LIVE: DoorDash’s Tony Xu and Miki Kuusi Talk Scaling Operational Excellence

Summary

Crucible Moments: LIVE with DoorDash’s Tony Xu and Miki Kuusi on Scaling Operational Excellence

In the latest episode of Crucible Moments, hosted by Sequoia Capital’s Alfred Lin, listeners are treated to an in-depth discussion with DoorDash co-founder and CEO Tony Xu, head of International Miki Kuusi, and Sequoia partner Alfred Lin. Released on November 14, 2024, this episode delves into the pivotal decisions and strategies that have propelled DoorDash to its status as a category leader in the food delivery industry. Highlighting the company’s journey from inception to a $60 billion market cap, the conversation offers valuable insights into operational excellence, scaling challenges, and the nuances of leadership within a rapidly growing organization.

Founding and Early Growth

The conversation begins with Alfred Lin providing a brief history of DoorDash, noting its foundation by Tony Xu in 2013 and the subsequent merger with Volt, founded by Miki Kuusi in 2014, in 2020. Lin emphasizes DoorDash’s impressive financial trajectory, stating, “There was about $80 billion of gov from the Q2 numbers, which was $10 billion in revenue and $1.7 billion in EBITDA” (00:50). This rapid growth is attributed to the relentless dedication of the team, exemplified by their early morning runs to set the company’s pace.

When questioned about the belief in achieving such milestones within a decade, Tony Xu humbly responds, “Believe takes you far” (01:53). Miki Kusi adds depth to this sentiment, explaining that foundational strategies were about “getting going and having a point of view on what the end state is” (02:02). This pragmatic approach allowed DoorDash to focus on incremental growth, starting with restaurant deliveries and progressively expanding to other services like campus deliveries.

Operational Challenges and Excellence

Alfred Lin shifts the conversation to operational excellence, referencing Bill McDermott’s perspective on its challenges. He asks, “How painful is it?” (05:19). Tony Xu recounts a pivotal moment in the fall of 2015 when DoorDash faced significant operational failures during a delivery launch, stating, “How is this ever going to scale? How is this ever going to work?” (05:40). This experience underscored the importance of balancing an exceptional customer experience with operational efficiency at scale.

Miki Kusi elaborates on defining excellence, highlighting the role of continuous improvement driven by customer feedback: “Very easy when I get like 600 emails a day about like why we suck, you know, or why we could do better” (07:20). This iterative process ensures that DoorDash consistently raises its standards across all aspects of the business, from product development to hiring practices.

Scaling and Leadership Evolution

As DoorDash scales, the leadership dynamics evolve. Alfred Lin probes into how leadership styles and company culture adapt with growth (11:57). Miki Kusi articulates that while the core culture remains intact, the mechanisms to sustain it must evolve: “You have to be more and more in love with the problems as opposed to solutions” (12:06). She emphasizes the importance of alignment on priorities and fostering institutional knowledge to maintain resilience.

Tony Xu shares his personal growth in leadership, noting the shift from patience to a heightened sense of velocity: “My number one word I use is velocity. How can we do things faster?” (14:49). This emphasis on speed reflects the company’s need to remain agile and ambitious amidst its large-scale operations.

Mergers and Acquisitions Insight

The discussion transitions to the merger between DoorDash and Volt, with Miki Kusi providing insights into their strategic approach. She prioritizes team strength over traditional metrics in mergers, asserting, “The strength of the team” was a critical factor (19:51). This focus on integrating leadership and ensuring cultural alignment was pivotal in making the merger successful.

Tony Xu adds, “The superpower of the founder is to be in the detail... The superpower of the CEO is to build a team, have a vision...” (17:18). This complementary dynamic between founders and CEOs facilitates effective integration and sustained growth post-merger.

Navigating Labor Laws and Future Ambitions

A significant portion of the conversation addresses the complexities of operating in diverse labor markets, particularly in Europe. Tony Xu discusses the challenges posed by varying labor laws and the necessity for regulatory reforms to accommodate the gig economy: “It allows for a whole new category of work... You should probably regulate this in a way that makes sense” (23:10). He highlights the efforts in multiple European countries to adapt labor regulations that balance flexibility with necessary protections.

