00:00:00 · Tony Xu, Aditya Agarwal
[00:00:00] S0: The best way to tell as a founder of whether or not you're sitting on that border of delusion and ambition is whether or not your customers actually want what you're doing. [00:00:09] S1: What's maybe one cultural aspect of DoorDash that was present from the super early days? [00:00:14] S0: I think the name in the game is to understand what is it that we're actually doing for the customer. It's almost like if you can run your business with metrics that only a customer would care about. Customer doesn't care about how many users you have or how much revenue you generate or whatever your ARR is. [00:00:31] S1: Do you worry that there is a more AI native version of DoorDash out there? Alright, folks. Welcome. Welcome to SPC. Welcome, Tony, to SPC. [00:00:42] S0: Thank you. [00:00:43] S1: Alright. We have a short hour here, so I'm not going to take a lot of time to introduce Tony. I think he's pretty well known at this stage. So I'm gonna jump right in. Did you know that you wanted to be a founder? Like, how could you have to... Like, what were your earliest almost, like, inklings of wanting to be a builder, a creator?
00:01:00 · Tony Xu
[00:01:00] S0: I don't know if there were inklings of my becoming a founder because I thought I was gonna become an academic. So my parents brought me to The US when I was very young, when I was four. And, you know, our family... I I didn't know what this meant at the time, but our family came to the country with $250 in the bank. As a result of that, I had to earn all of my toys. So one example that comes to mind, you know, maybe my first company, I didn't think of it this way until you asked the question, was a lawn mowing business when I was seven or eight. I was barely tall enough. I don't know if anyone has mowed lawns, like, but acres of grass, not like the San Francisco yards we're talking about. And the reason why I did that was because I really wanted to buy Nintendo and Duck Hunt. And so I don't know if that's called tinkering per se. That was probably the first, quote, unquote, entrepreneurial experience. I I... And, you know, something else that comes to mind for whatever reason when you ask that question is I had to move around a lot as a kid. My parents were always trying to find a better lot in life for for our family, and for me, that meant trying to find a better school. So I probably went to, like, four schools in my first, I don't know, six years of elementary school, maybe seven years, something like that. So I was always kind of the the new the new kid who had to figure out whatever, a new teacher system, a new friend network, a new logistics setup, etcetera. And so I was always very good at figuring out the new thing. Those are probably the best examples I can think of that maybe were somewhat useful to me later on in life where you you you know, it's... You kinda have to figure it out. If I were to summarize, like, you know, those stories, it was figure it out. Figure it out on how you wanna buy your own Nintendo and video games. Figure it out on how you're gonna make it in school. But I had a very free childhood.
00:03:00 · Aditya Agarwal
[00:03:00] S1: Yeah. I mean, it's really interesting. So, actually, some similarities there. So I also moved around a lot growing up, And I actually probably attended about 10 or 11 different schools all through high school. Wow. And I think one of the things that makes you kind of moving around a bunch and always being the new person is be really adaptable, be really flexible, and you kind of figure out how to fit in. And it kind of makes sense, right, that you're very comfortable with the fast rate of change in Silicon Valley. So here's kind of the way to morph this question. I think that sometimes it's only obvious when you connect the dots backwards, as Steve Jobs said, right, like, you know, what your life ends up becoming. So to jump around a bit here, what do you think the first ten years of DoorDash as you kinda now look back? And, you know, it's kind of amazing to hear you talk both about the journey so far Sure. But also what's coming. What do you think it uniquely positions DoorDash to do in, like, the AI world that we're kind of going towards? Right? Like, what are the set of skills? What are the set of, like, almost happenstances that have happened that allow... Like, what what can DoorDash become?
