The Championship Mindset of DoorDash CEO Tony Xu - [Glue Guys, Ep. 60]

Our very first executive that we brought on, we spent two hours in our first discussion talking about our logistics algorithm. He then later that night without prompting takes out his 13 year old and just do deliveries in their Tesla for like four hours or something like that. And the next day he writes me this like 2000 word essay email about how our logistics algorithm sucks.

All right everyone, I am so excited about our guests for today. I'm actually going to keep the intro shorter than I normally would because the conversation was so good that I want to get you to that. But we have my friend Tony Hsu on today. Tony is the co founder and CEO of DoorDash, which is a company that is, you know, around 100 billion market cap and it's one that's near and dear to, I'm sure, everyone's heart. Tony is an amazing leader. He has built an incredible business and he's also just like a really great friend and he also is a glue guys listener. And so that makes us extraordinarily excited to have him on today. And I'm sure you'll like it, but let's get into it. Alex and I have so many places that we want to go with you today. So Alex, what you got?

Yeah, no, no, I. This has like been on my mind. Honestly. It's been fun to prep for this. Tony, I've been like so excited since we found out that you were going to jump on with us. But like the big one that's really been eating in my brain is honestly, I mean, you and Ravi are friends, so how long, like when Doordash decided to get into grocery, like how long did it take for Ravi to start talking to you again? How long like did he give you the silent treatment for? What was it like? It had to be at least weeks, right?

I love it. Boom.

Good question.

I mean, honestly, what an opener. What an opener. I. I don't think there was any cold shoulders or any. Nothing. No. Any. Any quiet period, Any.

No, no, no, no.

You should have heard what he was saying to us.

Yeah, that's true. I don't know, you should have heard in the green room or, or in the private spaces. I think it's always been both business and fun together with Robbie.

I will tell you, Alex, I will tell you that, you know, you gotta welcome amazing friends and competitors, you know, but the thing about it is Tony is doing so many things right that you know, you have to admire the ambition and the excellence. But also, you know, if people didn't want to be friends with Tony because He was competing in their space. You wouldn't have any friends left, you know, like. And so I think that, you know, you got to be there for your friends. And I want to. I want to be one of his friends for a long time.

I will say this, like, when, obviously when Amazon got in the grocery game, it like, the feeling wasn't the same for Bezos, so.

Yeah, well, I was younger and utor. But also, yeah, he was. Tony actually was there. What's so funny? Tony? The day that, that Amazon thing happened at the Khosla Ventures CEO summit where he kicked me out during his talk, you know.

Oh, yeah, okay.

Tony actually got to have like a one on one with him that day. And Tony was like, oh, like, how was your sit down with Bezos? Like, what do you mean you got to have a sit down with jb? I was like, he kicked me out. How did that happen? And so Tony was actually literally at the event that that happened.

Little did he know that Doordash was coming for him.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. He picked the wrong guy to kick out, I'll tell you that. You know.

I was telling Robbie this, like, your story. Doordash's story is like one of the coolest story, like, honestly, coolest stories that I. I've ever, like, looked into of all these companies, like, thinking about. I, like, I can't get over the Honda, first of all. Do you still have your Honda?

No, it died.

Oh, it finally did.

It died. It died a few years ago. Super sad.

But this idea of, like, starting with eight PDF menus in Palo Alto, like, while you're graduating.

Yeah.

One of the best business schools in the world. And, like, you're delivering, like, hand delivering food. Honestly, back then, like, I just want, like, what did you have this vision from the get go? Like, was it just something that was fun at the point, like, at that point, like, where did you see it? I mean, I'm so interested in this. Like, obviously the behemoth that Doordash has become, by the way. My wife and I, I think, are like, our 14th straight day of ordering. We're doing some work on our kitchen and, like, we're on a hot streak, but.

Okay.

Yeah, I mean, from the get go. Did you envision this?

Well, I'll have to get feedback from you and your wife. Look, I mean, the short answer for all these stories is no. I mean, I think there was always some truth that there is a vision that's very similar to what it is today. I mean, I'm still embarrassed by some of the videos of me out there pitching the idea of DoorDash to Y Combinator, maybe it generates some lessons for entrepreneurs, but. So I think there's some truth that our S1, which we filed five years ago, actually was the original application or very similar to the original application into y common ear. That's true, but when you're schlepping hummus from your Honda and you're watching your classmates think twice about how smart you might be because they're out doing their fun things in Europe or wherever their fancy vacations are, you obviously aren't sure if you're delusional in that moment. And so for us, in the beginning, we actually treated it with very low expectations. We treated it really as a project. The project was really how much we enjoyed working together. And that was very genuine. And we did not get a lot of traction early on. And so it really was that enjoyment of working together that really made up the most of the early days.

I'm not sure if people realize Alex and I were talking about this yesterday. How many food delivery companies were there in terms of just, like, peak providers of a similar initial service to DoorDash? How many do you think there were?

Probably 10 to 12. I mean, there were, there were. There were certainly a lot.

I think the thing that's cool is, like, you talk about early on, like, what mattered was, are you enjoying working together? You could have easily, like, had some other goal of, like, well, look, you know, there's this many players in the space and we gotta get to this ranking or whatever. But, like, it's such a different input, you know, to actually be focused on of, like, you know, do I just kind of want to come to work with these people again the next day? And I don't know, it already speaks to you, being pretty different than I think one might expect operating in a ridiculously competitive environment.

