John Collison: evaluation

Transcript context

…Not to speak our book, but one of the first things that comes to mind is actually something like delivery. When you look at the economics for a restaurant, rough math... For every dollar of food that if you and I bought inside of a restaurant, from the cost structure, you're going to have 30% of that in the food and the packaging, you're going to have 30% of it in the rent, you're going to have 30% of it in the labor, something like that. Rough math. On that dollar, a restaurant can net 10 cents. On a takeaway order, you're still paying for the food and the packaging, but you're, largely speaking, using the same labor and you're paying the same rent. There are some exceptions where some restaurants have become delivery only and things like that. But by and large, on average, you're going to make 3-5x the incremental margin. I think, number two, I think restaurants recognize that they need to build relationships with customers that are not just over the telephone or over in-person visits where they're relying on their memory. That area is still, I would say, somewhat incomplete, where there are products where you can manage your social media pages and maybe have a database of relationships that you recall. The challenge, however, though, is you don't get to see everything. You don't get to see the full visibility of your online orders, your in-store orders. Another challenge is your staff turns over. The average staff may turn over every other day. Not every other week, every other day. I do think that there's still a long road ahead there in both making that product a lot more robust for restaurateurs to be able to have those relationships. Back to one of the things we talked about in this conversation about the importance of retention in a consumer business, it is so important for a restaurant to build the concept of a regular, which is a retained customer. You and I, I know we travel a lot for work and so we wouldn't always be great customers for a restaurant. What's more important, actually, is if they knew that there was a regular that is actually coming that should be prioritized. Those are the kinds of things that I think, hopefully, we, DoorDash, can help and actually solve. Don't most restaurants do a bad job of recognizing regulars? You think about the airlines as an industry. They've made it where it's highly irrational as a frequent traveler to travel not your preferred airline. They've really created a lot of lock-in there. Whereas as I think about restaurants, there is the super-mass market punch card, 10th coffee free stuff. Then there's the really old-school restaurant where the owner might greet you and might comp your dessert or something, but it's very sporadic and very dependent on the owner being there because as you say, when the new waiter or waitress is there, they don't know you. But there's nothing in between systematic, and it feels like some way of rewarding the regulars is missing. It's a hard problem. Let me ask you, what is your favorite food to eat?…

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