Ben Gilbert: belief

Transcript context

…Yeah. I was talking about this with some friends—in the research for this episode—who are former Uber employees. The thing is Uber, Lyft, and ridesharing, either canonically everybody found, like hey, once you get the wait times down to 5, maybe 10 minutes, that's fine, it's all good. But to your point, with food, it's not all good. The degree of diminishing returns is much, much higher for food delivery because I want it fast but it also needs to be high quality and still good. If it's fast but it's only half-way cooked, I'll never use your service again. The far more forgiving side is it took too long. The food can stay warm-ish under a heat lamp for a while, but I think everybody knows when they've gotten food that's been sitting under a heat lamp for too long. Totally. Okay, they're hacking these pieces together. This is cool. From the beginning, the business model was basically already there and they haven't changed it much since. Under the hood, a lot has changed. Initially, it was a flat $6 delivery charge to the consumer for getting your food delivered. Obviously, that has changed since then in terms of how it's calculated. Jenny and I ordered Chinese food last night from Mama Ji's here in San Francisco, a great Chinese place. They're on DashPass. We paid a $7 tip to the Dasher and got our food, it was basically the same from our perspective. They also started going to the restaurants really early on—this is even during the Palo Alto Food Delivery days—and said, hey, we're bringing you these incoming orders, will you pay us a cut of the revenue so that we can make this work, the $6, $7 delivery fee that will go to paying the couriers, we're bringing these revenue deals, we'll take a little bit of cut off the food. The restaurants said, yeah. Tony's talked about it. They basically never had a problem with it. I think it was because for many restaurants, this behavior had already been established with the Grubhub and Seamless model. This is probably a good time to take a step back and say, okay, what is unique and different here? We were texting before the show. Most people don't understand the difference between Grubhub Seamless, and what DoorDash and Eats were doing.…

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