DoorDash CEO: Customer Obsession, Surviving Startup Death & Creating A New Market

0:00 There's no better way to be the expert than just to do the work.

0:05 You might be surprised at how quickly you get to become the expert.

0:09 We're here to build a company that will grow and empower every physical business

0:15 and grow the GDP of every city if we are successful in doing so.

0:19 That's not going to happen in 1 year, 2 years, 5 years, 10 years.

0:22 That hopefully can be a forever or an eternal mission.

0:26 There are moments whether it's the start

0:27 of the company or a crisis situation like

0:30 co 19 where it becomes very clear why you're doing what you're doing or should

0:34 be very clear to you why you're doing what you're doing and when you have

0:37 that kind of clarity it makes it a lot easier to make those [Music] decisions.

0:45 Welcome back to another episode of how to build the future.

0:50 Today's guest, Tony Shu, who created Door Dash,

0:53 which now has mid60% of all food delivery in the United States.

1:00 Tony, welcome.

1:02 Thank you.

1:02 You actually mentioned you had, you know, two or three other ideas, you know,

1:06 how did you arrive on this particular one and what disqualified the other ones?

1:11 There were two important things.

1:12 One was that uh if we decided that we enjoyed working together,

1:18 we're going to keep going.

1:19 And two um was whether or not we actually liked

1:23 the idea of the project enough to to keep going

1:27 and and we we called it a project I think for the entire first year

1:30 of the company's life even after legally incorporating.

1:34 So, one of the projects, for example,

1:36 that we worked on that met one of the criteria but didn't

1:38 meet the other was a tablet app that would sit at the counter,

1:42 so at at the point of sale register,

1:45 and would ask customers while they were paying for whatever items they

1:48 were purchasing um where they had heard about this retailer or this restaurant.

1:54 And it was just a very simple um you know survey and reporting app

2:00 that basically uh helped uh merchants figure

2:03 out the effectiveness of their marketing spend.

2:07 We loved working together.

2:09 We didn't love working on that particular project and that uh turned out

2:14 to be something that we we canled when it came to Door Dash.

2:19 Um, the initial idea really came when we visited a macaroon store owner.

2:27 Our question that we tended to ask business owners was,

2:30 can we follow you um around for a day?

2:32 So, we'll go and pack boxes with you,

2:35 do your accounting with you, make salads with you, and what undercover?

2:39 Well, we wanted to actually feel what it was like

2:42 their lived experience versus just asking a bunch of survey questions.

2:46 Sometimes it's very very hard for any customer to tell you exactly

2:50 what is inside their brain when you ask them what problems they have.

2:54 And so we wanted to feel

2:55 and and and and maybe trying to figure it out ourselves.

2:58 And it was toward the end of the time we spent with the store

3:02 manager that she had showed us a booklet of orders she had turned down.

3:06 All of them were delivery orders.

3:07 That was the comment and thread.

3:10 And it just made no sense to us.

3:12 We said, "You're a oneperson shop.

3:15 this is a big deal.

3:16 This is a thick booklet of orders that um probably is very meaningful to you.

3:21 We don't understand why you're not pursuing it.

3:23 And so we really just unraveled that thread.

3:26 As we kept, you know, studying this problem,

3:29 we just found more and more interesting threads of where it would go.

3:32 Um, yes, certainly we could have done

3:34 delivery just for this macaroon store owner,

3:36 but then you can imagine you could do it for all bakeries,

3:40 all types of restaurants, all types of retailers.

3:44 And we started, you know, hearing the need um from so many different

3:49 merchants that we we knew there was something there.

3:51 What we didn't know was whether or not consumers cared and whether

3:54 or not there could be a driver workforce that we could partner with.

3:58 And so those turned out to be the key things we worked on at YC.

4:02 And you also met your co-founders um uh partially through Stanford, was it?

4:06 Yeah, the GSP was was an interesting, you know, time for me.

4:10 I mean, I um it it I I I applied on the recommendation of uh

4:16 one of my mentors at um at eBay at the time who was the CEO,

4:20 John Dano at the time.

4:21 And um he thought that it would be great for my personal development.

4:24 So that was really that was kind of the thesis.

4:27 Um and and so I didn't go into Stanford, in other words,

4:30 trying to think about starting a company or or even looking for co-founders.

