Kofi Amoo-Gottfried (DoorDash) | The DoorDash Super Bowl Bet That Changed Everything

Summary

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The CMO Podcast – Kofi Amoo-Gottfried (DoorDash): The DoorDash Super Bowl Bet That Changed Everything

Date: March 18, 2026
Host: Jim Stengel
Guest: Kofi Amoo-Gottfried, CMO of DoorDash

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Episode Overview

This episode centers on Kofi Amoo-Gottfried’s unique journey as DoorDash’s CMO, his background and influences (including his relationship to his uncle, Kofi Annan), the culture and strategic decisions driving DoorDash’s success, and a deep dive into the company’s groundbreaking Super Bowl campaign that won the 2024 Cannes Lions Titanium Grand Prix. Kofi reflects on risk-taking, building an adaptive team, and how personal values permeate leadership. The conversation is filled with warmth, candor, and actionable insights for marketing leaders.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

Kofi’s Roots and Early Influences

• Ghanaian Heritage & Family:

  • Kofi’s mother was the twin sister of Kofi Annan, former UN Secretary General. After his mother passed when Kofi was young, his uncle became a surrogate parent and later his legal guardian when he moved to the U.S. as a teenager.
  • Reminiscing on growing up around a global figure, Kofi highlights Annan’s openness, empathy, and refusal to create power distance.

    “He would deal with everyone in their full humanity... shrinking power, distance... really seeing people for who they were.” — Kofi [06:01]

  • On Annan’s career view:

    “I don’t think the choice of career mattered as much to him as... finding something that lit me up... I was good at...” — Kofi [08:22]

• First Brand Memories:

  • The first ad to captivate him? Not a big consumer brand, but a local Ghanaian nail company ad in '92 featuring rap before hip-hop went mainstream in Ghana.

    “It was a guy rapping… about how good these nails were… all of us knew it, because it was so cool.” — Kofi [01:15; 57:56]

Embracing Risk & Growth

• Career Leap: Leaving Wieden+Kennedy for Ghana
  • Kofi left a prized job on Nike’s account to launch an agency in Ghana—a move met with bafflement in the U.S. industry.
  • Takeaway: Jobs should “change how your mind works.” Immersing himself in a new context, running all aspects of the business, was deeply formative:

    “Those three years... made me a different animal... that’s the bar of what a job should do.” — Kofi [11:30]

  • Emphasizes first-principles thinking: you have to invent your own metrics and approaches in unfamiliar markets.

    “There’s no frameworks you can apply... none of that stuff exists.” — Kofi [14:23]

DoorDash: Culture, Growth, and Ambition

• Personal Favorites:

  • Most ordered restaurants: Millburn Deli and Nima African Restaurant for jollof rice; DashMart for convenience goods, especially snacks for his kids. [17:00]
  • Late night go-to: “Probably Ben and Jerry’s ice cream… tends to make its way to our house around about 9pm.” — Kofi [17:55]

• Describing DoorDash:

  • One word for company culture? “Ambitious.”
  • One word for being CMO? “Nonstop.”

    "We operate a multi-sided marketplace... constantly just trying to figure out what the next iteration of this thing is." — Kofi [18:15-19:37]

• Evolving Scope of the CMO Role:

  • Responsibilities have expanded from restaurant delivery to a multi-category, global business—consumers, merchants, dashers, and now advertisers.

    "Everyone’s job is going to change every 18 months... Hire people who have the slope... who can deal with ambiguity… and who are excited to build.” — Kofi [22:41]

• Playbook for Market Leadership:

  • DoorDash’s “suburban strategy” challenged industry wisdom—prioritizing the suburbs over cities, contrary to prevailing logic.

    “The prevailing industry wisdom at the time was... you could not make delivery work in the suburbs. We knew from Palo Alto... that was just false.” — Kofi [24:52]

  • Relentless daily execution:

    “Day in, day out, we are in the weeds, we are in the numbers. We are operating at a very, very high level.” — Kofi [24:52]

  • Obsession with customer over competitors.

• CEO Tony Xu’s Leadership Style:

  • Described as a generational founder, fiercely ambitious and highly customer-centric, while providing his leaders with autonomy and accountability.

    "You have the autonomy to operate... in almost seven years, there’s nothing that someone else has approved. It lives or dies by the calls we make as a marketing organization." — Kofi [28:45-31:04]

  • Clear accountability is rigorously maintained.

Purpose, Values & Social Impact

• Why Stay So Long?

  • The people and company culture—low ego, “no bullshit,” high intensity, focused on real-world impact.

    “Even though our ambitions... are really high... it never gets into the place where it’s toxic.” — Kofi [33:29]

  • Annual marketing offsite features “user stories” to ground the team in impact, e.g., a woman using dashing to pay her motel night.

• Brand Aspiration: The 24/7 Life Assistant

  • The company’s North Star: moving beyond delivery to becoming an essential everyday support for consumers, dashers, merchants, and advertisers.

    “Modern life is a minefield. What role can our brand play? … to be there, to be that 24/7 life assistant.” — Kofi [35:46]

  • Metrics span selection, price/accessibility, speed, dasher pay, merchant profitability—measured year over year as evidence of progress.

The Super Bowl “Delivers All the Ads” Campaign

• Cannes Titanium Grand Prix Winner:

  • In 2024, DoorDash’s risky, technically complex campaign delivered, live, every product advertised in the Super Bowl to a real consumer.

    “Way more interesting than the idea itself is what are the sets of conditions that would need to be true?... We are a very risk-forward company.” — Kofi [41:33]

  • The campaign required legal, engineering, and external brand collaboration—testament to a risk-tolerant and solutions-driven culture.
  • NFL issued a cease and desist two weeks prior; DoorDash navigated complex legal obstacles to ultimately win buy-in from participating brands (e.g., Hellman’s supplying a 60-pound jar of mayonnaise).

    “Every brand... leaned in... the most critical ingredient is probably risk tolerance and daily problem-solving, both of which are present here.” — Kofi [44:42]

• Results & Impact:

  • 8 million entries; massive earned media; cultural impact; record-high new vertical transactions following the campaign.

    “It absolutely worked... all-time highs for percent of monthly actives transacting in new verticals... we drove awareness, adoption, and a massive cultural moment.” — Kofi [45:36]

Leadership, Team, and Life Balance

• Maintaining Groundedness:

  • Stays connected to lifelong friends from Ghana, forming a support circle outside professional life.

    “You always know there’s going to be a crew there that will have you and will be there for you... They don’t care; none of this stuff matters to them.” — Kofi [49:01]

• Balancing Roles:

  • Juggles being a CMO, husband, father, and board member by prioritizing family and intentionally structuring time.

    “I try to be there every evening for bedtime... try to be as deliberate as you can in slotting all the things.” — Kofi [52:05]

Lessons from Agency Days

• Marketing Fundamentals (Kellogg's, Leo Burnett):
  • “If your client gets hit by a bus, you should be able to do their job”—deep discipline in all the basics.
• Creativity and Imagination (Nike, Wieden+Kennedy):
  • “Throw all of that shit out... what’s going to really capture the imagination?”
• Contextual Empathy (Publicis, Ghana/Nestle):
  • “Sometimes you just have to trust blindly... get to that next level deeper.”

