How DoorDash built a $40 billion business in 10 years with Kofi Amoo Gottfried, CMO

25:41And then we think about affordability. Like, can we do this in a way that is actually ultimately affordable for the end customer? Can we deliver the value? Like, are you willing to pay the trade out between time and money? And like, what's that right point? And then like, assuming all of that goes well, and you make an order, if it goes wrong, which are our scale, some percentage of orders will go wrong. The final pillar is service. Can we make it right? And so that's how we think about the entire business. I think that bit is so important as well. Can you make it right? I mean, in the UK, I've been ordering off Deliveroo for years.

26:14And then it popped up with a 20 % discount. And I was like, oh, this is fantastic. Got through his checkout and it didn't appear. And I'm like, that's a bit weird. Anyway, I went through an audit and I thought, I'll drop a little question over there. And then it came back and said, oh, it's only for new customers. And I'm like, oh, it didn't say that, right? And anyway, what was really interesting is I then switched to Just Eat, just purely out of sight. Well, you're not going to look after me. And I've been ordering for years and years and years. And you can't even give me a discount that's right for new customers.

26:42And I thought, that response in that moment just turned me off. Now, they'll never know that. I'm not going to kind of write in and go, by the way, you've lost weekly orders for the next 20 years. Correct. If they're looking at their data, they'll know that they've lost an important customer. They'll know, yes. They'll know that they've lost an important customer. And ideally, when we have these types of situations and you're like, okay, we've done something that is not right by the customer. How do you think about what you need to do to fix that? So one early story in Palo Alto was this was early on in the business started.

27:15We didn't actually quite understand sort of this is before my time. But we had a deluge of orders on the day that we did not anticipate. So there was a football game at Stanford. Drove a ton of demand. We didn't understand that this is what would happen. So crash the app. And so you had all these people who had made an order who we didn't really have a policy for how we refunded things. So there's a first time we'd seen this and we made the call at the time to refund everyone. Yeah. Even though there was no policy for it. Yeah. Because you and you know that wiped out half the company's bank account for a bunch of students trying to figure this thing out.

27:50But it felt like the right decision to make because to your point like that customer who's been let down in that situation. if they feel like they're taken care of, they're going to come back. And by the way, if they don't feel like they have, they will churn. And the data tells you that. Yeah. Generosity is so important. Because you can see it as a cost to your business, but actually your greater cost comes in the future. Correct. Which kind of brings an interesting thing to you when you started at DoorDash, because then within six months, COVID happened. Correct. That must have, well, of course, it was both a challenge and an opportunity, wasn't it?

28:20But what happened in COVID to the business model? Honestly, it's hard now to go back and think about that period. So the context is at the time, so in 19, DoorDash was already in hyper growth, right? So this was a category that in general was growing super fast, driven a lot by what DoorDash was doing. So growing sort of 300 % year over year. So like I had a really good clip. And then you get to sort of March. And I remember because I'd just, I'd been in Ghana. So I'd been in Ghana in February. and I remember getting off the plane in Ghana and we're already doing contact tracing and this was like late Feb and we knew that there was this thing but it was happening and seemed in a very isolated way.

29:03So I was sort of like, this Ghanaian's overreacting, like chill, it's fine. And then I get back to the States and I think five days later, the world shuts down and it's sort of like, and we had no idea. We didn't actually know if delivery was going to be allowed. Like there were no rules around this. So in the first week, we're just trying to figure out like what is happening? What are the regulations around this? Like, are we an essential service? Are we not? How's this classified? But it came very apparent very quickly that this was the way that people were going to get everything, but we didn't know for how long.

29:35But what it required was the entire company going into like a complete all hands on deck. Once it became clear that we could operate and became clear that we could be a lifeline for a lot of people, a lot of businesses, a lot of people looking to earn. And so like a few examples of this, like all of us started onboarding restaurants because we had so much demand coming into the system. We must have done, suddenly everyone had to switch. Every business had to switch their home model. And so now we're having to, like all of us are manually onboarding restaurants. My marketing team built the supply chain for personal protective equipment for dashers.