4:34 That was very fertuitous.

4:36 Um meeting Andy Stanley and Evan.

4:38 Um Evan turned out to be a a roommate

4:41 and and and that was just purely from a social circumstance.

4:44 Andy and Stanley were roommates at the undergrad.

4:47 We happened to meet.

4:48 We worked on different projects together.

4:50 It wasn't intended to necessarily over time become a company

4:53 or anything like this, but that's really how we got started.

4:56 At what point did you decide to apply to YC?

4:59 While we were in school.

5:00 So we we we actually the first two weeks of the summer batch

5:03 of 2013 uh were the last couple weeks of our time at Stanford.

5:08 So we had a few weeks of overlap or a couple weeks of overlap.

5:11 I remember very specifically my classmates or some of our classmates, you know,

5:16 planning their exotic vacations to Europe or other

5:19 um interesting areas for for the summer.

5:22 And when they asked me what I would be doing,

5:24 I said I'd be delivering hummus for my Honda.

5:26 It was a very different type of uh answer.

5:30 But yeah, you know, we had a lot of fun.

5:32 I mean, the the the the earliest days all four of us did all the deliveries.

5:36 It was called Palo Alto Delivery previously.

5:39 Yeah.

5:39 Yeah.

5:39 A super scalable name, but a name we were able to get for less than $10.

5:45 Yeah.

5:45 We shipped um powtodely.com under an hour.

5:50 I don't remember exactly but maybe 4550 minutes because

5:53 all it was was a static uh HTML page with eight PDF menus and these were menus

6:01 of restaurants in Powalto that we frequented often as students.

6:06 It had a Google voice number you can call.

6:08 That's how you would place the orders.

6:09 There were no other way in which you can order.

6:11 Once you call that number,

6:12 it would ring the cell phones of all four of our our all four of the founders

6:16 um cell phones and whoever picked up first would

6:19 be the one to take care of that order.

6:21 Amazing.

6:22 What was it like to interview at YC get in and then

6:25 I know Paul Bukite did a lot of work with you actually creat

6:29 was was our um group partner and I think he took a personal

6:33 affinity to us because he really wanted us to exist where he lived.

6:37 Yeah.

6:37 and we we hadn't yet we only operated in Palo Alto at the time

6:41 um not yet where where he lived which was a neighboring city.

6:44 YC was intense.

6:45 You know, for us, the reason why we did YC

6:48 was we really wanted to keep going on this project.

6:50 And to us, YC was a bit of an accountability mechanism.

6:54 One of the biggest things we learned, you know,

6:56 from all of the different partners at YC was really just what's important,

7:01 you know, in the earliest days versus what's not important.

7:04 The ethos in in YC was fantastic, I think,

7:07 for for certainly a group that um wanted a structured

7:11 place to find uh guidance on whether or not, you know, we were on to something.

7:16 Two things you had to figure out, supply and uh actually consumer demand.

7:22 Yeah.

7:22 So driver supply and consumer demand.

7:24 What was that like you know sort of over the 10 12 weeks?

7:27 Yeah.

7:28 So the number one thing we were we were very

7:30 scared about was whether or not consumers would want this product.

7:33 And it's because delivery is not a new idea.

7:36 It's been around since horses.

7:38 It's been around forever.

7:39 And and so um and obviously the US is a very highly capitalistic market.

7:45 So if something doesn't exist, maybe there's a good reason why it doesn't.

7:50 And so we wanted to make sure um from the get-go

7:53 whether or not consumers would pay us for the service.

7:56 So that was one big question.

7:57 The other was whether or not we knew that restaurants had a need for it.

8:00 We didn't know if they would pay us.

8:01 Um that was the second you know pillar and then the third was whether

8:05 or not uh there would exist drivers who would actually want access to this.

8:09 And so early on uh we did all the deliveries.

8:12 One of the best parts of doing all the deliveries

8:14 besides teaching us what are all of the steps

8:17 within a delivery is what customers wanted and our earliest

8:22 customers tended to be uh families with young children.

8:26 it tended to be the mom who um ma made a majority

8:30 of the decisions when it came to to meal prep and food.

8:33 And so they told us what they wanted.

8:35 They told us what was important.

8:37 They told us what restaurants we that they preferred.