Yeah, I think a lot of what drives, what keeps anyone going or what gets you started may be different, like you said. And for us, certainly working together was probably the biggest draw. I think the four of us were very good friends. And so as a result, working together, irrespective of whatever the topic was, DoorDash was actually project number three that we had worked on together early on. I could have given you many reasons why DoorDash would have not made it or not been a great business idea, but that wasn't the driving force. One was we felt like there was an important opportunity, certainly to help local business owners, small business owners, but that was maybe the brain side of the equation. The hard side of the equation was we liked working together.

The whole idea of being first to market. Right. Like how important that is to start a company. Right. Doing something that nobody's done before, have some different angle on it. And I do think back again to how competitive this field was. Right. Like at that time. I'm sure there are a lot of people telling you the same thing. Right. Like again. And you talk about this team there, there had to be self doubt certainly. Right. Like of wherever this was going to go, what it was going to turn into. I had no idea. You know, I've talked at length with Ravi about your guys story along the way. I had no idea. The turbulence even in the later years. Right. Like of, of what you guys went through and where you are now. And it's hard to believe and I just don't think, like you said, people don't see it.

Right.

Like they see the finished product. They see obviously the scale that you guys have achieved. And you know, it's hard to look back and remember those like tough times. Right. Like when it was hard to get financing and 1,000 days.

Right?

Yeah, over. Over a thousand days. Yeah, yeah. It was March of 2016 when we raised our Series C. And then March 1st of 2018 when we raised our.

Series D. I mean like that's crazy.

Yeah, yeah, it was. Yeah, it was. It was definitely a tough couple of years there in the middle.

Okay, so like what, what about the team? Looking back now from your seat, like what Again, I think so many teams just don't make it through that. Right.

It's tough circumstances and you know, crisis moments that really get a team to bond. But I do think the relationships kind of have to be there or some version or some foundation has to be there from the beginning. And so I think in the beginning we were very particular and picky about picking who we wanted to work with. And so we had a pretty lean team even through 2018. So that would have been five years after the founding of the company. The team was maybe a couple hundred people, maybe slightly over that number. It wasn't like this massive organization. We selected for people who certainly had, you know, from a skill perspective, we call them Rhodes Scholars meets Navy seals. That's kind of like the group we looked for, for engineers. We looked for engineers who would be willing to do deliveries. And so when you think about like the mindset required in both of those types of, you know, folks, it's people who generally first and foremost are very humble. There aren't a Lot of, you know, software engineers who just are happy to do deliveries on a Friday night, rolling in their Teslas or something. That's not the first thing they do. The second thing I would say in addition to that is this ability to do any task and to do all of the tasks. And I think that's one of the hardest things. And the kind of crop of companies that rose in this space had to figure out, which is you're not just writing software. The software does interact with the physical world. The physical world is messy. You don't get to control your anything, really. You don't control the demand, you don't control the supply, and you kind of are responsible for all of it. And I think in general, that just requires some different skill sets and building a lot of different muscles. So that's kind of the skills we had to develop. I think in terms of the culture, we always said that we were one team, one fight. That still is one of the cultural norms today at the company. And so whether that meant everyone doing deliveries every day, everyone doing support or taking turns doing support, whether that meant an engineer possibly selling restaurants or a salesperson, you know, literally helping create menus, you know, whatever, it meant, this is definitely a place that you need all of these skills. And at the same time, we all have to be responsible for the end to end customer outcomes. And then when the times did get tough, that was very helpful. The other things that were very helpful was it was a very intellectually honest place. So every week, from really the first day of the company to certainly the hard times, we'd show every metric in the company. Obviously, a lot easier to do when you only have 200 people. You could fit everybody into the same physical space. Harder to do today, but we'd show every metric, including this, you know, scary, you know, cash balance that's kind of just on its way towards the X axis and heading to zero every single week. But then on the same side, you know, I think what got people somewhat both confused and optimistic was, wow, look at the order growth.

Yeah.

And it's happening without marketing spend, and it's happening organically because of repeat business and word of mouth. And I think people were both, again, confused why we couldn't raise any dollars because of the performance, but they also felt like what we were working on was working. So, yes, there was the camaraderie, but it wasn't delusional. It wasn't this, like, Kumbaya, you know, Singh exercise. It was like, man, it seems like the thing we're Working on is working. People don't believe us. We believe it. And we're in it, you know, to fight for each other as well as, you know, fight for something that we believe is working.

I so appreciate the. The algebra reference there. I'm helping my seventh grade son currently in algebra class.

So there we go.

I had to talk to him about what negative slope and positive. Okay, the difference between up and to the right.

And, you know, Tony, I actually was going to ask you about slope, and so you're not allowed to be humble when you answer this question. Okay? So get out of your normal mindset. You got to just, like, answer it for real. You mentioned being embarrassed when you look at, like, videos of yourself, you know, years and years ago pitching, you know, doordash. Right. But that is a sign of, like, tremendous growth too, which is that, like, you're not the same person as you were. And one of the doordash values, I think, is the 1% better every day.