30:11So how do we get sanitizer, gloves, mask, all of these things, all of these drivers were now going out into the world in this challenging period. You know, going back to your thing around generosity, like we made a call as a business to cut commissions to all local restaurants by 50%. We were the only brand in the category to do this because we just understood that these restaurants were not going to make it if they were not getting enough orders and we're still paying us full rates. We said, look, for the time being, we're going to make a call to pull back on what we charge because we think it will actually be material and then in a week from i think march 13th is when the world shut down by march 20th we had an entirely new marketing campaign on air in seven days from when this started and the whole point was that it doesn't matter who you order with whether you do that on doordash or grubhub on whatever but what matters is that like your favorite restaurants the kitchens the restaurants The dining rooms are closed, but the kitchens are open for delivery.

31:15And you need to go out and support these businesses because that's what's going to get them through this. And so we pivoted the entire company to really be in support of like all of our audiences and try to figure out sort of. And we did daily stand-ups from March to October. Daily stand-ups from March to October that year. It's weekends included. Because we just needed to understand what's happening. How do we respond? how can we provide value in this moment? What do we need to change about our business? We built, so some things that are fascinating now because we take them for granted, contactless delivery did not exist in 2019.

31:54It was always handed to me, right? Like you went to the door to meet someone. So all of a sudden you go, oh my God, we actually have to rebuild this entire flow. And then we have to educate everyone that that's how this thing works now because you can't have any contact. And so we built that in probably about 10 days and shipped it. But then that leads to things like more missing and incorrect. Because now like the person has put it there, but I don't know exactly. You know, you've got the handover. Yeah. So there's all of these things that we had to figure out. We figured out things like instant pay, right?

32:24So for both the restaurants and dashes, how do we, rather than make you wait a week, we actually have to build a product that pays you today if that's what you want. So there's all of these things that we had to break and rebuild over that period. That's incredible. Massive accelerants to business. I remember actually, I was actually in my system, one job working with Deliveroo at the time, and we were kind of measuring some of the advertising. I remember when they turned around to me and said, it doesn't really matter because we're doubling every six months. So, you know, whether it's 100 % or 120%, it's kind of like, we're just trying to keep supply going.

32:58I mean, literally was a case of we just can't fulfill it because the uplift in demand that created was just incredible. You know, wow. So what a time. So, you know, the business has been funded with a lot of round of sea capital, haven't it? You I think it was around H, I think, wasn't it? Oof, I actually don't remember if we got to H. But yes, we had multiple rounds of funding. I'm not sure when it runs out. That's right. I don't know if we got to H. I remembered joining when we were Series D. I don't know how many after that. Quite a few Series. But that led up, of course, the IPO the following year as well, coming out of that.

33:31So what was it like working in a business that was preparing? So you've gone through this enormous shock of COVID, which you had to you know pivot and change and focus on you know keep well keeping you and your restaurants afloat but then how do you prepare then for a year later then to float the yeah i mean it was for me it was like one of the most interesting sort of moments because you don't often get to be inside a business when it's going through that process um and you know i remember things that i didn't even know existed which is like taking a pitch from the stock exchanges to decide which one we were going to go with.

34:06Like you never, you know, we think about pitches on the agency side, right? But you're sort of like, no, this is a competitive process. And which banks are you going to go with and which lawyers? And so all of these, there's just like new language, a new process. And then for me, being able to be part of the team that actually helped write the company story and the S1 that went to investors and to the public that explained, you know, our mission about empowering local economies, how we do that, how we build that, the origin story of the company, a lot of what we've chatted about already. But being able to sort of be in that room in a creative process, that was also like a legal process and a financial process because we're in this writing room and it's like you and bankers and lawyers.

34:46And it was just like fascinating to sort of like work through how we bring this story to market, how we talk about what DoorDash is and what the potential for that company and sort of where we see it going. And I think it was like a great moment to both realize the vision up until that point, but also set the stage for what was to come, right? Because one of the things that we talk about often is sort of this notion of getting 1 % better every day. And for us, it's always about like, what's next? Like, what's the next phase of this company? And at that time, we were largely a restaurant business.

35:19We had started to expand into new categories, but it was about articulating the vision of being able to get everything in your neighborhood. And what would that mean? And what sort of impact could we drive to communities and to customers. So being able to be part of like charting that out and thinking about what that looked like. And then obviously being part of the company and figuring out all the things that needed to be true, like compliance and, you know, what does it mean when we're now public? What things have to change? What things have to stay the same? How do we maintain our values and our operating philosophy, even as like the world changes around us?