8:40 Um and but the most important thing was that they

8:43 kept coming back in again without our throwing advertising at them,

8:47 coupons or discounts at them.

8:50 um that kind of gave us the check mark, if you will, on growing organically.

8:54 Um on the consumer front with drivers, because we did every single delivery,

9:01 um it was very easy to speak knowledgeably um uh about uh what it would be.

9:07 So, we would just post ads on Craigslist,

9:10 see who shows up, and then started filtering different segments of drivers.

9:14 That was one where we weren't necessarily sure whether or not there would ever

9:19 exist a large enough um workforce interested in in in this type of work.

9:25 One of the questions we had asked ourselves was would drivers

9:28 only be interested in working for a platform that pays the most?

9:33 Because obviously it's going to be more valuable

9:35 to transport Gary than to transport a burrito.

9:39 And so one of the earliest tests we ran was we recruited two groups of drivers.

9:43 Um, roughly speaking, 20 drivers who drove for Uber X at the time

9:48 and 20 who uh delivered for Door Dash.

9:51 The control, if you will,

9:53 variable was that they both earned $20, uh, an hour each group.

9:58 I made them an offer to uh,

10:00 work for $25 an hour um, guaranteed if they were to switch jobs.

10:05 if the Door Dash drivers would go over to Uber

10:07 X and Uber X drivers would come over to Door Dash.

10:09 Exactly one driver out of two groups of 20, so one out of 40 said yes.

10:14 Now, this wasn't a very scientific study,

10:16 but clearly we were missing something or I was missing

10:19 something and it was actually staring me right in the face,

10:21 which was these were very different groups of people.

10:24 They self- selected completely differently.

10:27 And um you know on the Door Dash side um we tended to skew younger,

10:32 we tended to skew more female.

10:34 And so today Door Dash has over 7 million drivers in on the platform.

10:40 Of these dashers, this the drivers on the platform almost 60% are women.

10:46 Today they literally come from every part of the economy.

10:50 Um hundreds of industries represented back then.

10:53 Uh they tended to skew younger.

10:55 they tended to skew um from segments like retail or um universities and the like

11:02 um or service jobs um and and and they didn't always deliver in a car.

11:07 You know, sometimes they preferred uh working on their scooter or working

11:10 on their bicycle or working on their mo from their motorcycle.

11:13 Very very different um from the ride sharing or the ride hailing segment.

11:17 I think that was one of the key experiments

11:19 I remember running in YC that gave us enough confidence.

11:22 We didn't certainly know, you know, how large the the the Dasher pool might be,

11:27 but gave us enough confidence that we had

11:29 positive answers that consumers would pay for this product,

11:33 merchants, the restaurants would pay for this product

11:35 because I sold them doortodoor and after

11:38 running this experiment that there would be

11:40 enough of a driver pool to partner with.

11:43 And then what was that demo day experience like?

11:45 Well, we felt great internally as a team where we answered our own questions

11:51 that those three questions because you know

11:53 to us the most important thing was that was

11:55 this project worth continuing forgetting about you

11:57 know you know the circumstance of demo day

11:59 or or how awesome of an opportunity it was to get in front of investors?

12:03 Can we prove to ourselves that this is worth continuing?

12:07 The answer was yes.

12:08 Demo day however was not successful.

12:12 I don't know exactly where we stacked ranked that day,

12:15 but we certainly weren't amongst the favorites.

12:18 Um, and and it was really tough.

12:20 I mean, the company almost went out of business because uh, you know,

12:23 we didn't we didn't raise raise a lot of money from Y Cominator uh,

12:27 with the initial grant and so we were looking for seed financing

12:30 and we were we were a couple weeks away from going to zero.

12:34 I think at the time people um, just weren't sure if this would be a business.

12:40 Yes, we had great um metrics.

12:43 Yes, we had positive evidence, you know,

12:46 to each side of our marketplace in terms

12:48 of uh thinking about whether or not they would participate.

12:51 Um but it was 10 weeks of data.

12:55 And so at the end of the day, if you were an investor looking at Door

12:59 Dash on demo day or anywhere near demo day, it would be a conviction bet.

13:03 Be a conviction bet on the team on that there would be a potential market.

13:07 You know, I think one of the things people missed early on was

13:10 that Door Dash was really in the business of creating a market.

