremendously. They... Why not, right? They don't just... They want their identity, their... I mean, their passion project to be exposed to as many people as possible. Some of those businesses, for example, find it very hard, though, to grow, you know, from one store to two stores to then somehow 2,000 stores. But imagine if you baked cookies, as an example, and you wanted everyone to have your cookies.

• 52:58Speaker 01

  Why can't we match your products with businesses that don't sell your product? And actually create a supply chain in which you can actually, you know, sell those products in more places? And you can literally make everyone win. You know, the new business who's selling your product now has a new menu item called a cookie. You get to maximally, you know, increase your exposure. There's a range of things in which we can do with the information and make it productive if we knew what your goals were. And so, a lot of what we're doing with a lot of businesses is, at scale, how do we maximally increase, you know, your exposure, your identity, and achieve whatever goal you may have?

• 53:42David Senra?

  So that's with restaurants. Tell me some of the...

• 53:44Speaker 01

  Or retailers.

• 53:45David Senra?

  Yeah, like this gets really interesting when you expand out to every physical business.

• 53:49Speaker 01

  When I think about restaurateurs, retailers, to me, they're no different from me in the sense that they're entrepreneurs. They want to create something. They want something that they have, an idea they may have, a passion they may have, and they want it to be exposed into the world. That gives them fulfillment of a variety of ways. Okay, so let's say that you want to make t-shirts and sell t-shirts. That's a passion project of yours. There should be no reason why you can't do that today from, you know, testing that idea with the audiences that we have, with the warehousing and logistics inventory that we have, with the ability very quickly to test in any neighborhood, any city,

• 54:34Speaker 01

  in the tens of thousands of, you know, different neighborhoods that we serve or cities that we serve and operate in, and see whether or not you may have something before you actually go out and try to spend a lot of money to open up a store or something like that. There's no reason why we can't be your business partner for any future creation.

• 54:52David Senra?

  Dude, this is blowing my mind because I just think about DoorDash as a way to get food.

• 54:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 54:57David Senra?

  I love the idea behind this.

• 54:59Speaker 01

  It's all about where you start and how you keep going, right? And by the way, a lot of these ideas came to us from our customers. You know, back to your question about why do I do customer support? I learned a ton too. Yeah, of course, I learned about all the edges of the distribution.

• 55:13David Senra?

  What are some examples of things that customers have asked?

• 55:15Speaker 01

  Okay, so one customer in 2014, I'll never forget, was a farmer who runs one of the largest farms in the state of California. And they run hundreds of trucks every day up and down the state of California, okay? Distributing their produce and their meats and other products to a variety of grocers, restaurants, hotels, et cetera. And they've been doing this for three generations as a family.

• 55:47Speaker 01

  They did not start their farm to drive a bunch of trucks. That is not the business that they aspire to be in or passionate about. And literally, in our second year of operation, they called me, or they wrote in, actually. And then we had a conversation on the phone about what they were interested in. They were curious whether we could solve that problem for them.

• 56:07David Senra?

  That's wild they even asked you that.

• 56:08Speaker 01

  And this was the second year of the business. And so, you know, I said, "Not yet," at the time. You know, perhaps I should, you know, I almost feel like I owe him a call. So this conversation is a good reminder. But the, when, I think you've earned, you know, our goal over time is to be the first phone call for any business, any business, for any issue. Yes, today, the number one calls we get about are about delivery. Totally get it, totally understood. Increasingly, they've been about other things. Can you actually help us build our app? Can you help us acquire customers? Can you help us analyze customers, retain customers, customer support customers? Can you help us store inventory?

• 56:52Speaker 01

  So those questions are more and more coming inbound. And that's why we've shipped a lot of the products that we have at DoorDash. But I think if done right, DoorDash can be your first phone call to start any business. I mean, that's really what we wanted. And we can do it in a way that is very low cost, that, you know, doesn't have to scale if you don't want it to. You know, some people are very happy with one or two locations. Or if you want to become the next McDonald's, or you want to become the next Walmart.

• 57:21David Senra?

  One of my all-time favorite quotes is from the book Zero to One. It says, "The single most powerful pattern I have noticed is that successful people find value in unexpected places. And they do this by thinking about business from first principles instead of formulas." This is exactly what AppLovin has done with their new advertising platform, Axon. Axon is the most powerful advertising platform in a generation. Axon allows you to capture undivided attention. Axon ads are full-screen videos that are watched for an average of 35 seconds, retention that blows other ad platforms out of the water. And you can launch in minutes. You set the goal, and Axon...

• 57:56Speaker 01

  Axon achieves it. No complex setup, no expertise needed. And Axon scales quickly. They can put your ads in front of over a billion potential customers. Other businesses have seen immediate results, scaled to hundreds of thousands of dollars of spend per day, and increased their revenue by millions. And most advertisers aren't even thinking about this channel yet. Less than 1% of advertisers have access to Axon, so you want to get started quickly. And you can do that by going to axon.ai/cenra. That is axon.ai/cenra.

• 58:30David Senra?

  Something that, again, I want to compare your story to Bezos, because I just think every time I hear you speak, I hear a lot of Bezos. He obviously did a ton of customer support at the very beginning of Amazon. He publicized his email and like made it public, like emailed me all the time. And one, he tells this great story in one of the books, that when he realized, you know, they were selling, I think, at the time, I think, just books, CDs and like VH, maybe DVDs. And somebody's like, he would ask, I think he would send an email to like a thousand customers a day or something like that. And he's like, what else would you buy? And one guy's like, will you sell me windshield wipers? And Bezos was like, oh my God, we're going to be able to sell anything.

• 59:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 59:08David Senra?

  Or everything in that case.

• 59:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 59:10David Senra?

  So yeah, I love that idea. What are these other products that you're building? Okay, we have to like educate me now, because I've heard, first of all, you need to do more podcasts, because I've listened to all of them. I didn't know some of the stuff you're telling me right now. But I know you've launched a bunch of different products in the last 12 months. Tell me about one that you're really excited about.

• 59:27Speaker 01

  Well, one of the things that we're trying to do is we're trying to obviously deliver everything inside the city. Okay, in order to, and just to put some, you know, context behind it, there are tens of millions of items inside of a city that you could deliver. DoorDash delivers a fraction of those items today.

