Sometimes our most important role is to pose tough questions, and help make sure the responses are airtight. And we need to help them poke holes in their argument so that picture is as robust as possible. Often, our founders can paint a great picture of the future. It makes us look in the mirror and ask, “Are we actually maintaining quality? Are our new markets performing as well as they should?” And, since Alfred’s very analytical as well, he can sanity-check our numbers, and really challenge us intellectually in those conversations.

Together we built an operating plan, which is a strong forcing function for us as DoorDash grows. From there, DoorDash built out a pretty robust portal for all operational metrics. Alfred LinĮarly on, we worked at understanding the unit economics, and both short-term and long-term profitability. And that commonality builds a lot of trust - but it also just makes conversations very intellectually honest, because the numbers are staring you in the face. Our belief, which Alfred shares, is that data wins arguments. Understanding the data is so important, and Tony’s a very data-minded person, so we’ve been able to really drill in on the analytics together to get a complete view of the business with all its attributes and complexity. So there’s this expansion challenge in the form of maintaining quality as the company gets bigger in this complicated, decentralized way. We went from a two-bedroom house, doing deliveries ourselves, to hiring local teams and scaling across the country. Tony XuĪnd in a year we went from three cities to over 50. It’s a logistics business, but they’re using their technical mindset to break down logistical problems, simplify processes, and minimize errors. This is a very intense business operationally. On every delivery you have 40 minutes to do 15 or 16 things right, and there’s not a lot of room for error.

Alfred lin