Yes.

You know, and just, like, the value of that compounding. Were you always somebody who, like, realized that value, or is it something that you sort of, like, learned and decided to make important? I'm curious for where that comes from.

My wife likes to tell me this all the time. I'm this, like, constantly dissatisfied person where, yes, maybe something really positive happens, and then, boom, I'm on to the next. You know, maybe we'll take a dinner out to celebrate. But then very quickly, my mind is already on to the next. And so I think that constant sense of dissatisfaction or maybe just realizing, you know, it's. It's not a huge deal. There are bigger deals in life than just whatever we accomplished, whatever that is. I think that's always been naturally true about me. I was born somewhat that way. The part that's not true or the part that was really developed through doordash was realizing, wow, these kind of businesses where, you know, you make a little bit of money on a lot of volume or you do lots of experiments to hopefully get 10 seconds faster on a delivery, 5% more accurate on an order, you know, 20% cheaper, but it takes you five years to get there. Boy, like, the only way you kind of get there is many small things put together. And in the beginning, it's really frustrating because you want, you know, like all humans, we want that silver bullet. We want that. We want that three bullet points. That is perfect on a napkin that can describe what is the strategy? How do you improve something? But in reality, you know, the way that doordash has achieved Some of its success in different areas is tens of thousands of experiments, 95% of which don't even make it to a customer because they fail. And so that came from learning at DoorDash, where the way that you want to get more accurate on a delivery is probably requires some level of detail that is lower and deeper than you realize. And you have to just keep trying as many things as possible to get closer and closer and closer and closer to it.

There's a lot of things in my life where I actually have like no interest in the details, right? And then there's some things where I have like tremendous interest in every single detail. You know, like when I was day to day at Instacart, I, I remember wanting to know everything, you know, and the same experience on like how to make a delivery faster. Well, where exactly is the parking spot? Which lane are we in? How close is the stop? Is the checkout lane to the door? You know, these kinds of things, right? Yes. And it's so different than some of my personality and other things. I'm like, I just don't care. But it, oh, but, but the reason is in these businesses the detail is the differentiator. It does apply to home too, you know what I'm saying? Like, I think about so much of what we're trying to do is like be someone our kids will be proud of, you know, and that means like, don't become stagnant. Like we need to get better. You know, I need to be a better parent or husband tomorrow than I am today. You know, that takes like being intellectually honest.

Tony, I, like, I'm so fascinated too, because you have such a unique experience of being a founder, right, who started a company with your, your three co founders and you, you start by, you know, hiring employee number one and you start this thing and you're still sitting in the CEO suite, right, like today. And what's the market cap 90? Is it. I mean it's.

I don't know. I genuinely don't know.

But anyway, regardless what the headcount would.

Be, the, the, the, the, the guess.

I'm so curious, like how you view leadership. Obviously that role has changed, right? The team is bigger, the scale is bigger. But like what is most important to you right now from a leadership standpoint?

That's a very tough question because it's one that I'm still trying to, you know, answer, re. Answer every single day. Because to your point, the company is different and the leader necessary to, you know, lead a four person team to now A tens of thousands person team. You know, every stage of that is very different. You know, the, some of the through lines though one is you always have to be ahead of where your company is going. And so that 1% better really starts with you at the top. In my opinion. It doesn't somehow start with, you know, the team starts with you at the top. And that to me starts with taking actions because if you don't change your behavior, it is very, very, very hard to keep doing the same thing over and maybe getting a new insight or getting better at something. Sometimes it is, it is just putting in the 10,000 hours and, and getting great at a skill, you know, learning what finance is for the first time, I didn't know what that was or you know, how do you lead an engineering team or you know, things like that. For sure it is about putting in the, the hours and then at some point it's about doing something, whatever the next thing is, right. And so one of those things is actually in recruiting. And you know, how do you actually know what excellence looks like? Because there's no way that you can put 10,000 hours into every particular category. So identifying what excellence looks like, identifying how that excellence matches and then ultimately how the excellence works together, it's not just about, oh my God, I have a five star recruit in every position. Okay, good for you, you have raw talent, but if the team can't play together, you're in trouble and some other team is going to come and beat you. And so a lot of my day to day today is do we have excellence in every position? Does the team work well together? Are we raising the bar on what excellence looks like in every phase? Are we trying to increase the tempo in which we try to get there? Those are kinds of the things that I try to focus on today. Certainly very different right from when I was doing deliveries every single day for the first couple of years.

How do you identify those qualities?

It's a super hard thing and it's something that I'm still trying to improve my understanding of. But I guess a few things I've done in that journey and have learned. One of the things I did in trying to teach myself, how do you recruit executives? This happened as early as 20, 15, 16, and it probably took a bit of a hiatus during the pandemic years was four or five years of meeting hundreds of different people. And I would literally just ask any friend of the company, it could be an investor, it could be a board member, it could be a friend and say, tell me who two great executives are. Just name them. I don't care which field, I don't care which function. My goal was learning just what is excellence in a craft looks like, what does excellence in a CMO look like? Or a CFO or, or a head of engineering ahead of product, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. How do you identify the team element or the team first element of the person? Most of what I learned there was really in the listening and in the reference checks. So my process with ultimately anyone that we made an offer to on my direct team probably took between 20 or 30 hours, something like that. In that ballpark, why did it take so long? A lot of it. There's no. What I've learned is there's no secret sauce interview question. There is no magic bullet question that like gets you to that. Because everyone, especially an executive. Yeah, exactly. They're income, super buttoned up, super prep, probably way more polished than I am.