• 59:42David Senra?

  What fraction do you deliver today?

• 59:44Speaker 01

  A very small fraction, very, very small fraction. There are many times the amount of things to deliver than what we currently offer. But there are challenges in making these deliveries, right? For instance, you know, how do you actually know what the catalog looks like for what, for each city? How do you know if the catalog is actually accurate? What if the items are not available in store but are available in a warehouse somewhere far, far away? There are a lot of these challenges in order to actually, you know, address before you can actually do something like deliver everything inside of a city. So one of the things that we launched.

• 1:00:20David Senra?

  Do you talk about like that internally? We're going to deliver everything in a city?

• 1:00:24Speaker 01

  Yeah. But one of the things that we launched last fall, it was actually in September, we announced Dash Bar fulfillment solutions where, you know, for companies like a Kroger or companies like a CBS, we'll actually carry their items and you can order their items, you know, directly from our site, but sometimes they'll actually come from a warehouse that we're operating on their behalf. That is an example of a product of a warehousing, an inventory management and a logistics solution in which we are offering, you know, perfect accuracy, fast delivery in a way that retailers don't have access to or the capabilities to do so today.

• 1:01:03Speaker 01

  That's part of how you can deliver, you know, all of a city by actually bring and aggregating and making closer some of the inventory to where someone lives. We're building autonomous vehicles. That's something else that we announced last year where actually, I mean, it was a fascinating journey where candidly mostly pain and suffering, but most of the journey was recognizing that you actually have to build a purpose-built or intentional product to do last mile delivery in a way that's very different from, say, robot taxis or delivering humans. You have to solve problems of getting products, for example, inside and out from the vehicle

• 1:01:47Speaker 01

  in a way that passengers naturally can do in a robot taxi that items cannot do on their own. You have to think about what types of, you know, vehicles you may need for shorter distance deliveries versus longer distance deliveries, heavier deliveries versus lighter packages. When I kind of think about some of those products, for example, that's all part of this mission of trying to bring you everything inside the city and giving every business a chance to win.

• 1:02:11David Senra?

  And are you making the hardware yourself?

• 1:02:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, so in some of the cases we are. And so we don't have, again, like the only religion we really subscribe to is making customers win. We don't have a religion about whether or not we have to build, you know, the product or someone else has to build the product. Actually, when we started the autonomous project, the autonomous vehicle project, we started with the

• 1:02:34Speaker 01

  belief that we did not have to build the vehicles. And in partnering with a lot of different companies, we ultimately realized that nobody actually wanted to build what we wanted to build. And that's ultimately why we decided to, you know, start our own project in 2019 and shipped it last year.

• 1:02:55David Senra?

  So that's what, six years, seven years, almost seven years of development.

• 1:02:58Speaker 01

  Six years.

• 1:02:59David Senra?

  Six years. Why did they not want to build, they just didn't want to build what you wanted?

• 1:03:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, if you think about it, in the world of autonomous vehicles, you have a lot of the projects and a lot of the capital and a lot of the attention are going towards RoboTaxi. And that's just a very different solution and form factor, in our opinion, than what you need for last mile delivery. You know, when you're, it's very hard, for example, to drive a RoboTaxi into a crowded hub of merchants, you know, whether it's a mall or, you know, a main street, and actually somehow find parking and actually, you know, get access to, you know, the products by itself somehow, you know, I think that's a, that's a, that's a difficult endeavor to accomplish. We built actually DoorDash Dot, which actually will, yes, it will travel on the road,

• 1:03:46Speaker 01

  but it also can travel on the sidewalk and in the bike lanes. It's a much smaller form factor. It doesn't go as fast, but it has the ability to actually get to the last 10 feet of actually, you know, solving the problem of last mile delivery, which really is the last 10 feet problem.

• 1:04:03David Senra?

  It's just live, like right now?

• 1:04:04Speaker 01

  It's in Arizona, so it's, it's in, it's in the Phoenix Scottsdale area.

• 1:04:09David Senra?

  Is it true, I heard that Waymo, you guys have partnered with Waymo to, for, to close the doors of, is that true?

• 1:04:15Speaker 01

  We do, we do partner with Waymo, and we do lots of things together.

• 1:04:20David Senra?

  Is it people just not shutting the door when they get out of a Waymo? Is that true?

• 1:04:23Speaker 01

  One of the things that I think is fascinating about the problems that a company like a Waymo or a problem like Door, or a company like DoorDash has to solve is there's always these funny edge cases in the real world that are very hard to predict. Shutting doors may be one of those examples, right? But you actually wouldn't know about that until literally. You read the logs of these customer transcripts of, you know, these things. Look, I think there's going to be lots of things that we could do together over time. But I think it starts with just building the foundation. I think the foundations you need to build one of these companies for the physical world are just very, very different from the digital world. And, you know, that's kind of the fun part of the exercise at DoorDash.

• 1:05:06David Senra?

  Okay, so let's talk about the talent needed to do all the things that you're describing. I heard you say that when you were recruiting, you looked for Rhodes Scholars that meet Navy SEALs. What does that mean?

• 1:05:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, this was a shorthand, I suppose, early on. When we were looking for, I think, the types of people that we thought would do well at DoorDash.

• 1:05:28Speaker 01

  And I think it started first from, because we did every job ourselves, whether it was the deliveries, customer support, making menus, selling restaurants. We recognized the personality type, if you will. Yes, you needed to be smart and you needed to be able to, you know, have high processing power in terms of, you know, analyzing all the information, especially in a world that's very unstructured. But one of the things you really needed was you needed to just do things. So much, I think that that's challenging is, that's very different about the physical world

• 1:06:10Speaker 01

  than, say, building software is you have no control in the physical world. We don't get to control when you hit that order button. We don't get to control whether or not a dasher accepts or rejects an order. We don't get to control how slow or how fast somebody makes an item or how in-stock or out-of-stock some item is. You have to be able to do things to go figure those things out. So one of the earliest things I did, I remember, was the interview question. If you made it to the interview with me, your final round interview was most likely a surprise. Because, you know, our teams would, you know, ask you to, you know, answer some prompt about fixing some problem in a city or something like that.