Looking ahead a decade, Miki Kusi envisions a more integrated online and physical world, driven by automation and data: “Things in the physical world will too. The question is like how?” (25:35). This foresight emphasizes DoorDash’s commitment to evolving alongside technological advancements and societal changes.

Conclusion

The episode concludes with Alfred Lin affirming DoorDash’s strong position as a long-term investment: “I hope you guys know why Doordash is a long term hold in the Sequoia Capital Fund” (29:02). Tony Xu and Miki Kusi leave listeners with a sense of DoorDash’s strategic vision and unwavering dedication to operational excellence.

Key Takeaways:

• Vision and Pragmatism: DoorDash’s growth is rooted in a clear vision combined with pragmatic, incremental strategies.
• Operational Excellence: Balancing customer experience with operational efficiency is crucial for scaling.
• Leadership Evolution: As companies grow, leadership styles must adapt to maintain culture and drive velocity.
• Strategic M&A: Prioritizing team strength and cultural alignment is essential in mergers and acquisitions.
• Future Outlook: Navigating labor laws and embracing technological advancements are pivotal for sustained growth.

This episode offers a comprehensive look into the strategic decisions and operational challenges that have defined DoorDash’s journey, providing valuable lessons for entrepreneurs and business leaders alike.

Transcript

[Tony Hsu]

Hi everyone. Today we're excited to share a bonus conversation with you. This season we heard about the Crucible moments that define DoorDash and how the team's non obvious strategies propel them to category leadership. At a closed event in Europe, we hosted a live conversation with DoorDash co founder and CEO Tony Hsu, head of International Miki Kusi, and Sequoia partner Alfred Lin. They pulled back the curtain on how DoorDash operates with meticulous detail at a global scale. Crucible Moments Season 2 will return with new episodes on Robinhood, Dropbox and more. See you soon.

[Alfred Lin]

Just so people know, Doordash was founded By Tony in 2013, Volt was founded by Mickey in 2014 and together they merged in 2020. And if you, anybody know the numbers? If you don't, I have them because they're public. So you can take the Q2 numbers and if you annualize them, there was about $80 billion of gov from the Q2 numbers, which was 10 billion in revenue and 1.7 billion in EBITDA, which is approximately free cash flow. So yeah, so the reason that they're going to be gap profitable is because I just say grow faster and be more profitable at the same time. They are the fast fastest growing in their category. They have a market cap of $60 billion. And the reason that is is because these two get up at 7am this morning, even being jet lagged and went for a run in the rain with the rest of the team.

[Tony Hsu]

True story.

[Alfred Lin]

All right, first question. Going back to the early days when you started 10 years ago, did you believe you could accomplish what you guys accomplished in a decade?

[Tony Hsu]

Believe perhaps actually think we could do it? No, but believe takes you far.

[Miki Kusi]

I don't know. I mean, I don't think any founder that at least I've spoken to maybe thinks about the forecast that way. Maybe some are just better at math than I am. I tend to think the way these things go is it's just important to get going and it's important to know what the end state is or have a point of view on what the in state is, which for us was always to be infrastructure for every city in the world. But that doesn't make any sense for like four people in an apartment. And so working backwards to know like, okay, well the first thing we're gonna do is restaurant delivery and there's a long story of how we got there. And then figuring okay, great, from there, what's the first thing we're gonna do? We're gonna do deliveries on campus, from restaurants that never offered it before, from there to Building eight PDF menus and a Google voice number to test whether or not people would care about delivery. I think that's probably more likely the story for most founding stories. I mean, certainly it was our case where it was really just a sequencing of things to think about. Where would you get started? And then I think you update your prognosis based on information you get. And I think you have a point of view on where the end state is, and you move around as you kind of get there.

[Tony Hsu]

And for us, perhaps it was mostly curiosity. So Internet was more or less part of our everyday life, part of everything. And it felt like all these shops and stores and restaurants and all these physical places, we're not, like, going online in the way that they should go. So it was kind of a curiosity of, like, how should this play out 10 years in?