13:15 There were there were 20,000 maybe restaurants offering delivery

13:19 at the time and that's who incumbents would work with, you know,

13:22 the GrubHubs or the Seamlesses.

13:24 They would partner with these restaurants that had

13:26 their own delivery fleet and they would, you know, just send them an order

13:29 and the restaurants would complete the deliveries themselves.

13:33 But the question we always asked was,

13:34 if you could build a last mile logistics network for every retailer,

13:39 well, could you open up everybody else?

13:42 There's about rough math, a million restaurants um in the US.

13:47 Only 20,000 of them offer delivery.

13:49 What would happen if you can enable the other 980,000 to do it?

13:53 So, Door Dash actually almost died, I guess,

13:56 after a Stanford football game in the fall of uh 2013.

14:00 We did.

14:01 Can you tell that story?

14:02 Yeah.

14:02 So, it was the first Saturday home game for Stanford football and it

14:06 was at an awkward time where after the ending of the game,

14:10 everybody in PaloAlto decided to order Door Dash for restaurant delivery.

14:15 Normally a good thing.

14:16 Normally a great thing.

14:17 You know, no one usually complains of too much demand except when

14:21 you have no ability to fulfill the demand or to shut off,

14:24 you know, the website that kept receiving these orders

14:27 when you didn't have enough drivers on the road.

14:29 So, that became the complication.

14:31 What ended up happening was every delivery was at least an hour late,

14:35 probably more like an hour and a half.

14:37 It was terrible.

14:38 And we also at the time or I at the time could not raise any seed financing.

14:44 So you got the cash going to zero.

14:47 You have hundreds of customers very upset because they

14:50 either received cold food or received very very late deliveries.

14:54 I remember that night, maybe 9 or 10 p.m.,

14:57 my co-founders and I looking at what the refund cost would be

15:01 because we thought the right thing to do would be to refund everybody,

15:04 but that would take away about 40% of the bank account,

15:07 which was already quite low.

15:09 We took maybe 10 seconds to make the decision to refund everybody.

15:13 We ended up staying up that night and then baked

15:15 cookies so that we could deliver them at around 5:00 a.m.

15:18 before everybody had woken up.

15:21 Oh my god.

15:21 That was an early story that ultimately, you know,

15:24 became the story that translated

15:28 to our internal company value of customer obsessed, not competitor focused.

15:33 And this is partially survival bias,

15:36 but um I think the the the founding team always had this desire

15:41 to at least do things the right way even if we wouldn't have made it.

15:46 Well, so what happened like the in the following

15:49 weeks like you know how did you get yourself out

15:51 of this sort of situation where the bank account is

15:54 dwindling yet I mean seemingly business is booming in some sense.

15:58 Business is doing actually really remarkable.

16:00 We've had a few occasions like

16:01 this in the history of Door Dash where business is

16:04 actually going really well organically on its own

16:08 without the aid of marketing spend or discounts.

16:11 Um yet I can't raise a dime.

16:14 And so I don't know what that says about my fundraising ability, but you know,

16:18 l l l l l l l l l l l l l l l l l

16:18 l l l luckily all you need is one investor to say yes and that's what happened.

16:21 So a couple weeks after the Stanford incident

16:24 uh in September we raised our seed financing.

16:27 You were not the only player.

16:29 there were others especially in urban areas there started to be a price

16:32 war you know talk to me about how you approached that like because you

16:36 took a very sort of contrarian view of it and uh ended up

16:40 mainly focusing on suburbs instead of fighting

16:43 it out in sort of battleground cities.

16:45 One of the things that we noticed at the time was,

16:47 you're right, it was a crowded space.

16:49 Lots of people more successful at raising capital than we were.

16:52 Um, they all went into perhaps the expected geographies,

16:58 the San Francisco, the New Yorks, the um areas where people thought you needed

17:05 order density in order to make the economics work.

17:08 So, it was all hail, you know, city centers that had high population density.

17:14 But because we had done all the deliveries

17:16 ourselves and we actually kept that going for about

17:19 2 years um straight after and even to this day um every person at Door Dash,

17:25 myself included, does deliveries every year.

17:27 We kept hearing over and again that the need

17:30 was very very strong outside of these city centers.

17:33 It makes sense when you actually take a step

17:35 back to think about it from the customer's perspective.