• 1:06:52Speaker 01

  And you probably would go out and do your analyses and... You know, come ready with a one pager of notes or something. And then you would come to me and you thought you might think that the interview is to present that to me. I would literally ask you, I said, "Well, this could be a really long or really short interview where I'm going to give you 20 minutes and you can ask me any question that you want. But after the 20 minutes expires, I'm going to give you $20 that you can use to go and acquire 100 customers for us. And you have eight hours to do so. But here's also a plane ticket. I know you traveled far to come to this interview in case you want to quit the interview now

• 1:07:34Speaker 01

  and just move on and find somewhere else to work." And that was the interview because that's the action part, right? So much of what we were trying to test for early on is someone who's going to do something to go and collect information as opposed to someone who's going to collect data, scrape information from some, you know, internet protocol and then do some magical analysis on it and then ship code. Okay, I mean, but what if none of that information existed? You have to go and do things in order to actually collect information. That was one big kind of behavior bias for action that we were testing for.

• 1:08:14David Senra?

  So that's the Navy SEAL part.

• 1:08:15Speaker 01

  That's the Navy SEAL part where you have to be willing to do things and be accountable, you know, for things. A lot of that was on the, you know, the non-engineering front. On the engineering front, we looked for engineers who certainly were great at coding, but we looked for engineers who would be willing to do deliveries with us. In fact, the interview with me, if you're an engineer, is the final round interview, was we would go and do deliveries together. So the interview would literally take place in my Honda and we would be doing deliveries for maybe an hour or two or something like that. And I'm walking you through the flow of literally the order and asking your opinion of how we could productize this. In Silicon Valley, I think sometimes there's the...

• 1:08:57Speaker 01

  Mythical obsession with the 10x engineer, right? And I totally get it, and they do absolutely exist. But a lot of times, that is about coding prowess. That's great. We have a lot of respect for that. At DoorDash, we also need you to have problem-solving prowess, or the "coding prowess" in quotes at DoorDash is about, how do you solve this end-to-end problem? And it takes a certain kind of engineer who's willing to do deliveries, and not just think about code all day, or what the latest, greatest AI tools are. But is what I'm going to ship actually going to solve a real-world problem?

• 1:09:42Speaker 01

  Is there going to be a real customer benefit? Yes or no? That was the type of profile and personality and aptitude and attitude that we're looking for for engineers.

• 1:09:51David Senra?

  Was there a specific source where you were finding people like this?

• 1:09:55Speaker 01

  Not really. There wasn't. In fact, to this day, I don't really look at people's backgrounds that much. I think one of the things I discovered along the way, probably in the 2015 to 2020 era, especially when DoorDash was building out its team, there were more attributes that I was listening for than there were things on a resume that I was seeking or looking out. A bias for action. And a lot of the ways I can tell in an interview is actually just what people naturally talk to me about. For example, Christopher Payne, our first chief operating officer, I didn't ask him a single interview question, but after a two-hour discussion about our logistics algorithm, he went home that night, it was Friday,

• 1:10:37Speaker 01

  drove with his son for four hours doing deliveries. I didn't ask him to do that. I also didn't ask him the next morning to write me a 3,000-word email about why our logistics algorithm sucks.

• 1:10:50David Senra?

  But he did it.

• 1:10:50Speaker 01

  But he did it. And that told me more than any set of interview questions.

• 1:10:55David Senra?

  You hadn't even hired him yet?

• 1:10:56Speaker 01

  No, hadn't hired him yet.

• 1:10:58David Senra?

  And then you immediately hired him.

• 1:10:59Speaker 01

  And this is certainly beyond the resume, right? Or we look for the ability to operate at the lowest level of detail. I remember my first, it was actually supposed to be a coffee chat, not a quote-unquote interview. It was scheduled for 45 minutes with our, you know, now-president, Prabir, then CFO candidate. And he came to the coffee with his computer and this like, multi-megabyte file, which was some projection of our financials somehow. I said, "What? Like, this is supposed to be me getting, we're supposed to get to know each other." But this is how he thinks, right? Like, I don't need to watch the resume or read the resume to decipher, how does this person work?

• 1:11:44Speaker 01

  He showed it to me.

• 1:11:45David Senra?

  So he built a model and then he walks you through?

• 1:11:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:11:47David Senra?

  How long did that take?

• 1:11:48Speaker 01

  We, I think, debated it for over four hours. So it was like, but it was literally going line by line to think through that. These kinds of examples, ultimately, and then there's like, you know, three or four other attributes that we look for, those tell me more about, I think, how you operate, what makes you tick, what's the environment in which you'd be most successful, and whether or not I think it matches what's required. So there wasn't, there wasn't like, a source. It wasn't like, "Oh yeah, we discovered the secret that it's this company, or this school, or this background that ultimately wins."

• 1:12:19David Senra?

  But don't they have to be very different people than would be people satisfied working in like, just a completely digital, like, software company?

• 1:12:25Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:12:26David Senra?

  Like, you told this story one time where you were wondering, let me see if I remember correctly, correct me if I'm wrong, but you're like, you took like, a small sample of like, 20 Dasher drivers and 20 Uber X drivers.

• 1:12:37Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:12:38David Senra?

  And I think the control of this experiment was like, you all are getting guaranteed $20 an hour. If I offer you more money, how many of these groups would switch?

• 1:12:46Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:12:47David Senra?

  Right? And what is the observation that you discovered from this experiment? Do you remember?

• 1:12:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, so, yeah, they were making about 20 an hour at the time. I made a guaranteed offer of 25 an hour if you switched jobs. So if the Uber X drivers would go to DoorDash, DoorDash would go to Uber, and one out of two groups of 20, so one out of 40 made the move.

• 1:13:08David Senra?

  And what did you derive?

• 1:13:09Speaker 01

  And

• 1:13:10David Senra?

  What conclusion did you derive from that?

• 1:13:11Speaker 01

  And this was very early. This is weeks within the companies getting started because at the time, one of the, you know, back to the three questions we were trying to answer, we're trying to figure out whether or not we could acquire enough dashers, enough drivers, was well, if drivers only cared about money, well, we're ultimately going to lose because obviously it's more valuable to transport David than a burrito or a coffee. And, and so we were testing this, you know, we were almost, you know, trying to confirm or to deny this hypothesis. So I ran that experiment. What I learned was, well, actually, there are two groups of completely different people. The DoorDash drivers, they were younger, about half of them were female, were women, and they had all sorts of vehicles.