Yeah.

The marketing people are the hardest ones to interview, by the way. Literally, I think by far the marketing people are the hardest ones because they're like amazing at marketing.

They're amazing storytellers.

Yeah.

And their job is to communicate. Their job is. And so you're playing against a pro who has way more reps than you do. And so most of what I do is in the listening to tell what someone is. And if you listen for enough hours, you kind of get to some truths. I'll give you a few examples that kind of make this come alive. So Christopher Payne was our very first executive that we brought on, who was our first chief operating officer. We spent two hours in our first discussion talking about our logistics algorithm. He then later that night, without prompting takes out his 13 year old, then 13 year old son and they literally go around Saratoga and the neighboring area and just do deliveries in their Tesla for like four hours or something like that. And the next day he writes me this 2000 word essay email about how our logistics algorithm sucks. Right. And why it sucks. And here's how you make it better, here's how it connects it. There's no prompting, right? There was no prompting like that tells. That signaled to me that this person takes action, that this person gets into the details. Right. I didn't ask that question. I didn't ask, oh, give me examples of how you operate at the lowest level of detail or show bias or action. I didn't do any of that. Actually. This person did that. Or our current chief operating officer, our CFO before he took over as president, he shows up to a coffee chat that we have scheduled for 30 minutes, he shows up with a 10 megabyte file Excel model of what he thinks Jordache's financials could be. That tells me everything you need to know about this person in terms of how they think, what matters to them. That's how I tell for the team story, too. And this is where the references, I think, really are helpful, where, especially if you do enough of them, I think if you do them especially for people that may only tangentially know them, but we're actually responsible for the work. So the skip levels, the actual people doing the project, I think they'll be very honest about that executive's actual involvement in the work and how they either stood up or didn't stand up in times of difficulty on that project. And so those are the things I've learned in terms of, you know, how can you actually tell what someone is about, especially someone who communicates brilliantly and whether or not they're a team player.

Earlier in my career, I didn't do any of that. I just thought there was, like, secret sauce interview questions you, like, didn't put in the time. And so what actually happens is sometimes you'll miss on somebody who turns out to be amazing and you were just wrong. And you. And you don't. No one else has to tell you, but you know that you, like, didn't do a good enough job to identify that they were great. So, like, even in our businesses, we have these Mrs. And the Mrs. Are like, your fault, right? Because you're like, oh, like, I didn't go and spend enough time. I used the wrong data to determine that this person was good. Because I think for sure, for me, earlier on, the reference from their boss was always like the driver. And I think that, like, think about that incompleteness of that versus the reference from their skip level person beneath them, notionally in the org. So that's like, really humbling. What ends up happening when you talk to somebody. I don't know, Tony, I'm sure you find this, but if you're ever talking to somebody for like, a role or like to invest or for a board member, all of a sudden the people that are really special that you start getting this, like, inundated with, like, people being like, oh, my gosh, let me tell you about this person. And you hear these incredible things about them, especially as you start to go out and then you'll talk to somebody who knows them, like, oh, you really got to talk to this person. You realize you're like you like really, it starts to converge. And on the flip side, people who aren't good because people trust you, like, it really compounds this approach that you're taking.

That's actually one of the benefits, I think of Silicon Valley that I think probably people don't talk as much about, which is there's a lot of craziness that happens in the Valley and obviously there's these cycles ups and down. But one of the constant benefits is actually how helpful people can be. I owe in a tremendous amount of, you know, gratitude to those who spent the hours with me, you know, teaching me about what great looks like or, you know, to Robbie's point, you know, back, back channel, referencing certain candidates that either I never even contemplated or candidates that we were actually, you know, exploring.

You talked about failure, right? You talked about experimenting, like early days of DoorDash and 95% of the experiments fail, right? Like they never see the consumer. And it so reminds me of we, we talked to Coach K and like one of the first things he went to West Point and he talked about his freshman year. The main thing you learn is how to fail, right? Like, and, and the importance of it. And it's so funny because I've talked about my experience as coaches and like you would think successful people have zero tolerance for failure, right? And like, and the coaches that I've played for that are like that, it's actually fairly miserable to play for, right? Like because you walk around on eggshells.

You'Re terrified, make a mistake, I bet.

And again, you like guard against it, right? Like you don't take risk, you don't grow. It's not essentially not a growth mindset and I'm, I guess I'm so interested. You like inherently just say that, right? Like there's this built in risk taking, I think from the get go that that clearly has embodied Doordash. So I, I, I'm just interested on your perspective towards that.

