YouSaid · the spoken record

Keith Yandell

lines on the record: 62
first: 2023-02-09
most recent: 2023-02-09
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Yeah, I mean, select role is definitely on the product and engineering side is a place we're focused right now. But even if there's not a role open today, I like meeting great people. I've found that building relationships over time, even when you're not looking is impactful.”
2023-02-09 · Lenny's Podcast · Leading with empathy | Keith Yandell (DoorDash, Uber) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People want to find me. LinkedIn is the place you can locate me. You can look at me there. I don't do any other social media. It is unusual in this day and age, but that's my preferred medium. And then as far as being helpful, always looking for referrals for great people, that would be the number one thing. And everyone has an opportunity to use our product. So if you have product feedback, I always welcome that as well.”
2023-02-09 · Lenny's Podcast · Leading with empathy | Keith Yandell (DoorDash, Uber) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Regulations are going to apply to your business and what type of constraints there are and how to push those constraints. Yeah. And so for me, it's just about that level of curiosity and actually engaging in the profession, right? There's nothing magic about the law. There's a finite number of things that you can learn, just like all the other functions I've learned. I think you can engage them in a way until you are proficient and can actually be really accretive to your business”
2023-02-09 · Lenny's Podcast · Leading with empathy | Keith Yandell (DoorDash, Uber) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, both for the product folks that are listening as well as the entrepreneurs who want to be founders, I've had the pleasure of working with two founders who are very product driven, product first folks in Travis and Tony. And I found that the way they engage on the legal side is with a curiosity I referenced earlier, which is they're both hyper curious and they will ask questions until they understand the law in the particular area about as well as the lawyers. And then they will apply a first principles product mindset to their understanding of the law. And they will push the lawyers to make sure that they're not being overly conservative, which sometimes they can be. And so when you're on the product team, especially if you're in a consumer-facing business, it may not be as pronounced for SaaS businesses, but if you're in a consumer-facing business, we're in a consumer-facing product, you would better have at least a general understanding of what type of”
2023-02-09 · Lenny's Podcast · Leading with empathy | Keith Yandell (DoorDash, Uber) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A thesis around a deal before you actually expend the product resources, I think, has been super helpful. And then the last thing would be to engage early, but not too early on deal opportunities.”
2023-02-09 · Lenny's Podcast · Leading with empathy | Keith Yandell (DoorDash, Uber) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the realization I had is that we should have gone out and tested this at one hotel with just some hacky operations and seen what the uptick was. And what I would have realized is this particular hotel chain was franchised. So even though corporate thought this was an important thing, they were going to prioritize. If the franchisee doesn't care about it, they're not going to give you the visibility in-room or otherwise to make it work. So we built all this great integration product work that was totally wasted because the operations weren't right. And I have probably two or three other examples of situations where I learned I should have just gone out and stood out front with a promo code and handed it out in certain forums and seeing if that changed customer behavior before going and asking for the product resources. And Raja correctly was like, hey, this is how we have to think about these things going forward. So yeah, definitely building platforms, dream big, start small, use operations to test.”
2023-02-09 · Lenny's Podcast · Leading with empathy | Keith Yandell (DoorDash, Uber) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A few other things. Number one, this is something else that Rajat taught me, which is one of our core values is dream being start small. And he really brought that to the BD product org. And there were some painful times. We invested heavily in a partnership with a hotel chain without we're going to build. Hey, we're going to make sure that this is the new dine-in experience when you're at a hotel. We can actually replace room service. And as for a lot of product work, and it was a total flop.”
2023-02-09 · Lenny's Podcast · Leading with empathy | Keith Yandell (DoorDash, Uber) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Return on the product hours and the engineering hours spent. And so that was a super valuable insight that I garnered from him is to try to figure out how to create these type of platforms.”
2023-02-09 · Lenny's Podcast · Leading with empathy | Keith Yandell (DoorDash, Uber) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Them and having a full discussion like, here's the pipeline. If you think, see things that are super impactful, let us know. If you think things you're not so sure that are going to make a difference, please let us know. That's been really helpful. Another thing that Rajat's taught me is the importance of building platforms. And whenever you can. So what we used to do is I'd go out and negotiate a deal. We had a lot of deals around Dashpass, which is our subscription product. And I'd ask the product team to go build a bespoke thing for this particular partnership chase or whatever partnership we were negotiating at the time. And Rajad said, why don't you figure out what the scalable solution is for this? We will build you a product. You won't need to come ask us every time to build something. And then you'll know the parameters in which you can negotiate. You can negotiate a better velocity. And we might spend more time on the first version of this, but very little effort for the next and we'll have a high.”