[Alfred Lin]

Are you guys enjoying your jobs?

[Tony Hsu]

Yeah, like, a lot of people ask me that. Like, you know, we did the doordash transaction and at the end of 21, closed in 22. So that was like two and a half years ago. A lot of people ask me, like, Mickey or an entrepreneur, like, what are you going to do next? And I'm like, I have difficulty figuring out something more interesting and exciting to do than the things that I do in my everyday life and the things that we do as a company. I think it's a very unique position to be able to witness how the world is literally going online and how that is changing entire industries, starting in our case with the restaurant industry and continuing with grocery and so many other industries. So genuinely, I don't like my job. I love my job. I love the opportunity that I get with what we do every day.

[Miki Kusi]

Yeah, I mean, the answer is yes. Short answer is yes. The longer answer is, I mean, it's a version of. It's a version of. I mean, you have to find the union of. I mean, what it is that you love to do and what it is that you're responsible to do. And, you know, I think one of the best ways to find that union is to work with people that are friends. I mean, it doesn't start that way perhaps, but, I mean, I actually tend to think that when you look at the longest tenured organizations, they generally have, like, those kinds of vibes, or at least the ones that I would want to be a part of. It doesn't have to be a company. I mean, it could be, I don't know, a school team, a sports team, a church Group, whatever it is. I mean, I think they tend to have those characteristics. And I've kind of understood after 11 years why that's true. I mean, it's very hard to kind of just do the same grind. Even if you love the mission, if you don't enjoy the people around you at the end of the day. I mean, they're the ones who make like the day to day actually go forward.

[Alfred Lin]

We heard from Bill McDermott calling Operational Excellence as pain. And I don't know of any company that is more operationally excellent as well as operationally intense as your business. Certainly much more operationally intense than just a software business. And so how painful is it?

[Tony Hsu]

There's this one evening I think back to every now and then. This was in 2015 Fall Vault launched delivery in the summer of 2015. And in the fall of 2015, I remember this one Friday evening, we had maybe 20 couriers online, 15 restaurants, maybe there was like 50 customers ordering and everything got fucked. I remember I was calling restaurants, refunding orders, calling customers. We're trying to hustle and make this thing grow because we were growing very quickly from the start. And I remember thinking to myself, how is this ever going to scale? How is this ever going to work? It seemed so impossible to be able to do this well at scale, efficiently, with good customer experience and so forth. And I think that that's ultimately the foundation of like, you know, that we've had to build at DoorDash and at Walt. Like, you know, it's easy to have an amazing. No, not easy, but it's easier to have an amazing customer experience or a world class efficiency. But it's very difficult to make those two true at the same time at massive scale, at high level of growth. And I think ultimately that's the problem that we need to still solve for every day. And we love details in this company. We love trying to understand how do you make a delivery seconds better for the customer, seconds more efficient for the courier, seconds faster for the merchant to prepare. And ultimately that's the business.

[Alfred Lin]

How do you guys define customer service at this point? How do you make it excellent every single day? You guys do approximately, from my account, 7 million deliveries every single day. How do you make each one of them excellent?

[Miki Kusi]

Well, we don't, I mean, I guess to start with the obvious, but like, I mean, I mean, look, I mean everything is in this kind of business in particular, and I would argue probably any kind of business, every product, I mean, it's a portfolio of outcomes, right? And you are Always you have to first know what excellence is and then you have to keep getting inspired. And it's really easy when I get like 600 emails a day about like why we suck, you know, or why we could do better and reading through those, you know, very quickly to kind of get to the next level. And then so every day you're actually getting better without knowing it in some ways, because what you're doing is you're raising kind of the bar for what excellence looks like. On the flip side, you're trying to figure out like which one of the distributions in this, like probability function matters. And that's how you kind of prioritize. And I think you just have to do that for all of the things I think you have to do that for the product. You have to do that for. I mean, the people you hire. You have to do that for understanding of a function or when a function changes. You have to do that on business strategy. I mean, that's the name of the game.

[Alfred Lin]

And all the employees dash.

