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- DoorDash CEO: Customer Obsession, Surviving Startup Death & Creating A New Market
DoorDash CEO: Customer Obsession, Surviving Startup Death & Creating A New Market
In this episode of How To Build The Future, Garry sits down with Tony Xu, Co-founder and CEO of DoorDash, to discuss their origin story, how the company survived several near death experiences, and what it takes to transform an entire industry.
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Chapters (Powered by https://bit.ly/chapterme-yc) -
00:00 - Intro
02:45 - How they landed on the idea of DoorDash
05:16 - Doing things that don't scale
07:08 - Figuring out what matters in the early days
09:01 - Answering the biggest questions about demand
10:30 - Demographics of the Dashers
12:03 - DoorDash almost goes out of business (the first time)
14:00 - DoorDash almost dies a second time
16:00 - All you need is one investor to say yes
17:00 - Price war
21:34 - Scaling up
24:32 - The ups and downs of the COVID era
28:00 - Long-term vision
30:00 - Advice for founders today
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Video Summary & Chapters
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Video Transcript
there's no better way to be the expert
than just to do the work You might be
surprised at how quickly you get to
become the expert We're here to build a
company that will grow and empower every
physical business and grow the GDP of
every city if we are successful in doing
so That's not going to happen in 1 year
2 years 5 years 10 years That hopefully
can be a forever or an eternal mission
There are moments whether it's the start
of the company or a crisis situation
like co 19 where it becomes very clear
why you're doing what you're doing or
should be very clear to you why you're
doing what you're doing and when you
have that kind of clarity it makes it a
lot easier to make those
[Music]
decisions Welcome back to another
episode of how to build the future
Today's guest Tony Shu who created Door
Dash which now has
mid60% of all food delivery in the
United States Tony welcome Thank you You
actually mentioned you had you know two
or three other ideas you know how did
you arrive on this particular one and
what disqualified the other ones There
were two important things One was that
uh if we decided that we enjoyed working
together we're going to keep going And
two um was whether or not we actually
liked the idea of the project enough to
to keep going and and we we called it a
project I think for the entire first
year of the company's life even after
legally incorporating So one of the
projects for example that we worked on
that met one of the criteria but didn't
meet the other was a tablet app that
would sit at the counter so at at the
point of sale register and would ask
customers while they were paying for
whatever items they were purchasing um
where they had heard about this retailer
or this restaurant And it was just a
very simple um you know survey and
reporting app that basically uh helped
uh merchants figure out the