2023-02-09 · Lenny's Podcast · Leading with empathy | Keith Yandell (DoorDash, Uber) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I joke that our head of product, Rajat Schroff, is actually the head of BD because he's both interested and good at it. And to do impactful BD, the two really have to go hand in glove. So when I think through how to make that relationship work, the first challenge I've confronted, and maybe mistake I made, is trying to figure out what the right cadence is, when do you bring in the product team, because if you bring them in too early on a deal that really has no chance of getting done, you waste valuable cycles and our tech talent is our most precious resource probably at DoorDash. And so you have to be really mindful about when you bring them in. But if you bring them in too late, it may be a situation where you've given on terms that you really shouldn't have. And that can be really detrimental to the partnership as well. So I think one thing to do is just give visibility. So without actually bringing”
2023-02-09 · Lenny's Podcast · Leading with empathy | Keith Yandell (DoorDash, Uber) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's fortunate because you only need one, yes, right? And you see all the people post how many rejections they got. Every business that you have heard of has gotten rejected by at least a handful of venture capitalists at one point or another. And so that drive to keep going if you believe in the business is critical, absolutely critical. I mean, we were weeks of runway situation and had been told no by everyone. And it was just Tony's drive really to keep going. And the way he explains it to me is it's just the difference between a founder and a non-founder. Like if you're really a founder, you just have to find a way. You have to keep going. There's no question. And I mean, that's the only advice I can give folks is it only takes one yes, but you got to keep going.”
2023-02-09 · Lenny's Podcast · Leading with empathy | Keith Yandell (DoorDash, Uber) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that was because we put up numbers we were highly confident we were going to hit. And I didn't realize until now I'm an operating partner at a venture firm on the side. And I see that most people put up stretch plans, but they don't. But that was just not in our DNA. We wanted to make sure that we put forth numbers that we knew we were going to hit. And that cost us some dilution up front in the form of lower valuations, I think. And there's just a trust that builds from that where when we tell people we're going to do something that they have conviction that we're going to do it. And I would trade a couple of points of dilution for that level of trust with the right investor base over time.”
2023-02-09 · Lenny's Podcast · Leading with empathy | Keith Yandell (DoorDash, Uber) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We've definitely tried to raise from everyone. I've been told no many, many times. I mean, raising the series D was really difficult. Tony and I worked together very closely on that one. And there was a lull in the tech market publicly and it translated pretty quickly to the private markets. And people didn't believe in both the TAM, either the TAM or the profitability of the business model. And it was difficult. I think one thing that that process taught me is after we raised the D, almost every rounder, I think every round ended up being led by someone who had passed in a previous round”
2023-02-09 · Lenny's Podcast · Leading with empathy | Keith Yandell (DoorDash, Uber) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It actually reminds me of the best advice I got when we were having our first kid. And everyone thinks they're going to give you the insight that's really going to be transformative. But one that stuck with me is. For better and for worse, everything's temporary. So the highs, you can't get too high, the lows, you can't get too low. That really resonated with me during that period of time, as well as this general idea that you have to try to find opportunities to reach the potential for the business. And decisions sometimes have to be made in very short time horizons and be able to seize those moments, I think, is really important.”
2023-02-09 · Lenny's Podcast · Leading with empathy | Keith Yandell (DoorDash, Uber) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And again, we were trying to go public, and Tony made a decision, and I admit I'm on the wrong set of history. I was arguing that this seemed extreme just to cut commissions by basically $100 million for restaurants to help them stay in business. And I'm like, hold on, we're trying to go public. This is going to completely change the bottom line perspective. No one's asking us to do this. And Tony says, Keith, you just think too short term. He's like, this is the right thing to do. And it reminded me of the Ten Lasso quote, which is doing the right thing is never the wrong thing. And I talked about how sometimes there's healthy debate. He didn't want to hear any debate on this one. He said, just shut it down. He's like, founder-led decision, this is the right thing to do. We're going to cut these commissions. And I woke up the next morning and never been happier to kind of been overruled in a debate before than there. It was just such a meaningful.”