• 1:13:55Speaker 01

  Some of them drove motorcycles, scooters, bikes, yes, cars, but, but, but, but not exclusively cars. The Uber X drivers at the time were usually men in their 40s. I think almost exclusively men. Maybe there were a few women in the group, but almost exclusively men. All of them drove vehicles, cars, sorry, four-wheelers. And, and they viewed that job almost like a full-time job. You know, in some ways, they're moving from taxi 1.0 to taxi 2.0. And because some of them had formerly drove for taxi. The, the dashers, on the other hand, came from a variety of places.

• 1:14:37Speaker 01

  Schools, hospitals, restaurants, retailers, service businesses, moms. And, and then if you look at it today, there's almost no overlap, very little overlap between ride-sharing drivers and delivery drivers. And the dashers, more than half of them are women today. They come from dozens of industries, literally, I mean, every place. The average dasher only does three to four hours a week. 90% do drive fewer than 10 hours a week. And so it just became a very different setup. You know, the delivery

• 1:15:12David Senra?

  They kind of self-selected into what

• 1:15:13Speaker 01

  They self-selected.

• 1:15:14David Senra?

  I wonder if there's that insight that you derived there is like, it's kind of what I'm getting to is like, how You find the people like the engineer that is willing to go get in your shitty Honda, no offense.

• 1:15:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:15:23David Senra?

  And do deliveries. Yeah, I feel like that is such a different person than.

• 1:15:27Speaker 01

  It is. It's a software engineer at Google. It's a super different.

• 1:15:30David Senra?

  Pheasant or something for lunch.

• 1:15:31Speaker 01

  It's super different. Yeah, it's exactly. No, I think you said it yourself. I mean, if you think about, you know, the early days, it was. I mean, I remember we would add, and it's a strange memory, but we would take a coding break at 10:00 PM to take out the trash. Because it was an apartment. So it wasn't like an office building where there was, you know, janitorial services. We were janitorial. And, and so we would take out the trash. It takes a certain kind of engineer. It takes a certain kind of person to actually want to work in that environment. But I don't think there was like a background. If anything, it was probably like a personal background as opposed to a professional one in which we were looking for. But I, I, I think all of these people had a bias for action. All of them cared about the details.

• 1:16:16Speaker 01

  All of them had the ability to hold opposing ideas in their brains. All of them had strong followership. They tended to move with others as they moved from one, once they joined a company, a bunch of others followed them.

• 1:16:30David Senra?

  Oh, that's an interesting trait to hire for. Say that, we're about that again.

• 1:16:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, they strong followership. Okay, they had the, they had this ability where. And I didn't even know the why many times, but when you just look at, you know, you know, company A they worked for or organization A they started, whatever. And they tend to have these groups that are attracted to them. And they tend to be quite like minded. They tend to always want to get better. That was one trait that we discovered. And, you know, and you see this, and it's not always professionally like trying to get better at some skill all the time. Sometimes it was they wanted to be the best burger maker. Where they wanted to be the best karaoke singer.

• 1:17:16Speaker 01

  And they would literally like tell you about the process in which they would on the weekends improve every single week. But that's not that different from if you think about the scientific process that we're recruiting for or trying to institute in our systems here at DoorDash. It's very similar, actually, very, very, very similar. There is an obsession, almost, to some activity. And there was a system that they devised for themselves to actually get better. Those were the traits that we looked for as opposed to what company did you work for, et cetera.

• 1:17:49David Senra?

  You have a great quote where it says, "DoorDash has always been a company where bias for action is the way we solve and settle debates. We don't debate a lot. We tend to ship hundreds of thousands of experiments a week." So you're not sitting in an office or that conference room behind us, mapping things out and like, "Oh, I have an hypothesis." You're just like, "No, we're just going to experiment and we're going to get to the truth as fast as possible."

• 1:18:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think, well, because so much of the physical, a big part of this is because the physical world, so much of it is, there is no analysis you can run on it sometimes. And, or it can be very counterintuitive. And, you know, for example, had we not done deliveries in both Palo Alto and San Francisco, maybe we never would have landed on the idea that you could deliver maybe faster or more economically inside of a quote-unquote suburb than a city.

• 1:18:38David Senra?

  It's almost like an earned secret. You read Sam Walton's autobiography?

• 1:18:41Speaker 01

  A long time ago.

• 1:18:42David Senra?

  Okay, so he has that line in there because his main competitor, Sears, Kmart, there was, people had the idea before he did and they're like, they're in the city center. He's like, "Well, I'm in Bentonville." I'm in like, he's basically said like, if we didn't, he was resource constrained. And so he's like, "I didn't have a lot of money, so I had to start out in these small towns. And if I didn't, never did that because I was forced to, because I didn't have the money that Kmart or the other competitors had. I didn't realize how much business there was out in these little towns." And then the earned secret that he had was, if he could compete on his, you know, organizing mantra was everyday low prices. If I can actually sell this same item to you cheaper, people would drive, in human nature, Vast distances to save money.

• 1:19:25Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:19:25David Senra?

  And what was interesting is Bernie Marcus, founder of Home Depot, realized that same exact idea like 30 or 40 years later, applied to a different industry.

• 1:19:36Speaker 01

  Well, constraints definitely breed creativity. I mean, for us, because we had no money or because I was so unsuccessful, you know, raising money in the earliest years, we had to run these experiments. If you think about it, if a company has no ability to compete with budget and other companies are outspending them with marketing dollars, as an example, you only have one way to compete, which is you have to build a product that has better retention, better engagement. You have to. There's no other way.

• 1:20:01David Senra?

  So what do you think when you see these giant like seed rounds that we're seeing now?

• 1:20:06Speaker 01

  It's impressive, is what I think. I think it's really, my encouragement to those founders is to actually find a problem worth solving first, but then, once you find the problem, to actually go and solve the problem. Because at the end of the day, that's going to cover for, you know, whatever financial, you know, metrics that they're going to be solving for.

• 1:20:29David Senra?

  Yeah, one of my favorite, because everybody's like, "Well, I need more money because if I have more money, I win." And one of my favorite historical anecdotes, you ever read the biography of the Wright Brothers by David McCullough?