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Measurable Impact:

  “Behind the dashboards that we look at, there’s actual people’s lives that are impacted.” — Kofi [33:29]

• On Ambition vs. Toxicity:

  “We grind, but everyone’s bought into doing the work... it never gets into a place where it’s toxic.” — Kofi [33:29]

• On Risk:

  “If you have the chance, you should swing.” — Kofi [41:33]

• On DoorDash’s Culture:

  “Pressure is a privilege.” — Jim quoting an athlete [24:06]

• On Being Authentic:

  “Know who you are and be who you are, no matter where you are, with what audience, and what stage you’re on.” — Jim [61:12]

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Timestamps of Key Segments

• [01:15] – First impactful brands and ads from childhood
• [04:29] – Growing up as Kofi Annan’s nephew; lessons learned
• [09:31] – Taking risks: leaving W+K for Ghana
• [17:00] – Personal DoorDash favorites
• [18:12] – “Ambitious” and “Nonstop” — company and CMO’s job description
• [22:41] – Hiring for “slope”; building a future-resistant team
• [24:52] – DoorDash’s suburban strategy and execution superpowers
• [28:45] – Working with founder Tony Xu; clear accountability
• [33:29] – The “feel good engine” and user impact stories
• [35:31] – “24/7 life assistant” brand aspiration and measuring progress
• [41:33] – The story, risk, and culture behind the Super Bowl campaign
• [45:36] – Campaign results: engagement, earned media, business outcomes
• [49:01] – Staying grounded with lifelong friends
• [52:05] – Running boards, balancing big job and family
• [53:57] – Lessons from agency clients; marketing fundamentals and creativity
• [57:56] – The first brands that shaped Kofi
• [59:34] – Most inspiring person: Kofi Annan
• [61:12] – Final takeaways from the episode

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Takeaways for Marketers and Leaders

1. Build a culture of autonomy, accountability, and clear goals.
2. Embrace risk, especially when it’s strategy-aligned.
3. Seek out career experiences that change the way you think.
4. Ground your marketing in both metrics and genuine, lived impact.
5. Stay connected to family and friends for authentic support and perspective.
6. Lead with empathy and integrity, following the example set by great leaders like Kofi Annan.

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This episode provides both inspiration and practical lessons for anyone aiming to lead with purpose, agility, and heart in rapidly changing industries.

Transcript

[A]

Before we dive into today's episode, we would very much appreciate a moment from you to make sure you're subscribed to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen, along with optioning to auto download the episodes. It really is the best way to never miss an episode. Along with supporting the show and the amazing team that helps me bring it to you. And while you're there, leave us a rating or review. It only takes a minute and helps more people find the show and helps us learn. And of course share this episode with a friend or colleague who might enjoy it. We wouldn't be here six years later and still going so strong without you all our community. So thank you for being part of it. Now onto the show. Working across teams is tough, but Asana helps you handle it. That's because Asana is where humans and

[B]

AI coordinate work together. AI can spot roadblocks and assign work

[A]

in a snap so everything and everyone stays on track. That's how work gets handled.

[B]

That's Asana.

[A]

Visit [e-mail] that's a S-A N A dot com. Kofi, what's the first brand you remember having an impact on you as a young boy?

[B]

So I'd say the first ad I was ever captivated by was for like a nail, actual, like hammer and a nail, like a nail company. But they had done this thing that had never been done before, which was like, it was a guy rapping, actually infante about how good these nails were. And it was like the first time I had heard that before, like, afrobeat was a thing. This was before hip hop was a thing. This was like, we're talking 1992 maybe, and this dude is like, rapping about nails. And all of us knew it, you know, because it was so cool and so, like, that always sticks out.

[A]

Hi, I'm Jim Stengel. I've helped hundreds of major brands discover and activate their purpose. Because when a brand's purpose is clear, compelling and authentic, profit naturally follows. Each week, I welcome the CMOs, the chief marketing officers of your favorite brands, to speak to how their job is so much more than marketing. These leaders share their inspiration and challenges along with how they try to build a full, healthy and happy life in and out of the office. And it's that energy that reaches everyone they touch. And we're glad you're here to feel that energy and to learn from these remarkable leaders who. So here we go. My guest this week is a rock star in our industry, Kofi Amou. Gottfried is the Chief marketing officer at DoorDash. It is the largest food delivery platform in the U.S. with about 14 billion in revenue, over 3.2 billion orders in 2025 and a retail media business that surpassed $1 billion in revenue last year. DoorDash is publicly traded with an astounding market cap for a 13 year old company of $78 billion. And by the way, they're way bigger than a food delivery platform. Their goal really is to be a 247 life assistance for all its stakeholders and customers. My guest ko Fi joined DoorDash in 2019 as VP of marketing before being promoted as DoorDash's first chief marketing officer in 2022. Kofi oversees marketing across consumers, merchants and dashers and has helped transform the company from a restaurant delivery app into a multi category commerce platform. Born in Ghana, Kofi came to the US for college in Minnesota where, as he says, he stumbled into marketing. He first worked at ad agency Leo Burnett, then Wieden Kennedy and publicist before stepping to the brand side with Bacardi and Facebook. After our recording, Kofi announced that he'll be stepping down from his role at DoorDash in May. This marks the end of a chapter where Kofi helped shape one of the most recognizable brands in tech and Commerce. In his LinkedIn post, he noted that Seven has always been his lucky number. He was born the seventh. DoorDash is the seventh company he's worked at and May will mark seven years with the company, the longest stint of his career. Teaser Kofi has a very famous uncle, which we will talk about right off the bat. This is my conversation with the CMO who swings big, who is also a proud husband, father and friend. Here's Kofi. Kofi, welcome to the CMO podcast. Now, were you actually born on a Friday?

[B]

I was born on a Friday. Thank you for having me, Jim. And for those who don't know, in Ashanti Akan culture in Ghana, where I'm from, male Born on a Friday is named Kofi. And so yes, I was indeed born on a Friday. But it is possible to be named after someone and not to be born on a Friday.

[A]

Okay, all right. Well listen, I was astounded by several things in my research on you, and maybe the biggest is that your mother was the twin sister of Kofi Annan, the Secretary General of the United nations for so many years and someone who I admired from afar. I was living in Europe at the time he was Secretary General. So my first question did you see a lot of Uncle Kofi growing up Yeah, I did.

[B]

And, you know, this is always such an odd thing for me because, you know, for a long time he was just Uncle Kofi. You know what I mean? He had obviously worked at the UN his whole career, but we would see him probably every summer when he came to Ghana. Obviously, him and my mom were very close, and I lost my mom when I was young, probably 9 or 10. And in the Ashanti culture, your family takes responsibility if something like that happens to you. So he became sort of another surrogate parent. When I eventually came to the States for college in 97, I actually wasn't 18 yet, so he was my legal guardian. So the first place I lived in the United States, which is crazy, was for 10 days I stayed at the official residence of the UN Secretary General before I went on to college in St. Paul, Minnesota. But, yeah, he's obviously been a massive influence and a massive part of my life. So obviously then he became this sort of global icon. But we knew him for a long time before that happened.

[A]

Nobel Prize winner, too, by the way.

[B]

Absolutely. Absolutely.

[A]

So what did you learn from him? I mean, now that you have perspective on it, right, you were kind of a kid back then. As you look back on it, what do you take forward to this day?

[B]

Well, there's probably two things that stood out. One was that he was willing to have the conversation with anyone. So there was no one that he thought of as beyond the pale in his role as sort of the world's foremost peacemaker. He had to be able to sit across the table from people that he might find personally objectionable. But he was always willing to have the conversation, and he always believed that you could learn something from having that conversation. And I think, like, that's something that we've lost. You know, we're sort of in this, like, highly polarized environment where people have lost family members and friends and, you know, neighbors and all sorts of things because of differing political views. And I think, like, that's one thing that I learned from him, is that you have to be able to have. If you can't have the conversation, there's nothing to be done. So he was always open to having the conversation. The second thing is, I'd say, like, he. Regardless of his position in society, like, it was incredible being out with him when he was secretary General and later, because, you know, he would have to come into places with, you know, enormous amount of security and Secret Service and sort of all of these things. But then once you got to that place, I remember him coming to visit in London when I. When our son was born. And once he was in the room, sort of all of that faded away. And he would deal with everyone in their full humanity. He was not like, I'm the UN head of the UN or the former head of the un and it's like he would be having a conversation with the waiter and asking them about their background and if he got in a cab, he would be getting into it with a cab. There was a time when I was actually hospitalized in the UK and he came to see me in the hospital. And it was nuts having him in the hospital because everyone who works in the healthcare system in the United Kingdom is an immigrant, which means they all know exactly who he is and the hubbub that he created. And he was just sort of swapping stories with the nurses and just seemed fully at ease in that environment. So I think the other, the other big thing I learned from him was that like the thing that matters most is sort of like the connections and relationships and being with people, sort of shrinking power, distance. And I thought he was like incredible at that. I like really seeing people for who they were and creating space for them to be.