[Miki Kusi]

Yeah. So we still do that. Yeah. So I still do support. I mean, I was just doing it this morning. I was jet lagged partially, so I just did it for longer. But like I did, I don't know, 4am to 6am I was doing support this morning. And so every day I do about 15 minutes on average. We do deliveries once a quarter required for everyone, but I think most people probably once a month, something like that.

[Tony Hsu]

Yeah. I've done deliveries, I think in seven countries in the last year, including for a competitor, which was very insightful.

[Alfred Lin]

We've invited you to this conference before and you never come. You guys are here for another reason.

[Tony Hsu]

Yeah, so this is actually a funny one. So like I wanted to come. I was not able to come last year and I asked my assistant, can you look into flights from our leaders that was in Berlin to come here? And then my assistant is like, yeah, we have this two day thing after our leadership offsite in Berlin. It's in the same location as this thing. So we technically didn't come, we just didn't leave.

[Alfred Lin]

I see. So what were the takeaways from your European offsite? It must be a very important continent for you. You started vaults, you wanted to win Europe from Finland, you won Finland, you won other minor markets that people didn't pay any attention to, like Malta. You have 85% market share in Malta. I heard recently that you have 45% market share in Berlin, which means that you must have some entree into cracking larger markets. So you Went from small markets to large markets.

[Tony Hsu]

So, like, we didn't actually go to small markets because we wanted to go to small markets. Like, we just didn't have a lot of funding. Like, you know, one thing to realize about our company is that, like, we founded Walt in 2014. There was no delivery industry. Like, you know, back in 2014, delivery was like, you know, pizza and kebab places that did delivery. That was kind of a sideshow of the restaurant industry. And there were some companies, like, taking this business online, like, aggregating those delivery restaurants that they deliver themselves. And, you know, we started with the problem of, like, how is the restaurant going to be. How is the restaurant going to operate when in an online world? How is, like, you know, the fact that every consumer is online going to make the restaurant better as an experience or more efficient as a business and so forth? And we ended up with delivery, and this kind of whole industry appeared around us in 2014, 15, 16, 17. So that's how we ended up with restaurant delivery. But when this industry came to being around us, we kind of noticed that, oh, we're suddenly a very small company in an industry, a lot of companies raising funding. So we just realized that we did the math, and we're like, if we want to go to a city like London, 100 million doesn't even get you started in winning in these cities. So that's why we just took bets that we could win. We invested in the markets where we saw that we can see the investment to actually a profitable market. And then as we became bigger, we could take bigger bets. Like, we expanded to Japan and Germany as Walt, basically, after we raised our series c, which was 100 million, because that was the first time we could see that actual capacity to invest enough into these markets. But if I look at, like, winning in Berlin, it's not really that different from winning in Tromso in Norway. That's one of our cities in Georgia. Like, ultimately, it's about, like, building the best possible service for consumers, couriers, and merchants and being consistent at it, not just for years, but optimally for decades. And, like, I think there's a lot of sprinting in our industry, but, like, ultimately, this is a marathon, and you only win if you win in the marathon. And we don't focus on the sprint. We like to sprint as well, but we like to focus on the marathon. You know, we talk about not being the first, we talk about being the last to go to a market.

[Alfred Lin]

How has either of your leadership styles, your culture, changed as the company is skilled.

[Miki Kusi]

