DoorDash founder Tony Xu: "You can't compete against an incumbent on their territory”

You can't compete against an incumbent on their territory. You're going to lose. You have to find something where they're either not incentivized to do it. Innovators dilemma, right where it's lower margin. Some of the incumbents never wanted to touch the end to end delivery because it is lower margin than just having to not deal with the delivery. And you have to find an area where you think you can be advantaged. For us, it always made more sense to us to deliver actually outside of city centers, which I think for a lot of others it was the almost the opposing view. And the reason for us was actually really simple. It's because it's where a everyone lives. If you look at the Bay Area, San Francisco's maybe 5 to 7% of the population. Everyone else lives outside of San Francisco. And so knowing where the market is and knowing structurally why that's different and why that may be difficult for a competitor to serve, that's pretty important. Now you also have to be correct on that bet. Meaning that yes, it improved our position, but we also had the belief that it was where the market was going to be. It turned out to be correct. Now that was a bet. We didn't know that a priori. The second thing I would say is operationally you have to be super fast. The good news is as a startup, focus is actually really easy. You only have one product. Probably you don't have this quote unquote capital allocation decision that I think a lot of schools or books would teach about CEOs and what the job of the CEO is. Your capital allocation decision is super easy. You got to build that one product.