• 1:20:38Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:20:38David Senra?

  Oh, I know you like to read history and biography.

• 1:20:40Speaker 01

  I do, I should probably, I should probably check that one out.

• 1:20:43David Senra?

  Listen to the audiobook, if you, I know you're busy. It's great because, you know, human powered flight was a centuries old problem, like, people were trying to figure it out over and over again. At the same exact time, the Wright Brothers were trying to do it, they had better funded competitors, better brand names.

• 1:20:57Speaker 01

  Oh, sure.

• 1:20:58David Senra?

  I think it was Samuel Langley. Samuel Langley was, I think, backed by like the Smithsonian, I think he'd raised like $500,000. This is like a crazy amount of money there. And there's a great line in the book where like, essentially, the Wright Brothers solved this centuries old problem with the modest profits from their bicycle business. And they tallied up how much it cost them, it was like $1,500.

• 1:21:16Speaker 01

  That's incredible.

• 1:21:17David Senra?

  Which I absolutely love. I want to go back, you make some jokes that I, well, maybe they weren't jokes, but I laughed when I heard you say this, that you're like, "I must be a really bad fundraiser." What is this like thousand days of hell? And you talk about this, you're trying to, Joe. And it's weird because the the the metrics in the business were all trending in the positive direction, right?

• 1:21:36Speaker 01

  They were, yeah.

• 1:21:37David Senra?

  So explain what the hell is going on.

• 1:21:38Speaker 01

  Well, so one of the hardest things I think you you learn as a founder and certainly as a CEO is you have to learn how to control your own psychology because there's lots of things that are going to be out of your control and that won't make sense to you. And this happened very early, you know, with DoorDash. I mentioned earlier that we had a difficult time raising the seed round and then this, you know, difficult event at with Stanford Football in which we we ran out of even our money faster, but we survived that. We raised the seed round. Our Series A, Series B were hot rounds, you know, we, I don't know, somehow was able to raise money in less than a week, something like that, in each one of those instances.

• 1:22:21Speaker 01

  But in the spring of 2016, you know, a few things happened and this is probably when I first started learning about the importance of dealing with your own psychology. It was actually the first time I took a vacation. I think it was, so we started the company in, I guess, January 2013, June, January 2013, January of 2016, so about three years or so. So I'm, first vacation, five days with my wife. We didn't go on a honeymoon, so I promised her that that we should we should make up for that. And so we go for five days, I think, to Hawaii. And we were, actually, we had received an inbound term sheet, actually. So things were going pretty well to raise our Series C in the winter of 2015 and the spring of 16.

• 1:23:03Speaker 01

  And I asked, I remember specifically asking the investor, why don't we just close, it's like, you know, why don't we just close this now, like before the year? He's like, no, don't worry about it. You've never taken a vacation. Go, go take, go take your honeymoon. Everything's going to be fine. You know, we're, we're, we're good for it. And I said, okay, all right, I'll, I'll, I'll go with you on this one. You know, my intention and my, my, my style is usually to get things done quickly, but I said, I'll go with you on this one. I owe this to my wife. So we, we go to Hawaii, have a great time, come back in January. And the markets actually tank, the public markets. So that's the first thing that happens. You know, companies at the time, companies I remember, I think it was like LinkedIn when they were still an independent public company or Salesforce, they drop thirty, forty percent,

• 1:23:48Speaker 01

  something like that in value in a matter of like a week or something. All of a sudden analysts and, you know, Twitter at the time, you know, maybe wasn't as big as exit as today, but they had all the commentary about how, oh, this is the beginning of the end, right? Finally, like the bubble's gonna burst. And that very quickly trickles to the private sector, private companies and private financings, where investors start backing out, including from the DoorDash Series C. And so this is the start, I would say, of three years. So, you know, where DoorDash could raise very little money, a fraction of what our

• 1:24:30Speaker 01

  peers could raise, and where we encounter several bouts of almost running out of cash. But you're right, there was this tension internally because, okay, so here we are, it's, the markets are going down. All of a sudden, the narrative for DoorDash was this, you know, really hot company now is a company that can do no right. You can't ever make money, you can't beat all these competitors who are better funded at the time. There was Uber, there was Amazon, who were either coming in or who already were in or announcing, you know, more expansion. And even if you win, you're gonna lose because this is a money-losing business or a forever money-losing business. Those are kind of some of the headlines or the themes behind the headlines.

• 1:25:13Speaker 01

  But at the same instance, you look at the metrics on the inside, and you actually see everything going the direction that you would hope as an entrepreneur. You see repeatability from City A to City B to City C. You see unit economics improving. And the reason why the company was unprofitable is because we were constantly launching new markets. And new markets require investment in the beginning because you're actually paying for drivers to make sure that they can stay on the road even when you have no business. And so... That was what was happening internally. That happened for about three years though. Where we were kind of stuck in this, one of these cycles, macro cycles, investment cycles,

• 1:25:54Speaker 01

  where the company could do no right, the sector was viewed as toxic. And that was certainly, you know, probably the three years in which I certainly had to learn how to deal with my own psychology.

• 1:26:04David Senra?

  So how were you doing that?

• 1:26:06Speaker 01

  There was no one way. I think the first thing is, you have to make sure that, I think a lot of times, it's very easy to believe in your own bullshit. And so the first thing, you know, I think a place like DoorDash, which is very intellectually honest, is, well, what's actually real versus what maybe people are saying? And so, we used to do this because we could fit all in one conference room, the all hands. I would show every metric in the company, including our cash balance, which is obviously going towards the X-axis. And people were getting nervous, but people were asking a very good question, which is, Tony, I don't get it. The cash balance is coming down, but the business is going the opposite direction. It's going up and to the right. And the way that, in a very organic way, we weren't spending, we didn't even have a

• 1:26:51Speaker 01

  marketing team, let alone a marketing budget, we didn't have money. People were very confused. So, job number one to me was actually put the company in the best possible place by focusing on what we could control. Because otherwise, I'm gonna go crazy. I'm gonna go crazy, and we're actually now gonna, you know, put the company in the best chance of success. And so, we got a group of, I think it was maybe 20, 25 people, the people that kind of ran a lot of different important areas, and basically brought them under the tent, said, "Look, we have to do the following. We gotta keep growing and keep taking share. We gotta get more profitable and can't run out of cash." And there's no or in any of these statements. It's an and function across all of these statements.

