Postmates co-founder Bastian Lehmann spent three years building the on-demand delivery model from scratch, but competitors like DoorDash entered later and scaled faster by copying what Postmates had already figured out. These competitive dynamics rarely make it into the public story of how the industry grew.
you're, of course, a pioneer in the, in this space. And, you know, also too didn't have any playbooks to follow. Right. So you kind of helped write those for us. So.
And that's also incredibly hard to understand. Look, I have great respect for all my competitors, and some obviously did better than us. But when the kids from DoorDash launched, we had 3 years of grinding and they were like, okay, we can do this in the suburbs.
Right.
And obviously they don't wanna say that and they don't wanna tell that story because it sounds a little, it sounds not as exciting as, But again, that's also a great story because the story goes, I wanna do what Bastian did in the suburbs and I can do it better operationally. And they clearly did for a long time. So, but that's, nobody says that, right? So people say like, hey, you know, oh, I had this idea, if only I could get, but there was a playbook and you knew there was product built at Stripe to support our use case. So you could just—
Yeah.
You could just, you could copy this service if you wanted to, right? And that's okay. I don't, I actually, I actually think some companies are great when they copy, others are great when they steal. And then we always love doing something that didn't exist. And when you wanna do something that does not exist, A, it's incredibly hard to get data points if this is viable. And you also have very few playbooks that you can sort of that you can lean into. No, not when it comes to running a startup. There are playbooks and they were at the time. So just to give you an idea, but just to give you an idea how different it was at the time, the greatest source of information about startups. And again, this is around 2009, 2010 in San Francisco, which was like an amazing time. There's the whole batch of founders that run companies, includes Airbnb and others. They, they, everyone knew each other and, and they shared ideas. And there was one website obviously by Naval and Nivi called, it was back then it was called Venture Hacks. It was before AngelList existed and they had the dream to turn it into AngelList. But Venture Hacks was basically just a blog that had a collection of stories for like experiences and like, this is how you structure a cap table. There, that was the only article that was on the internet about how you structure a cap table for a startup, which is crazy because, you know, Just yesterday, probably six people have written about cap table for startups just for SEO reasons on some blog somewhere, right? So it just to get the information density was just not there. So being in a place where you could talk to other people was what was important. But you you got some of that. So you knew how to do certain things, and there were like five lawyers that had worked with a lot of startups, and they were at the five law firms, and. You know, so these things were in place, but not the operational playbook or like how do you evaluate the idea and things like that.