00:04:03 · Tony Xu
[00:04:03] S0: I feel like right now, and maybe this... I I had this thought in in 2021 or '22 that this decade, you're gonna have, like, two big battles in business. And and they're almost like... You can call them battles. You can call them wars. You can call them explorations. You know, there's a handful of companies that are fighting for your attention. They wanna be the super assistant that can, you know, solve any query that you may have or, you know, later on, any task that you may have, and that's not the the world in which DoorDash lives. DoorDash lives in the second world, which is we are trying to facilitate all of the physical atoms, not the digital bits, in the world to actually make something useful, that, you know, hopefully will complement actually what's happening in the race for your attention because the two kind of, you know, systems kinda need to work together if you think about it. You know, no app ecosystem or operating system is that useful if it can't really solve everyday problems for you, I would argue. It's why you find probably your... The device in your pocket to be the most valuable or most used device you may carry or have. And it's not just because it solves lots of fun digital problems in the background for you, but it can do things in the physical world for you. And so when I think about the physical world that, you know, probably... Certainly isn't getting the amount of attention as the digital world, there's lots of exciting things happening. You know, for example, if you think about the amount of things or stuff that people look for or buy today or could buy today, there's tens of millions of those items today. On DoorDash, however, there's only one of them, 1,000,000 of those items. That means we can solve 5% of your needs expressed, you know, through searches, expressed through things you've actually bought, expressed through things that sit on shelves but are not digitized in any, you know, way, shape, or form. Bring everything inside the city to you, I think, is the best way to grow the GDP of those cities and do something productive for your life. And, hopefully, you know, team up with all these, you know, people trying to compete to be your digital assistant. I think that's a really big, you know, mission in what we can do.
00:06:31 · Tony Xu, Aditya Agarwal, S2
We can talk about how we do that, whether it's bringing inventory closer to you, building autonomous technologies. Those are all getting into the space of the the the how and and and the details. But I think there's a big kind of battle, if you will, of how do you actually facilitate all the atoms in the physical world in a way that actually, you know, solves real problems for real consumers, and grows the GDP of the cities that house all of us. That's a big mission of where DoorDash is going. [00:07:03] S1: Yeah. It's a compelling answer. As you were saying that I was trying to do a mental checklist in in my head about, okay, probably use 70 apps on my phone regularly. I was like, okay. Probably 60 of them are just bits flying around the Internet, and maybe 10 of them interact with the real world. Maybe Amazon, Uber, DoorDash. And it's a pretty small list of apps that kind of actually interact with the physical world that have a digital interface. [00:07:31] S2: And this is interesting because you [00:07:32] S1: have clearly created a company that believes it can tackle that divide. Right? And there are very few companies in America that I think have that belief relative to say, if you go to Bangalore, so SPC has a place in Bangalore, you see entrepreneurs there and they see logistical operational challenges, and it's like they have it for breakfast. It's not a big deal. Totally. [00:07:52] S2: Right? And so it's kind
00:07:52 · S2, Aditya Agarwal, Tony Xu
[00:07:52] S2: Right? And so it's kind [00:07:53] S1: of always remarkable to me that when you come to America, there's there's a real trepidation, fear, or maybe almost lack of know how. How did you build that within the company? [00:08:03] S0: Yeah. Well, we didn't we didn't have anybody either to get started. I mean... But I guess the short answer of how any of you guys are probably building your own companies is you start by doing the work yourself. You know, for us, it was four of us who started the company. We just did deliveries every day. We did customer support every day. I still do customer support, you know, about fifteen minutes every day, and I still do deliveries every year. And that teaches you many things. That teaches you things that are... There's no way that if you're just staring at, you know, I guess now if Claude is staring at, you know, you know, your your databases to try to just come up with whatever the right algorithm is, it doesn't teach you that, oh, actually, you know, if I try to assign the closest, you know, driver to a restaurant, you know, for an order, that may not be the best idea if the food's not ready. But you would know that almost immediately if you actually did deliveries yourself. And and so there's no, like, secret sauce, I think, in any of the domains that each of you are pursuing. You have to be the expert, and you can be the expert, maybe not on day one. But if you did it every single day for, you know, a decade, I think you'll be pretty close.