[A]

He would have been a great cmo.

[B]

He would have been an all time cmo. Thankfully, he did something better. Jim. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Okay.

[A]

But what did he think of your career choice? I'm sure you talked about that with him.

[B]

Yeah, we did. I mean, look, he was incredibly. I don't think the choice of career mattered as much to him as like, you know, I think when you grow up in sort of traditional Ghanaian, African, immigrant cultures, you know, I would be considered a failure by many. Like, I'm not a doctor, I'm not a lawyer, I'm not an engineer. I didn't do one of like the three jobs that everyone. Yeah, but no, I think he was just very proud that like I had found something that I was interested in that lit me up, that I was good at and I was able to sort of build a life myself doing this thing that I enjoyed. And then, you know, one of the things that was incredible much later in life is when he was turning 80. At the time I was at Meta and we actually worked inside the company and with a bunch of partners with the Kofi Annan foundation, with folks like David Jones at One Young World, to build a campaign to raise money for the Kofi Annan foundation so that he could continue to do the work that he was doing around election integrity and sort of the causes that mattered to him later in life. So it was great to be able to take the things that I'd learned how to do over that time and then help drive an initiative that he cared about for his foundation, given just how wildly influential and important he was in my life.

[A]

Wow. Full circle moment for sure. For sure. Hey. Another thing I learned about you was that you feel the biggest risk you have taken in your career to date was to leave Wyden Kennedy way back in 2008. 9. Where you were working on Nike. Right. The prime account to return to Ghana to set up an agency under the Publicis umbrella.

[B]

That's right.

[A]

As you look at that, why do you feel that was your riskiest move?

[B]

Well, I mean, I think everyone thought I was crazy, Jim. No one, like, legitimately, no one thought this was a good idea.

[A]

Someone did they talk you into it. Someone talked you into it.

[B]

Carter Murray. Carter Murray and Richard Pindo. They thought it was a good idea because, you know, oh, wow, okay. We're going to be helpful to them as the people. People are publicists, but I think generally most of the people were like, oh, this is. And I think people could get their head around it, but not as a career decision. People could get their head around it as like, oh, this is something you want to do because you're from Ghana and this allows you to go back home and sort of spend time with, you know, your dad and all of these things, which was certainly part of it. But I think most people sort of went, I have no idea what the advertising industry in sub Saharan Africa looks like. I've never heard of it. If anything I know about maybe South Africa, maybe I know about mena, never heard about West Africa. And you're the head of strategy on Nike or Widening Kennedy. Like, the. One of these things is not like the other. You know, my, one of my, my jokes is that when I told this actually happened, but I thought his response was so funny. Spence Kramer was the global account director on Nike at the time. And he threw a chair when I told him. He was like, so confident that I was leaving. And then he said, this is like me moving back to Ohio to manage a Bob Evans. And I was like, I don't. I don't even know what a Bob Evans is, but I'm pretty sure it's not like that. I now know what a Bob Evans is.

[A]

It's pretty good. Not a bad purpose in life.

[B]

It's pretty great. I've since been to a Bob Evans, but I thought that was like, a good reflection of, like, how I think most people Thought about what.

[A]

So why. Why did you do it? And what do you. How do you feel about it now as you look back on it?

[B]

Well, I mean, I did it definitely for the reasons of, like, being back home. I think there was, like, a personal. I don't know if I would have done it if it was in another, like, part of the world. Going back home mattered a lot to me. Feeling like I could contribute in some sort of small way to, you know, Ghana's development story mattered to me. But then the other thing that I didn't know for a fact, but felt pretty confident of was that I would learn more doing that than pretty much anything else I could. And those three years, like, changed me. It made me a different animal, which I've since now come to think of as, like, that's the bar of what a job should do. Like, can a job change how your mind works in some material way? You know, And I had to do every job. I had to, you know, hire everyone. I had to find the building, I had to find the clients. I had to deal with, you know, when we were, you know, hitting our revenue, like, I had to deal with all of it. Working across 23 countries, dealing with everything from daily frequent power outages to coup d'. Etats. That meant that all of a sudden one of our clients couldn't operate in the market. And we had to adjust in real time. So I would say I wouldn't trade that experience for anything. It's by far the hardest thing I've ever done. But it's also the most meaningful personally and most meaningful from a growing me as a leader and as a marketer and as an operator. It made everything that came after that feel easier. Because I'm like, listen, if you've had to be in Lagos dealing with the Procter and Gamble clients who are incredible. We had Oral B. And dealing with just the complexity of that operating environment and finding a way to make it work. Everything after that is doable.

[A]

It's a great criteria. You just said that go to a job that changes how your mind works. I mean, we all get presented with opportunities in our career. As I reflect on mine, which I've done frequently. You know, there were two assignments that. And it wasn't the CMO at P and G. There were two assignments that really stretched me, changed how I thought one was going to an acquisition where we were not wanted.

[B]

Right?

[A]

So you had to bridge, you had to listen, you had to exercise empathy, but at the same time, bring them in to the new company. They're not the old company anymore, they're part of the new company. So that was a tough one. And then following that, I was the second general manager that P and G sent to Czech and Slovak republics when they were still wildly developing. We had no chains, we had no supermarket chains. It was all kiosks. And just to think about it, everything, as you say, cash flow.

[B]

Yeah. Money has to go to shoebox. There's no cash system. Yep, I've been there. Everything.

[A]

So everything was different every day, which is how I put my headline. So I think those assignments are so good because once you do them, you're right. You go into almost anything with a bouncing your step and a level of confidence.

[B]

Yeah. And I think it forces you. I don't know if you felt this, but it forces you to be like, truly a first principles thinker. Because there's no frameworks you can apply to some of these places. You can't sort of be like, oh, here's the thing that I learned about these things. I'm just going to plug them in here because none of that stuff exists. You know, one of my clients at Nestle who just had this brilliant observation where we're chatting about things like market share and we didn't have good enough data because it's all informal economy. To your point, like, yes, there's a handful of supermarkets, but everything else is kiosks and open markets and it's cash. So no one is like tracking share data with the fidelity that you would want. And we're talking about how you do that. And they sold a powdered milk. And he said, you know, I go into the markets and I look at all the women who are selling like grated cassava and rice and all these things, and they use the powdered milk cans as a measuring can to sell the thing that they're actually selling, the sugar and the rice and the cassava. So I literally count of the cans that I see in the marketplace, how many are mine, and that's my market share. And these are the sorts of things that you would have to do.

[A]

You have to improvise.

[B]

Yeah,

[A]

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[B]

There's probably two. So there's a brilliant sort of sandwich place, the Milburn Deli. Regular order from the Millburn Deli. So that one stays up there, I'd say. The other one is there's a Ghanaian restaurant not far away from my house called Nima African Restaurant. The Jollof Rice, you know, comes to my house probably too many times every month. That's okay. We, we make it work. I'd say those two are probably for me personally, the, the top things. The other thing is we have our own line of dark stores on DoorDash called dashmarts that are convenience stores and one of them is close to my house and those are incredible because the quality is super high because it's all controlled end to end and it's like a quick delivery. So whenever I'm doing snacks, which, you know, I have two kids, 10 and 12, a lot of snacks come to my house. Say Dashmart is the go to for like ice cream and snacks and those types of things.