2023-02-09 · Lenny's Podcast · Leading with empathy | Keith Yandell (DoorDash, Uber) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so every Friday night, the app would crash. And if you're running customer support, there's a few things you like less than the app going down. Set aside what it means for the customers and for the business. Selfishly, it's just super painful. The irony of it was is our NPS was going up and people were just so grateful to have the product to be able to safely get the things they needed for people to be able to earn money at times when they really needed it because maybe their job had been shut down or they weren't allowed to go in. It became a really essential service for folks. And that was really motivating for me. And I think for the team is to really be able to fulfill a big part of our mission of empowering local economies in a very unique way in a very special time. And the last thing I'll say on the pandemic was I remember vividly one of my most vivid door dash memories was being on a Zoom call where we were trying to figure out what to do to help restaurants.”
2023-02-09 · Lenny's Podcast · Leading with empathy | Keith Yandell (DoorDash, Uber) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then all of a sudden volume doubled. And that was really exciting for a second until we realized that our customer support center, I was running support at the time. All the support centers around the world shut down. So you're doubling volume. You have no one to serve it from a customer support perspective. And our infrastructure, we weren't planning to grow that fast. We didn't think there was a chance of two or three Xing in a very short window.”
2023-02-09 · Lenny's Podcast · Leading with empathy | Keith Yandell (DoorDash, Uber) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, it was just a wild roller coaster. We were trying to get ready to go public, first of all. And so there was that overlay. And then what you saw was our volume dropped right away like the first or second day of lockdown. And I was like, well, this is going out of business because no one wants to order food from restaurants anymore. People didn't know how COVID was transmitted. And so just basically volume dropped off a cliff. And I was like, oh, went from super high. We're getting rid of IPO. Super low volume's going to zero.”
2023-02-09 · Lenny's Podcast · Leading with empathy | Keith Yandell (DoorDash, Uber) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And put make bullets and board material, there's definitely an element of that in the great founders that I've come across. And there's just a raw curiosity. And so it's like competitiveness, but the curiosity and learning how things are working. And those all come together to create a drive that just never stops.”
2023-02-09 · Lenny's Podcast · Leading with empathy | Keith Yandell (DoorDash, Uber) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think it can be lonely to be a founder for sure. I know that Tony's tried to develop a community for him of people who are similarly situated from other companies, and that's been helpful. And the real founders that I've come across that drive, though, is something they can't turn off. They don't have to try to keep it because there's a handful of traits I've seen that are pretty common. One is a level of obsessiveness. Two is hyper competitiveness. And I think they're good at manufacturing straw men, even if everyone's saying nice things. It's like Michael Jordan used to take things out of context.”
2023-02-09 · Lenny's Podcast · Leading with empathy | Keith Yandell (DoorDash, Uber) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I remember our IPO day, we had a thing I had to wake up super early. It was a virtual bell ringing. And the second it was over, we had our weekly business review. And there were tough questions being asked. There was not champagne being passed around. People were, I mean, people were in a good mood, but it wasn't like, wow, this is so great. This is like, hey, how are we going to serve our customers today? And I thought that was really emblematic of, hey, if we take too deep of a breath and are pat ourselves on the back, it reminds me of the saying somewhere, someone out there is practicing. And when you meet them, they will beat you. It's the same kind of thing. It's like if you take too long to be self-congratulatory, you're going to fall behind the people who are still hungry. So it's important to stay hungry.”
2023-02-09 · Lenny's Podcast · Leading with empathy | Keith Yandell (DoorDash, Uber) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He's very good at frustratingly good at that. Just when you think you've achieved the goal, the goal might go up, it might get shorter if you're from the product side. And speaking specifically on the product, compound interest is a really hard concept to fully explain to people to make them truly appreciate. But that's something Tony is fantastic at, which is he understands that by pushing a roadmap up even by a week, if you can continuously push up what you ship by a week, you're going to end up lapping competitors who are just one week behind because you're going to start the next thing a week sooner and you're getting that 1.1, 1.01x return, and then it grows and grows and grows. And he's as good as I've ever seen combined with our present infrastructure pain at creating that sense of urgency and just pushing people. Do we really need to test this thing again or can we ship it? How can we move that much faster, even if by a small margin, understanding that you can compound those gains over time is been really impactful for our success?”
