The economics and trends of the restaurant industry, with Tony Xu of DoorDash

“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.”