Why I'm Joining DoorDash

After 3 years at Uber, I have decided to switch gears and sink my teeth in a new set of problems. I’m incredibly excited to apply everything I know about marketplaces, scale and consumer psychology to a startup on a historic trajectory. My new role will head up everything related to taking Doordash to be a last mile juggernaut beyond just food delivery by leading the "Non-Restaurants" Product Team.

The decision came from a collision of different variables; the desire to stretch myself and own a holistic end to end product vertical vs just focusing on a specific feature, to join a slightly smaller company where I can make a bigger impact vs a company on the verge of IPO, and lastly; to understand how to operate a company that doesn't have the good fortune of owning every system or micro service in-house (Uber is notorious for building their own in-house versions of well established SaaS products like Michelangelo, UChat, AllenKey, EventTruth, etc) which is highly unrealistic to the real-world startup since very few companies (with the exception of FAANG) has the scale, capabilities and coffers to build all these ancillary services beyond their core problem set. For all the luxury I had as a PM at Uber where I never had to be on external partner calls about API integrations, that was also a skillset I was lacking and needed to build up.

At Doordash, my team will be tasked with spearheading the company's entry into new verticals like grocery, flowers, pharma, and retail through innovating upon DoorDash's best in class technologies (in dispatch optimization and on-demand pricing) to leverage its nationwide supply base as a white label fulfillment platform for merchants across North America. Leading such a large scope will definitely be a new muscle for me, but something I'm extremely excited about, and I wanted to share a few of the reasons why I decided to join DoorDash:

1. Team Dynamic: win as a team and lose as a group of individuals

Doordash is an intensely cross-functional workplace. Solving the intersection of a math problem and human problem requires thinking about the people outside your teams and placing their needs above your own OKRs. As I was interviewing with the team, I was blown away by how the engineers on the team thinks about shipping products and who “owns” the maintenance of a product. From my previous experiences, as a PM, I was always told by my tech team that my main job was to “shield my engineers” from thrash from the business side; whether that be shielding the tech team from changing budgets from the finance team or weekly category-position-dip fire drills from growth teams or market “unhealthiness investigation requests" from city teams- and I thought that as what my biggest value add was- the intermediary between Eng and Ops. At Doordash, it was refreshingly mindblowing from first conversations with the tech leads I would work with that they have their own Jira board and slack channels they maintain with Operators who have questions regarding a certain topic. If an Engineer was the DRI on building a feature (eg. batching capability), s/he is the one that creates a slack channel called “#ask-batching” and any person in the company that has any bugs, questions or concerns on the topic and can directly ask the engineer who built it to investigate/fix it.

2. Unprecedented Growth Rate

Growth rates are much more important than the current size of a company because it’s a sign of the impact you the company can make. A startup can have 100 million users but if it doesn’t have an impressive growth rate it’s not going to be relevant in the future. DoorDash has impressive growth especially from the raio of employee to valuation perspective when I did a back of the envelope calculation: Uber with a $69B valuation has 250+ PMs (20,000 employees). Doordash at the time I was interviewing at was at a $1.7B valuation with 10 PMs (800 employees), which approximates to Doordash having half as many people (and PMs) for the same valuation that Uber would have had.

Edison Trends analyzes anonymized credit card transactions and uses that data to shed light on customer behaviors. In the world of third-party delivery, those behaviors underscore the rapid growth DoorDash has undergone recently (achieving the 1st place in the category position of food delivery) beating out both UberEats and long-time incumbent Grubhub,and further ahead from smaller startups like Postmates and Cavier by a long shot:

3. The Founding Story

Every company has a unique founding story. I think it’s important to know the story because it helps you understand the company’s DNA. Founding stories are clues that give away information about how the company creates culture.

With Zoom, people said enterprise communications were crowded and a startup would never be able to compete with the likes of Microsoft and Cisco. With DoorDash, for example, many people said there was no money in food delivery because the margins were too low. If either of those teams cared too much about what other people thought, they could’ve been dissuaded from realizing their visions. But they chose to stay focused on their customers. The DoorDash founding story was truly inspiring. I was astonished to learn how three Stanford friends came together to create a relatively unprofessional looking website called PaloAltoDelivery.com with just a few menu PDFs, and they did all the deliveries themselves in the early days. Before that, I had a totally different idea about how companies were created. That willpower, determination, and “roll up your sleeves” mentality says a lot about how DoorDash became a multi-billion dollar startup.

4. Leading a team unravelling a clearly unsolved problem

WholeFoods, Walmart and a slew of other grocers recently announced that they will be ending their relationships with Instacart in early 2019. Many grocery analysts and industry experts such as Phil Lempert, were not surprised by the announcement. Lempert wrote an interesting article about the breakup that raises questions about the future of e-grocery and how quickly Instacart's reputation from being a white knight (being the E2E e-grocery solution to fight against Amazon) was switched to a Trojan horse as it became apparent that Instacart was targeting grocery-specific customers with heavy promotions to switch to IC, poaching the grocers' CPG promotion funds, all while cutting grocer margins . This, paired with the recent Uber announcement that it was closing down its UberRush division (Uber’s last mile delivery of anything play) the previous summer really got me thinking - outside of food delivery, why have major companies not figured out how to deliver last mile? Intuitively, non-food delivery should be a lot easier - non-perishable goods (relative to food) that allows for larger delivery windows, higher margins due to higher driver utilization, higher basket size...what is wrong with the equations of these other companies, how has no one solved this correctly?

Not surprisingly, this is exactly why when Doordash reached out to me with the role to lead the "delivery of anything" division, I jumped at the opportunity.

5. Culture

After having read Ray Dalio’s “Principles”, it became very clear to me that culture is the most important thing in a company. Culture isn’t just about allowing pets in the office and encouraging diversity, it’s more than that. Culture is what makes or breaks a company. Bad culture attracts bad people. Great culture attracts great people.

Once again, DoorDash stood out from the crowd when it came to culture. Unlike many startups that conduct behavioral interviews as if it’s just a formality, that was clearly not the case at DoorDash. Also the big 5 big words written in the cafeteria that wrote “humble, thoughtful, bold, optimistic, and relentless” were signs that DoorDash truly cares about culture.

Great things happen when an employee’s incentives are aligned with the company’s. That way, the two grow together. I’m excited to be part of the DoorDash family and am looking forward to the exciting future!