Keith Yandell: evaluation

Transcript context

…Awesome. And Gokul's been on the podcast. Maybe we'll get Micah on the podcast at some point. I wanted to start off with a story. Apparently, there's a story of you interviewing what is now your VP of engineering. And I hear that in the interview, you called him an asshole. And more interestingly, he joined DoorDash because you did that. Can you just talk about that story and share that story? Yeah, actually, it 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 asshole" culture. And I'm not one to swear a lot, but after interviewing Ryan Sokol, who's now our VP of eng, he was just kind of aloof. He came off 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 Xu, 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. He said, "Keith, I want you to 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 general area. We went out to dinner, and I started right away. I said, "Ryan, during the interview you kind of seemed like an asshole. Are you an asshole?" And he was so great. It completely changed my perspective in a good two minutes. He wanted to know 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, that's just not how I want to be perceived." And we talked and joked about the things he 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 six months later, he told me that one of the reasons why he joined DoorDash was that we were going to blackball him potentially from joining just because of his attitude, because his perspective is life's too short to work with people you 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 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, of just like, "Are you an asshole?"…

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