• 1:27:32Speaker 01

  And that was ultimately what I just kind of kept obsessing over. You know, because if I obsessed over anything else, the markets, or what people were writing about us, or another rejection from an investor, if I just obsessed over what was not in my control, I think I was gonna go certainly nuts. That was, you know, certainly part one, focusing on what I can control. Part two, I think, is, and this is another lesson I learned during those years, is that

• 1:28:00Speaker 01

  I think this can be risky, but I actually think that it's really important and undervalued to have genuine friends at work. And meaning that this can't just be about a financial success, or a commercial success, or some professional success on the resume, that there is this adventure, if you will, that we're on, on this worthy eternal mission, and that at least we're gonna die trying. You're right, worst case, we're gonna die trying, kinda like the Stanford football example day. Yes, of course, we want DoorDash to make it, but what gets you through the next day isn't thinking about DoorDash as much as, I just wanna make you to be successful, like my teammate to be successful.

• 1:28:45Speaker 01

  And so this willingness to think about someone else, in addition to just thinking about your own problems, I think actually made this a bit easier to go through. And then the final thing is, you know, back to trying to find, to build anything out of things that don't change. One thing that I've been able to keep throughout the DoorDash chapter so far is just my exercise routine. So the routine itself has changed, but you know, back then, I was really into running marathons, things like that, just keeping that up, having something that was a bit of a constant in my life, whereas everything else was out of my control, extremely chaotic, usually extremely negative. And then part of the routine was also date nights with my wife. So there was no one thing to answer your question about how to manage my own psychology,

• 1:29:30Speaker 01

  and trust me, I didn't, you know, have my thing all together during every single period. But that was kinda when I look back, what were the things that got me through it? What were the things that I kept trying to tell myself, you know, in my notebook, of what to do every single day? Those were the things.

• 1:29:47David Senra?

  Yeah, you control what you control, and I love this idea of having a mission bigger than yourself.

• 1:29:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:29:51David Senra?

  Because you have this great line where it's like, at some point, willpower is gonna give out. Like, your own personal willpower is gonna give out.

• 1:29:56Speaker 01

  Hundred percent.

• 1:29:57David Senra?

  Especially because you're doing, this is over a thousand days, how many rejections, how many no's you're getting from investors?

• 1:30:01Speaker 01

  I stopped counting after 50, but it was over 100.

• 1:30:05David Senra?

  That's incredible. To this day, though, you don't, I heard, so we have a mutual friend, Robbie Gupta.

• 1:30:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:30:11David Senra?

  And you went on his podcast and you said, I don't look at the stock price. You try to get everybody else not to pay, the company not to pay that much. And he goes, you had to remind me of our market cap because I don't know what it is.

• 1:30:21Speaker 01

  Yes, yes.

• 1:30:22David Senra?

  That's still the case today?

• 1:30:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I, back to the things that I can control. You know, well, I mean, usually our finance team will remind me of the market cap during earnings calls and things like this. But like, but sincerely speaking, it's not something I get to control. And it's also not what is fulfilling or motivating to me. You know, what am I going to do on a daily basis, knowing what the stock price is? Like, am I going to behave, no, I'm not going to behave any differently. I'm probably going to still stick to my routine, which is I'm going to spend time with, you know, our teams that are, you know, trying to make sure that they can hit the year. There's one group and the team that is trying to invent the future, and there's several of those teams. And then with customers, that's how I spend my time.

• 1:31:06David Senra?

  I want to talk about that. I just be remiss not to mention this because again, I don't know why every time I hear you speak and having this conversation with you personally. It's like, there's just so much like Jeff Bezos-esque stuff going on here. I think you already know this, but there was a time in Amazon history where he talks about this. And I think, I don't know what the exact numbers were, but the stock price went from like 180 down to like six. And his whole point, I think he talks about this in his shareholders, I think it dropped like 90% or whatever the number was. And he's like, yeah, but I, they're like, I wasn't focused on the stock price. I was focused on the internal metrics of the business and they were all getting better and better and better and constantly improving. So he's like, I knew this was just, this was temporary, like I will get out of this. I will survive because I'm going in the right direction. What is this idea, you had this saying where you're like, as an operator, you need two management systems. I think you dropped a hint right there in what you said earlier.

• 1:31:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, so if you're so lucky as an entrepreneur to one day find product market fit, where you can organically grow now and build a business that's self-sustaining, that generates cash, in other words, you have the privilege now of making a choice. That choice is, you know, keep doing what I'm doing or to keep expanding in, in service of our mission. And when you look at, I think, and one of the reasons why I think Amazon is inspiring, or a lot of these big tech companies now, actually, is they tend to do two things at the same time. One is they continue to build the core business,

• 1:32:34Speaker 01

  the business that kind of got them to their place, both in terms of their place with customers, in terms of what they're known for, as well as their financial place where they can invest from. But they also do new things. And they launch the next thing, or the next thing, or they're trying to create the next thing. And those are two very different systems. One system is about making sure that you can constantly reinvent yourself, almost. You're trying to build the next version of the product to disrupt yourself, to build something that is 10 times better than what you have today, while you're also running the machine at the same time. So it's like you are flying the airplane. It's a big airplane. You're carrying lots of passengers,

• 1:33:19Speaker 01

  and you're going to do a mid-air engine transplant. Right? That's one type of system that you're constantly trying to build. And then there's new stuff. It's not even an airplane. It's like a paper-stick airplane. It's like a paper airplane. There are no passengers, no nothing. You're in search of product-market fit all over again. And they require different ways in which you measure success. They require usually different talent. They require a different amount of resourcing. They have vastly different timelines in terms of rate of progress. And they tend to have a lot larger air bounds on some of these newer areas. And it's really hard to do because the more successful your big airplane is,

• 1:34:03Speaker 01

  the more probably paper airplanes you're going to have to have. And they may be very expensive, some of those paper airplanes that you're going to build. Because you need more shots on goal to keep up this big business that you're trying to move in service of your mission.

• 1:34:23David Senra?

