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every business that you have heard of has gotten rejected by at least a handful of venture capitalists at one point or another and so that drive to keep going if you believe in the business is critical absolutely critical
Search this video
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I mean we were weeks of Runway situation and had been told no by everyone and it was just Tony's Drive really to keep going and the way he explains it to me is it's just the difference between a founder and a non-sounder like if you're
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really a Founder you just have to find a way you have to keep going there's no question and I mean that's the only advice I can get folks is it only takes only takes one yes so you got to keep going welcome to Lenny's podcast where I
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interview world-class product leaders and growth experts to learn from their hard-won experiences building and growing today's most successful products today my guest is Keith Yandel Keith is a long time leader at doordash where
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he's been for about seven years and in that time get this he's led the legal team the HR team the marketing team the customer support team and currently he leads the BD in corporate development teams before doordash he led litigation
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at Uber he's also managed folks like Goku rajaram who was previously on this podcast and who suggested that if he Thon and Dan was he right before I had this chat with Keith I didn't know that much about him but now you can count me
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as a huge Keith Fanboy I suspect you'll feel the same way after you listen to this episode I'm just gonna jump right in and bring you Keith Yandel after a short word from our wonderful sponsors today's episode is brought to you by one
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answers and make growth happen to get started with amplitude for free visit amplitude.com amplitude power to your products Keith welcome to the podcast thanks so much for having me Lenny First off the bat I just want to give a big thank you
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to Goku rajaram and Micah marowi for suggesting you be on the podcast helping make this happen and also just suggesting a bunch of questions to ask you so I hope you're ready to be in the hot seat definitely as ready as I'm going to be and those are two good folks to talk to awesome and Google's been on the podcast maybe you'll get Mike on the podcast at some point I wanted to start off with a story apparently there's a story of you
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interviewing what is now your VP of engineering and I hear that in the interview you called him an and more interestingly he joined doordash because you did that he just talked about that story and share that story
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yeah it actually wasn't during the interview we were debriefing and for me one of the top things I always hear about doordash from an executive standpoint when we do the internal survey is it's a no politics no culture and I'm not one to to swear a
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lot but after interviewing Ryan Sokol who's now our our VP of Eng he was just kind of aloof he came up as aloof to me really Curt answers and I just didn't have a great feeling about him and I pride myself on being able to discern when people are really engaged or not and I went to Tony Shu who's our founder and CEO I said Tony I think this guy's a jerk I don't think we want him at the company and Tony was great if he said Keith I want you to
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just have dinner with him please because I got a completely different impression and if you have dinner with him and you still think he's a jerk we won't hire and so I ended up meeting Ryan down the street we actually live in the same
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general area we went out to dinner and I started right away I said Ryan during the interview you kind of seemed like an are you an and he was so great it completely changed my perspective in a good two minutes he wanted to know
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what he had said he said I'm super embarrassed and what could I do differently regardless of how this works out for me in this circumstance it's just not how I want to be perceived and we talked and joked about the things he
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had done and he kind of told me the background for how he reacted or why he reacted the way he did and by the end of the dinner we ended up staying super late we had a couple beers afterwards Ryan and I have become really good friends and like six months later
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he told me that one of the reasons why he joined doordash was that we were going to back black ball in potentially from joining just because of his attitude because his perspective is Life's too short to work with people you
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don't really enjoy and a lot of people pay lip service and he knew he was going to be a tough hire for us at the time and the fact we were willing to go all the way down the path and have someone super qualified but didn't meet the
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culture bar for him was what pushed him over the edge to join the company I love that I love the directness of that meeting I was just like are you an think about it right and if someone really was a jerk they probably wouldn't have taken it very well right
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it's just like when you're interviewing someone giving them tough feedback after the interview if there's an area of concern but you otherwise liked them can be a really great way to see how they would interact with you personally as
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well as how they take feedback and so that was my learning from this situation is is to if you really enjoy an interview except for maybe something on the culture side to give the direct feedback and see how people engage this touches on another question I want to ask you which is just about doordash's culture which feels really unique just feels very driven very pragmatic there's a story I heard where when you guys celebrated one of your biggest
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Milestones you bought like the cheapest champagne and like plastic flutes and I think the founders brought that to everyone could you just talk about what makes doordash's culture so interesting and unique and maybe if there's a story
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of just like a microcosm of what Jordan's culture is like that'd be awesome to hear founder-led companies tend to take on the personality of their Founders and if any time with our founder Tony Shu you realize that he's a humble leader he's
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competitive he really wants to win and he'll do whatever it takes to win and the example you're you're referring to I think is when we raised our series D funding which was a really tough fundraise for us we had very little
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Runway left we almost went out of business and it was a huge relief when we we had finally gotten the funding secured and I remember I was in a meeting I was running policy and Communications among other things at the time and I was in
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the meeting with a couple other folks and we were talking about the the press release strategy Tony was there and someone ran down and got some I think it was like Corbell or something champagne and some plastic flutes and
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one of the women who was in the meeting with me was going to leave to go put those together this is a very smart woman who who I think Tony recognized could add more value and he said whoa whoa you stay here I'm gonna go put together the champagne flutes and he