That is literally the hallway conversations of probably every virtual corridor we have here at Doordash, where I think it starts with this idea that even when I think about Doordash's history or any company, but certainly I'll speak about ours, is that it is so unlikely the story to have made it. For every Doordash that made it, I have a feeling there are many awesome teams that probably didn't get there. And so that kind of means that it is very hard and I don't think I have the ability to know the future. The best thing you can do is to Focus on what's in your control and to take action. That's the best thing that you can do when you don't know something is to collect information by taking action. As a public company, obviously one of our big audiences are a lot of public market investors. And one of the things we try to do our best in showcasing is how we invest or how we think about things. And one of the things we kind of talk about is we're always going to invest to make long term decisions. That usually means you're going to stomach a lot of short term pains and mistakes because you're going to make investments that won't pan out, which means you're going to have to shut them down. But you already spent the money or you spent the time and that comes at a cost. And what we should be held accountable to is whether or not we make enough great investment decisions that the ones that actually make it to the customer pay off for all of the mistakes that didn't make it. You need to have that growth mindset that you got to keep, you know, throwing the next ball if you threw an interception. On the flip side, you do have to hold the player and the team to a high bar of accomplishment. At the end of the day, it is about winning, right? It is about the championship, whether it's the super bowl or some other version of that. In, in business, it is getting that titration right for the right stage project, the right amount of investment, the right amount of feedback, positive and constructive for the team.

I work with a company with a guy named George who used to be at Doordash. You know, actually Doordash is also an investor in the company. And this, George is like a founder, founder through and through. Like this is, this is who he is. But he was, you know, he helped create a bunch of new things within DoorDash, specifically DoorDash Drive. The thing about it, I'll tell you is that like he talks about all the failures they had early on, you.

Know, 18 months, the first 18 months for complete zeros.

Yeah, just like zeros, right? And. But he's still close with Tony and DoorDash invests in his company and DoorDash Drive ends up working out incredibly well. But the real value that you provided to him there was showing him what excellence could be and protecting him from the organization. You know, killing this initiative because you believed in it for whatever reasons, whatever data points you'd seen. Dude, that's so hard because you got to be in the details enough to know to protect it. And Know which ones to not. And then you also have to realize as a human being, despite the fact that there's all the zeros. This guy George, he's good.

This is one of the hardest things to get right, I think, about building a company is you need actually different management techniques for these kind of different projects. You kind of have projects that, you know, have been working for a while. You know, in our case, maybe the restaurants business, everything is a bit of a gradient. There's no like zero or ones here, but. But there it's. The gradient leans more towards excellence and, you know, perfecting the craft optimization, agility, where you want them to reinvent and disrupt themselves. So there's. There's a bit of that. But then on the complete other spectrum, you have new projects where they're complete zeros to start with. They probably will be zeros for a while. You still have to make the investment. And I think one of the things that in order to get that set up right is a, you got to match the right person. So someone like George, who has that capability. But secondly, you have to design the organizational incentive to protect it, because the natural response is to shoot it down. The natural response is, say, listen, why are we putting all these awesome people on this project that delivers zero value? They should just be working on the core, core business. And when those stars actually don't, you know, do well, you actually have to protect them. In this case, we promoted George and we promoted a lot of that team because I felt like they were making progress against their milestones, even though maybe overall the scoreboard wasn't. Wasn't yet very high. Think about the message you send to the company. The company. The message would be, okay, if you're a star player and you want to remain a star player, you shouldn't work on no new.

I never do anything. Anything new.

I got to imagine that's even harder as a public company CEO.

It is hard because of a couple of reasons. One, there is this stock price that I've tried everything in my power to get people to not look at. I personally don't look at it. You had to remind me of the market cap today, because I don't know what it is. But the second thing is it's part of our compensation equity. And so when it has fluctuations, especially when it goes down, obviously people take that seriously, and we have to take that seriously. And so you got to. But I think just like with all things, whether you're a private company, you're a public company, whether you're A startup, whether you're a slightly larger company, you just have to be honest about what you want to do. And you will find your group of investors or teammates or employees or partners. And because that's, that's, that's the only thing that's in your control.

This is why you don't pay attention to the stock price, right? Like, this is like the epitome of. We talk about it all the time, like Bill Walsh. Like, the whole score takes care of itself or takes care of itself, like to not obviously. Like, again, this is such a public, forward facing, loud output, right? Like to the second every single day. I'm sure it'd be hard for you to turn on the radio and not get some of this information.

How often are you listening to the radio these days? Is it, is it because you have a Hotmail account that you still. I still listen to the radio.

Back off, bro. I get my marketplace, you know, uploads the thing.

So a friend of mine literally yesterday was telling me about this and I think it's like a good analogy to think about. He's like, my investors tell me that the stock market is a scoreboard. The stock price is scoreboard. He's like, no, it's not. He's like, think about this for a second. He's like, a scoreboard works where like, it is a predictable reaction of like, if this input happens, this shows up on the scoreboard and it's real time and it demonstrates an accurate view of what's happening in the game. He's like, that's not what the stock price does. He's like, I could like have a great quarter and then the stock price could go down. I could have a shitty quarter. The stock price could go up. He's like. And like, yeah, sure, over the super long term, yes, I understand. He's like, but like, remember the analogy you're telling me to have, which is like, well, this is the scoreboard. He's like, in fact, it's like a terrible real time scoreboard. It exists for liquidity for investors, right? It exists in order to have a compensation mechanism. It was not created to be a functioning real time scoreboard of progress in your business. And I was like, damn, he's totally right. Like, that's that and it makes sense. You're like, I am going to pay attention to the things that I know will yield great results, but it takes discipline not to look at the thing that's blaring in your face.