[A]

What's your favorite late night order?

[B]

I am, I am a late night person. I'd say late night order. It's actually probably ice cream. It's probably a little Ben and Jerry's ice cream. Yeah, Ben and Jerry's tends to make its way tends to make its way to a house around about 9, 9pm every now and then. So that's probably the one.

[A]

What's one word to describe the DoorDash culture?

[B]

Ambitious.

[A]

How about one word to describe being CMO at DoorDash?

[B]

Oh, one word to describe being CMO@ DoorDash. Nonstop

[A]

as you are. Right.

[B]

100% as you are. We operate a multi sided marketplace. So I think most people when they think of DoorDash, think of it through the lens of sort of being a consumer. But we also have an entire sort of B2B side of this, which is like getting, you know, merchant partners on the platform, making sure they're successful, whether that's a large enterprise like Procter and Gamble or McDonald's or a small business like, like Nima African Restaurant. But then we also have the driver side of the house. So, you know, my team is also responsible for acquiring, engaging, onboarding dashers, helping them be successful on the platform. And then in the last couple of years we've also added advertisers. So there's always something, yeah, breaking. There's always something to go figure out. There's always something to go build. And then as we've also had sort of like global aspirations over the past couple of years, that's also created. You know, we started when I was here sort of seven years ago. This was pretty much a US company operating in one vertical, which was restaurant delivery. And now we're in 40 markets and you can get everything from, you know, some of the things we've talked about to a bridal dress on doordash. There's very little that you can't get on there. So it's this exercise of constantly just trying to figure out what the next iteration of this thing is.

[A]

Your scope, as I was doing my research and you just went there with us, is big, right? It's a lot bigger than other CMOs that we talk to in this show. So could you talk a bit about that? You went there. Your responsibility for bringing dashers in for B2B, B2C for ads on your platform, it's a lot. So how do you manage it? How do you focus? And I suspect the scope is different from four years ago when you became CMO at the company.

[B]

Yeah, I'd say the scope is materially different because the business is different. Right. So the scope four years ago would have been maybe a little bit of restaurants, plus maybe convenience. But we weren't huge in grocery, we weren't huge in retail. We were in Canada and Australia and New Zealand, but not at the scale that we are today. So I think the scope and the complexity has definitely grown as we think about new businesses. We didn't have reservations as a thing that we were doing on the platform. But I would say the way you get it done first and foremost is by having an incredible team. The scope is super broad and so the way that you can actually operate across all of it is hiring amazing people. And I have an incredible leadership team that sort of sits across whether they're managing an audience or a function or market, and then enabling, empowering, and trusting those people to do their best work while then being able to still operate. I think one of the challenging things about leading a doordash is none of us just get to be a leader. We're all fully expected to be in the weeds. One of our core values is this notion of operating at the lowest level of detail. So it's that balance of having the right people but still being able to go deep on all the surface areas as intended. And then where I end up spending my time ends up being like, okay, where. Where are we particularly challenged in a particular moment? Or is there a. You know, I think about this time of year, for instance, like with snowstorms and huge demand and disruption. Like, the supply side of the house on the dasher side is always challenging in the first quarter. So I may end up spending more of my time there. You know, we did the deal to acquire Deliveroo the back end of last year, so I'm spending a lot of my time on, with the Deliveroo team on, like, how do we integrate the function across both companies and make sure that we're learning from each other? So I'm spending a bunch of time there. So that's sort of how it flexes, which is that, like, from quarter to quarter, I may have, like, slightly different areas of focus, depending what's happening in the business. But I'm accountable for all of it, which is, you know, at any given moment, if someone wants to know how we're doing on, you know, driver acquisition this week or how many merchants we signed up, like, I need to understand what we're doing and be able to react to that.

[A]

It's tough to build a leadership team in such a dynamic company.

[B]

100%.

[A]

Right. So your leadership team now, I suspect, looks a lot different from what it did three or four years ago. Any tips or advice or counsel for those listening who are also trying to build the capabilities and the people for preparing you for the future? So how do you think about that? Because you're obviously doing it, you've done it, you continue to do it.

[B]

Yeah, I think one of the things that we talk a lot about is this notion of slope and hiring for slope, because we think, like most to the point of this place is entirely different than it was four years ago, certainly than it was seven years ago. Everyone's job is going to change probably every 18 months. So if you sort of start with that as like the premise, all of our roles are going to be more complex in some way every year. Then the thing you have to solve for is like, can I hire people who can adjust to that complexity? Can I have people who have the slope? Can I have people who are excited to build, who can deal with change, who can deal with ambiguity, who can deal with all of those things? So a lot of what we try to do is try to identify talent that we think has that sort of like that hunger, that builder mindset, that entrepreneurial bent. Because if you are in a place like this and you get upset or frazzled by things changing, it's gonna be painful because things will change all the time. You know, when I started in 2019, I was talking to one of our GMs and he said, look, everything was breaking and you know, the site was going down every week and sort of all of these things, we're just dealing with hyper growth. And so I was complaining to him about it and he was like, hey man, if you wanted to work somewhere that grew 2% over year over year and was like super stable, you should go do that. But for what this is, this is the reality.

[A]

Pressure is a privilege. Some athletes said that, right? The pressure is a privilege.

[B]

Exactly.

[A]

Right now you're only a 13 year old company, right? And you have a dominant market share. And I've seen it ranges from, I don't know, 60 to 70, depending on what you're looking at and so on. But that's big. That's big by P and G standards, right? That's kind of tied in Pampers level. So we like those kind of brands

[B]

back then one day, one day we'll be tied in Pampers. I don't think we're quite there yet,

[A]

but you're the number one player by far. It's not a category you created. You were not the first mover. So how did you do it, you and your team and the colleagues that came before you? I mean, 13 years, market leader, big category, growing category. What was the playbook or what were the principles that gave to this amazing rise?

[B]

Well, I think there's a couple of things and I think there's some strategic things, but a lot of it is. And I'll talk about those. But a lot of it is also just like daily execution. Like I think Doordash's superpower is that like day in, day out, we are in the weeds, we're in the Numbers. We are operating at a very, very high level. And I think that's the sort of thing that's hard to explain outside and easy to underestimate if you don't understand it. But this is a company that runs a massive daily business in a daily way where we're focused on all sorts of input metrics, where every week we're meeting together as a leadership team and taking action. And so I think that sort of executional discipline and rigor matters a great deal. But I think strategically, there's probably a couple of principles that early on mattered. So we talk a lot about being customer obsessed, not competitive focused as one of our values. And the way that that shows up early on is, you know, we launched in Palo Alto. This was a company that was built by students at Stanford called Palo Alto Delivery. And so the first place that we operated was Palo Alto. And once it became clear that this could be like a going concern, the next question then became, do you go to San Francisco or do you go to San Jo? And two things were in our favor. One was like, there was a constraint, which is that, like, delivery up until that point was an urban phenomenon. And so you had like, every big city had delivery companies. So we looked at San Francisco and sort of when we don't have the money to compete in San Francisco. So the constraint was super helpful, but it's like, we should try San Jose. The prevailing industry wisdom at the time was that you could not make delivery work in the suburbs. It was this idea that you needed dense urban environments, that the economics would never work. And so no one had actually gone and explored that and sort of gone and listened to the customers in that area. But we knew from operating in Palo Alto that that was just false. There were businesses that had unmet demand, that there were consumers that would be looking for this service. There were dashes, people that would want to work, gig work. And so that I think that pivot of sort of going into San Jose first sort of became what was then known as the suburban strategy, which is while everyone started in the cities, we started in the suburbs and built up racing from there before we moved into the city centers, which were, like, highly contested. So, like, you know, even that 67 market share in food delivery, if you go into the suburbs, it'll be even higher, but then if you go into, like, some very urban markets, it'll be a lot lower, right? Depending on sort of how we built our business. And so I'd say that is one piece of it. I'd say the Second piece of it is like a lot of what the industry was at the time. If you look at folks like grubhub was lead gen. They were not doing the logistics side of the business because the logistics side is hard and it's expensive. And so like, what you could do as grubhub is you go, I will build a marketplace that highlights all the restaurants. I will then take a commission for driving your traffic, but I'm going to leave the delivery up to you. So that worked for restaurants that would do their own delivery, but over time you just realized that that TAM is much smaller than being able to enable delivery for everyone. And so I think both of those things which all start with like really understanding sort of the customer and not taking the prevailing industry wisdom and as gospel in a lot of ways, matted. And then you tie that with sort of like a relentless daily execution machine and you just keep going at it. And you know, we have this notion of being 1% better every day and if you do that enough, it just compounds over time and you end up being sort of where we are today. But, you know, we don't think we've won. You know what I mean? It's all part of it, just not the mentality. The mentality is that like, we can always keep doing better for our customers on every side of the marketplace and we have a lot of room to grow on everything from the core restaurants to grocery to convenience to alcohol to retail and beyond.

