Keith Yandell: evaluation

Transcript context

…That resonates. Coming back to the DoorDash journey a little bit, I imagine the pandemic was kind of this microcosm of high highs and low lows, where, as an external observer, felt like everyone needed DoorDash immediately, and it was just probably the best thing for your business. On the other hand, I imagine you had to scale like crazy and keep the wheels on the bus through this time. Can you just talk about that part of history for DoorDash? I mean, it was just a wild rollercoaster. We were trying to get ready to go public, first of all, and so there was that overlay. And then, what you saw was our volume dropped right away, like the first or second day of lockdown. And I was like, "Well, this is going out of business because no one wants to order food from restaurants anymore." People didn't know how COVID was transmitted. And so just basically volume dropped out a cliff. And I was like, "Oh, went from a super high. We're getting ready to IPO. Super low. Volume's going to zero." And then, all of a sudden, volume doubled. And that was really exciting for a second, till we realized that our customer support center... I was running support at the time. All the support centers around the world shut down. So you're doubling volume. You have no one to serve it, from a customer support perspective. And our infrastructure, we weren't planning to grow that fast. We didn't think there was a chance of two or three exiting in a very short window. And so every Friday night, the app would crash. And if you're running customer support, there's few things you like less than the app going down. Set aside what it means for the customers and for the business. Selfishly, it's just super painful. The irony of it was, is our NPS was going up and that people were just so grateful to have the product, to be able to safely get the things they needed, for people to be able to earn money at times when they really needed it because maybe their job had been shut down, or they weren't allowed to go in. It became a really essential service for folks. And that was really motivating for me, and I think for the team, is to really be able to fulfill the big part of our mission of empowering local economies in a very unique way in a very special time. And the last thing I'll say on the pandemic was, one of my most vivid DoorDash memories was being on a Zoom call, where we were trying to figure out what to do to help restaurants. And again, we were trying to go public. And Tony made a decision, and I admit, I'm on the wrong set of history. I was arguing that this seemed extreme, just to cut commissions by basically 100 million bucks for restaurants, to help them stay in business. And I'm like, "Hold on. We're trying to go public. This is going to completely change the bottom line perspective. No one's asking us to do this." And Tony says, "Keith, you think too short-term." He's like, "This is the right thing to do." And reminded me of the Ted Lasso quote, which is, "Doing the right thing is never the wrong thing." And talk about how sometimes there's healthy debate. He didn't want to hear any debate on this one. He said, "Just shut it down." And he's like, "Founder-led decision. This is the right thing to do. We're going to cut these commissions." And I woke up the next morning and never been happier to kind of been overruled in a debate before than there. under-led decision. This is the right thing to do. We're going to cut these commissions." And I woke up the next morning and never been happier to kind of been overruled in a debate before than there. It was just such a meaningful moment for the company, and I was so proud to be a part of the organization.…

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