Yeah, I think, but I think that's so true. About every part about building a company, though. All of these sorts of things require fighting human nature. And that's why most people do it, right? Most people do watch, you know, the ticker symbol and things like that. But, you know, someone has to show that there can be a different way. It doesn't mean that it always works. It doesn't mean that, you know, you don't wish for, you know, some of those things to be turned off at times. But it. That's. That's just part of the game.

One of the things, Tony, you and I have talked about that I was actually surprised by, maybe it was a couple years ago, the passion with which you talked about Jiu Jitsu when we had dinner. Yeah, I think it was in Russian Hill. Tell me, like, why it's so important to you what you've learned. Can you talk about that? Alex, have you ever done Jiu jitsu before?

No, no. I've had several teammates, though, that, like, have gotten gone deep down the rabbit hole of it. Would even do it right, like at the facility. Would bring out, you know, mats and train.

Oh, wow.

I've learned a lot, actually, about business through a lot of, I mean, interestingly enough, non business sources. You know, whether it's my background in math or some things I used to study in biology as I was trying to study what caused cancer to things that. Or jiu jitsu, to your point. And really credit goes to my coaches way more than anyone else, because I do think, like, with all things I'm seeing this with my kids in any subject, their affinity for that topic has a lot to do with who the teacher is, whether they like soccer or math or art or whatever, whatever the topic is. And so with Jiu jitsu, I think I just got lucky with, you know, one of the best coaches ever in the world. And. And. And he taught me a ton about, you know, a lot about myself, more so. And, you know, Alex, you asked earlier about leadership. You know, one of the greatest lessons I learned from him was knowing how to let go. You know, sometimes as the leader, you kind of feel like you need the answer for a lot of questions. And you get a lot of questions, obviously, as you compete in more spheres in business and in Jiu jitsu, there's this very hard thing that the most elite athletes do, which is they can both keep their bodies firm and relaxed at the same time. They know exactly when to pounce when there's an opportunity, and they know exactly when to give in and kind of roll with the punches if you Will before they kind of plan the next attack because they realize that they're on a dying hill and it's a lot better to give up on that position and move to the next thing. One of the things that you learn very early on, especially when you're a white belt, when I was Wipeout, is you want to be so aggressive, right? You want to really take it to the field. Well, you got about two minutes of that. Every athlete has about two minutes where they can contract their entire body and then they have nothing left. And so knowing when to save up those precious resources and actually concentrate your attack, for example, is really important in certainly a five minute match in jiu jitsu or you know, the game of business where it's really hard, right, to fight a lot of battles all out at the same time. Just like in basketball. I used to be terrible with my left. Okay. Practicing with the left as much as you do with the right. And jiu jitsu is the same, right. If you're great with one sided attack, trying, you know, the other side, you know. So there are a lot of things I learned about just the practice of the sport that in my opinion have a lot to do with business and life.

I talked about at the start of the show, but like the story of Doordash and I think so much of it, obviously even your story, your upbringing.

Sure, yeah.

And I know the idea of Doordash I think saving small business and saving brick and mortar, right. And this is something that's like very personal to you with your mom, right. And how you grew up is that, do you think that's like why again coming out of business school that this was so close to home for you and like energized you so much?

I think for the start of the company, for sure, right? The start of the company stories like my mom and how hard she worked. I think the thing that I really take away from that is, you know, for a small business owner, one thing that I don't think we appreciate sometimes working in the non service industry, you know, in the office, in offices is that for the small business owner, this is their life, this is not their business. It's not just their business. It is not a 9 to 5 or 9 to 9 or whatever the, you know, the new mantras are out there about hard work. It is, it is how they view their self worth. It is how they view, it determines whether they're having a good or bad day. It's all. It is like their child and family and closest, you know, things in life that they hold most dear. And that. That's what it is. That's what I got from my mom. But you know, obviously there was a lot of years in between when I worked as a dishwasher in a restaurant to. To when doordash got started. So I can't really like, you know, make that linkage. But, but, but, but I get to see every single day when I talk to these businesses owners, including, by the way, I think this is under reported franchisees of big companies. Big companies that you've all heard of or the people that run grocery stores, for example. Sometimes they're even co owners in that grocery store. But they're very similar. Their mindset. They take that job so seriously. Everything revolves around it. Their weekends revolve around it. They bring their kids every single day to work. Not, not like there's no like one bring your kid today to work event. They bring their kid every day as a way, as a way to see their kids. Really. That's. That's the reason why they do it. The essence of, of it being their livelihood and deter. And these are the biggest job creators in the economy. You know, I know, I know. We love, we want to talk about AI and that's awesome, but boy, like it is these small, medium and large physical businesses that produce the vast majority of GDP in every part of the economy.

Tony, there's this trope that people often talk about, which is people that are busy with their jobs and particularly founders, they take tremendous sacrifice in their personal life. But the reason I called it a trope is I actually don't know if that actually is true. When you go deeper and it depends a lot on the person, how do you think, like the doordash experience has impacted you as a parent?