  So the people scaling the businesses in DoorDash that are post-product-market fit?

• 1:34:27Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 1:34:27David Senra?

  Right? And then the inventors, do you separate these people in the company?

• 1:34:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, we try to.

• 1:34:32David Senra?

  Okay.

• 1:34:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, we try to.

• 1:34:33David Senra?

  Separate buildings?

• 1:34:33Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 1:34:35David Senra?

  No, no, I was just saying, do you even take it to that extreme? Like, separate them physically? Like, how do you do this?

• 1:34:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, usually that happens. But that, I don't know if is as important as... You need very different goals, goaling systems and incentive systems. And that is probably more important than physically necessarily where they are per se. You know, DoorDash today also operates in more than 40 countries. So it's tough to get every single person in exactly the same location. But it's very important, though, to separate how you actually track, manage, measure, incentivize these projects. And so that's more what I'm referring to.

• 1:35:17David Senra?

  Are you making these decisions about like, we're going to allocate this amount of resources, this amount of time, this amount of people to these experiments? Like, how do you actually structure this?

• 1:35:24Speaker 01

  Yes and no. If I had to make every single decision, I mean, DoorDash would certainly move a lot slower than we would want to move.

• 1:35:34Speaker 01

  But certainly, I have to set the standards and the pace, if you will. You know, that's kind of what I view a lot of my job. And so usually, how it works is, well, first of all, anyone should be able to come up with an idea. It can't be somehow that only the leaders come up with the idea. Usually, it's the people closest to the problems that actually come up with the ideas or have the ideas. And if they can run an experiment, back to this process, that actually demonstrates some viability of success, that customers actually want this product, then it starts entering the phase where we can evaluate whether or not we should actually pursue it during our planning process.

• 1:36:16Speaker 01

  And through the planning process, then we decide, okay, well, how many chips should we bet in Project A versus B versus C? And some projects, look, they're not all starting at the same time. Some projects are older. Some projects just got born. And so it's almost like an internal venture system, if you will, where it's stage gated. There is no, oh, you get all the money upfront, and no. You kind of have to earn your right to the next stage. And that's going to be based on how well you're solving that customer problem.

• 1:36:49David Senra?

  Where'd you get that idea from? This internal stage gating, like essentially trading it as like internal venture capital?

• 1:36:54Speaker 01

  Well, I, you know, a lot of it came from DoorDash's own history where DoorDash kind of worked this way, right? And maybe some of it wasn't in the exact formulation we wanted, but that's how DoorDash was born. You know, you started with little resources or not a lot.

• 1:37:13Speaker 01

  And as we got progressively more successful or discovered more product market fit, we were given more resources. And to me, when I think about the things that we built that were the most,

• 1:37:29Speaker 01

  that most solved customer problems, it tended to be when we were most resource constrained.

• 1:37:34Speaker 01

  And it's just, so I do feel like that's important to know whether, because the most important thing, again, when you're starting something is, do you really have something? Or are you just, you know, believing that you have something? And you don't get to make that call as the inventor. It's the customers that you're inventing for that ultimately are going to tell you whether or not they're going to buy or not. And so that's the most important thing. We're trying to make sure that we actually can create something that is 10 times better than the status quo. And then if we can do that, yeah, of course, we'll keep scaling. Now, some projects cost more money to start, but that's just the nature of the problem. But we're still, relative to its size, giving it a small amount of budget to begin with.

• 1:38:17David Senra?

  Are you also learning from your peers? Like, the reason I ask is because we just did, I think, one of the episodes I'm most proud of so far for this new show is the one we did with Toby Luque.

• 1:38:25Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:38:26David Senra?

  And I was really excited to talk to Toby because I'm constantly asking world-class founders, who are you learning from? Toby's like your favorite founder's favorite founder. And his name kept coming up over and over again. And that was the conversation I had where it's like, you ask a question and you cannot predict what's going to come out of his mouth next. Because he has all these like uncorrelated ideas, which makes for a very fascinating conversation. So like, what are, who are the people that like you've either built relationships with or you've like studied like your peer group that you're also like learning from and like taking ideas from?

• 1:38:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, I mean, I mean, you're right, Toby's actually great. And well, first of all,

• 1:39:03Speaker 01

  Some of the peers I have are just people that I grew up with. Right? Like if you think like one of the benefits, which we didn't get into, was one of the benefits of, you know, Y Combinator, besides being a forcing function of whether or not, of testing our commitment, you know, to the project, was actually the peer group, which we never got into that part, where, you know, if you think about like the 2010s, right? So the companies that grew out of Y Combinator that we kind of grew alongside with, maybe we were slightly in different batches, or, you know, not exactly in the same, but whether it was the Airbnbs, Stripe, Coinbase, we all kind of grew up in the same era, if you will. And so as a result, got to know each other through, you know, different events and venues

• 1:39:46Speaker 01

  and things like this, but trading notes, you know, with one another, I think certainly was, and we've all had our shares of, you know, challenges and triumphs. And then looking at companies that are ahead of us, right? You know, in my not a job, in my other job, I play a small role in Meta's part, where I serve on the board, learning from, you know, founders like Mark, who certainly have built companies that are at a different level of scale versus where DoorDash is at.

• 1:40:18David Senra?

  Let's stay on Mark for a second, because we were talking before we recorded. I got to spend some time with him. I've had a few conversations with him and came across like even more impressed than I thought I would be, given the fact that for his age, he doesn't really have a peer. And I actually told him that. So I was like, I wish you did more podcasts and talked about how you built a company that no one else your age is ever remotely close to. But like, what are some things that you, like you're on the board, what are some things that you've learned from observing him?

• 1:40:42Speaker 01

  Well, I think the first thing that impresses me a lot about Mark is this willingness to always learn new things. I think one of the traps, if you will, of success, or fighting your own psychology, is actually not just the challenging parts about that when things aren't going well, but it's also when after things go well. And maybe you actually have achieved some milestone. And one of the trappings of success is actually wanting to hold on to it. And what you see in someone like Mark and the team, I would argue, at Meta, is this willingness to reinvent themselves. Betting early, for example, on building a different platform in the case of, you know,

• 1:41:27Speaker 01

  virtual reality augments your reality. Obviously, they're going all in on AI. And those things take a ton of courage. There's not a lot of data, you know, early on in a, either a platform shift or a new technology's arrival to know whether or not you're on the right track all the time. But you gotta place the bets, you know, before you can see the success. And I think that that willingness to learn a new domain where you're the rookie, where you're gonna stumble, where you're gonna get criticized, misunderstood, you don't know the answer, which is the opposite, if you will, of the successes maybe that they came

• 1:42:11Speaker 01

  from in terms of the previous businesses they've created. That is really impressive. That willingness to always be the beginner, to always go in the arena and sweat and bleed and toil and struggle. That's really impressive.