2023-02-09 · Lenny's Podcast · Leading with empathy | Keith Yandell (DoorDash, Uber) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's singularity of focus. You know what the job is. You know you're going to get whatever resources the company has when you're focused on the main thing. And these tough economic times will create that work. It's crystal clear. You got to cut burn. And everyone's going to be doing what they need to do to achieve that outcome. And I think talented folks really like that one resourcing and two singularity of focus about what the main thing is and crises manifest those for folks.”
2023-02-09 · Lenny's Podcast · Leading with empathy | Keith Yandell (DoorDash, Uber) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Funding that a lot of our competitors did, which forced us to be super focused on our economics and efficient and serve the customer in unique ways from the start. And I think a lot of our success, even to this day, emanates from those tough times. The last thing I'll say is if you're a founder and you're looking for talent, tough times are great because there's a lot more talent out there. I saw, oh, I can't, I think it might have been Bill Gurley. Someone tweeted, this is the best time in recent memory since 2008 to start a company. That really resonated with me because there's a lot of talented folks out there who are looking for their next thing. And three years ago, it was tough to find talent. And so I think there's a lot to like about tough times. The last thing I'll say is one thing that I found surprising is from our surveys internally, people actually like crises at DoorDash. And I dug into that recently. I was trying to figure out people like these crises. And it's because”
2023-02-09 · Lenny's Podcast · Leading with empathy | Keith Yandell (DoorDash, Uber) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I'm going to regurgitate some of advice. I got from some folks on our board at the same time when we were having really tough times, which I really didn't like hearing at the time. But I was kind of new to the space. And that is tough times make companies for a host of reasons. I mean, this is super healthy for the startups out there right now. It's because number one, you're going to find out who the mercenaries are on the team that are people that are there for the mission versus they're there because they think this is going to be a quick road to ridges. We had a lot of people leave the company when Uber launched food and we fell quickly behind. And that was good for us because the people that stayed were there because they wanted to work on this team, on this mission, and they really believed in it. The second thing is it forces discipline. It's a good thing to focus on unit economics. And we didn't have the”
2023-02-09 · Lenny's Podcast · Leading with empathy | Keith Yandell (DoorDash, Uber) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Are the things that I've changed? And so making sure that there's that feedback loop, I think, is another important part of creating the right structure for a good, healthy culture.”
2023-02-09 · Lenny's Podcast · Leading with empathy | Keith Yandell (DoorDash, Uber) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You have to thank him for it, right? I mean, there's a saying feedback is a gift, but you have to say stuff and you have to action. I mean, that's one thing I found that can be really demotivating for folks, whether it's a lot of these companies have these polls surveys or they talk about what the company can do better. And they put the results on the screen and we're going to work on it. And that's the end of it. And that was something I learned early on in DoorDash that people didn't like unless you were going to come back and say, hey, this was our lowest performing area in the pulse survey. Here are the three things we did to action it. Because that's how you would treat the business, right? If we got feedback from a customer or from another business line, you would say, heard it, we're going to come back and report out on what we're going to do differently. And then we're going to track the progress. And so I think that's really important when you receive feedback. You have to show people that you're actioning it and say, I heard this from you. Checking in, am I doing better?”
2023-02-09 · Lenny's Podcast · Leading with empathy | Keith Yandell (DoorDash, Uber) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a nice way to create space to have that dialogue. And that's something I actually learned from Travis when I was at Uber. We had a system called T3B3 where during reviews or pulse check-ins, you'd have to say three positives about your manager and three constructive pieces of feedback for your manager. And the first time I did it, I just did the T, the top things for my manager, who was the general counsel at the time. And Travis came over. This is totally unacceptable. You have to provide constructive feedback, which made me super uncomfortable, but created the right environment where people could have these tough conversations because my manager can't get mad at me because she knows the CEO is going to come give me a hard time if I don't provide some constructive feedback. And I think having that as an expectation is super important to building open minds of communication.”