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called the other two co-founders Andy Fang and Stanley Tang they came stayed up all night put together I don't know 500 champagne flukes plastic ones for this cheap champagne and let the people who are closest the problem try to work
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out the conspies piece and I do think that's that that's one great example of the culture the other thing I think that really exemplified doordash's culture is a level of customer Obsession and that manifests in a few different ways
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we have a program called we Dash where four times a year all employees are required to go do deliveries and I love doing it I do it more than four times a year and I usually take my daughters with me and one time I was out
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with my daughter who was eight at the time we got a delivery and it was not was not the best delivery there's clearly something wrong with the system we got a sandwich and a coffee and we're supposed to drive 18 and a half miles to Dropbox
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and that didn't make sense for the customer it didn't make sense for for us as drivers and she'd gotten to know Tony over the years and she said I really want to call Tony and tell them this thing's broken honey I I like my job I'd like to keep
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my job can can we not call Tony right now but she was adamant and I was so proud of her for feeling so strongly that she wanted to fix this thing that was broken I figured he's not going to answer any way we can just call him so
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call Tony picks up on the first ring and I'm like oh you know this this might go badly and she just lays into him she said this is going to take us 36 minutes to drop off the coffee's not gonna be hot how could you allow this experience if you really
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care about your customers whoa and I kind of sucked in my breath and said well that's how my time at doordash ended but Tony was great he was hey hey Alice you know we have people who do deliveries for for months we have people
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with deliveries for years and they're always providing me feedback and this is one of the most insightful pieces of feedback I've gotten recently and you've only been dashing for like a few different times and by the time we got home he'd
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actually sent an email out to the product organization calling out the problems suggesting the fix and they were already working on it and that shows the bias to action that I think really is at the heart of doordash
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alongside that customer Obsession and it's not unusual for Tony to do customer support it wasn't like just because he heard this from my daughter that he actioned it he does support every day and again this goes back to that level
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of humility and companies really taking on the ethos of their founder what an awesome story I want to chat a bit more about the what is it called we Dash is that the program yeah so you say that you're supposed to do it how many times
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a year four times a year yeah at least four times a year and then you said that you do it a lot more often how often are you doing it and then is there any other uh fun stories of that experience like you know someone like you delivering
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someone's sandwich I'd probably do it once a month wow and there's all kinds of great we die stories but I don't know how interesting they're gonna be to the broader public because for for me it's just about getting out and experiencing
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the product I almost always find something that's broken and I send an email to we have a slack Channel That's devoted to experiences via we Dash it's everything from I found a bug once where it wasn't routing you necessarily the
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fastest route it was going using straight line as opposed to road that was something that we fixed and for me the best parts about we Dash are are the experiences interactions with the restaurants the interactions with colleagues so I'll go
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delivering with Ryan Sokol the head of engineering I'll give him a hard time about what we find in the product and things like that but that's by far my favorite we Dash story is the one with my daughter that's a good one side
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Airbnb we actually had a similar program where Brian wanted everyone to be a host an Airbnb but as you can imagine that's much harder not everyone is able to not everyone has a place too so there's always kind of a challenge to make
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people do that I imagine doordash is a lot easier because a lot of people can go around and deliver things but yeah such a killer idea such a good way of dog food in your product yeah it's a good point that not everyone is able for
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a host of reasons that doordash to do it and so there are alternatives so you can do customer support for example in lieu of actually going and doing deliveries it's just about making people have empathy and get closer to the product
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it's also going back to the culture Point erase it's a great way to weed out people that maybe we wouldn't want to work with right because not everyone wants to not every software engineer wants to hop in their Tesla and go out
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and deliver McDonald's to some kids right it takes a certain level of humility a certain amount of customer Obsession to even sign up for that so we're really vocal during the interview process that this is something that's
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expected and it serves as a governor to attract the people that you think are going to be most successful at the company I love that imagine all your programs have the dash in there somewhere something Dash we try I I think when I was head of marketing we
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did a much worse job I think we're doing much better now nice and Airbnb was always air something nothing okay so I think one of the most interesting things about you and your background and maybe unusual things is the number of teams
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that you've LED over your time at doordash I have a list here so over your time at doordash you've led the HR team you led the customer support team like the sales team the marketing team now you the BD and Corp Dev team initially I
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think your Chief legal officer so here's my question as someone that I imagine doesn't have a ton of expertise and experience in a lot of these areas how were you able to credibly lead these teams and I ask partly because as a
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Founder you have to learn how to lead teams and people that you don't actually know what they're doing as well as they do and so I'm just curious what you've learned about being able to lead teams in such disparate skill sets and
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functions yeah the one thing I'll say is I did not run sales that's maybe one of the very few non-technical functions I I did not lead but the the question is is a good one and I had massive imposter syndrome the first time Tony asked me to
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take on something that I wasn't a subject matter expert in and I told him I didn't want to do it and he had me read this book called range by David Epstein and the general thesis is that generalists are better than Specialists and it goes through all these examples
