00:33:56 · Tony Xu, Aditya Agarwal
Because one day, the shiny object you're working on today is gonna be the old project someday if you're successful, and you have to kinda keep rinsing and repeating. [00:34:07] S1: Yeah. It's hard. I mean, I think that Silicon Valley is so predicated on the new, the shiny. Of course. But, man, if you grow at 30% year over year for twenty years, right, that's a... That's kind of like a generational business. You know? [00:34:20] S0: And it's hard to do, and it doesn't just happen on its own. I think that's the point that I'm trying to make and that I think a lot of times in in in Silicon Valley, what we talk about is we talk about the paradigm shift. And trust me, those are ones you gotta get right, of course, and they deserve all the attention. But you also have to get right all the thousands of small things that add up to what are monumental changes on some of these businesses that are huge scale touching billions of people every single day and still trying to grow 30% a year, it doesn't just happen on its own. [00:34:53] S1: So, I mean, I'm curious. How have you... How are you trying to do that at DoorDash? Because that's tricky. Right? Because, like, how do you institute... And how do you capture the importance of that without making it feel, frankly, overly grindy? And it is just about the numbers where all you're looking at is just an... Like, how do you make it both fun but also kind of, you know, the the requisite amount of importance? Yeah.
00:35:19 · Tony Xu
[00:35:19] S0: I think you can always make something better. I think I start with that belief. You know? One test I always would do with DoorDash is I would say, okay. A lot of us live in city centers, you know, like San Francisco or New York or some of these places. Just drive fifteen minutes in every direction and use the product again. Okay. Drive another fifteen minutes. You know, you don't have to drive that many, you know, incremental, you know, minutes traveled before you start realizing that the product gets weaker and weaker. And the interesting question is, well, why? You know, one of the hard things about what DoorDash builds is that it's not this global service that kind of is relatively speaking the same product, you know, every time we serve it on a compute instance or something like that. There's differences, you know, like the the the town, not the city, the town I grew up in, you know, had very few restaurants, you know, two dozen restaurants total. That's very different from from San Francisco. What you can offer in in that town versus what you can offer in San Francisco are materially different. But as consumers, you kind of only think about your own experience. You don't think about, you know, where we're completely, like, you know, myopic in our view of, you know, what the actual experience is. And so I think, you know, to keep things fresh, to answer your question, Aditya, is you gotta actually, you know, use... You find ways to articulate the customer struggle in a very visceral way. And, you know, I mean, I I gave one, small example of how we've done it at the company, but there's there's a lot of ways. You know? That's why we do deliveries. Why do we do deliveries? Okay. We have, you know, everyone do deliveries four times a year. You're gonna find out maybe in three of those four times that there's something broken. It may not be this, like, you know, earth shattering, like, discovery, but when you add all of them up across, you know, 10,000 people, it starts to add up. And if you did that every single time, you know, it it starts to compound. And I would argue that, you know, that is a lot of how innovation happens in the physical world. It's not like... It doesn't have to be an earth shattering thing. And and you wanna self select.
00:37:36 · Tony Xu, Aditya Agarwal
You wanna find people who enjoy those kinds of problems versus people who only wanna work on the new. [00:37:42] S1: I'm curious. We are all... Maybe to move on to some of your own, how do you stay curious? How do you stay motivated, Tony, which is that... What's your information kind of like diet or regimen? All... It's so hard to keep up right now with all of the... Both the pace of companies that are getting created, but then also the rate of kind of, I would say, development in a lot of these foundational technologies. So do you have any tips and... Or tricks?
00:38:06 · Tony Xu
[00:38:06] S0: I think you can drive yourself crazy to try to keep up with everything right now. And I I think I've always felt that way, though. At least for me, personally, one of the things I have to do is... I don't know if this is a a a tip or a trick. It's almost a survival mechanism, is to remind myself of what's important and what will always be important, and then to find things that kind of filter, if you will, into some of those statements versus let me just see what's the latest x post or the latest, you know, whatever, you know, thing that you guys see in Hacker News or whatever that, you know, some engineer decided to show me in terms of some cool new version of a tool that we haven't been using. I think that's very easy to just get drowned out by the inbound, and especially, you know, you guys are... I mean, the number one thing that you're competing against as a startup founder is time. You're competing against time. And and and so you kinda have to always, you know, write down the one or two things that you're trying to solve for at that exact moment to get you to product market fit or whatever the milestone you're you're still in search of is and to just stay relentlessly focused. So to me, that's probably the only survival mechanism I use in terms of my information digest. Otherwise, I think I could spend twenty hours a day reading and get nothing done.
00:39:26 · Aditya Agarwal
[00:39:26] S1: Yeah. So true. Before I open it up to the audience, one of the questions I love asking in this forum is how do you think about preparing for your kid... Preparing your children for what is bound to be a pretty different world in, gosh, even the next five or seven years. And, you know, we have kids that are about the same age. So it's something that I admit that it's kind of tricky right now. And, you know, you want to give them access to, obviously, the new tools, let them experiment, have agency. But what advice would you give to... I bet there's a bunch of young parents in the in the room as well. So what advice... And older parents. What advice would you give them?
00:40:05 · Tony Xu
[00:40:05] S0: So I I I go back to, you know, what I was saying earlier about the information digest. And one of my things that I always like to, you know, write down is, like, what do I think is gonna remain important in the next, you know, five years about, you know, DoorDash or whatever it is. It could be about raising your kids or... Because that's the thing that's not going to change even though all the tools and all the education or the ways in which we teach kids and all the opportunities they're gonna get in a way that you and I never had growing up are are going to change. A few that come to mind for for kids, you know, one of them is do you actually feel like you have agency over what you wanna do? Or do you kind of feel like, you know, life doesn't matter, and it's just a set of circumstances, you know, thrown your way, and and, you know, whatever happens happens? Another one might be, what does the definition of excellence look like? Because excellence isn't just building the prototype. Right? Excellence is taking it to the finished production line, and that gap might be very small in terms of progress bar, but it is massive in terms of getting all the rough edges right. And that might be true in programming. That might be true doing some other activity. And the third is I'm still a big believer in humanity. I know that there's a huge debate right now about what is the future of, you know, what humans will do versus what machines will do. But I I think it's really important to be a good human that I believe most humans were born that way, if not every human was born that way. And along the way, you know, things change at times. And so those are probably three things that come to mind of, like, what are the things that I think are gonna remain to be important?