2023-02-09 · Lenny's Podcast · Leading with empathy | Keith Yandell (DoorDash, Uber) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is super tactical, but something I think is really important is I'm very clear in the document we talked about earlier about how I like to work is I demand feedback from me. And so we set aside time during one-on-ones where I want the feedback first, constructive feedback. And I expect it, and if you don't give it to me, I'm going to press you on constructive feedback. And then I give feedback. And it's a lot easier, I tell this to managers all the time. If you create a space where you require constructive feedback, it's a lot easier to give feedback because one of the top things I hear from managers, especially new managers, they don't like giving constructive feedback. They want to be positive. They want to be liked and things like that.”
2023-02-09 · Lenny's Podcast · Leading with empathy | Keith Yandell (DoorDash, Uber) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that's the right framework. I can tell your product guy. You're very good at distilling it down to the essence. I think that's a good summary.”
2023-02-09 · Lenny's Podcast · Leading with empathy | Keith Yandell (DoorDash, Uber) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Everyone knows I'm not trying to build an empire. I'm trying to find a way to win. And I think it gives me some credibility to call the question, figure out who decision maker is, set a timeline and move on. But it's all the only way it works is if there's empathy on both sides.”
2023-02-09 · Lenny's Podcast · Leading with empathy | Keith Yandell (DoorDash, Uber) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sometimes these conversations can go on forever. People just want to keep going back to an argument they've already made because they're not willing to settle. And there needs to be someone that says, all right, we got to be clear on who the decision maker is here. If we haven't reached a consensus, who's the tiebreaker? And a lot of time that's our CDO, Tony Xu, but a lot of times it's the GM for a certain business line or a head of product or a head of engineering, depending on the decision to be made. I think being really clear about, hey, we're all going to come together. We're going to have a healthy debate. We're going to make sure everyone's perspectives are heard. We're going to try to reach consensus at the end of the day. Here's the person that's going to make the decision. And we're going to make it on this time horizon. And once the decision is made, we're going to debate and commit. And I think that having someone that's in the room that has run a lot of the functions that are trying to articulate the perspective is helpful. And someone who's been at the company as long as I have.”
2023-02-09 · Lenny's Podcast · Leading with empathy | Keith Yandell (DoorDash, Uber) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Want to hit their numbers in part because they believe it. One thing I found super effective in those contexts is I try to ask the other side, so let's take the profitability side. I ask them to make the growth case. I said, tell me the three best reasons why we should actually focus on growth here. That generates instant empathy for the other side. And sometimes they'll even persuade themselves as they're talking and say, actually, this, I think you're right, that we should focus on growth here. We can achieve this profitability measure later or vice versa. And so generating empathy and having empathy for the other side, understanding how their goal and what they're bringing to the conversation, I think is the first step to having those really tough conversations.”
2023-02-09 · Lenny's Podcast · Leading with empathy | Keith Yandell (DoorDash, Uber) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I hope that's true. I think that for me it all comes down to empathy. And what I mean by that is you have to understand what different people's motivations are in the room, different people are gold on different things. People come from different life experiences and different work experiences. And I think it's really important to make each person feel heard. We've just had a situation, for example, where we were deciding between a trade-off between two business lines. It was a profitability question for one business line that would make one business line much more profitable to do a certain partnership, but it would come at the expense of the growth of another business line that was more nascent. And so it's hard when you get the gems for all these businesses together and they have very strong perspectives and good reasons on both sides about why path A is better of profitability, path B is better for growth. And they're arguing very strenuously, partly.”
2023-02-09 · Lenny's Podcast · Leading with empathy | Keith Yandell (DoorDash, Uber) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think it made her want to save, right? Like, if I wasn't invested in her success, she could have left anytime and gotten a job super qualified. But I think she felt a sense of loyalty based on my sense of loyalty. And I think it worked out best for all involved.”
2023-02-09 · Lenny's Podcast · Leading with empathy | Keith Yandell (DoorDash, Uber) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I say, in addition to that, you're going to learn the questions they asked during the interview process. You're going to learn what type of qualifications they're looking for. And if I'm not getting you that experience, you can tell me. And thankfully for me, Tia decided to stay and has now grown into the general counsel of DoorDash and doing a much better job at the role than I ever did. But she had the opportunity to leave. And I think she learned from some of those inbounds and the experiences she had.”
