Keith Yandell: prediction

Transcript context

…Nice. And Airbnb, it was always Air Something. Okay. So, I think one of the most interesting things about you and your background, and maybe unusual things, is the number of teams that you've led over your time at DoorDash. I have a list here. So over your time at DoorDash, you've led the HR team. You've led the customer support team, led the sales team, the marketing team. Now you lead the BD and corp dev team. Initially, I think, you were chief legal officer. So here's my question. As someone that, I imagine, doesn't have a ton of expertise and experience in a lot of these areas, how are you able to credibly lead these teams? And I ask partly because as a founder, you have to learn how to lead teams and people that you don't actually know what they're doing as well as they do. And so I'm just curious what you've learned about being able to lead teams in such disparate skill sets and functions. Yeah, the one thing I'll say is, I did not run sales. That's maybe one of the very few non-technical functions I did not lead. But the question is a good one. And I had massive imposter syndrome the first time Tony asked me to take on something that I wasn't a subject matter expert in. And I told him I didn't want to do it. And he had me read this book called Range by David Epstein. And the general thesis is that generalists are better than specialists. And it goes through all these examples of about how Nobel Prize winners are usually amazing in something other than the field that they actually win the Nobel Prize in. And Tony believes pretty deeply in this philosophy, and the way he explained it to me is as follows. If you want to achieve a 10x outcome, hiring someone that's an expert in the field, it's maybe unlikely you're going to achieve that 10x outcome, because they're likely to do things the way things have always been done. So you might achieve incremental benefits, but the odds of completely reinventing the system and doing something that's vastly superior to others is much lower. And he said, "I know you don't know how to do this stuff. That's why I'm putting you in the role." And I said, "Okay." So, first thing he helped me do was believe that I could add value here. And then, the second thing for me was to go out and find the best people that really were the subject matter experts, and add the value I could to help them be successful. And I found that they were actually really attracted to wanting to work with someone like me, who came into the interview process and said, "Good news, bad news. I don't know your field anywhere near as well as you do. Here's the ways I intend to help you. Here's what I think you can provide. And at the end of the day, I'm going to get out of your way." And that's really proven true. So, I ran marketing. Hired initially a head of brand, Kofi, who now is our CMO. Hired ahead of legal, who's now our GC, Tia Sherringham. And these people have really just excelled at their function and, with the warmup that I was able to provide, have really proven that they're much better at the jobs than I was. You don't strike me as someone that is trying to build empires and take over all these teams. I imagine this kind of came at you because you've been doing a great job at other things. Is that how it worked? And, I guess, is there anything, any lessons there that you can take away?…

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