35:52And being part of a company that also treated this as like a milestone, but nowhere near the end. You know, one of the things that I loved about that day, we're doing all this work leading up to it. And because it was COVID, we actually didn't know how we were going to go public like physically, right? Because it's like, do we get to be in New York? And so we were planning for multiple scenarios, which is like, do you actually go to the stock exchange? So you get to ring the bell and do the whole thing. Right, so it's like, are you going to go to the stock exchange? It's like, well, that was one plan, but turns out you couldn't travel.

36:25Yeah. So then it's like, okay, we had another plan. It's like, we actually want to do this at a local restaurant and have the entire leadership team. Then that got shut down because this was Omicron at this point. I'm now in the second wave. So like that gets shut down. So like, okay, now we're in a world where it's like fully virtual. And so we're like working through all of these options in real time. And the day before we went public, the working group that's working on all the things we're chatting about, okay, what does tomorrow look like? Do we have everything buttoned up? and we had our weekly business review, which is the key meeting we have across the company every week.

36:56And it was that day as well. It was later in the afternoon. And someone said, do we think we're going to have the WBR tomorrow, given that like all morning will be like all of this going public stuff. And I said, not only will we have it, no one will mention that we went public today. And no one believed me. And we went into that meeting and there was no discussion about going public. It was like, what's going on with that number? What's going on here? Like, it was just very clear. They're like, this is a milestone. And like, we celebrated that this morning. We go again. But we go again. That's good.

37:25That's a good philosophy. How much of the plan that you created and you sold to people, you know, at the time, because you're right, you had to, you know, you had to sell a vision, sell a future plan, tell the story. Right. So how much of that has kind of then played out? Because presumably that gave you a real focus in terms of the next chapter of the business. How much of that actually kind of came to life? It's incredible. If you go back and look, even before, let's call it like the S1, which is the official document. If you go back to the initial, you know, 12 years ago when they made their submission to Y Combinator, like so much of what we thought this thing could be has come to pass.

38:05But the reality is that like we're still in the very early inning. So if you think about it this way, which is, we thought that this is ultimately a multi-category, multi-vertical business where we're empowering all sorts of businesses to grow. And you sort of go, okay, well, last year, DoorDash, Ford's Merchant Partners, drove$50 billion in sales. And you go, okay, we think this is the thing that's going to enable lots of people to earn. Last year in 2023,$15 billion, two dashers. and so the like the scale and the amount of like economic activity that this platform is generating i think those are things that we thought we could do but you don't know it until you've done it right you you have the aspiration we have this thing of like think dream big but start small right so like you have the aspiration you articulate what that is but like it only happens if you will it into being right so and so the work has just been about how do we continue to do that And so today you look at DoorDash now and you're like, you open that app and it's a materially different experience than it was five years ago when it was 100 % restaurants.

39:09And today, like every shop in your neighborhood, we have more non-restaurant stores on our platform than any other. How do you choose which innovation to do? Because you've done some pretty cool stuff. I mean, drone delivery is coming. Sure, sure. Which is the one that caught my eye. But that's the reality, isn't it? I mean, it's not just a sort of a sci-fi kind of story. I think the thing that we try to do is generally work backwards from the customer. Yeah. Right. So really thinking about like, what are we understanding both from our data, about how people actually behaving on the platform or about the conversations we're getting about the feedback or about the stuff that comes through our support interactions because we got something wrong.

39:52So trying to understand what are all of these inputs. And then that ends up like being the thing that drives the innovation engine. So like one tactical example, which is a product that I love, if you've used DoorDash in the States, it's a thing called DoubleDash where you make an order and then it starts a timer and it says, hey, in the next 15 minutes, if you want to add something from these other stores that are close by to the first order you made, because we have the logistics capacity, we can see all the stores that are there. We will batch it and have the dash and bring it and bring it to you for no extra cost.