[A]

Now you have a CEO who has got to be a CMO's dream, right? He's highly customer and employee centric, 100%. He reads emails, comments for customers, employees, acts on them, gets inspired by them, keeps them in touch. So what's it like working with Tony, who's a founder as well?

[B]

I mean, he is. I think Tony will go down as like a generational founder. I think he is. He has a few things that I think you want in a founder. And I think the leadership team at Doordash inclusive of, you know, the president, CEO Prabhya Adarca, who I report to, all share this trait, which is the, like, they're wildly ambitious. So the thing that they will do is push really hard on, like, how hard are your goals? Like, are these goals truly ambitious? Are they actually a stretch? Are we actually solving a problem for the customer? What gets better in a customer's life as a result of us doing this and really try to ground all of us in the work, in the value that we're creating for people and that we're being ambitious enough, and then they do an incredible job of giving you a high degree of autonomy. So once the goals are set and you're accountable for those goals. So across marketing, we have a wide variety of goals that we've talked about, like new customer acquisition or getting people onto a subscription product Dash pass or getting dasher to turnout this week. But once those goals are set, like, I'm now on the hook for those goals, and then what ends up happening is that. But then you have the autonomy to operate in terms of what we think makes sense to go hit those goals, so long as we're respecting the budgets and the constraints and the payback periods and all of those things. And I find that, like, working certainly in a company that operates that way and being able to work for a founder for me has been just, like, enormous because I can take full responsibility. I think we find that, like, most, not just in CMO roles, but I think in most jobs, you end up with this mismatch between, like, what you're accountable for and, like, the freedom with which you can go after the thing that you're supposed to hit. And like, one of the things that's kept me at doordash this long is that, you know, in the almost seven years I've been here, there's nothing that someone else has approved. Like, ultimately, it lives or dies by the calls that we make as a marketing organization. And we have full accountability and full autonomy and full responsibility. And if we get it wrong, which, by the way, we have many times, we will go fix it. If we're behind plan, it's up to us to figure out how to get back on plan. If we do something that doesn't land in the way that we expected, it's incumbent on us to, like, understand why that happened and get better the next time out. But that sort of, like, recursive loop of, like, clear goals, clear accountability, clear autonomy with the room to, like, test, learn, experiment, fail, get better is super rare.

[A]

Yeah, I mean, it's a great lesson. I mean, the companies that I talk to, work with, have worked with who get into trouble. There's just not clear accountability. It often comes down to that 100%. And when there's not clear accountability, when P and G got into trouble at times during its, it's because accountability wasn't clear. It's a powerful principle. And by the way, not super easy to execute.

[B]

Not super not easy to execute. No. And you have to be willing to sort of build a culture that, like, fosters that, that allows it to work in a way that's like we are competitive vis a vis the external environment and we're obsessed with like delivering for our customers. But that's at the end of the day, if you're doing that well, everything else kind of, kind of sorts itself out and you have enough instrumentation to get really clear on like who owns what goal, but enough collaboration for that. Like when it gets blurry to just go work through it, because there's times when it will get blurry. And so I think all of that has been like really helpful to making it work. But yeah, you're right, it's not, it's not easy to set up. It's not easy to run a company like this.

[A]

Hi everybody. I'm Andrea Sullivan, the CEO of Vive and we have produced the CMO podcast with Jim Stengel for many years. And I'm sitting in his seat right now. It's so exciting. I wanted to tell you a little bit about one of our programs. It's called Vive by Vayner. It's a 12 month program that's designed for C suiters and founders. And we want to help people to grow their businesses, but also to grow themselves. And so we bring in people from Shark Tank to talk to our founders, but we also focus on wellness. We want to make sure that people are leaning into becoming their best selves, their best and happiest selves. So if you are someone that wants to learn how to grow your business and grow yourself, check us out at Vive Co. That's V Y V E Co. We'd love to talk to you. You said you love working with this company. You've been there seven years, which is a lot longer than other places. Right? This job has been in this role. This company has been very sticky for you and you've said why? Is there anything else you'd like to add to that? Why you've stayed so long and have had such a great time?

[B]

Yeah, I think it's the things that we've talked about, but it's also the people, right? It's the people. It's the team that we've built not just in marketing, but across the business. I think this place is also unique in the sense that this is a low ego company. It's a no bullshit company. Everyone's focused on getting the work done. There's very little politics. We grind but like everyone's bought into doing the work. And even though our ambitions and aspirations and goals are really high and we drive towards those with A lot of intensity. It never gets into the place where it's toxic. And so, like, when you find a place where all of those things are true and then is, you know, making a meaningful impact in the world in a real way. You know, we do this thing where we have a marketing off site every year. And, like, we try to do this more than that, but I try to pull out a bunch of user stories to just remind people, like, what we're actually doing here that, like, behind the dashboards that we look at, there's, like, actual people's lives that are impacted. And we found this video last year, which was a woman who was, like, going dashing with her daughter in her car, and she was saying, hey, I'm just trying to make enough money every night because we're in a motel right now. And so my job is every night I go out and I make enough, and that covers our motel rate. And I'm just like, this is what, like, a product is doing out in the world. And obviously, we then went on and leaned in and did more than that to, like, help. And we've built this thing that we call the Feel Good engine, where we find these stories online and we just, like, lean in with them, you know. So we did this thing last year for back to school where everyone knows that, like, teachers never have enough resources. We said, hey, just tell us the 500teachers on Twitter that you absolutely adore. And, like, we're just going to take over them, like, hook them up for, like, their classroom going into the school year. And so, like, you just find that, like, our products play such a meaningful role in people's lives and you can see, feel, hear that meaning. It's very real, it's very tangible. So I'd say that's the other thing that keeps me here.

[A]

Let's stay on that. I've heard the metaphor used for your company, your aspirations to be a 247 life assistant.

[B]

That's right.

[A]

Talk about ambitious. Right? So could you tell us a bit about the power of that internally and how did you arrive at that metaphor? I'm sure it just didn't fall out of the sky. It was a lot of discussion and customer work. But what does that mean to you and your team?