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about how Nobel Prize winners are usually amazing in something other than the field that they actually win the Nobel Prize in and Tony believes pretty deeply in this philosophy and the way he explained it to me is as follows if you
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want to achieve a 10x outcome hiring someone that's an expert in the field it's maybe unlikely you're going to achieve that 10x outcome because they're likely to do things the way things have always been done so you might achieve
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incremental benefits but the odds of completely Reinventing the system and doing something that's vastly Superior to others is much lower and he said I know you don't know how to do this stuff that's why I'm putting you in the role
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and I said okay so first thing he helped me do was was believe that I could add value here and then the second thing for me was to go out and find the best people that really were the subject matter experts and add the value I could
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to help them be successful and I found that they were actually really attracted to wanting to work with someone like me who came into the interview process and said good news bad news I don't know your field anywhere near as well as you do
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here's the ways I intend to help you here's what I think you can provide and at the end of the day I'm going to get out of your way and that's really proven true so I ran marketing hired initially had a brand uh Kofi who now is our CMO
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hired ahead of legal who's now rgc Tia sharing him and these people have really just excelled at their function and with the warm-up that I was able to provide have really proven that they're much better at the jobs
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than I was you don't strike me as someone that is like trying to build Empires and take over all these teams I imagine this kind of came at you because you've been doing a great job at other things is that how it worked and I guess
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is there anything any lessons there that you can take away yeah 100 I run a 12 person org today so I've gone from running 1500 people in the company to 12. and for me people talked a lot about hiring people better than you are people
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don't talk a lot about what you do when you hire those people and if you really care about the company and your long-term brand as an individual as a manager you realize what you want to do when you find the person that's better
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than you is you want to slowly get out of the way and it's really good for the company it's my favorite part of my job is seeing people that either have hired or or managed to be successful on their own and I think it's a big part of of our
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success is this desire to be successful regardless of who's in charge and that comes from the fact when I joined doordash we were getting our tail stick we were in fourth fourth place in the space Uber had just launched food and
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Rocket to market share leadership and I think that was really good for us as a company because we realized unless we all work together and it wasn't about who was doing what or or things like that we weren't going to have a shot at
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being successful and I think that ethos has really pervaded and and persisted since then yeah I I think most people don't realize doordash actually is the biggest market share in food delivery imagine that's still true I've seen
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we've seen these like line charts of market share and doordash has always thought I think people kind of think ubereats is is winning but it's not true yeah I mean the category chart I've seen are consistent with what you said by a
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pretty wide margin but we try not to focus on things like that we try to focus on the customer experience and it's humbling in our space because we're doing millions and millions and millions of deliveries a day and those deliveries will go wrong no matter how hard you try and we read those experiences we do customer support and we understand that there's a long ways to go so we're just getting started and we know that you mentioned that you ran
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this 1500 or get one point and something that I've heard you do that helps you do that is you have this document that you put together that kind of explains how to work with Keith and also just broadly how things work at doordash can you talk
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about this document why you thought it was necessary and kind of the impact something like this has had and then we're gonna share a link to a redacted version of this in the show notes one thing I've learned is it's super hard to
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scale culture especially when you're growing as fast as doordash has since I joined we were two or three exiting the company from a headcount perspective for the vast majority of my time every year and so one thing I noticed is it's hard
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to come into a place and be new and understand how things work and what it means to be successful there and so the idea was to do our best to scale that and one thing that Tony taught me is one thing that scales really well is
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written work product and so I put together this document there's there's three basic subject matters it's kind of my expectations slash what I've seen as traits and successful people within the company two are how I can improve like basically feedback
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I've given and think gotten and things I'm working on for example I'm a litigator by training and so I tend to argue about things even if I agree with people to test levels of conviction and I got feedback from my team that was
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really confusing because I'd be arguing against something and then we would execute that exact thing and so I try to be transparent about that and explain how I work through problems but also in saying hey this is something I'm trying to improve on is not being quite so argumentative for for sport and then it talks about what my commitments are to team so I'm committed to finding you your next job even if that's not at doordash Life's too short
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to be in a job you don't lie things like that I've heard from a few people how impactful this document ended up being I guess what impact have you seen this have on the org that you've run and the company and then and yeah any any other
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examples of just like why this is powerful because I imagine some people are saying like oh I should do something like this yeah I mean for me one of an executive's main jobs is to attract and retain top talent and going back to why people have
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joined doordash Kofi emu Gottfried who's now our CMO join me as head of brand when I was running marketing and it's it's comical because this person is a legend in the marketing space and I had no idea what was going on and so
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convincing him to join I was really nervous about and the point where he decided to join I had sent him this document he wanted to know what it was like to work with me I said well I've actually written that down and he later
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told me that that was a really important factor for him that someone was so transparent about their areas for growth how they thought they could be helpful and he liked the fact that I knew that I didn't know and so he knew he was going