I mean, I think the culture's largely stayed relatively the same. I think the mechanisms to keep it that way or to scale it have changed. I mean, it's obviously different when it's just a few of us as founders to now 15,000 people around the world in 32 countries. Right. So I mean by definition some things have had to have changed if you wanted to keep constantly, you know, one of the things that you think is really important, I actually am starting to. I used to think that maybe this wasn't true, that you know, perhaps like how you do things is perhaps the only like real permanent or longest term moat that a company can have. I'm starting to think maybe that is actually starting to become true, especially in a business where, I mean it really is a detail oriented business that is different by the neighborhood, by the store, by the category, by the geography. And I think the first thing is just realizing that you have to be more and more in love with the problems as opposed to solutions. I think that's the first thing that you have to do to scale yourself as you go from founder to manager to leader to CEO of a larger company. That's probably one of the hardest things for me to learn. I think the second thing is just actually pretty important to make sure that everyone is quite aligned not just on like what are the priorities of what's important, but also how you debate some of the organizing principles or tenets on how to settle a debate. If that's not true, then generally bad things can happen. I think the third thing is just recognizing that your culture is going to be most, I guess scale through the incentives that you have or the incentives that you don't have. I think one of the things that we've been lucky to get right and maybe spend a lot of our time on is just building a lot of people from within. I actually think that when you look at the most successful companies, I don't know if this is causal, but for some reason the people at the top seem to be there for a long period of time. And that seems to be quite consistent across industry, across time span, across the nonprofit or the for profit sectors, across science, sports, business. And you know, those are things that we work quite hard on. So I think the mechanisms change. I don't think the culture at Doordash actually has changed that much from day one. I mean, I think our best tell is we always ask, especially folks who are a bit more senior who joined the company, what are their observations? And we literally write down those five words and see if it matches, you know, what the five words we wrote down when we started the company were.

[Tony Hsu]

Yeah. And I think like one thing I've, I've been thinking about is that like when you're growing up as a company, like I, at least I'm a very impatient person. So I've had to learn a lot about patience because like, you know, building a company takes a lot of time. Like I remember there's an investor who told me that like Mickey, you know, when I was finding Walt, Mickey, like you realize you have to do this at least five years. And I remember thinking like, okay, that's a crazy long period of time. And that was a decade ago. It takes a long time to build a company. And you have an enormous amount of patience when it comes to not just thinking about like the week and the month, but the year and multiple of years. However, if I think about myself today, I've had to learn, relearn impatience. Because what happens when your company becomes big is obviously you have a lot of impact. Your ability to create impact is immense. But at the same time things just end up taking more and more time. And if you talk with people that work closest with me to these days, my number one word I use is velocity. I talk about velocity. How can we do things faster? How can we fight the status quo of hey, we're going to do this in Q4? And I'm like, why do we talk about quarters when we used to talk about weeks or months? Like, let's not talk about quarters, let's talk about weeks. So like you know, just pushing everything to be a little bit faster, a little bit more ambitious, a little bit more compressed. Compressed. And that's like something that has happened with the virtue of the scale that we have.

[Alfred Lin]

So you're pushing, you guys are pushing harder and harder and harder, trying to bring the intensity.

[Miki Kusi]

Look, I mean your job really as the leader, I mean whatever you want to call yourself, whether you're a founder of a two person startup or I don't know, the room size here, CEO of a thousand person startup or you know, CEO of a 500,000 person company or something, is you're setting the bar for excellence. You're setting the bar for what is the how, the speed, the way in which you treat people. I mean those are, yeah, that's, that ultimately is your job. And the more that you can do that, you know, in all the things, I think it's really important as companies scale, you need management systems, right? And obviously the management system to do something from zero to one is very different from the management system in which you run a tens of billions or hundreds of billions of dollars kind of scaled business that has a rhythm. On the flip side, you also want to try to try different management systems to shock each system. How do you one exercise. We go through a lot in our core businesses and we try to have internal teams try to kill the core business, just as we have teams try to bring rigor to some of the early stage bets that are actually working.

[Tony Hsu]

Yeah. And like, the way I think about it is that the superpower of the founder is to be in the detail, to be able to do a lot of these things that we do at the early stages of a company like yourself, with your own two hands. And the superpower of the CEO is to build a team, have a vision, make sure that there's the right model, the right direction for the team to go. And as a founding CEO, you try to find the best of these both worlds and that's where you can do something unique.

[Alfred Lin]

How do you. Well, I want to follow up on that. How do you make sure that the team is cohesive if you're having one team trying to kill the core business and another team trying to expand somewhere else, how do you give Mickey his autonomy in Europe and doing things differently? Because vault and doordash grew up differently and have different cultures.