The first thing I would say is it is so incredible to actually watch kids think about things from their perspective. It's so awesome. You know, back, back to this, like releasing your agenda, which we talked about in jiu Jitsu. Sometimes you have to let go. That is kids 101, right? Like trying to ask them about what you want to know about versus them kind of telling you what they're excited about. Boy, do you get different responses. But that's business. That's like, a lot of times you don't get to force a customer to like something that you do or just because you did it, or to like or to force a team to do something exactly the way you want to do it, because that's how you think it should be done. You know, that is one that immediately comes to mind of recognizing that in business, sometimes it's a lot better to, you know, set the standard and be very flexible about the house or set the what, but be flexible about the how. That's really helped with parenting. I think the second is realizing that, you know, every moment shall pass. And that means when the big feelings start with the kids and I got younger kids, and that's why I say things like that, you know, I have a 7 year old and a 5 year old. When the big feelings explode, that moment shall pass. And when something really awesome happens and your child maybe is proud for the first time, for example, because they figured out how to write the Alphabet or read to stay on that moment for a little bit longer. And that's actually something that's teaching me about the business world where I tend to be a person I said earlier.

Where totally perpetually dissatisfied.

Yeah, exactly. I suck at celebrating. We hit some awesome milestone. I'm. My brain is already on the 17 problems we have, you know, as opposed to, you know, the celebration. And so I think it goes both ways. I mean, put a different way. I don't think it's just, oh, you know, doordash has helped me, you know, in my parenting life. I think it's gone the other way as well.

We've talked about this, Ravi, but like, growing up like my parents, they both worked. Like I wrote, I got myself to and from practice most of the times, like, they came to most of my game, like, you know what I'm saying? But like, it wasn't expected. Where I feel like today there's this expectation on parents to like, be at everything, right? And both parents, right? And sometimes it's kind of crazy, I think, and unfair. There's like multiple things that as you were talking, like, they just gave me so much reference. And I do appreciate it too. I was the same way. Like, I always took a lot of pride in when you had success, right? Like not celebrating, it's like the Barry Sanders thing, right? Like just hand the ball to the ref and like the next play, it's like professionalism to it. But like, I do, I think as I've grown, you know, gotten older and even through, especially through my leg injury, my rehab, like how important it was to celebrate a little bit, right? Like little milestones and victories and achievements. And I do think, and I never thought of it until last week when we had this, this episode on momentum, right? And how important it is in, in creating and keeping momentum, right? These little celebrations, taking note of These things, I think it does build that.

Right.

And it's obviously momentum's hard thing to quantify, but like, it is important in fostering that kind of atmosphere.

Dude, can I tell you something, Alex, on this? Just to, just to add, I. One of my like, big, big, big beliefs is like, joy and fun are massively underrated.

Okay.

And like, I literally, you guys can see I have my note card, it's on my desk. You know, bring joy. I don't know if you can see that, but like, I literally have it like next to me on the desk every day. It allows you to keep going and then the keeping on going is actually the thing that allows you to compound. Right? Like, remember, like the. In the bounding equation, time is actually the thing that's the most important one. And so the thing that people forget when they're all fucking serious all the time, take any time to like enjoy it, is they're actually going to lose the time aspect because people aren't going to stay. Right. Whereas if there are a few moments, like, you know, Tony and one of his co founders do a foot race. They do like a race every year. They literally do like, it's 100 meter dash, right?

Oh, it's gotten a lot shorter over the years. It's probably, it's probably like a 40 meter, maybe a 30 meter dash.

But like, okay, so, okay, so at some point it'll be like a 10 meter dash.

At some point I'll be crossing.

Yeah, yeah, just like, who can cross the street? But like, dude, think about like every year the whole doordash team's like, oh, let's go, we got the race. And like, I don't know, you're probably pretty busy. I don't know, like, should you really have an event around that? It's like, yeah, you should because it creates joy and camaraderie and, and it creates like a tradition. And so I really think on this one I'm like, I am 100% sure. I'm like seeing the matrix here, which is that like, it actually is like good for business to have some like, fun.

The privileges I have in my job is I get to meet a lot of companies. A lot of them are our customers. And these retail organizations or restaurant organizations, they have a lot of tenure. You're talking 10, 20, 30, 40 years of service to an organization. And yeah, a big part of it is that joy that you see. And they're not the huge moments. It's the, it's the hallway banter, it's the Jabbing at each other, you know, in the team room or in. Or in the cafeteria. Those are the moments.

Alex and Shane talk about this all the time. Like, you guys say you miss, like, the bus you miss, right? Like, it's the things that you miss about playing, isn't it? Isn't that what you.

Oh, yeah, you would miss, like, getting razzed all the time, right? Like, because, like, in the locker room, right? It's. It's, you know, literally, obviously, you can't hide, right? And so you'd come in, it could be from, what, the out. The stupid outfit you were wearing that day or like when you got on a bus to travel, right? And it's become more of a culture, right? Like, that celebrate. Like, they celebrate a turnover. You see these defenses that, like, the entire unit runs down to the end zone and celebrates. And it's funny, the teams that do that, I do think inherently I see them do it a lot. They create a lot of turnovers, right? Like, it is something that they take a lot of pride in.