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to have a lot of autonomy on the role and that was really important to him but more broadly within the organization how it's been helpful is just being able to have people engage with me in a way and with a company in a way that is so
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consistent with the culture from day one I've had people come and tell me that I'd never met before that they'd read the doc even if they're on a different team and just how helpful it's been to try to acclimate to this fast-paced
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environment where you're learning and while drinking from the fire head is effectively yeah that makes sense touching a little bit on you talked about all these amazing people you've LED and how you've been able to do that something else I've
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heard that you do that's pretty unusual is you help people that you manage find their next job which may not necessarily be within the company maybe another company you kind of like help them land it and find something else to do I've
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never heard of that before really I'd love to hear why why you decided to do that how how you do that and just the kind of impact second order impact maybe that has maybe that leads you to be doing this I wasn't a calculated
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decision why I started doing it then I gave it a lot of thought because I was afraid that I might get some blowback when people started taking jobs elsewhere and as I thought about it I realized it really is better for the
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company to have that type of open dialogue with people that work on your team I think that's true for a few reasons first of all when you're opening in this how to work with keep the document I say I will help you find your next job
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and what that means is number one people are gonna be transparent with you or more transparent if they're looking for something else or if they're not happy that's going to allow you to lay the foundation for a backfill so you're much
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less likely to get surprised when someone leaves number two what's gonna happen is if someone runs a blind reference on on me at this point with someone that I managed which in the current environment is more and more common people
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diligencing the managers what they're going to hear is Keith's gonna put you first and I think that's really motivating for a lot of people so if you're thinking on a five ten year Horizon of your career as a manager whether you're an entrepreneur hiring people into your company whether you're a product manager who's trying to build a team building that long-term reputation I think people take a much too short-sighted perspective on that and so
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now if I get a blind reference people are going to hear that it's not all about the company it's not all about Keith it's about you and your career and that's going to pay back 10x maybe you lose one really talented person but you they probably
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shouldn't be there anyway they're probably going to leave anyway and this way you can participate in that and really Drive value for them as well as for the company in the future by creating a much better reputation for
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the group of managers so it's it's been really helpful for me I keep in touch with a lot of people who have left and we get a lot of boomerangs too there's a lot of people who leave doordash and come back and that's something I I love
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seeing because it shows that people have gone out and seen what else is out there and realize this is the right place for them can you talk a bit about how you operationalize this like because it's just out there tell me if you're gonna
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thinking about a new job and I will talk to you through your options and help you find something or is there anything else there for folks that maybe want to offer this to their employees so first of all I put it in this document and so I say
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how I run one-on-ones in my how to work with keep document in the last 10 minutes my 101 is our Career Development conversations that's a really fertile ground for having the discussion but for particularly more senior folks if I get
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pinged for a GC job or when I would get pinged by a recruiter for a GC job I would forward that to Tia sharing him who's now our general counsel but was basically head of legal for for years before she got the general counsel title
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and I'd say hey Tia I don't know when this job's going to be available here I'm still liking what I'm doing I think I'm still adding value if you think it's time for you to leave I think this is a really good opportunity wow and I say in
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addition to that you're going to learn the questions they asked during the interview process you're going to learn what type of qualifications they're looking for and if I'm not getting you that experience you can you can tell me
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and thankfully for me Tia decided to to stay and has now grown into the general counsel of doordash and doing a much better job at the role than I ever did but she had the opportunity to leave and I think she learned from some of those
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inbounds and the experiences she had wow that is a that's amazing that your boss is forwarding you uh recruiter pitches to go work somewhere else I think it made her want to save right like if I wasn't invested in her success
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she could have been left any time and gotten a job super qualified but I think she felt a sense of of loyalty based on my sense of loyalty and I think it worked out best for for all involved I love it this episode is brought to you by Coda
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you've heard me talk about how Coda is the doc that brings it all together and how can help your team run smoother and be more efficient I know this firsthand because Coda does that for me I use Coda every day to Wrangle my newsletter
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content calendar my interview notes for podcasts and to coordinate my sponsors more recently I actually wrote a whole post on how CODIS product team operates and within that post they shared a dozen templates that they use internally to
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and collaborate in one place take advantage of this special limited time offer just for startups sign up today at coda.io Lenny and get a thousand dollar startup credit on your first statement that's coda.io Lenny to sign up and get a startup credit of one thousand dollars coda.io Lenny something else I hear about you which I'm sensing as we chat more and more and I can see why this is true is that on the doordash kind of c-suite and board
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meeting and board in general you play this really strong unifying force that helps the group come to fast decisions on really complicated topics and I'm curious one would you agree with that and two what is it that you do that
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helps a lot of strongly opinated people come to decisions on some on really complicated decisions I hope that's true I think that for me it all comes down to empathy and what I mean by that is you have to understand what different
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people's motivations are in the room different people are gold on different things people come from different life experiences and different work experiences and I think it's really important to make each person feel heard we've had a situation