17:37 If you and I lived in New York City

17:38 or and we walked outside of the elevator of the building,

17:43 we probably could walk into hundreds of restaurants

17:46 in a place outside in New York City,

17:49 Long Island for example, or you know, when we launched here in Palo Alto,

17:54 you would be walking for miles probably

17:56 before you would see the first restaurant.

17:59 And so from the customer's perspective, not from, you know,

18:03 a unit economics perspective or anything like that, um it was quite obvious

18:08 that um the need was higher in these places outside of city centers.

18:13 And I think that always became, you know,

18:16 a a a um a general mantra we had whenever we were in question of what to build.

18:23 Listen to the customer, run the test.

18:26 And that was certainly one of the things, you know,

18:29 early on that we made a very large bet

18:31 on that if this industry were to be created,

18:34 it would actually be created outside of the city centers.

18:37 If you looked back over the last 10 or 12 years in this industry, um,

18:42 you know, the majority of the growth

18:43 came from these places outside of city centers.

18:46 Obviously, we didn't have the data to prove it at the time,

18:48 but what we did have, uh, was the conviction in doing these deliveries ourselves

18:52 that there was a chance that could be true.

18:54 So I mean that's fascinating.

18:56 I you know from the outside it always felt like oh well logically speaking

19:00 like somehow maybe gross margin would be higher or you know CAC would be

19:04 lower in the suburban areas and somehow like from the spreadsheet view some sort

19:09 of like quantbased analysis would cause you to you know sort of choose suburbs.

19:13 But what I'm hearing is actually certainly that might have been true

19:17 but like being super customer obsessed was like the number one reason.

19:22 Well, it was the number one reason of how it happened.

19:24 But actually, if you got into the PNL

19:27 where I think the details would surprise you,

19:30 where in the um places outside of city centers,

19:33 the suburbs, you tended to have um a greater percentage of families,

19:38 which have more mouths to feed.

19:40 As a result, you tended to have higher baskets.

19:42 Higher baskets meant larger revenues.

19:45 You also tended to have easier ways to find parking.

19:48 you tended to have a greater percentage of single family homes which

19:52 made it easier to you know deliver whereas you can imagine you

19:56 contrast that by going into a high-rise building in downtown Manhattan

20:00 or something like this and that would be a much more complicated delivery

20:03 when we studied it you know line by line by line

20:06 actually the unit economics were much stronger outside of the city centers

20:10 and that wasn't the first instinct you know the first instinct was just

20:14 listening to what the customers had told us um where the need does,

20:18 but it was very easy to prove out very very quickly, you know,

20:22 thereafter every line on the line item on on the unit economic spreadsheet

20:26 of how it could be even better if we did a good job.

20:31 You just continued to grow.

20:32 You kept you raised, you know, multiple rounds of funding.

20:35 Your series C was actually a down round.

20:37 What was that like?

20:38 You know, you're growing the business,

20:39 raising more money, you know, you're fighting off competitors,

20:43 you know, how did you manage that and what was that experience like?

20:47 It was very tough.

20:48 I mean because on the one hand you see

20:50 all of the internal metrics going in the right direction.

20:52 You're growing organically.

20:54 You're growing quite quickly organically.

20:57 You see that the market is perhaps larger than you expect.

21:00 These are all the positive signs on one side of the equation.

21:05 And on the other hand, um to your point,

21:07 we're also investing in scale because this is a business where

21:12 um you need enough order volume to make the math work.

21:16 To get there, you have to invest before you get the demand.

21:20 And so we needed to raise capital.

21:22 And there were a couple there were a few years actually in a row,

21:24 three years in a row, 2016, 17, 18,

21:26 where I continued to struggle to raise capital.

21:29 And I think this was the part that was

21:30 quite difficult for us where you have a company whose

21:34 product seems to be moving in the right direction

21:37 across any metric anyway you want to cut the data.

21:41 On the flip side you know I'm

21:43 receiving hundreds of rejections um for investment.

21:47 I think this was this was certainly one of the most difficult periods um

21:52 so far that we've had to overcome from the outside like having never been

21:55 fully a growth investor in theory it

21:58 should be deterministic like mechanically what the growth

22:00 investor should be doing is well I get to look at this data room

22:04 I get to look at this other data room they certainly give the indication

22:06 that like they have you know a sense for what is normal in the market

22:11 and yet they were just like wrong about you well I think one

22:16 of the things I've learned that's tough

22:17 for an investor is knowing when to invest.