[B]

Yeah. So I think this is how we have described certainly sort of what is the brand promise or DoorDash at its best. Right. And it came from this notion of, like, we started with, hey, we deliver food. And again, as we talked about, most people think of DoorDash through the lens of the end consumer experience. But, like, actually what we do is much broader than that in the first instance, without even getting into the categories, which is, you know, if you're a small business that's looking to sort of balance the playing field, that's looking to figure out how do you survive and thrive in a world where foot traffic is no longer coming through your door, that's moving online? Like, doordash can be a partner to help you figure that out. You know, if you're someone who's looking for a few more additional hours or additional ways to earn, like, doordash can be the way that you do that. And certainly if you're someone who's looking to get a fix of kankake and fried fish, which is like a much smaller problem in the scheme of all of this, like, doordash can help you with that. So this was like, first saying, let's actually broaden out. Like, the role that we play, it's not just about the end delivery. It's about actually, like, meaningfully impacting these people's lives in some way. And then if you then go from that to also now, we're no longer just doing that for food. We're doing that for. In all sorts of ways. And again, you think about that through the lens of the end customer, but also through the lens of, like, now all of a sudden, if you're a small bodega, you can also benefit from coming online. If you're a Kroger, a large grocery chain, we can help you figure out how do you reach customers who are no longer coming into your store. So we just found that this notion of, like, how do we show up and meaningfully, like, help people do the thing that is that they're trying to do, juxtaposed against, like, this insight where we said, like, modern life is a minefield. Like, it's really, really hard to be like a human today. Like, there's a lot of things competing for your time for your attention. The state of the world is in flux, it seems, all the time, particularly this week. And so modern life is a minefield. What role can our brand play? And it's to be there, to be that 247 life assistant. Like, how do we help you with all the jobs that you need to do, whether you're a consumer or whether you're a dash or whether you're a business or whether you're an advertiser? And over time, there's probably more audiences beyond that, and there's more services that we can offer you Know, one of the things we do on the Dasher side, for example, is that audience, because of their financial position and, like, what they're looking for, they tend to be underbanked. So, like, we actually have a card product, financial services product, that says, hey, how do we help you actually start to solve that problem? So a lot of what we think about is just through the lens of, like, as we serve all these audiences across all of these needs, how do we become the 24 life assistant? 24, 7 life assistant.

[A]

Kofi, what are the signals that you're making progress on that, fulfilling that, that mission?

[B]

Yeah, it's a really good question. I don't know that we have sort of a dashboard for that specific mission. But the way we think about it is generally, like, is our service getting better? Right. So the way we would think about it is, over time, we want a bunch of things to be true. We want to be able to, like, deliver everything in your city to you, right? So can I get you the entirety of the selection that is around you? And so we measure that. Like, are we making progress on getting you all the selection that you could possibly want, not just in terms of the stores, but in terms of everything that's in every store? Because just because you have a store doesn't mean you have the full catalog. So can both of those things be true? Then we think about it through the lens of like, and over time, are our prices coming down? So are we able to get you all the selection, get it to you in a way that's more affordable? If you think about probably the number one barrier for a category like this is the fact that, like, using a service like this is more expensive than doing it yourself, right? So, like, over time, we want that to get more and more affordable. And we've done a lot on that, and we've seen progress. You know, so that's selection, that's pricing, and then quality. Like, are we getting faster? Are we getting it to you as quickly as you want it? And on top of that, are we getting it to you with as few errors as possible? So, like, we measure all of those things from the consumer standpoint, but then from the Dasher standpoint, we want actually DASHA pay to go up. Like, we want to be able to get you more orders in the same timeframe so that you're earning more over an hour so that your utilization is higher. On the B2B side, we go merchant profitability. So are we not just growing the merchants, but are they getting more profitable over time? So A lot of the metrics that we look at through the lens of, like, are we becoming that 24, 7 life assistant is about? Are we making progress on what we consider, like, the most important inputs for our business on each side? And can we look year over year and say, yeah, that is getting better? And it's one of the things that I'm really proudest of is that we can look at our business over the past 13 years and go, yeah, it's gotten more affordable with more selection. Dashes have gotten paid more businesses are doing better. And you're sort of going, like, the flywheel is actually working.

[A]

I think you have your dashboard. Yeah, no, that's great. A really beautiful story. Kofi. We can't not talk about this one topic in this interview, and that is what happened at the Cannes Lions Festival in the summer of 2024, about two years ago. You won the highest acknowledgment possible in Cannes. You won a Grand Prix Titanium. And for those people not in the inside of this industry, it's like the uber Academy Award for it's beyond Best Picture. It's just something that has never been done before. It's a crazy achievement. And it was for that Super bowl idea. DoorDash delivers all the ads where you essentially deliver to some consumer the products from every ad in the game, which is crazy. It is the most challenging and daring super bowl initiative in the 60 years of the Super Bowl. There's no doubt, and that's why you got that award. So, of course, we could talk about that specific idea which was so wild. But I'd love you to talk about the culture that allows that to happen. It's something that was outrageous, unprecedented, impossible to do, and you did it. So tell us about that.

[B]

I love the question because I think way more interesting than the idea itself is like, what are the sets of conditions that would need to be true? I would say that for us, again, I think some of this comes from Tony. Some of this is in the DNA of the company. But, like, we are very risk forward company. Like, we believe in that. Like, you have. If you have the chance, you should swing. If you think about some of the stories we've even talked about on this show, a lot of it has been like, hey, you know, Palo Alto or San Jose or San Francisco, or do you do the deliveries or do you not? All of those things were calculated risks that paid off. So it's very core to us to sort of say, like, the job is to take a risk. And then the second thing is from marketing perspective, I think most people are trying to ignore your work. Like, that is their job. So, like, the big risk is actually, like, no one's going to care. So you actually actively have to, like, overcorrect against that. And I think in the context of the super bowl, it's so noisy and there's so much attention being paid that, like, really standing out on that night is an impossibility. Like, I think most marketers and ad people think you want a Super bowl brief, but, like, the level of pressure involved in the super bowl is unlike your day to day work in every single way because you know everyone's going to be paying attention. So I think for us, when you sort of pull all those elements together, the thesis was like, we know what we want to say, which is the, like, doordash delivers everything, but what is the most compelling, most interesting way to do that? And so we had like a bunch of other ideas that we looked at that were like, fine. And then this idea came up from Wieden and our internal team and all of us went, this is the right idea. Now we don't understand anything about what the mechanics would even be like. We just know that it's a great idea, which is we're going to deliver everything from the Super bowl to 1 AD. No clue how we would actually do it. So then it was like, okay, is it a sweepstakes? Is it not? Is it a game of chance? Is it not? We had to get the lawyers in early. Can we get every brand around the game to, like, participate with us having, like a legal team that was like, down the clown. Like, our legal team's brief from Tony is that, like, it's very easy as a lawyer to say no. And so his explicit brief to the legal team is figure out how to get the teams to yes. And ultimately the teams own the decision, whether it's the marketing team or the BD team or, you know, the product team or insert whatever team here. But, like, having that partner that like, really leaned in with us, having Wieden and Kennedy really lean in with us, having our internal teams, creative teams, really leaned in and then like working with all of these brands, because I think once we had the mechanics, then selling other brands in and getting them, like, getting all the legal paperwork done, because, you know, with two weeks to go, we got a cease and desist from the NFL saying that we couldn't do this. And we sort of went, why not? And they said, you're trying to hijack. We said, we're not we're. We literally have 60 signed legal documents from every brand advertising saying that, like, they're absolutely happy to participate. But I think it got infectious. Like, as we started talking to people, I'd be like, oh, this feels big. This feels like something we want to be part of. So, you know, we would go to like Hellman's and said, you know, we want to give away a tub of mayonnaise. And they go, how about a 60 pound? 60?

[A]

Good for them.