• 1:42:29David Senra?

  You both share a love of jiu-jitsu. Have you found anything from your jiu-jitsu practice that, like, you brought back to your day job?

• 1:42:38Speaker 01

  Well, jiu-jitsu is a fascinating activity. I mean, it is, it's like some version of physical chess.

• 1:42:50David Senra?

  That's a great way to think about it.

• 1:42:51Speaker 01

  And it's almost like an exercise where there's so many opposites that you have to hold at the same time. The best jiu-jitsu athletes can both be extremely firm and strong, yet at the same time extremely relaxed. They're very capable of being intentional with their game plan, but then give up and release their agenda within a nanosecond if they see that they're losing their position.

• 1:43:18Speaker 01

  I think the willingness of how to be so flexible is certainly something that I think I'm trying to teach both myself and my personal life and also bring that back to DoorDash. I think the other thing is just, you know, no different, I think, from frankly, any craft, the willingness to just get 1% better every day in a particular position, any particular flexibility exercise to actually just improve your balance in order to hold a position. Very small things ultimately compound when you look at the elite athletes, not someone

• 1:43:58Speaker 01

  like myself, but the elite jujitsu practitioners who win the world championships or who win medals at events, they all have that. And when you actually talk to them about their craft, it's the tiny details, it's the edges of a move. It's actually not some, you know, silver bullet that they're looking for in a match or something like that. In fact, actually, these matches at the most competitive levels are decided by, sometimes not even points, they're decided by like what are called advantages. And that is, you know, one thing that I think is just a great reminder that you always have to be trying to master that craft.

• 1:44:37David Senra?

  I have to ask you about how AI is changing the way that you guys are running the business. You have this great line where you said, "I think some of the technical advances like AI have given people new ways to run companies."

• 1:44:46Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:44:47David Senra?

  How are you using it? What are you doing? How's it affecting your work?

• 1:44:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, it changes by the month. So I, this is a, this is a question that if we were to talk, you know, in the future, I'm not sure it'd be actually the same answer. Well, one of the first things I would say is, you know, I think about some of the systems that we've architected here, about how you can learn from doing things that don't scale all the way to shipping, especially with something like coding. Right now, I think where the agents are, they're, they're still good at what I call, you know, functional tasks, for example, coding. But outside of coding and looking at cross-functional areas,

• 1:45:31Speaker 01

  they're not quite there yet, for a lot of reasons. But, but within something like coding, the things that you could do today.

• 1:45:40Speaker 01

  Where anyone, actually, frankly, it doesn't have to be anyone of any function. Anyone can come up with an idea, run the prototype, run the experimentation and the analysis, and then actually ship to a small group of people, all by themselves. That is very impressive, and that collapses, if you will, you know, the amount of activity required, or speeds up the learning loop you can have in any scientific process inside your company that touches code. That's very cool. Second, LLMs, you know, what are they good at that humans are not good at, or less good at?

• 1:46:25Speaker 01

  Well, they can have almost infinite memory and infinite context and search across any sort of file. Okay, so then the question becomes, how do you actually feed it the right information? And if you can feed it the right information, it probably can do a lot better than humans can at the same activity. So I think those are two areas in which, whether it's speeding up your learning processes or actually improving the same activities right now that are effectively manually done, to be done with higher, not just efficiency, but also effectiveness.

• 1:47:01David Senra?

  Would there be any benefit for you, like partnering with one of the big model companies with all the physical data that you guys collecting, or would you keep that proprietary?

• 1:47:09Speaker 01

  Most of the information to run, you know, DoorDash to be a great service, you know, are things that we use for ourselves. And the reason why we use them for ourselves is because it's not just that simple, like, oh, we just give away information and then somehow someone's going to be able to do something positive with it. You also have to take the action that the data kind of suggests. For example, if the data says something is missing in this order.

• 1:47:36Speaker 01

  Or the dasher is at the wrong location and cannot find the customer. Let's say that those are all parts of, you know, pieces of information. Some corresponding action has to take place in order to actually solve the end to end job, in order to get the item that was missing, or in order to actually find the customer, you know, where the dasher is. And, and so a lot of DoorDash is, sure, we have a lot of information, but we have to do something productive because it's the end to end job that ultimately, you know, we get judged on with customers. And so if we can partner with anyone, frankly, in order to solve the end to end problem better, of course, we would do that. But I think it's very hard sometimes to just give away something if there is no ability

• 1:48:19Speaker 01

  to, you know, correspond that with action that ultimately will solve some customer's problem.

• 1:48:24David Senra?

  I think what a wild ride you're on. Like you start the company and your competitors are literally using fax machines to now we're in like the age of AI.

• 1:48:33Speaker 01

  It's incredible in 13 years.

• 1:48:36David Senra?

  Yeah, and I love this quote, and it will end here, but you have this great quote where he's like, "There's just no better way to be an expert than to just do the work. You might be surprised at how quickly you get to become the expert."

• 1:48:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:48:48David Senra?

  That's beautiful. Thank you very much for the time, Tony. I think we just like scratched service. I think there's a lot of things that you said today that I haven't heard anywhere else. I'd love if you'd just come back on every, you know, a few months, every year, whenever you want.

• 1:48:58Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 1:48:59David Senra?

  It was fun. Thanks for having time.

• 1:49:01Speaker 01

  Thanks, David.

• 1:49:02David Senra?

  I hope you enjoyed this episode. Please remember to subscribe wherever you're listening and leave a review. And make sure you listen to my other podcast, Founders. For almost a decade, I've obsessively read over 400 biographies of history's greatest entrepreneurs, searching for ideas that you can use in your work. Most of the guests you hear on this show first found me through Founders.