“I think when you have high volumes of activity, I think keeping the reliability as reliable as the electricity we have or the water inside of our buildings, that is extraordinarily difficult. ... One of the biggest things that we're going to have to do before we can just fulfill the items, which is what we'll get to, is where are the items and what are the items? There's tens of millions of items literally inside these cities, whether it's in the US or different countries within Europe, other parts of the world, they're not catalogued.”
Autonomous delivery requires solving for specific use cases
“Drones obviously can do a lot of these longer distance orders. And so we've been doing drone deliveries actually for a couple years now, mostly outside of the United States. Outside of the US. Places like Australia, we're going to bring them to Europe, bring them to the United States as well. But again, you have all of those problems you have to solve. The autonomy is a little bit easier. You still have a routing problem, you have hardware problems. Obviously, you still have permits and regulation, set up, loading inside different stores, things like that.”
Last-two-feet mapping data prevents offline delivery fraud
“We have our own mapping system, for example, that we built. Why do we build our own? Well, it's because we care much more than any third-party mapping system of exactly where the last two feet, forget 20 or 200 feet, of some apartment unit door is, for example. And we know if we reliably deliver to that door, and that we saw that the pin actually hit exactly where, we have a little bit more fidelity in whether something was dropped off. We build profiles of customers, I'm sure you do too, of their behavior and what they tend to say.”
Retention and frequency signal product differentiation
“At the end of the day, though, if our app is performing at a higher retention, much higher retention and frequency of use than others, that's how we know whether or not the things that we say actually are making a difference to customers. And so, getting, I think, all of that right very, very early and then building the systems to actually instrument that, as well as to repeat that over and again, I think was very, very important in the development of the company.”
“We made the decision to refund everyone. That cost us over 40% of the bank accounts. So when you have two weeks of runway, 40% of the bank accounts. And we baked everyone cookies and deliver them at 5 a.m. before everybody woke up. Look, this is like maybe 100-ish customers or something like this. But I think it demonstrates that this was a real value and it's actually my test really, which is like, what are the actions that are naturally occurring inside of an organization?”
“One of the things that we had looking backwards is we actually did not have a large budget. In fact, between 2016, 17, 18, we barely were able to raise a dollar relative to our peers. As a result of that, that made it a constraint. One of the constraints is, okay, you can grow but you cannot spend in order to do it. So in order to do that, you effectively have to actually come up with ideas in a product to actually stand out and make a difference, and have organic growth carry you.”
Urban density drives China's food delivery dominance
“Well, one of the first big differences is the eating out culture in China is very, very high and very, very affordable. Eating out in China is about as affordable as cooking at home. And as a result, nobody cooks. This is one where I'm always on the one hand, so impressed by how far ahead sometimes behavior is in markets like China. And then on the other hand, I have to remind myself that there are differences.”
“When you think about something like restaurant delivery, you actually get judged on multiple dimensions as a service. We get judged on what restaurants we bring you, certainly whether it showed up on time, and the quality and condition you expect, how much did it cost, if we screwed up, what did we do about it. It's not one thing that you have to be good at actually. It's all of the above. Unfortunately or fortunately, this is literally the game that we're playing where customers are judging us on all of these dimensions.”
Retention and frequency signal product differentiation
“At the end of the day, though, if our app is performing at a higher retention, much higher retention and frequency of use than others, that's how we know whether or not the things that we say actually are making a difference to customers. And so, getting, I think, all of that right very, very early and then building the systems to actually instrument that, as well as to repeat that over and again, I think was very, very important in the development of the company.”
“We made the decision to refund everyone. That cost us over 40% of the bank accounts. So when you have two weeks of runway, 40% of the bank accounts. And we baked everyone cookies and deliver them at 5 a.m. before everybody woke up. Look, this is like maybe 100-ish customers or something like this. But I think it demonstrates that this was a real value and it's actually my test really, which is like, what are the actions that are naturally occurring inside of an organization?”
“One of the things that we had looking backwards is we actually did not have a large budget. In fact, between 2016, 17, 18, we barely were able to raise a dollar relative to our peers. As a result of that, that made it a constraint. One of the constraints is, okay, you can grow but you cannot spend in order to do it. So in order to do that, you effectively have to actually come up with ideas in a product to actually stand out and make a difference, and have organic growth carry you.”
Urban density drives China's food delivery dominance
“Well, one of the first big differences is the eating out culture in China is very, very high and very, very affordable. Eating out in China is about as affordable as cooking at home. And as a result, nobody cooks. This is one where I'm always on the one hand, so impressed by how far ahead sometimes behavior is in markets like China. And then on the other hand, I have to remind myself that there are differences.”
“When you think about something like restaurant delivery, you actually get judged on multiple dimensions as a service. We get judged on what restaurants we bring you, certainly whether it showed up on time, and the quality and condition you expect, how much did it cost, if we screwed up, what did we do about it. It's not one thing that you have to be good at actually. It's all of the above. Unfortunately or fortunately, this is literally the game that we're playing where customers are judging us on all of these dimensions.”
“We put up a website in 43 minutes. We called it Palo Alto Delivery dot com. We weren't looking for a business model; we were just seeing if people would use it. We went to a few restaurants, put their menus on the site, and within half an hour, we got our first order. We were just students skipping class to deliver food ourselves.”
Dishwashing experience inspired the entire company
“My mom was a licensed doctor in China, but when we moved here, she had to wait tables. I worked right beside her, washing dishes for years. That experience became the animating idea behind everything we built at DoorDash. I saw firsthand how hard it was for a small business owner to succeed and the tools they lacked to grow.”