[Miki Kusi]

Yeah, I mean, this is where the word alignment becomes more and more important. And I actually think that like alignment can happen actually really quickly. This is where I mean, I get the unique privilege of, you know, setting some of these tenets in terms of whether it's direction or calling out like, you know, what trade offs or outstanding questions there are. I mean, we had this off site with like at least 30, like outstanding items. I mean, I better get to those 30 within the next week. Right. Because the faster I get to those 30, the faster we're aligned in those 30. The faster we ship, the faster we test, the faster we execute. And I think that, you know, I think it also is really important that you team up with people that are, they're not like you in the sense of, I don't know what they look like or, you know, some of their personal beliefs, things like this, but that they're like you in terms of what they believe excellence is. How do you achieve that excellence? What are the right ways to treat one another? I think that's a pretty big deal if you get that part wrong. I almost think all of your management techniques probably don't have Nearly the same amount of impact. I think if you can start by getting that right every single time, really evaluating every single role, and then moving people around to also help build not only longevity, but also institutional knowledge and resilience and redundancy in your team. And then you mirror that with this very fast ability to reconcile any differing points of view on specially strategic direction. Generally, those are the ways in which we try to keep people happy, let founders do their thing. But, yeah, it's hard. It's not perfect.

[Alfred Lin]

Any questions from the audience?

[Miki Kusi]

I actually had breakfast with Mickey at the first version of this Europe 100 in 2022. And I asked a point of question. Of all of the delivery companies, he was still independent and a CEO back then. Which one is the best? Literally in a heartbeat, he said, doordash. So marriage of love. Now that you guys, now you gotta make the marriage work. That's right. So now that this is the big first acquisition for DoorDash and you got acquired, give us some of the lessons learned of both acquiring companies as well as being acquired. Yeah, I think some of this depends on your philosophy. And for instance, when we looked at companies to team up with, one of the things we prioritized, the strength of the team, probably more than what a traditional M and A exercise would have maybe scored it. Our view on this is that this is a business where you might be winning in the, I don't know, like temporal next X years, but then losing, like, you know, why years later. And so if you think that way and, you know, you actually believe the leadership matters, then, well, it seems to reason that that should be maybe the most important thing. But I don't. But I don't. But I think there's a temptation sometimes where the numbers kind of, you know, talk louder somehow than this particular point. So I think for us, it started with that. Then it turned into, well, if you truly believe in this, you kind of have to go all the way through the logic and take it to its natural limit, which is, well, Mickey has to run everything. Because if you truly believe that you're teaming up with the best operator for what we wanted to accomplish, that was kind of what we did. Even the DoorDash operations that were not a part of Volt, but outside of the United States for DoorDash reported into Mickey, I think then the third was actually just figuring out by trial, by fire and trial and error. And we're still obviously making sure that we can do this, but reconciling the kind of arguments as quickly as possible just What I mean by these organizational tenets, because it's not just the what or the strategy that's actually quite straightforward. I think in most cases, I think it's the how you do things that is where all the tension is. And I think, you know, it helps though if you, if you find a team that you actually think very similarly about the how. And so I think that's probably some of the most important things that we worked on.

[Tony Hsu]

Yeah. To maybe add a perspective. Like, I think Doordash and Vault is a very unique partnership. Like, you know, one thing I learned about MNA is that like people talk about MNA as if it's like one topic. Like different M and A transactions or partnerships are very different in nature. Very different. Like, you know, two companies of like 10,000 plus people coming together is a very unique thing versus something else. But I think, like why Doordash and Walt work ultimately, from my perspective, comes back to Tony and who Tony is as a founder and the trust he has placed in both myself and by extension our team. And that's ultimately what it comes down to, even as it's a massive transaction when you think about it.

[Alfred Lin]

Take one final question and then I have another one.