[B]

That's ridiculous. But sure, you know, and we had, you know, everyone would like, lean in and make the thing bigger than even what we had dreamt it could be. So it ended up being, like, really fun, but, like insanely hard. But I think it was sort of like this risk tolerance and this being in a risk forward culture and being in a problem solving culture. Because it also created, like a bunch of, like, things we had to go figure out, which is we knew we were going to drive a lot of traffic, but we didn't want to bring that traffic to the site because we could bring the site down. So we had to work with engineering to sort of stand up like a virtual velvet rope. And then we built like a micro site to buffer the site. Like, we had to solve all of these problems.

[A]

Wow.

[B]

But it was like being in a company where everyone, like, got excited about what it was that we were trying to do and leaned in and all the brands around us got excited by it. But the most critical ingredient is probably risk tolerance and daily problem solving, both of which are present here.

[A]

So did it work?

[B]

It absolutely worked. So the numbers were crazy.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

The level of engagement that that thing got, it was designed for, like, earned and pr, like all the news anchors, like, no one would stop talking about it. It's like talking about all these things you could win. We built online cart so that whenever everyone dropped their teaser, we would just add them to the cart and go. BMW is now in the cart. And you could like. Everyone's announcement became a piece of news for our campaign. So we just built all these hooks. We had like, influencers in all the different categories. Because you find out, Jim, that there are people that are like snacks influences, you know. So, like, we went and got all those people, like, talk about snacks. And then there's the car people and like the fashion people. Like, whatever thing dropped would create a little mini conversation around it, drive all this attention around the fact that you could win all of this. And, you know, the engagement we had like 8 million entries. It was just astonishing of people Sort of like entering this code. We saw this crazy thing, like people were like complaining that they missed the end of the game because they were like obsessed with like trying to figure out how to like win this doordash thing. And you know, coming out of that quarter, we reached all time highs for a percent of monthly actives transacting in new vertical. So like we saw all the things happen. It's like we drove awareness, we drove adoption, we drove a massive, like sort of cultural moment. It was a fun one.

[A]

Well, good for you. I mean, and it's. And the key part of it, fantastic idea, but it was your strategy. You wanted to let people know that you're playing in all these different categories and spaces.

[B]

There's not a better way to do that.

[A]

No.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

No. And that's widening Kennedy at its best too. They take a strategy and think of something outrageous to bring it to life. This podcast is sponsored by IQ Bar. I've got good news and bad news. Here's the bad news. Most protein bars are packed with sugar and unpronounceable ingredients. The good news, There's a better option. I'm Will and I created IQ Bar plant protein bars to empower doers like you with clean, delicious, low sugar, brain and body fuel. IQ bars are packed with 12 grams of protein, brain nutrients like magnesium and Lion's Mane, and Zero Weird Stuff. And right now, you can get 20% off all IQ Bar products plus free shipping. Try our delicious IQ Bar Sampler Pack with seven plant protein bars, four hydration mixes, and four enhanced coffee sticks. Clean ingredients, amazing taste and you'll love how you feel. Refuel smarter, hydrate harder, caffeinate larger with IQ Bar. Go to eatiqbar.com and enter code BAR20. To get 20% off all IQ Bar products plus free shipping. Again, go to eatiqbar.com and Enter code BAR20. Okay, let's get on to the creative brief. This is so fun. I love this first one question I have for you. I'm going into the hall of fame this year. The advertising hall of Fame in April.

[B]

Well earned.

[A]

I have to make a video of my life, Right? So last weekend we had a film crew come to my house and I invited a bunch of my childhood friends for the weekend. So I'm really close to the kids I've known since I was 4 or 5 and we stayed lifelong friends. I think you're the same way. Right. I've heard you stay grounded because of these friends from home who could care less what you do. Don't care Same with me. So talk about that a bit, Kofi. How have you done it? How have you kept connected? What kinds of stuff do you talk about? How's it helped your life?

[B]

Well, I think for me, like, I met, you know, my close friends, there's probably five or six of us that are, you know, tied at the hip, and we all went to, you know, boarding school together in, you know, the Ghanaian tradition at the time was that everyone went away to boarding school. And these were, like, pretty harrowing sort of environments. It was not like a fancy English boarding school type situation. These are hard places, but as a result, you build these relationships that just stand the test of time because you were in it together. And so, you know, my buddy John lives in San Diego. Quamena lives in Pasadena. Big John, the other John lives in Ghana. Augustine, who we call Bombay, he actually lives, like, an hour away from me. Yeah, but, like, we get together all the time. We get together at least once a year. But even more than that, we're in each other's lives for, like, everything that happens. Like, if someone loses a parent or someone's going through a hard time or someone, like, we will show up for each other. You know, weddings, like, whatever it is, you always know that there's going to be a crew there that will have you and will be there for you. And so, like, for me, that's been such an important force. And also, like, when you lose your way, there are people that are gonna tell you, like, hey, I don't. I don't think you should be. I don't think you should be walking down that path, like, come back over here, you know, and, like, when you get too big for your britches, like, you're gonna find out, like, they don't. They just don't care. Like, none of this stuff matters to them because we've known each other for so long. And so that, like, I think of them as. As another set of siblings, frankly, because, like, that's. That's what the relationship is.

[A]

It's so important and so rare. And I think what you. You have to, you know, you have to want to do it. You have to be intentional about it. We. We have formed. We sort of make the super bowl weekend a reunion weekend. And that gives us something. We don't do it every year, but we see each other at least once a year often. But as you say, we're in each other's lives, but we kind of use this one thing. We don't go to the Super Bowl. We just find someplace to be. To come together. Yeah. At someone's house or whatever it might be. But it gives us sort of a Thursday to Monday time to just sit around and reconnect and do fun things and exercise together and watch the game and, you know. But it's a ritual. I think you have to set up your own rituals.

[B]

I fully agree with that. And I try to also build that around, like, work and where the opportunities make sense. Like, I was just in LA for All Star, where we were activating as a partner of the NBA. So I brought both John and Kwamena, who are local to that area, and we got to hang out all weekend while I was working. It was fantastic being able to be with my guys, but also getting stuff

[A]

done, staying kind of close to this topic. You have a big job, but you're also really active outside the company. You're on the board of Stitch Fix Vital Farms, your undergraduate alma mater, McAllister. And you have two sons and a marriage and so on. So you're really successful, you're really engaged, you're a wonderful guy. I mean, how do you make it work? How do you be sure in this life where you have so many roles that you're successful in all of them? I know it ebbs and flows, but how do you do it?

[B]

I don't know, man. I don't think anyone has a good answer to this one. I think part of it is working out sort of the. The objective and then the things that feed that objective. Right. So, like, for me, the objective is always going to be like, the family, like this. This is all in service of that. So trying to be clear about that and trying to figure out how to structure things around it, but it's not. It's not easy. Like, the, you know, my job at Doordash is demanding, and then, you know, some of these other things that I do also sort of have their own demands. I think the helpful thing about boards is it's on a predictable cadence. I said, like, when that is going to spike up? It's not sort of every day. So, you know, leading up into the quarterly market meetings, you know, there's gonna be a few days of your time that's required. But, yeah, a lot of it is just trying to be as thoughtful about it as possible and to build some structure around it like I used to for a long time, you know, as someone who grew up in a world where things were largely unplanned, which meant that, like, your superpower was, like, how you were going to react versus how you were going to. I had to learn that, like, actually planning and structuring things can also save you a lot of pain. Right. So a lot of what I think about is, like, even with my family, like, I try to be there every evening for bedtime, right? So that doesn't work, obviously, when I'm on the road, but when I'm at home, there's probably a window where I'm like tools down on the work front. It's 7 o' clock on the east coast, 4 o' clock on the west coast and go do bedtime and bath time and books and all of that stuff. And then if I need to, like, hop back on and sort of check a few things, I can do that afterwards. But I think it's just try to be as deliberate as you can possibly be in sort of slotting all the things and making sure that all the priorities are being looked after. But I definitely don't get it right all the time.