2023-02-09 · Lenny's Podcast · Leading with empathy | Keith Yandell (DoorDash, Uber) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, first of all, I put it in this document, and so I say how I run one-on-ones and how to work with Keep Document. And the last 10 minutes of my one-on-ones are career development conversations. That's a really fertile ground for having the discussion, but for particularly more senior folks, if I get pinged for a GC job or when I would get pinged for a recruiter for a GC job, I would for that Tia Sherringham, who's now our general counsel, but was basically head of legal for years before she got the general counsel title. And I'd say, hey, Tia, I don't know when this job's going to be available here. I'm still liking what I'm doing. I think I'm still adding value. If you think it's time for you to leave, I think this is a really good opportunity.”
2023-02-09 · Lenny's Podcast · Leading with empathy | Keith Yandell (DoorDash, Uber) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Drive value for them as well as for the company in the future by creating a much better reputation for the group of managers. So it's been really helpful for me. I keep in touch with a lot of people who have left. And we get a lot of boomerangs too. There's a lot of people who leave DoorDash and come back. And that's something I love seeing because it shows that people have gone out and seen what else is out there and realize this is the right place for them.”
2023-02-09 · Lenny's Podcast · Leading with empathy | Keith Yandell (DoorDash, Uber) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Number two, what's going to happen is if someone runs a blind reference on me at this point with someone that I managed, which in the current environment is more and more common, people diligencing the managers, what they're going to hear is Keith's going to put you first. And I think that's really motivating for a lot of people. So if you're thinking on a five, 10 year horizon of your career as a manager, whether you're an entrepreneur hiring people into your company, whether you're a product manager who's trying to build a team, building that long-term reputation, I think people take a much too short-sighted perspective on that. And so now if I get a blind reference, people are going to hear that it's not all about the company. It's not all about Keith. It's about you and your career. And that's going to pay back 10x. Maybe you lose one really talented person, but they probably shouldn't be there anyway. They're probably going to leave anyway. And this way, you can participate in that and really.”
2023-02-09 · Lenny's Podcast · Leading with empathy | Keith Yandell (DoorDash, Uber) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I wasn't a calculative decision why I started doing it, then I gave it a lot of thought because I was afraid that I might get some blowback when people started taking jobs elsewhere. And as I thought about it, I realized it really is better for the company to have that type of open dialogue with people that work on your team. I think that's true for a few reasons. First of all, when you're open in this how to work with Keep Doc document I say, I will help you find your next job. What that means is number one, people are going to be transparent with you or more transparent if they're looking for something else or if they're not happy. That's going to allow you to lay the foundation for a backfill. So you're much less likely to get surprised when someone leaves.”
2023-02-09 · Lenny's Podcast · Leading with empathy | Keith Yandell (DoorDash, Uber) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so convincing him to join, I was really nervous about. And the point where he decided to join, I had sent him this document. He wanted to know what it was like to work with me. I said, well, I've actually written that down. And he later told me that that was a really important factor for him that someone was so transparent about their areas for growth, how they thought they could be helpful. And he liked the fact that I knew that I didn't know. And so he knew he was going to have a lot of autonomy on the role. And that was really important to him. But more broadly within the organization, how it's been helpful is just being able to have people engage with me in a way with a company in a way that is so consistent with the culture from day one. I've had people come and tell me that I'd never met before, that they'd read the doc, even if they're on a different team and just how helpful it's been to try to acclimate to this fast-paced environment where you're learning and while drinking from the fireheaders effectively.”
2023-02-09 · Lenny's Podcast · Leading with empathy | Keith Yandell (DoorDash, Uber) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, for me, one of an executive's main jobs is to attract and retain top talent. And going back to why people have joined DoorDash, Kofi Amu Gottfried, who's now our CMO, joined me as head of brand when I was running marketing. And it's comical because this person is a legend in the marketing space and I had no idea what was going on.”
