In this episode, the host welcomes Tony Xu, CEO and co-founder of DoorDash, who shares insights into his journey from working at Square and eBay to launching DoorDash—a platform that empowers merchants through on-demand delivery and data-driven insights. Xu reflects on the pivotal moment inside a Palo Alto macaroon store that sparked DoorDash's focus on delivery challenges for small businesses. He discusses his parents' influence on his work ethic, the importance of resilience, and how becoming a father reshaped his perspective on time management and problem-solving. Xu also touches on leadership, advocating for a culture of followership and the ability to lead by example. He emphasizes the significance of recruiting, aiming for diversity, and the continual evolution of company culture. Throughout the conversation, Xu maintains a focus on the long-term vision for DoorDash, striving to build a vast local commerce app and platform, and ensuring that his team can do their best work within the company.
"I'm going to dive straight into it because I'm too excited for this one, so I'm thrilled to welcome Tony Shu." "Now, Tony is the CEO and cofounder of DoorDash, the company empowering merchants to grow their businesses by offering ondemand delivery, data driven insights and better instore efficiency."
These quotes introduce Tony Shu and highlight the core services of DoorDash. The speaker expresses excitement for the episode featuring Tony and the impact of DoorDash on merchants.
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"I wish there was one aha moment that happened over 20 seconds or something, but I guess if there was one, it really happened inside of a local macaroon store in Palo Alto, where the founding team met a store manager who had to turn down hundreds of deliveries."
This quote explains the pivotal moment that led to the creation of DoorDash. It emphasizes the real-world problem of delivery logistics that DoorDash aimed to solve.
"When I think about my parents journey into this country, it kind of is that classic immigrant story where dad was getting his graduate degree. Mom was putting food on the table because we had a couple of. She worked three jobs a day for twelve years to make things happen."
The quote reflects on Tony's parents' dedication and hard work as immigrants, which instilled in him a strong work ethic and a sense of relentless effort.
"Well, I'm still trying to figure it out. So I have two young kids. And so I think even though I've had two times to have tried to impart or learn lessons, I think so far it's really reinforced, one, what's important and where to really make sure I get great return on time."
The quote expresses Tony's ongoing learning process as a parent and how it influences his perspective on time and learning.
"Nothing was ever pushed on me. I don't think they even ever saw my report card, maybe ever actually, all the way through college, graduate school, and certainly not in my earlier years."
This quote highlights the hands-off approach Tony's parents took, which he believes allowed him to develop his own interests and work ethic.
"I think maybe the succinct way, when I've seen great leadership, I've noticed, is there is great followership."
The quote defines great leadership by the presence of followers who choose to support and follow the leader, indicating the leader's influence and effectiveness.
"In fact, when I think about even people at Doordash, there are many leaders at the company that have zero direct reports, but have lots of followers because of their influence and because of how they show up and how they show their work."
This quote highlights that leadership is defined by influence and action rather than hierarchical position. It emphasizes the importance of how leaders conduct themselves and their work.
"And I think the easiest way to do that, as the leader, is to give all of the credit and take all of the blame."
The quote suggests a leadership strategy for fostering a supportive environment where team members feel secure in taking risks, knowing that their leader will support them regardless of the outcome.
"I don't think there was a singular motivation or motivating factor that got the team through it."
This quote indicates that multiple factors contribute to a team's ability to persist through challenges, rather than relying on a single source of motivation.
"And it's why it is business is so tough because it's very against human nature to think that long term and to have that infinite horizon in your mind."
The quote reflects on the difficulty of reconciling the ongoing nature of business success with the human tendency to seek closure and finite achievements.
"So what I mean by reducing the scope, it's almost formulating or manufacturing a set of milestones of, you know, where true north should look like."
This quote explains the strategy of simplifying complex problems by creating milestones, which serve as guideposts toward the ultimate goal, making the problem more approachable.
"One of the beliefs we have at Doordash is to try to manage people to their superpowers."