40:26right so we're going to like create a thing that delivers more value to you but not charging you any money for it yeah um and the reason we built that is because we saw that behavior we saw people ordering and then ordering again 10 minutes later well because they suddenly went oh i forgot this i forgot this or like i've got this thing but i don't want to get this thing with it yeah um and so you go okay that's really interesting like can we build a product that actually solves for that yeah problem and so a lot of what we do is looking at that and if you think about, you know, DashPass as a subscription product, which, you know, for$10 a month gives you$0 delivery fees, reduced service fees, and future benefits to come.

41:05But you look at that product and that's inspired by the fact that we understand that affordability is one of the key barriers to engaging in a category like this. So particularly if you're a heavy user, how do we make it more affordable for you? How do we constantly bring the prices down? We revamped our merchant sort of how we charge merchants based on feedback from them. Because, you know, three years ago, the complaint was like, hey, all these delivery companies charge me a flat rate of 30%. That's very expensive. How do I make a profit? And so we rebuilt how we charge. We created an entirely new product that gave merchants choice and control in terms of where they wanted to play in our system.

41:39And so a lot of what we do is really driven by like, what are we hearing? What are we understanding? And what do people need? And how might we show up in a way that like delivers value to them and then delivers value back to the business. I love that kind of win-win. And 100 % is the only way. Yeah. At the storefront, I thought was quite clever as well, because you're like, you're building like businesses, online business and behind the scenes, you're, you're powering it, but it's coming from them as well. Correct. It's amazing. It allows lots of small businesses to act big and get the advantage of scale, right?

42:08That's exactly right. Every business can be a scale business. Correct. It's pretty cool. And how do you, and there's a lot of businesses that don't have that capability themselves. Yeah. Like a lot of SMBs do not have a tech team, do not have a marketing team, do not have like a way to build these things. So it's like, okay, how do we take everything we've learned about how we've built this business? And then how do we do that in partnership and on behalf of these merchants to give them their own virtual storefront? And if you think about one of the major shifts in 2020 was that every business had to become an e-commerce business.

42:36It just became clear that you could not operate as a pure bricks and mortar business. So then if you've never done that before, how do you do it? And so being able to be there as a partner to businesses as they did, that has been phenomenal. Because that's what I think is interesting about your business model. You know, you start by, you know, let's say delivering restaurant foods and now effectively you're becoming e-commerce, but you're also becoming retail media, aren't you? 100%. Because basically the amount of people that are interacting with you, you now are a shop front. Yeah, that's right.

43:05Effectively for lots and lots of businesses. That's right. And the retail media must give you another kind of… Yeah, that's been a really interesting business. We've been focused on it over the past couple of years. And a lot of what we've been trying to do is to like build it in a way that's like concordant with our mission and our values and how we operate and what we're trying to do, which is to say, okay, if we're in the business of empowering local economies, what does that mean for how we build a retail media network? So like one of the things I'm proudest of is our sponsored listings product, which like these are common products on any of these sorts of place where you search for a thing and you can be in the auction.

43:39but we only charge on a conversion. We don't charge on a click. We don't charge on an impression because if you're a small business, you can't spend a marketing dollar that you don't understand what the return is going to be. You need to feel relatively confident that like if I spend a dollar, I'm going to get X dollars back. And so a lot of even how we design those products for our retail media network is informed by how we think about who the customer is and what they need. So that's been - That's game changing, isn't it? Because the amount of suspicion around you're buying views likes you know correct you know even engagement but you're not actually buying conversion correct are you you just don't know kind of you know behind the scenes what what gets lost in the transactions but if you're buying conversion buying conversion you can feel very you can feel very confident yeah um so that's been interesting and then figuring out how do you balance the ad engine with the actual mechanics of the platform itself because what you also don't want to do is to turn it into a pure eight for play yeah right so you have to both your organic your ad results have to be as good as your organic result yeah and so figuring that out has been super interesting that's very interesting love it well um am i right saying as well that you deliver is it's like two in every three meal deliveries come from you guys now yeah so we're on the restaurant side 67 percent yeah um of the category um which you know five years ago was about half that wow that's amazing yeah and what role is the kind of you've done some pretty big communication we'll come back to cam now so but let's start in the super bowl because uh um system one we've been testing super bowl ads uh for many many years we test all of them and and one of the best bits of my job is every super bowl we get the team together and within one hour of every ad breaking we've gone out there we've got we've got hundreds of responses we've got the results live up you know live on the system and we have a team that kind of work through the night you know getting all results together what have we learned so the next day i get the fun job of uh kind of sharing who won right you know what we learned you know what you know what's kind of works this kind of thing but in in 20 i remember doing it 2021 um your sesame street ad came third wonderful it got 4.7 stars out of five so almost top of the scale absolutely brilliant but it was a it was a wonderful bit of work it's kind of maybe going back to your leo bernett days it's kind of like the the basic of advertising really well you know you've got a story you've got humor you've got a song you've got actors you've got famous characters that's right and through doing that you show off what you're all about which is whatever you want you can find it here yeah that's right I mean that was that was it was our first time at the Super Bowl so the the sort of inbuilt pressure that comes with that not even for so you were a rookie that year that was the first time you'd done first super bowl ad i will need to go and check yeah i don't know of a rookie that's come third hey we'll take it i reckon this is like breaking news we'll take it um yeah it was our first appearance of the super bowl and the way we tend to think about that particular moment is like do we have something really important to say or to demonstrate that requires that level of scale Yeah.