22:21 And I think that it's really easy to invest when

22:25 the numbers are clear and that you know the story of repeatable

22:29 profitable growth has happened enough times where you just believe

22:34 and then there are moments where it's just before that moment.

22:38 And I think for Door Dash 2016, 17, 18,

22:42 a lot of those times or moments were just before that moment.

22:45 It's not an a game that's just measured on your own scores.

22:50 It it's a relative score um in in some ways,

22:54 especially when a market hasn't been yet defined

22:56 or that it's not obvious who the winner is.

22:59 Investors were were a bit gunshy because they saw lots of people going for it,

23:04 people who are better capitalized.

23:06 While Door Dash may have had very strong numbers,

23:08 it wasn't obvious that it would merge as the largest player.

23:11 I mean the amazing thing is you came out

23:13 of like sort of the capital as a bludgeon phase uh

23:16 as actually the winner like by 2019 you actually had

23:20 surpassed Uber Eats and GrubHub and you became the category leader.

23:25 Well, all you need is one investor to say yes.

23:28 And so in 2018 when we raised our series D in March,

23:33 it was obvious to the team internally what was going to happen next.

23:37 Everyone can have an opinion about um their product versus,

23:41 you know, the fields, but one of the hardest things to to really fool

23:46 is the retention and the engagement of a of a product.

23:50 And because Door Dash um always had superior retention and frequency,

23:57 every dollar that we spent would just go a lot farther for us than anyone else.

24:01 And so when we received the capital to actually

24:04 be able to invest and launch all the geographies,

24:07 it was just a matter of time before

24:08 Door Dash would get to the um largest position.

24:12 So fast forward a little bit.

24:13 I mean at the start of COVID delivery demand

24:16 cratered and then skyrocketed and you cut commissions in half.

24:20 You ran a TV campaign that advertised your competitors.

24:23 What gave you conviction about that?

24:26 What you know what was that period like?

24:28 Co was a bit of a blur.

24:29 COVID 2020 was a bit of a blur.

24:32 Um we were actually in 2019 preparing you know to go public.

24:37 Obviously CO um sheld those plans but but you know CO was probably next to 2013.

24:46 So the the the co year 2020 that is next to 2013

24:49 was probably the year where it felt most like Door Dash in YC.

24:55 you know, it was seven days a week, 10:00 a.m.

24:57 to 2 am, all hands on deck, you know, multiple,

25:01 you know, all company, you know, uh, uh, meetings per day.

25:05 And sometimes in in crisis, I actually find that it's a lot easier operating

25:08 a company because it's very clear what to do.

25:11 Number one, job number one, keep everyone safe, right?

25:14 Get tens of millions of units of PPE.

25:17 Make sure that we can ship no contact delivery or contactless delivery.

25:20 We ship that product in four or five days.

25:23 Number two, got to make sure that everybody gets liquid.

25:26 Why?

25:27 Because the average merchant has 17 days of cash on hand.

25:32 So every hour of cash is I is very very important.

25:37 Same thing for Dashers um who who um a lot of them are f furoughed

25:41 or or laid off um because of COVID and and so getting them instant liquidity.

25:46 The third thing was making sure that we

25:49 could take care of the community actually.

25:51 And so we partnered with dozens of the largest hospital networks um from UCSF

25:56 or Stanford here in in California to Mount Sinai on the east coast where

26:01 we wanted to make sure that all the hospital workers and and nurses um

26:05 you know could get free delivery and also

26:09 because they were doing the hardest jobs.

26:11 Um it was very easy to run the company.

26:13 Now, you called out a couple of decisions

26:15 that were made that were more controversial in the company.

26:18 One was running a national TV campaign where we

26:20 spent millions of dollars advertising on behalf of the industry,

26:24 basically saying whether you order on us or any of our peers, just order.

26:28 You know, the dining rooms may be closed, but the kitchens are open.

26:31 Um, and the other decision, which we were the only platform to do,

26:35 we cut our commissions by half, which cost us over $und00 million.

26:38 Now, these things sound inconsequential um when

26:42 you look at our balance sheet today.