[Tony Hsu]

Yeah, hi. I was wondering if you could compare both of you operating more in the states, operating more in Europe, about the labor laws in Europe and how do you deal with that, and if you believe that Europe should reform its labor laws, at least for part time workers or people who work less than 20 hours a week. So I can start, like, should we, as societies change our laws around, like prescription drugs and apathecaries because of the Internet, like, kind of makes sense. Like, you know, we came up with a lot of regulation for a lot of different industries, like in a world, you know, predating the Internet. I find it funny that when we talk about this in the context of labor and labor regulation, we're kind of like, no, we have the perfect labor regulation. We figured it out in late 1800s. It's a ridiculous thing. Every aspect of society is being redefined by the Internet. And what the Internet does for labor in specific is that it allows for a whole new category of work. And that's ultimately the kind of work that we are able to enable, not just on the career or dasher side, but also on the, on the merchant side of the equation. And like, you know, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to say that, okay, we should probably regulate this in a way that makes sense, that enables this kind of unique freedom of flexibility and self Directness of this kind of online enabled work with like, you know, protections and predictability and safety nets of like labor systems that we've spent 200 years building. When it comes to how is dissimilar different across like the US or Europe, like every country is different. There's no European labor regulation. Like Vault operates in 17 European Union countries today. And I can tell you that like no two countries are alike. Like the countries are very different. And there is a lot of like, you know, that goes to the detail of like, you know, how the laws have been written in each of the countries and what that means. I will like, you know, raise my hat to Estonia, who's done a lot on this front, to Greece that did a labor reform that figured out like a way to regulate this kind of IC work, to CBAs that have been done in France and the UK. So I think this is ongoing, but it's going to take some time. This is not a painless transition we're going through.

[Alfred Lin]

Final question, looking out a decade from now, what are your skills of ambition and how do you know those are aspirations versus delusions?

[Miki Kusi]

Yeah, I don't know if my brain necessarily like, I mean you definitely maybe earn a little bit more credibility to think longer term as, I mean when the company's like 11 days old, probably thinking about 11 years out, a bit tricky. But when you're 11 years old, can you think about the next 11 years? It's probably a bit more straightforward. I actually think in general it's fairly straightforward where things are going to go. I think the question is the sequencing of how you do that. Right now, obviously in the online world there's this massive investment cycle into figuring out how this is going to play out. Most of you participate in it funded or some version of these things. There's a similar physical version of this happening. It's just happening a lot slower. Right. For example, one of the things that I think this was mentioned in one of the previous sessions that has allowed these LLMs to be somewhat useful is this ability to actually scrape lots of information that's available on the Internet. Well, a lot of information in the physical world's not actually available anywhere. Where is the last parking space in downtown San Francisco? Or how many apples are in this aisle in the rev A store or you know, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. I mean those are all things. I mean we're just in an earlier stage in that in the physical world versus maybe where things are in the digital world. And then if you think okay, well, the first thing is then you gotta go and rewind and think historically about how you would actually go and do that. And if you can do that. I think another pretty interesting piece is you're going to have to reorganize the atoms inside these cities once you have that information. In the US to give this example, we have very large square footage for most retail stores, whatever they sell bananas to couches, to TVs, to iPhones. And while it probably doesn't always need to work that way. Right. Things on the Internet got more and more efficient. Things in the physical world will too. The question is like how? And it's a little bit more complicated because you're talking about real estate and people and labor and a lot of other things. And so I mean that's what's going to happen in the next 10 years. And I think it's quite straightforward. I mean, I actually think the general like ending of where it goes is pretty straightforward in terms, but I think the sequencing of kind of how you get there and when things around automation, the reorganization, the business model, innovation is actually going to ultimately get there. Right. Because if you think about it, if we ultimately want to bring you everything inside the city and enable every retailer to compete against anyone with any kind of business model, I mean those are the kinds of things that we're ultimately going to have to do in order to make successful these transitions.

[Tony Hsu]

I think it's kind of crazy that like, you know, we are now in Switzerland and like, you know, if there's a book that you would like to order as a physical copy, like that book is likely going to be like in so many different shops and stores around this place, but they're not listed anywhere online. And literally the easiest way to probably get that book is to go to go online and order it and it's going to be transported from another country to your location. Like someone needs to book all of those books and all those other items in these stores and shops and restaurants and so forth online. And like until 100% of them are online, we are not done.

[Alfred Lin]

Well, thank you, Mickey. Thank you, Tony. I hope you guys know why Doordash is a long term hold in the Sequoia Capital Fund. Thank you.

[Tony Hsu]

Thanks Walter. Thanks man.