46:53Because a lot of the way we think about marketing at DoorDash is like the, you end up in sort of these sorts of like odd debates in the marketing community about like short and long term and sort of all of these things in brand versus performance. We tend to think of all of those things as like the customer doesn't care. The job is to like drive the business today. Yeah. And grow the brand over time. And by the way, it turns out like building a bigger business is probably one of the single biggest things you can do for the brand. And so we don't trade off between those things, but that means that when you go into a thing like a Super Bowl, you really have to think about how do we make sure that like this will deliver both short and long term wins for the business.

47:32Like I don't exist in the luxury of like, I'll tell you what the brand results are eight months from. Call me back next year. Yeah, call me back next year and I'll tell you how it did. And so, and I think in that moment, we felt that the most important thing to say was to start to signal to the market that like we've actually gone beyond what you think of us for. And that's actually been the journey we've been on every Superbowl now that we've been at. It's like, how do we tell you about a net new offering? And so Sesame Street just felt like the perfect, if we deliver everything in your neighborhood, what better way than the most iconic neighborhood in history?

48:07And you and I were chatting about this earlier, but it also has like an incredible nostalgic pull. There's everyone, there's no one in America that doesn't know what Sesame Street is. And it has, you know, great, warm and fuzzy sort of like feelings. It's cross-generational, isn't it? We all grew up with it. Correct. Everyone's probably got kids that are into it now. It's just, you know, it does emotion, does it brilliant. I mean, what I love about, if I take your 2021 compared to what you did this year, is I guess that was like a, what you might call a kind of brand ad, but actually did, you know, even facts on the system one day it did very high on start and very high on spike which is the short-term measure did both this year you had what you might call a promotion correct activation correct but you delivered it in such a correct incredible way but i saw it and i was like how the hell do you pull that off so just explain that you know door dash all the ads yeah as an idea because it's a bit bold yeah so we the the you know we again this was uh we went into the super bowl with you know similar brief as what which is like okay we have new things to communicate we have new categories that we're part in how do we really start to let you know that like whatever you want you can find a door dash how do we continue to hammer that home but do it in a way that feels really disruptive and it went to like as you typically do rounds and rounds of work and then you know those just literally the random slide in the deck that sort of went well what if we just like delivered everything from the super bowl from every ad i was like that is going to be incredibly painful yeah but that is absolutely what we should try and figure out how to do and there was no real playbook yeah um for doing something like this so we started with that as sort of the nugget of the thought which is like could you actually do it and what would it look like to do and then that evolved into okay what's the mechanic how do we get partners on board because one of the things we said very early on is like this can't be like watching one of those sports movies where everyone's wearing a generic jersey because it just doesn't land this actually has to be the brands in the super bowl um leaning in we want to actually partner with all of them we want to like light up our social channels um and then we ended up building this thing where in a lot of ways the ad itself was actually the least important part of the ecosystem that we built we went like we're going to create a three-week journey that just drives insane excitement and engagement around the notion that DoorDash is going to deliver everything from the Super Bowl to one lucky winner.