[A]

None of us do. Hey, you spent 12 years of your career at ad agencies. Could you talk about what client in those 12 years most influenced your views on marketing and branding?

[B]

That's a terrific question. I'd say there's probably a few different folks all at sort of different stages. I started at Leo Burnett and all of our business was on Kellogg's. Essentially. That's the business that I worked on. And I'd say that, like, the CMO at the time was this guy named Mark Baines. And I think the thing that was great about growing up on Kellogg's, which, you know, you might agree with this Jim from Proctor, was that, like, you just got schooled on the fundamentals, right? They were just like, really good at, like, the basics of marketing. I mean, really thinking about the entire sort of experience, thinking about distribution, thinking about price. So I felt like I got to do things that frankly, other people at other ad agencies didn't get to do because our job, at least as it was described to us by Clive Serkin and John Sheehy, who ran the Kellogg's account, Leo Burnett was like, if your client gets hit by a bus, you should be able to do their job. So we had to get like deep into the weeds of, like, how that business actually worked. And so, like, I would say from, from Baines and from Kellogg's, I got like just a deep understanding of, like, the fundamentals, consumer understanding, positioning, pricing, go to market, like all of these things. And then I would say, you know, like at Wieden, when I worked on Nike, it was like, Adam Roth and, you know, Jabari Hearn and Julian Duncan and all those people. And Nike could not have been more different than Kellogg's. Cause where like Kellogg's and Burnett was all about the fundamentals, Nike and Wieden was like, throw all of that shit out. Like, this is about what's going to like really capture the imagination. And it's okay if it's actually divorced from like functional, emotional, sort of all of these things. But like, how do we show up in a way that captures attention and makes a splash and makes Nike the center of conversation? So that was just an entirely different way of thinking about sort of the same problem. And then I would say, like, when I went to Ghana to build the agency for Publicis, there was two clients, Martin Garretts, who run the food business for them. He ran Maggie. He was the first one that believed in us. So like, I owe Martin Garrett's. Like, I learned from him that like, sometimes you just have to trust blindly. Like, he had no reason to trust. He just decided that he was going to buy the proposition and that he would help us. And then John Thompson, who came in later and ran all of communications for Nestle, was then our lead client and the key interface for the agency. And from him it was really about like. And I knew this before, but in that part of the world it's so important just getting under the skin of everything, right? So like with jt, we would do things like when we were building the brand proposition for Maggie, historically it all been grounded in like functional taste and all of these things. But when we actually went and spent three days with our client in the market, with the market woman, like, so going home with them, setting up, waking up with them, coming to the market at 4 in the morning, setting everything up, being there all day, seeing them go back home at 10pm and do it all over again and get their kids ready for school and like. And you just sort of. It's actually not possible. Like, if you think my life sounds complicated, like you spent one day with these people, you realize that this is actually insane. And we came up with this proposition of like, actually it's not about the product. The woman is the star. Because the woman is whom the entire world of like West Africa revolves around them. And without them nothing actually works. So that led to an entire campaign about heroing the woman, not the product, which I ended up doing incredibly well. And so from John, it was more about let's all of us. He was very big, even as an outsider, as a foreigner, he's Canadian being like, hey, even though all of you guys are Ghanaian, like, you're not close enough. Like, you are middle to upper class Ghanaians working in an agency with air conditioning and a generator. Like, you're not in the shit. And so, like, you know, really encouraging to, like, get to that next level deeper. I'd say those are probably the key lessons.

[A]

Kofi, what's the first brand you remember having an impact on you as a young boy?

[B]

There's probably two answers to that. So I'd say Coca Cola. And it's like ubiquity. It was just like, everywhere, everywhere in Ghana. And this was the thing I would say Maggi, which is the Martin Garrett's product I was talking about, which was like this bouillon cube that is literally in every West African dish. It finds its way in there somewhere. It's just like, at the heart of all the cooking. And cooking is so central to, like, life. And then as far as, like, local brands, like, this is like a really odd one, but, like, the first ad I was ever captivated by was for, like, a nail. Actual, like, hammer and a nail. Like a nail company. But they had done this thing that had never been done before, which was like, it was a guy rapping actually in Fonte about how good these nails were. And it was like the first time I had heard that before, like, Afrobeat was a thing. This is before hip hop was a thing. This was like, we're talking, you know, 1992 maybe, and this dude is like, rapping about nails. And all of us knew it, you know, because it was so cool. And so, like, that always sticks out as another one. But I'd say, like, all of what all of those brands had in common was, like, they felt very tactile and very woven into the fabric. There were like, the high degree of certainly, like, emotional resonance, but, like, also utilitarian. Like, Coca Cola was the cold chain. You know, it's like wherever in West Africa you would go, you could get a cold Coke, which is insane, given that you could not get electricity in a lot of these places. How are they doing this? Right, that's correct. But I think those are probably the ones that stick out.

[A]

Who's been the most inspiring person in your life?

[B]

My uncle. Yeah. Go finding without question, as you think

[A]

about your relationship with him now that he's passed, what, about eight years?

[B]

Yep, that's right.

[A]

How do you think of him?

[B]

I mean, just as this. Just one of the best humans I've had the privilege of being. Because for me, it wasn't about, like, the. The un of it all. It was just like seeing him in sort of the quiet moments and, you know, trying to figure out how to be like, a good person in the world. You know, he didn't always get it right. I don't always get it right, But I think it's like an aspiration. It's like seeing someone who's as close to that as you can get and trying to learn from how that person shows up and sort of how they make their way through life and how they create space, as we talked about, for other people, for different perspectives, for people that may be in a different stage of life than they are.

[A]

And my impression, sort of reinforced by this last hour, is that he was the same person no matter who he was with or where he was or where he went in his life. And I think about the leaders that I admire and have an impact on me. They show up the same way. They knew who they are and the skin they're in and what's important to them. It doesn't matter if they're in a taxi cab chatting or sitting in front of the General Assembly.

[B]

That's right. That's exactly right.

[A]

Kofi, thank you for this.

[B]

This was amazing.

[A]

Fantastic chat.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

In every way, a great way to start my week. Thank you. Thank you. It's a great gift, and our audience is going to love it.

[B]

Thank you for having me. And congratulations again on the hall of Fame induction. It's incredible and so well earned.

[A]

That was my conversation with Kofi. Three lessons from this one for your business brand in life. The first one, build a culture of clear autonomy, accountability, and freedom. I love that thought. And Kofi went deep on this. He loves his job because he goal sets with his leadership team and his boss, and then once they goal set, his team is given the freedom and the accountability to deliver. Second takeaway. What a story about leaning into risk. The whole discussion about the super bowl doordash delivers all the ads. What an amazing idea. What risk involved. They leaned into it. It paid off. And the important thing was it was a clear strategy. And the strategy was one where they wanted to differentiate themselves on. So lean into risk, but make sure it's on strategy. Third takeaway. Career choices. Kofi and I talk about lessons from our career, where we went into a job which may kind of change the way we. Our mind work changed the way we think about our role because they were assignments that were challenging, they were stretching. They were different. So as you think about your career and the choices you make throughout your life. Think about that as a criteria. And the last bonus takeaway. I love the discussion we had about his uncle and his friends. And the lesson really is know who you are and be who you are. No what matter matter where you are with what audience and what stage you're on. Know yourself and be yourself. That's it for this week's episode of the CMO Podcast. As always, I would be grateful if you shared our show with your friends, along with subscribing and leaving a review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. The CMO Podcast is a Vive original production.