The quote emphasizes the importance of recognizing and leveraging individual strengths within a company, suggesting a tailored approach to management and role assignment.
"I think one of them is actually in recruiting, especially identifying, I think people before they're identified by everyone else as being world class in some domain."
Tony Shu identifies his unique ability to recognize potential talent early on as one of his key strengths, which has been beneficial in building a successful team.
"I wish we did more post mortems on the success cases. I think we do lots of post mortems on the not so successful outcomes."
This quote highlights the speaker's desire to focus on learning from successes as much as from failures, suggesting that there is much to be gained from understanding what went right in successful ventures.
"And early on, when I think about the team at Doordash, it was mostly people with more talent than experience."
This quote explains the initial hiring philosophy of DoorDash, which favored innate talent and potential over proven experience, given the innovative nature of the company's business model.
"It took us a while. It probably took a year, year and a half before I started observing the most successful people at DoorDash and writing down what I call the six attributes of excellence."
The speaker reflects on the time and observation required to distill the qualities that made employees successful at DoorDash, which then informed their hiring strategy.
"I think the learning algorithm here is you have to figure out what culture is going to be authentic to your organization."
This quote stresses the need for a company to establish and understand its own unique culture in order to recruit individuals who will thrive within that environment.
"I think the only success criteria here I've seen is you have to hire someone excellent where it's so obvious for the person on the inside that this person on the outside can really help their careers and really grow them."
The quote addresses the delicate balance of bringing in external expertise while maintaining internal morale, emphasizing the need for the external hire to be a clear asset to the team.
"But I think when the person is in the door, in order to set them up for success, you probably want to start small, because the information asymmetry of how your organization works versus how they may think your organization works is very, very large."
The quote explains the strategy for integrating new executives into the company by starting with a limited scope of responsibilities and gradually increasing it based on performance and adaptation.
"Why is that not true for your culture? Maybe it changes more slowly because you're talking about people ultimately, when you talk about culture as opposed to software or other types of products, but it ideally is always improving."
This quote draws a parallel between improving a company's product and its culture, suggesting that although culture may evolve more slowly, it should nonetheless be subject to continuous improvement.
"Yeah, I mean, the first thing is you have to actually be able to measure these things."
The speaker underscores the necessity of having quantifiable metrics to assess and improve upon cultural values within the company.
"Who are the people that you're recruiting? Why are the funnels the way they are? Because we're always going to hire those that look like us or sound like us or more in our circles, and et cetera, et cetera."
"How do you make sure that the person who has maybe the most disadvantaged voice, because they're not in the room actually gets to speak first?"
"DoorDash always had very electric kinds of energy levels in all of our offices. And this isn't just the San Francisco office, but across all of our offices globally."
"It started because we just didn't have enough drivers, and so it was really part of just making sure that we had enough drivers on the road and doing deliveries."
"The other thing I found useful for Sundays is, candidly, just some thinking time and how important and sometimes increasingly rare that can be."
"We are trying to build the biggest local commerce app, and we're also trying to build the biggest local commerce platform in which we're giving tools to merchants so that they can create their own digital businesses and really compete in today's digital economy."
"Resilience, curiosity and kindness."
"One of those leaders that comes immediately to mind was Barack Obama."
"Mental consumption. I guess building Doordash is an all consuming effort."
"Especially for someone who is very curious, has done everything from cancer research to other things, and like a lot of different areas and different types of problems, that's one of the big sacrifices."
"Bandwidth. Making sure that I'm giving the right amount of energy and attention to the right projects."
"You can make any model works as long as you're actually solving problems with whatever your organizational model is."
"And I think that there was one of these opportunities that came up in which we're discussing as a board, and I think it took 30 seconds for the board to look at one another and said, why would we ever give up on DoorDash?"
"Where am I going to have the most fun and the least regret?"
"It's going to be hopefully evolving as a leader. It's hopefully, I'm trying to add to our team's personality, so improving our culture, making sure that our best people get to do the best work of their lives at the company."