50:35But we're not going to tell you how you can win it. You have to watch the ad for that. So we got influencers, we got all the brands. So every time a brand dropped their trailer or their ad, we had this cart and we would add it to the cart. So it's like a BMW is now in the cart. And so, and we were talking to all of these brands. And so we built this cart that was updating in real time and so every time someone came and then so as the ad breaks it drops in the car is that how it would work no like so yes if you so imagine it's two weeks before the super bowl and bmw is like oh we see they're signed up they're gonna be in they're gonna be in so it's like yeah and so we're using all of that and we had relationships with all these brands i spent a month talking to all of them um getting everyone to play um and we ended up just having like an enormous amount of fun with it because it just generated so much content where every time there was a thing that happened.

51:20We brought in an amazing influence, Alani, who was our official Dash pondit, who was reporting on everything that was happening. But a bunch of influences in all these subcategories. So there were people that are super into cars. We had them talking every time a car is like, yo, you can get the new Kia when the DoorDash thing happens. And so we had all of this going for three weeks leading up to the game. And so we're able to generate like a real groundswell of anticipation. um and then our ad um which we can chat about that placement but our ad was the first ad break after the two minute warning towards the end of the game so the very first you got all the ads had gone at all the points you'd seen what you could win and and but we knew all of this but some of it were updating we're having to update in real time because not every advertiser discloses So we had...

52:14So there were the things you... We didn't know. There were things we didn't know. So if luxury yachts of the world decided to advertise or private planes... I guess maybe we have to give someone a yacht or maybe we give them a seat on the yacht. Like we have to figure out what the thing is. And then there were brands that didn't have like physical things. Yeah. So like there's this campaign for Jesus. There was, wasn't there? Called He Gets Us. And they have like four spots. You have to deliver Jesus. So it's like, are you going to deliver Jesus? We're like, not sure, but we can deliver you merchandise.

52:41nice they have like amazing water bottles down there yeah exactly so there was all of this stuff that we just had to figure out on the fly wow um and then our ad aired and it was uh you know 2 000 character promo code that was the thing that got me it just carried on forever it just carried on forever that you had to go enter in order to win this thing and we legitimately did not know yeah how it was going to go because it hadn't been done so we're like we felt really good about the excitement we had been able to drum up but like once we dropped that thing we're like are people gonna do it are people gonna tell us like are people gonna be pissed off like what happens once they see that this is not like the easiest thing in the world to win um we ended up getting eight million entries it was it was it was astonishing and we have all these great reaction clips of people who missed the end of the game because because they were trying to pause rewind pause rewind you know cancel the code um where people trying to sell it code wouldn't have worked right because absolutely not you need the long you need all of it you need all of it um we had people who were trying to sell it on cash app they're like dm me i'll give you the code um and then an hour later someone solved it and posted it on reddit and then the whole thing went nuts um so yeah it was it was just like uh it was a social experiment of sorts um but it was It was fascinating.

54:02Yeah, that's amazing. And in terms of like executing this kind of thing, which agencies do you work with to kind of bring this kind of stuff to life? How does that work? Or is it in-house that you do it? Yeah, so we have an in-house, terrific in-house agency called Superette. And Superette partners with external partners. So some work we execute entirely in-house. Some work we partner with agencies externally to do it. We've partnered with and continue to partner with the Martin Agency, with Gut, and with Wieden & Kennedy. This particular Super Bowl work was a partnership between Super Ed and Widening Kennedy to bring that to life.

54:36That's a kind of formidable mix, that, in a way. I look at that and I go, you've got your brand basics covered with Martin Agency, you've got your big stunt ideas we've got, and then you've got your absolutely classic, emotional, memorable, kind of above the line, Widening Kennedy. That's quite a mix, isn't it? Yeah, it's been. And I think the model we've built also feels like a really good partnership. One of the things that we talk about a lot is like this notion of collaboration and like radical collaboration. Because this is not, we try to make it not a client agency sort of relationship. It's sort of like, hey, we're extensions of each other's teams.

