John Collison: evaluation

Transcript context

…But I think Michael always had a fairly simplistic view of the company, where if three things worked, the business works. When I met Michael, it actually reminded me a lot of our journey in Y Combinator, because I think in Y Combinator, I think we were just happy to be there, but a lot of people were really racing towards demo day where the objective function was to raise as much money at the highest possible valuation. For us, actually, the objective function was answering three questions. It was, would consumers pay for this product, pay a premium for delivery? Would merchants actually work with us and pay us commission? And would Dashers partner with us for a wage that we could afford? I think Michael had a very similar set of very simple questions about the company. I think so long as those dimensions looked right to him, he kept on investing. I think he said, "You have to do the math and work out that the economics of this business do work," and they do, therefore, a more compelling product experience will win. Yeah, that he believed that if the unit economics were there, that we could secure enough Dashers. I think his third comment was really that we can continue executing into the market opportunity that things will work out. He turned out to be right.…

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