Honestly, man, like, forgetting about all the decisions we have to make and all the ambition, whatever. I just want the kids to think that their home was, like, it was like a place where they got to, like, smile and laugh. And so, like, a lot of the shit I'm trying to do is just, like, make them laugh so that, like, when the whole thing Shane talks about, about, like, the lessons we learn from our parents are the ones where they're not trying to teach us something. I just want them to feel like there was a lot of, like, laughter in the house, you know, like, I will run around sometimes. Like, you know, we have all the rules of here. You can watch this much of screen time. You can eat this at this time, you know, whatever. A lot of the role I play at home is just, like, breaking those rules and running around, dancing, yelling. We can change this because I'm a grown up, you know, and like, the kids, like, now, like, when they want to change a rule, it's like, hey, dad, you want to be a grown up today? And you want to have some pancakes for, like, you know, lunch? And then sometimes I'll say no, and sometimes I say yes. And then we all dance and yell, dad's a grown up. Like, yeah, I don't know. I love, you know, when we do that.

So, you know, I also. It's funny on that same note, and Tony, it's weird to hear you. You know, you mentioned, obviously, the idea of, like, letting go, right, As a.

As a leader.

Right. Like, as a. Obviously, as a leader of Doordash and this idea of. Right, obviously you can only control what you can control. And, you know, as much as we want to tinker and be a leader and have every answer for every question, like, you do have to have this idea of letting go.

My dad told me that the other day because I was, like, you know, annoyed about some upset about something with the kids. And I asked him, like, how did you guys. How did you and mom, like, deal with it when we were like, when we did something you didn't like? And he was like, you know, son, you just got. Your eyes are too, like, focused on them right now. Like, he's like, I was, like, worried about, like, losing my job. I was worried about, like, making sure, like, we had, like, you know, enough. He's like, dude, like, you gotta. You're just, like, seeing too many things. Like, this stuff is fine. Like, it doesn't matter. And, like, the idea of, like, see less, you know, like, care less, you know, it's such a weird thing because it's like, oh, that's the most important thing. But I totally agree. Like, the advice, like, you know, my parents, who I could my most on this, who I always thought of as, like, strict in this and that, they're like, yo, just like, chill out. It's fine. Like, you know, like, everything, it's going to be okay. And, like, you don't need to, like, comment every time something is incorrect. Like, Ruth Bader Ginsburg had this thing of, like, the key to a successful marriage was selective hearing. You know, just like. Just like, leave it alone, dude. You don't need to, like, engage on everything.

Everything is a gradient. You can take everything, you know, just way too myopically or to, you know, way too seriously. And that's. That. That's, by the way, one of the hardest things in, you know, any. Any competitive field, whether it's sports or business, which is. It can feel like everything is just about the outcome, right? Like, whether, oh, we have to deliver this particular product or this business milestone or win this game, et cetera. And you do lose, or you definitely stress the joy, the humanity, the camaraderie. And you want both. You really want both in order to have that sustained momentum to keep on doing positive things.

Our traditional closing question, as, you know, as a listener is, you know, who are your glue guys? Glue people. You know, glue gals. And so we'd love to hear about those people.

First person that comes into mind is, is my wife. And that's because again, I think you guys probably can understand this. One of the ways you make a lot of things happen at the same time is you actually need multiple quarterbacks in your life. You can't be the quarterback for every situation. And so my wife runs our household, and it doesn't mean that she does everything, and trust me, she dishes it out to me to do a bunch of things too. But the fact that someone does that for me and the fact that someone knows when to ask more of me and when not to is a blessing. And that is by far my single biggest glue person, actually at the company. I was going to say, though, you know, this is one thing that maybe people don't talk about a lot is I think a lot of times the whatever the game ball or the attention or the compensation, it goes to the people who get, you know, the airtime, whether it's press, whether it's the titles. I actually think that a lot of times in Silicon Valley, it's the people who run functions that don't get a lot of attention. And I want to give many examples here because I think sometimes it's quite underappreciated. And so it's actually something I try my best to pay attention to at our company. Within engineering, I think all the rage right now is on AI researchers and product engineers in the AI world. That's awesome. I have a lot of respect for them. What about the people who build tools?

Totally, dude.

And to make it easier to run evaluations, to know if any of these models are actually working. Customer support? Always. Who's dealing with the front lines of the failures of our product? Candidly, the people who onboard merchants or account manage them. I think it's easy to celebrate a huge logo that we added to the platform. No one talks about the integration work that happens. These are just some of the examples. But actually, those people actually, I think are tremendously important because they almost never get the game ball, so to speak. But without them, literally without them, we would not actually be able to celebrate any of these outcomes. So I actually think a lot about this concept. We don't have a great. Maybe, maybe glue guys will make it into DoorDash's culture, you know, as an award we can give because we literally actually, you know, my teams and I constantly talk about how do we actually recognize that work versus I think some of the work that you read about in the press or, you know, so on and so forth.

We would humbly submit that glue guys is a good term. You could also take no stats all stars. You could just steal Shane moniker. Yeah.

To pay homage to one of the. To one of the hosts. No, for sure, for sure.

You call it the Badier Award. You know, we'll know. It's for all of us.

Okay. Got it. Got it. No, no, no. But, but, but, but, but, but, but, but in all honesty, like, that, that is actually something that we. We do try to pay attention to, and those are glue guys that we have a lot of respect for and a lot of.