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for example where we were deciding between a trade-off between two business lines it was a profitability question for one business line that would to make them one business line much more profitable to do a certain partnership
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but it would come at the expense of the growth of another business line that was more nascent and so it's hard when you get the GMS for all these businesses together and they have very strong perspectives and good reasons on both sides about why path a is better of profitability path B is better for growth and they're out you know arguing very strenuously in part because they want to hit their numbers in part because they believe it one thing I
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found super effective in those contexts is I try to ask the other side so let's take the the profitability side I asked them to make the growth case I said tell me the three best reasons why we should actually focus on growth here
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that generates instant empathy for the other side right and sometimes they'll even persuade themselves as they're talking and say actually this I think you're right that we should focus on growth here we can achieve this profitability measure later or vice
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versa and so generating empathy and having empathy for the other side understanding how they're gold and what they're bringing to the conversation I think is the first step to having those really tough conversations I love that
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what other steps are there I like that as a first step is there anything else yeah that you end up being in a finding is really helpful there sometimes these conversations can go on forever right people just want to keep going back to
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an argument they've already made because they're not willing to settle and there needs to be someone that says all right you got to be clear on who the decision maker is here if we haven't reached a consensus who's the tiebreaker and a lot
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of time that's our CDO John issue but a lot of times it's the it's the GM for a certain business line or a head of product or a head of engineering depending on the decision to be made I think being really clear about hey we're
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all going to come together we're going to have a healthy debate we're going to make sure everyone's perspectives are heard we're going to try to reach consensus but at the end of the day here's the person that's going to make the decision and we're going to make it on this time Horizon and once the decision is made we're going to debate and commit and I think that having someone that's in the room that has run a lot of the functions that are
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trying to articulate the perspective is helpful and someone has been at the company as long as I have and given up as much as I have right to your point earlier everyone knows I'm not trying to build an Empire I'm trying to find a way to
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win and I think it gives me some credibility to call the question figure out who decision maker is set a timeline and move on but it's all the only way it works is if there's empathy on both sides this is great so I just took a few
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notes so one is there's essentially the Steel Man component like have them steal me on the other side argue why that's the the better decision clarified decision maker make it clear like there's the tie breaker if we don't again get there this person is going to
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make the decision and then create a Time Horizon of like we need to make a decision by this time is there anything else before we move on to a different question I think that's the right framework I can tell you're a product
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guy you're very good at distilling it down to the essence I think that's a good summary yeah you gotta do it uh you mentioned the one-on-one meetings and I took a note on this actually and I wanted to come back to it so yeah you
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mentioned at the end of your one-on-one meetings you have this kind of coaching career conversation is there anything else you could share about just your approach to one-on-one meetings your like agenda or how you think about
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one-on-ones this is super tactical but something I think is really important is I'm very clear in the document I we talked about earlier about how I like to work is I demand feedback for me and so we set aside time during 101s where I
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want the feedback first constructive feedback and I expect it and if you don't give it to me I'm going to press you on constructive feedback and then I give feedback and it's a lot easier if I tell this to manage all the time if
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you're if you create a space where you require constructive feedback it's a lot easier to give feedback because one of the top things I hear from managers especially new managers they don't like giving constructive feedback they want
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to be positive they want to be liked and things like that and so yeah it's a nice way to create space to have that dialogue and that's something I actually learned from from Travis when I was at Uber we had a system called T3 B3 where
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during reviews or or pulse check-ins you'd have to say three positives about your manager and three constructive pieces of feedback for your manager and the first time I did it I just did the top things for my manager who was the
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general counsel at the time and Travis came over and this is totally unacceptable you have to provide constructive feedback which made me super uncomfortable but created at the right environment where people could have these tough conversations because
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my manager can't get mad at me because she knows the CEO is going to come give me a hard time if I don't provide some constructive feedback and I think having that as an expectation is super important to building open lines of
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communication wow I like this T3 B3 so T is top good things and B is three bad things yeah cool I'm trying to imagine you in this meeting with the CFO you mentioned the CMO you mentioned and them like having to give you constructive
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feedback that's always hard even though you expect it is there anything else you do to help people feel comfortable giving you hard feedback and meetings like that that you have to thank him for right I mean there's a saying feedback is a gift
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but you have to say stuff and you have to actually I mean that's one thing I've found that can be really demotivating for folks whether it's a lot of these companies have these pulse surveys or they talk about
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what the company can do better and they put the results on the screen and we're going to work on it and that's the end of it and that was something I learned early on in doordash that people didn't like unless you were going to come back
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and say hey this was our lowest performing area in the pulse survey here are the three things we did to action it because that's how you would treat the business right if we got feedback from customer or from another business line
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you would say heard it we're going to come back and Report out on what we're going to do differently and then we're going to track the progress and so I think that's really important when you receive feedback you have to show people
