Lenny Rachitsky: belief

Transcript context

…Think about it, right? And if someone really was a jerk, they probably wouldn't have taken it very well. Right? 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 like them, can be a really great way to see how they would interact with you personally as well as how they take feedback. And so that was my learning from the situation, is 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 wanted 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 milestones, you bought the cheapest champagne and 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 of just a microcosm of what DoorDash culture is like, that'd be awesome to hear. Founder-led companies tend to take on the personality of their founders. And if you spend any time with our founder, Tony Xu, you realize that he's a humble leader. He's competitive. He really wants to win, and he'll do whatever it takes to win. And the example 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 runway left. We almost went out of business, and it was a huge relief when 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 the meeting with a couple other folks, and we were talking about the press release strategy. Tony was there. And someone ran down and got some, I think it was Korbel or something champagne and some plastic flutes. And 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 I think Tony recognized could add more value. And he said, "Whoa, whoa, whoa. You stay here. I'm going to go put together the champagne flutes." And he 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 flutes, plastic ones, for this cheap champagne and let the people who are closest to the problem try to work out the comms piece. And I do think that's one great example of the culture. The other thing I think that really exemplifies DoorDash's culture is a level of customer obsession. And that manifests in a few different ways. We have a program called WeDash, 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 with my daughter, who was eight at the time. We got a delivery, and it 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 drop it off. And that didn't make sense for the customer. It didn't make sense 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 him this thing's broken." "Honey, I like my job. I'd like to keep my job. 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 anyway. We can just call." So call. Tony picks up on the first ring. And I'm like, "Oh, 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 going to be hot. How could you allow this experience if you really care about your customers?"…

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