Keith Yandell: evaluation

Transcript context

…I want to zoom out a little bit and talk about the DoorDash kind of journey. There's been a lot of high highs with DoorDash. There's been some low lows. I know that there was a funding round at one point, where it was very precarious and may not have worked out. Question I have for you around that is just, leading through hardships and through tough times, what have you learned, as a leader, about how to lead through challenging times? And ask partly because a lot of companies are going through that right now. It's pretty hard for a lot of folks out there, a lot of layoffs. And so yeah, I'm curious what you've learned about leading through challenging times. Yeah. I'm going to regurgitate some advice I got from some folks on our board at the same time, when we were having really tough times, which I really didn't like hearing at the time, but I was kind of new to the space. And that is, "Tough times make companies," for a host of reasons. I mean, this is super healthy for the start-ups out there right now. It's because, number one, you're going to find out who the mercenaries are on the team, that are people that are there for the mission, versus they're there because they think this is going to be a quick road to riches. We had a lot of people leave the company when Uber launched food, and we fell quickly behind. And that was good for us because the people that stayed were there because they wanted to work on this team, on this mission, and they really believed in it. The second thing is it forces discipline. It's a good thing to focus on unit economics. And we didn't have the funding that a lot of our competitors did, which forced us to be super focused on our unit economics and efficient and serve the customer in unique ways from the start. And I think a lot of our success, even to this day, emanates from those tough times. The last thing I'll say is if you're a founder, and you're looking for talent, tough times are great because there's a lot more talent out there. I saw... I think it might have been Bill Gurley. Someone tweeted, "This is the best time in recent memory, since 2008, to start a company." And that really resonated with me because there's a lot of talented folks out there who are looking for their next thing. And three years ago, it was tough to find talent. And so I think there's a lot to like about tough times. The last thing I'll say is, one thing that I found surprising is, from our surveys internally, people actually like crises at DoorDash. And I dug into that recently, and I was trying to figure out [inaudible 00:37:10] like these crises, and it's because there's singularity of focus. You know what the job is. You know you're going to get whatever resources the company has, when you're focused on the main thing. And these tough economic times will create that work. It's crystal clear. You got to cut, burn, and everyone's going to be doing what they need to do to achieve that outcome. And I think talented folks really like that, one, resourcing, and two, singularity of focus about what the main thing is. And crises manifests those for folks. It's interesting that there's all these benefits to tough times. It's hard to recreate artificially. Reminds me a little bit of Frank Slootman, I think his name... and his book Amp It Up, where he talks a lot about the importance of urgency, always creating urgency. And obviously, a downturn like we have today is an urgent situation. Have you found that to be true, the power of creating urgency? And then, is there something you've learned about how to create that urgency at a company [inaudible 00:38:07]?…

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