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that you're actioning it and say I heard this from you checking in am I doing better here are the things that I've changed and so making sure that there's that feedback loop I think is another important part of creating the the right
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structure for for a good healthy culture another guest on the podcast at the same exact advice for getting feedback and the way he described it is you want to be enthusiastic about like thank you so much for that you and the way you
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described it is even though you're melting inside because you don't want to hear it thank you so much that was so helpful it's really good advice I want to zoom out a little bit and talk about the doordash kind of Journey there's
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been a lot of high highs with doordash there's been some low lows I know that there was a funding round at one point where it's like very precarious it may not have worked out question I have for you around that is just like leading through hardships and
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through tough times what have you learned as a leader about how to lead through challenging times and ask partly because a lot of companies are going through that right now it's pretty hard for a lot of folks out there a lot of
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layoffs and so yeah I'm curious what you learn about leading through challenging times yeah I'm gonna regurgitate some advice I got from some folks on our board at the same time and we were having really tough times which I really didn't like
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hearing at the time but I was kind of new to the space and that is tough times make companies for a host of reasons I mean this is this is super healthy for the startups out there right now it's because number one you're
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gonna find out who the mercenaries are on the team that are people that are there for the mission versus they're there because they think this is going to be a quick road to ridges we had a lot of people leave the company when
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Uber launched food and we fell quickly behind and that was good for us because the people that stayed were there because they wanted to work on this team on this Mission and they really believed in it the second thing is it forces
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discipline it's a good thing to focus on your economics and we didn't have the funding that a lot of our competitors did which forced us to be super focused on our unit economics and efficient and serve the customer in unique ways from from
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the start and I think a lot of our success even to this day emanates from from those tough times the last thing I'll say is if you're a founder and you're looking for talent tough times are great because there's a
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lot more Talent out there I saw oh I can't I think it might have been Bill Gurley someone tweeted this is the best time in recent memory since 2008 to start a company and that really resonated with me because there's a lot
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of talented folks out there who are looking for their next thing and you know three years ago it was tough to find talent and so I think there's a lot to like about tough times the last thing I'll say is one thing that I found surprising is
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from our surveys internally people actually like crises at doordash and I dug into that recently I was trying to figure out people like these crises and it's because their Singularity of focus you know what the job is you know you're
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going to get whatever resources the company has when you're focused on the main thing and these tough Economic Times will will create that work it's Crystal Clear you got to cut burn and everyone's going to be doing what they
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need to do to achieve that outcome and I think talented folks really like that on resourcing and two Singularity of focus about what the main thing is and crisis manifest those for folks it's interesting that we like there's all
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these benefits to tough times it's hard to recreate artificially it reminds me a little bit of Frank slootman I think his name and his book amp amp it up or he talks a lot about the importance of urgency always creating urgency and
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obviously a downturn like way of today's is an urgent situation have you found that to be true the power of creating urgency amen is there something you've learned about it create that urgency at a company and continue yeah this is
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something Tony's talked about since the day I joined and he's very good at frustratingly good at that because just when you think you've achieved the goal the goal might go up it might get shorter if you're on from the product side and you know speaking specifically
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on the product compound interest is a really hard concept to fully explain to people to make them truly appreciate but that's something Tony is fantastic at which is he understands that by pushing a road map up even by a week if you can
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continuously push up what you ship by a week you're going to end up lapping competitors who are just one week behind because you're going to start the next thing a week sooner and you're getting that 1.1 1.01 x return and then it grows
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and grows and grows and he's as good as I've ever seen combined with our president Christopher Payne at creating that sense of urgency and just pushing people do we really need to test this thing again or can we ship it how can we
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move that much faster even if by a small margin understanding that you can compound those gains over time has been really impactful for our success I saw the same thing at Airbnb it feels like things are going well maybe we
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could take a little break but it's constant just like how would we go faster how do we go bigger okay what's next we launched this thing let's move on and it feels like such a pattern across companies that do really well as
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the founders continuing to keep that pressure on I remember our IPO day we had a like this thing I had to wake up super early we it was a virtual bell ringing and the second it was over we had our weekly Business review and there were tough
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questions being asked there was not champagne being passed around people weren't I mean people were in a good mood but it wasn't like wow this is so great this is like hey how are we going to serve our customers today and I thought that was really emblematic of
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hey if we take too deep of a breath and are patting ourselves on the back it reminds me of the saying somewhere someone out there is practicing and when you meet them they will beat you it's the same kind of thing it's like if you
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take too long to be self-congratulatory you're going to fall behind the people who are still hungry so it's important to stay hungry wow reminds me I think it's Bill Gates talking about someone's in a garage building the next Microsoft and he's
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always trying to stay ahead of them so true the other thing this makes me think about is just like it's wild at founders like Airbnb Founders have been at this 15 years Tony I'm not exactly sure but probably a similar amount of time it's
40:28
