Keith Yandell: preference

Transcript context

…You mentioned that you ran this 1,500-person org at one point, and something that I've heard you do, that helps you do that, is you have this document that you put together that kind of explains how to work with Keith, and also, just broadly, how things work at DoorDash. Can you talk about this document, and why you thought it was necessary, and kind of the impact something like this has had? And then we're going to share a link to a redacted version of this in the show notes. One thing I've learned is it's super hard to scale culture, especially when you're growing as fast as DoorDash has since I joined. We were two or three X'ing the company, from a head count perspective, for the vast majority of my time every year. And so one thing I noticed is, it's hard to come into a place and be new and understand how things work and what it means to be successful there. And so the idea was to do our best to scale that. And one thing that Tony taught me is one thing that scales really well is written work [inaudible 00:19:16]. And so I put together this document. There's three basic subject matters. It's my expectations slash what I've seen as traits in successful people within the company. Two are how I can improve, like basically, feedback I've gotten in things I'm working on. For example, I'm a litigator by training, and so I tend to argue about things, even if I agree with people to the test levels of conviction. And I got feedback from my team that was really confusing because I'd be arguing against something, and then we would execute that exact thing. And so I try to be transparent about that and explain how I work through problems, but also in saying, "Hey, this is something I'm trying to improve on, is not being quite so argumentative for sport." And then it talks about what my commitments are to team. So, "I'm committed to finding you your next job even if that's not at DoorDash. Life's too short to be in a job you don't like," things like that. I've heard from a few people how impactful this document ended up being. I guess, what impact have you seen this have on the org that you've run in the company and then, yeah, any other examples of just why this is powerful? Because I imagine some people listening are like, "Oh, I should do something like this."…

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