26:43 Back then, Door Dash was not profitable.

26:46 Um and it was also when we were thinking about going public um which is not

26:52 usually the first decision you'd make if if

26:54 that's what you know you're trying to do.

26:56 And you know to me I think what made it easy was what do

27:00 you want to build became the question I I I think I asked you know

27:04 everybody who worked at the company you know and are we just here to build

27:07 a company that ends in 2020 or ends you know in an IPO or something.

27:12 No we're here to hopefully um build a company that will grow and empower every

27:19 physical business and grow the GDP of every

27:22 city if we are successful in doing so.

27:25 that's not going to happen in 1 year, 2 years, 5 years, 10 years.

27:28 That hopefully can be a forever or an eternal mission.

27:32 And so when I thought about it from that perspective, I mean,

27:35 this was a drop in the bucket in in the grand scheme of the journey.

27:38 And that's how we made that decision.

27:39 That's amazing.

27:40 It's so super long-termist basically.

27:43 I think that's the only way you can make some of these decisions.

27:45 I think if you're just purely looking at some of these decisions

27:48 in the in the here and now or just looking

27:51 at it as a as a business line item on a spreadsheet

27:54 or something like that, it's very difficult perhaps to make the justification.

27:58 I think sometimes there are moments, it's not always,

28:00 but there are moments whether it's the start of the company

28:02 or a crisis situation like CO 19 where it becomes

28:06 very clear why you're doing what you're doing or should

28:09 be very clear to you why you're doing what you're doing.

28:11 And when you have that kind of clarity,

28:13 it makes it a lot easier to make those decisions.

28:15 What advice would you have for sort of the 18

28:18 or 22year-old version of yourself knowing what you know now?

28:22 And I might ask you to uh modify it a little bit

28:24 in that obviously we're at the beginning of this sort of uh age of intelligence,

28:28 this boom in large language models, you know,

28:31 what what do you have to pass on to the next generation right now?

28:34 One of the things I would tell, you know,

28:36 the the 18-year-old self is that um especially

28:40 when you're on the cusp of something new,

28:44 take AI, there's no better way to be the expert than just to do the work.

28:50 And you might be surprised at how quickly you get to become the expert.

28:56 I mean, that was really my experience with logistics and delivery.

29:01 I mean, I had no background um in in in any

29:04 of this, but by doing deliveries two years in a row, three years in a row,

29:09 even 12 years later, you get to very very quickly um have a strong

29:14 point of view on how the physical world works.

29:18 And whether that's, you know, now in software,

29:22 in AI, in biotechnology, in whatever field of interest,

29:28 the best way um really to be the expert is just to get started and do the work.

29:33 What are you excited about for Door Dash?

29:35 Like what, you know,

29:35 what what comes next and what does Door Dash look like in the future?

29:40 I think there's obviously a big um exploration and set of battles

29:45 right now for all of the the digits and the bits, right?

29:52 And and these things obviously come and go in terms

29:54 of the level of excitement versus the level of progress.

29:58 And I'm long-term super optimistic about

30:00 what's happening um in the digital world.

30:03 I'm as optimistic though about what's happening in the physical world.

30:06 I think um sometimes we still forget that um it's

30:09 still even in 2025 whether it was 2013 when we

30:14 started the company or or present day that it is

30:17 the physical businesses small medium and large that produced the vast

30:21 majority of jobs and GDP in any society and I

30:25 think GDP growth is probably the best offensive weapon for any

30:28 city and so I can't really think of anything more

30:34 worthwhile than trying to grow the GDP of the cities.

30:38 And so, you know, I I I think

30:40 that as important as the digital battles are happening,

30:45 I think there's still this um

30:48 massive opportunity to understand the physical world,

30:51 you know, where is the last parking spot in a rainstorm here in San Francisco?

30:56 How many apples does the local grocery store have in aisle 6?

31:00 These are questions that actually nobody has the no LLM has the answer to.

31:04 uh no one uh has the answer to.

31:07 And I think that the physical world is just as interesting as the digital world.

31:11 When you say GDP, I mean what that means is prosperity,

31:14 abundance, jobs, and uh you know, problems being solved.

31:18 So Tony, thank you so much for creating Door Dash and spending time with us.

31:22 It's great to be here.

31:24 [Music]