just like they have to keep that pressure on within the company and also keep themselves motivated and excited and continuing to push just such a hard path you know there's like benefits to being that founder but it's such a challenging life too yeah I think it can be lonely to be a Founder for sure I know that you know Tony's tried to develop a community for him of people who are similarly situated from other companies and that's been helpful
40:51
and the real Founders that I've come across that drive though is something that can't turn off they don't have to try to keep it because there's a handful of traits I've seen that are pretty common one is a level of obsessiveness two is
41:04
hyper competitiveness and I think they're good at manufacturing Straw Men even if everyone's saying nice things it's like Michael Jordan used to take things out of context and put make bullets and board material there's
41:17
definitely an element of that in in the great Founders that I've come across and there's just a raw curiosity and they so it's the competitiveness but the Curiosity and learning how things are working and those all come together to
41:30
create a drive that just never stops that resonates coming back to the doordash journey a little bit I imagine the pandemic was kind of this microcosm of high highs and low lows where as an external Observer felt like everyone's needed doordash
41:45
immediately and it was just like probably the best thing for your business on the other hand I imagine you have to scale like crazy and keep the wheels on the bus through this time can you just talk about that part of history
41:54
for doordash I mean it was just a wild roller coaster we were trying to get ready to go public first of all and so there was that overlay and then what you saw was our volume dropped right away like like the first or second day of
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lockdown and I was like well this is going out of business because no one wants to order food from restaurants anymore people didn't know how coca was transmitted and so just basically volume dropped off a cliff and I was like oh
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went from super high we're getting ready to IPO super low volume's going to zero and then all of a sudden volume doubled and that was really exciting for a second until we realized that our Customer Support Center I was running
42:32
support at the time all the support centers around the world shut down so you're doubling volume you have no one to serve it from a customer support perspective and our infrastructure we weren't planning to grow that fast we didn't
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think there was a chance of two or three exiting in a very shared window and so every Friday night the app would crashed it just and if that's if you're running customer support there's a few things you like less than the app going down
42:55
set aside what it means for the customers and for the business selfishly it's just super painful the irony of it was is our NPS was going up and people were just so grateful to have the product to be able to safely get the
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things they needed for people to be able to to earn money at times when they really needed it because maybe their job had been shut down or they weren't allowed to go in it became a really essential service for and that was really motivating for for
43:20
me and I think for the team is to really be able to fulfill a big part of our mission of empowering local economies in in a very unique way in a very special time and the last thing I'll say on on the pandemic was I remember vividly one of my most
43:36
Vivid doordash memories with being on a zoom call where we were trying to figure out what to do to help restaurants and again we were trying to go public and Tony made a decision and I admit I was on the wrong side of History I was
43:50
arguing that it seemed extreme just to cut commissions by basically 100 million bucks for restaurants to help them stay in business and I'm like hold on we're trying to go public this is going to completely change the bottom line perspective no one's asking us to do this and Tony says Keith you're just you think too short term he's like this is the right thing to do and it reminded me of the Ted lasso quote which is doing the right thing is
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never the wrong thing and like I talked about how sometimes there's healthy debate he didn't want to hear any debate on this one he said just shut it down and he's like founder-led decision this is the right thing to do we're going to
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cut these commissions and I woke up the next morning and never been happier to kind of been overruled in a debate before than there it was just such such a meaningful moment for the company and I was so proud to be a part of the
44:39
organization is there anything else you took away from that experience of just living through this up and down of of pandemic times at doordash it actually reminds me of the best advice I got when we were having our first kid
44:52
and everyone thinks they're going to give you the Insight that's really going to be transformative but one that that stuck with me is for better and For Worse everything's temporary so the highs you can't get too high the lows it can't get too low
45:05
that really has resonated with me during during that period of time as as well as this general idea that you have to try to find Opportunities to to reach the potential for the business and and decisions sometimes have to be
45:18
made in very short time Horizons and you know be able to seize those moments I think is really important I have a few questions about product that I want to get to but one bigger question about doordash is you've been involved in a
45:30
lot of the bigger fundraising moments doordash I think you've worked probably with every major firm out there uh raised large dollar amounts for doordash are there any memories or lessons that you can share from that experience
45:44
we've definitely tried to raise from everyone I've been told no many many times I mean raising the series D was really difficult Tony and I worked together very closely on that one and there was a lull in the tech Market publicly and it translated pretty
45:58
quickly to the private markets and people didn't believe in both the Tam either the Tam the profitability of the business model and it was difficult I think one thing that that process taught me is after we raised the D almost every rounder I
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think every round ended up being led by someone who had passed in a previous round and that was because we put up numbers we were highly confident we were going to hit and I didn't realize until now I'm an operating partner at a
46:27
venture firm on the side and I see that most people put up stretch plans but they don't but that was just not in our DNA we wanted to make sure that we we put forth numbers that we knew were gonna hit and that cost us some dilution up front in the form of lower valuations I think and there's a trust that builds from that where when we tell people we're going to do something that they have conviction that we're going to do it and I would
46:51
trade you know a couple of points of dilution for that level of trust with the right investor base over time for Founders that are going through fundraising right now may be having a hard time any just advice from that period for Founders they have that are
47:05
having a hard time raising these days it's fortunate because you only need one yes right and you know you see all the people post the how many rejections they got every business that you have heard of has gotten rejected by at least a
47:22
handful of venture capitalists at one point or another and so it that drive to keep going if you believe in the business is is critical absolutely critical I mean we were weeks of Runway situation and have been told no by everyone
47:39
and and it was just Tony's Drive really to keep going and the way he explains it to me is it's just the difference between a founder and a non-founder like if you're really a Founder you just have to find a way you have to keep going
47:51
