John Mark Nickels: preference

Transcript context

…Yeah. Like at Airbnb, there was always this, "Should we optimize for hosts? Should we optimize for guests?" And there's always this like, "This time, guests are most important. Right now hosts are more..." Make these trade-off decisions in the marketplace. So it's interesting that at Uber, your insight there is Uber is always very rider focused, and DoorDash from its DNA was very merchant focused. You also talk about at DoorDash, there's this mentality of just going before figuring out where to go. Is there anything more there that might be helpful, either as a cautionary tale or as a lesson? Yeah, I think it's a balance. It's back to I don't want to deliberate and pontificate for weeks on end about which door I should run through. And I don't want to go to the other extreme and just spend 30 seconds thinking about what to do and just go, go, go. So it's finding that kind of happy medium. If I had to pick one, I'd rather bias towards running through a wall than not doing anything, because you still get learnings from that and you either make progress or you don't, and that gives you feedback and you can run through another wall as a result. So I think the biggest failure case is probably erring on the other side of deliberating too long without action. What about Waymo? What's something that you took away from that experience as a thing that you want to do more of or something you want to try to avoid?…

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