55:10So like, how do we just get the best work out and clear as much of the ego out of the way as possible and just like jam on the thing? And one of the things I'm proudest of on this particular thing was the degree of collaboration between our teams, but also between all the brands, you know, getting all the brands on board, getting our social teams across all those brands working together getting the agency teams working together like that's what ended up powering yeah this thing was like everyone was able to let go of like this is my thing and it's like no this is our thing how do we make it how do we make it hard work to do that yes how to make it the biggest thing possible it's harder than it sounds but the business is built on collaboration isn't it in terms of the restaurants the dashes and the you know the customer as well i thought i'd round up actually just because um i i love how you describe your culture at doordash in terms of kind of being leaders being doers being learners describe a little bit about the culture and how you operate because you know you valued at 40 billion which is insane but but you still feel like a startup and still acting like it you know what are the secrets to the kind of how the culture operates yeah so i think doordash at its core is like an ops and logistics business it's the best executing business i've ever been around um And at the core of that, there's a bunch of values, but I think there's a few that are sort of very door to ask.

56:31So one of them is like operate at the lowest level of detail, right? One of them is be an owner, bias for action. And a lot of the stories we've talked about today actually fall into that. So like I'll take be an owner. Like this Super Bowl thing was one of those things that's like it's a hard idea to get through a business because it's like unfamiliar. And no one really knows exactly how it's going to work and you don't know what's on the other end of it. So you have to have like a lot of faith, but that, that only works if you have a culture that says, Hey, by the way, the only thing we care about Kofi is that you have a set of goals.

57:03So you're the owner. So you get to make the call on whether you think this thing hits those goals. If it doesn't, we'll have a different conversation, but you get to own that decision. And so like, that is like a really practical example of like how those values show up. We talk about things like a bias for action. We chat about how we responded in COVID. it like this is a company that operates on a daily hourly weekly cadence we're looking at data all the time we're responding to things as we understand them happening in real time week over week we're actually looking at our business and allocating dollars to places that we think those dollars need to go so the business is managed in a very real time um way and you know my my boss likes to say that like if you could do something yesterday do it then you know it's just sort of like because time is a currency right and the quicker you move um the quicker you can actually learn what's working and what's not and how do you iterate and then you know sort of operating at the lowest level of detail like we tend to think about how do you take all these complex problems and sort of like break them down to the atomic unit right so when we're thinking about things like how do we grow that's like a very broad question but like we understand that like one of the inputs to growth is selection yeah so now the task becomes who's the team that has to go and acquire all of these businesses onto the platform.

58:21And that's like an atomic unit. Who's the team that's thinking about pricing? So like everything we've taken, break down into like the most granular detail and then like build it back from there. We chat about customer obsession already. So there's a bunch of these things. Well, that runs through everything, doesn't it? Correct. Everything you've done has been informed by the customer and the customers in the three kind of results. Correct. Three are now four when you talk about retail media. Yes, of course. Now you talk about advertisers. And so like, what do we understand about what they need and what we need to build for them.

58:50So yeah, a lot of it is at the heart of how we run it. Well, it's very exciting, Kofi. It's been quite a wild ride. It's been fun. You've been dangling drones at me like this. What crazy thing is next? I don't know, but it's a lot of fun. Massive congratulations on your CAN win as well this year. Oh, thank you. Thank you. Well, you did the complete top trumps, didn't you? You had like titanium, gold, silver, bronze, and many shortlists. Yeah, and I think the thing for us, you know, that we try to index on is like things like can are an outcome yeah but they're not a goal and they're not an input into our process like we win when we do our job by like meeting customers and meeting their needs and delivering a thing that we think is memorable and interesting um but we don't get out of bed to go to can yeah we get out of bed to meet our customers needs if we do that well hopefully you end up with that sort of outcome but like there's this great book called the score takes care of itself which is about bill walsh and the 49ers dynasty and we sort of think about canon that way we're just like we don't control any of that yeah all we control is the inputs and doing the work and then after that the score hopefully takes care of itself i like it well that's perfect place to end i reckon kofi mate thank you so much been a blast thank you for having me thank you very much for listening or watching uncensored cmo i hope you enjoyed that if you did please do hit the subscribe button wherever you get your podcast if you're watching hit subscribe there as well.

1:00:15I'd also love to get a review. Reviews make a big difference on other people discovering the show. So please do leave a review wherever you get your podcasts. If you want to contact me, you can do. I'm over on x at Uncensored CMO or on LinkedIn where I'm under my own name, John Evans. Thanks for listening and watching. I'll see you next time.