Tony Xu

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Everyone was focused on San Francisco because it was the dense urban center. We realized the suburbs were where the actual need was because the opportunity cost of time was higher for families. We decided to win Palo Alto and the surrounding areas first, which gave us a unit economic advantage that the city-only players didn't have.”

“In the logistics business, you don't get credit for the 99 times you were right. Trust resets every time a customer places a new order. If we fail one delivery, the previous ten thousand successful deliveries don't matter to that customer in that moment. You have to earn your place on their phone every single day.”

“Data can tell you what is happening, but stories tell you why. I still spend time doing customer support and delivering because one anecdote can change an entire product strategy. If you only look at the aggregate dashboard, you lose the signal of the individual merchant's pain point or the driver's friction in the field.”