there's no question and I mean that's the only advice I can give folks is it only takes only takes one yes so you got to keep going awesome shifting a little bit to a few product questions most listeners to this podcast are product Builders growth people Founders and so I have a couple questions here today you're currently leading the Corp Dev and BD team and I imagine you work closely with the product team and so I'm curious what you found to Be
48:20
an Effective relationship between BD and product and from The Experience you've had at doordash doing that yeah I joke that our head of product rajat Shroff is actually the head of BD because he's both interested and good at it and to do
48:36
impactful BD the two really have to go hand in glove so when I think through how to make that relationship work the the first challenge I've confronted and maybe a mistake I made is is trying to figure out what the right Cadence is when you
48:52
bring in the product team because if you bring them in too early on a deal that really has no chance of getting done you waste valuable Cycles in our our Tech Talent is our most precious resource probably at doordash and so you have to
49:06
be really mindful about when you bring them in but if you bring them in too late it may be a situation where you've given on terms that you really shouldn't have and that can be really detrimental to the partnership as well so I think one
49:18
thing to do is just give visibility so without actually bringing them and having a full discussion like here's the pipeline if you think see things that are super impactful let us know if you think things you're not so sure that are
49:28
going to make a difference please let us know that's been really helpful another thing that rajats taught me is the importance of building platforms and whenever you can so what we used to do is I'd go out and negotiate a deal we had a lot of
49:41
deals around dash pass which is our subscription product and I'd ask the product team to go build a bespoke thing for that for this particular partnership Chase or you know whatever partnership we were negotiating at the time and
49:54
Rashad said why don't you figure out what the scalable solution is for this we will build you a product you won't need to come ask us every time to build something and then you'll know the parameters in which you can negotiate
50:07
you can negotiate a better velocity and we'll we might spend more time on the first version of this but very little effort for the next and we'll have a high return on the product hours and the engineering hours spent and so that was
50:20
a super valuable Insight that I garnered from him is to try to figure out how to create these type of platforms any other lessons of just building an effective BD team within a product company especially at the scale you're at
50:35
a few other things number one this is something else that rajat taught me which is to one of our core values is dream being start small and he really brought that to the BD product org and there were some painful times we invested heavily in a
50:49
partnership with a hotel chain we thought we're gonna build hey we're gonna we're gonna make sure that this is the new dine in experience when you're at a hotel we can we can actually replace room service and ask for a lot of product work and it
51:04
was a total flop and the realization I had is that we should have gone out and tested this at one hotel with just some hacky operations and seeing what the uptick was and what I would have realized is this particular Hotel chain was
51:20
franchised so even though corporate thought this was an important thing they were going to prioritize if the franchisee doesn't care about it they're not going to give you the visibility in room or otherwise to make it work so we
51:30
built all this great integration product work that was totally wasted because the operations weren't right and I have probably two or three other examples of situations where I learned I should have just gone out and stood out front with a
51:42
promo code and handed it out in certain forms and seen if that changed customer behavior before going and asking for the product resources and correctly was like hey this is how we have to think about these things going
51:55
forward so yeah definitely building platforms dream big start small use operations to test a thesis around a deal before you actually expend the product resources I think has been super helpful and the last thing would be to
52:08
engage early but not too early on Deal opportunities it's interesting how the advice of doing things that don't scale just continues to be useful even at the scale of a doordash like like you said you could just stand out there and see if people
52:20
want room service through doordash before building a whole solution yeah early doordash that was oh the core value and do things that don't scale and it's as relevant today as it was then same at Airbnb as something the founders
52:33
brought up all the time and speaking of that another area that you have a lot of expertise on is legal so you led legal for a while at doordash and I was thinking as I was thinking about this question like I wonder what's more uh
52:45
difficult to be head of legal Airbnb or head of legal doordash both fraught businesses and ideas but we'll avoid that question for for now so my question is just legal and product it's always this interesting relationship how much legal has say over what happens versus how much product has final decision making Powers any lessons there but just how to set up a product and legal relationship within a software business yeah I mean both for the the
53:13
product folks that are listening as well as the entrepreneurs who want to be founders I've had the pleasure of working with two Founders who are very product driven product first folks and and Travis and and Tony and I found that the way they
53:26
engage on the legal side is with the Curiosity I referenced earlier which is they're both hyper curious and they will ask questions until they understand the law and the particular area about as well as the lawyers and then they will
53:40
apply first principles product mindset to their understanding of the law and they will push the lawyers to make sure that they're not being overly conservative which sometimes they can be and so when you're on the product
53:53
team especially if you're in a consumer finishing business it may not be as pronounced for SAS businesses but if you're a consumer-facing business work on a consumer-facing product you would better have at least a general understanding of what type of
54:07
regulations are going to apply to your business and what type of constraints there are and how to push those constraints yeah and so for me it's just about that level of curiosity and actually engaging in the profession right there's nothing
54:18
magic about the law there's a finite number of things that you can learn just like all the other functions I've learned I think you can engage them in a way so you are proficient it can actually be really creative to your
54:30
business Keith this has been incredible I can see why people want to work for you why they keep giving you more teams to run I learned a ton I'm really excited for folks to listen to this and learn from you two final questions where
54:42
can folks find you online or if they want to reach out or learn more where do you point them and then two how can listeners be useful to you if you want to find me LinkedIn is the place you can locate me you can look at me there I
54:55
don't do any other social media and it is maybe unusual in this day and age but that's my preferred medium and then as far as being helpful always looking for for referrals for great people that would be the number one thing and
55:09
everyone has an opportunity to use our products so if you have product feedback I always welcome that as well for folks that maybe want to join doordash after hearing this is is there specific roles you're hiring for anything you want to share there folks
55:22
that might be interested yeah I mean select roles definitely on the the product and Engineering side is a place we're focused right now but even if there's not a roll open today I like meeting great people I've found that building relationships over
55:35
time even when you're not lifting is is impactful awesome Keith thank you so much again for doing this thanks Lenny thanks for listening you can find the full episode on YouTube or head on over to lennyspodcast.com [Music]