2023-02-09 · Lenny's Podcast · Leading with empathy | Keith Yandell (DoorDash, Uber) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I've seen traits and successful people within the company to how I can improve. Like basically feedback I've gotten and gotten and things I'm working on. For example, I'm a litigator by training. And so I tend to argue about things even if I agree with people to test levels of conviction. And I got feedback from my team that that was really confusing because I'd be arguing against something and then we would execute that exact thing. And so I try to be transparent about that. Explain how I work through problems, but also in saying, hey, this is something I'm trying to improve on is not being quite so argumentative for sport. And then it talks about what my commitments are to team. So I'm committed to finding you your next job, even if that's not at DoorDash. Life's too short to be in a job you don't like. Things like that.”
2023-02-09 · Lenny's Podcast · Leading with empathy | Keith Yandell (DoorDash, Uber) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One thing I've learned is it's super hard to scale culture, especially when you're growing as fast as DoorDash has since I joined your two or three Xing the company from a headcount perspective for the vast majority of my time every year. And so one thing I noticed is it's hard to come into a place and be new and understand how things work and what it means to be successful there. And so the idea was to do our best to scale that. And one thing that Tony taught me is one thing that scales really well is written work product. And so I put together this document. There's three basic subject matters. It's kind of my expectations slash what.”
2023-02-09 · Lenny's Podcast · Leading with empathy | Keith Yandell (DoorDash, Uber) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, the category chart I've seen are consistent with what you said by a pretty wide margin. But we try not to focus on things like that. We try to focus on the customer experience. And it's humbling in our space because we're doing millions and millions and millions of deliveries a day and those deliveries will go wrong no matter how hard you try. And we reread those experiences. We do customer support and we understand that there's a long ways to go. So we're just getting started and we know that.”
2023-02-09 · Lenny's Podcast · Leading with empathy | Keith Yandell (DoorDash, Uber) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And rocket to market share leadership. And I think that was really good for us as a company because we realized unless we all work together and it wasn't about who was doing what or things like that, we weren't going to have a shot at being successful. And I think that ethos has really pervaded and persisted since then.”
2023-02-09 · Lenny's Podcast · Leading with empathy | Keith Yandell (DoorDash, Uber) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, 100%. I run a 12 person org today. So I've gone from running 1500 people in the company to 12. And for me, people talk a lot about hiring people better than you are. People don't talk a lot about what you do when you hire those people. And if you really care about the company and your long-term brand as an individual, as a manager, you realize what you want to do when you find the person that's better than you is you want to slowly get out of the way. It's really good for the company. It's my favorite part of my job is seeing people that either I've hired or managed be successful on their own. And I think it's a big part of our success is this desire to be successful regardless of who's in charge. And that comes from the fact when I joined DoorDash, we were hitting our tails tick. We were in fourth place in the space. Uber had just launched food.”
2023-02-09 · Lenny's Podcast · Leading with empathy | Keith Yandell (DoorDash, Uber) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Good news, bad news. I don't know your field anywhere near as well as you do. Here's the ways I intend to help you. Here's what I think you can provide. And at the end of the day, I'm going to get out of your way. And that's really proven true. So I ran marketing, hired, initially had a Kofi, who now is our CMO, hired ahead of legal, who's now our GC, Tia Sherringham. And these people have really just excelled at their function. And with the warm-up that I was able to provide, I've really proven that they're much better at the jobs than I was.”
2023-02-09 · Lenny's Podcast · Leading with empathy | Keith Yandell (DoorDash, Uber) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But the odds of completely reinventing the system and doing something that's vastly superior to others is much lower. And he said, I know you don't know how to do this stuff. That's why I'm putting you in the role. And I said, okay, so first thing he helped me do was believe that I could add value here. And then the second thing for me was to go out and find the best people that really were the subject matter experts and add the value I could to help them be successful. And I found that they were actually really attracted to wanting to work with someone like me who came into”
2023-02-09 · Lenny's Podcast · Leading with empathy | Keith Yandell (DoorDash, Uber) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The one thing I'll say is I did not run sales. Maybe one of the very few non technical functions I did not lead. But the question is a good one. And I had massive imposter syndrome the first time Tony asked me to take on something that I wasn't a subject matter expert in. And I told him I didn't want to do it. And he had me read this book called Range by David Epstein. And the general thesis is that generalists are better than specialists. And it goes through all these examples of how Nobel Prize winners are usually amazing in something other than the field that they actually win the Nobel Prize in. And Tony believes pretty deeply in this philosophy. And the way he explained it to me is as follows. If you want to achieve a 10x outcome, hiring someone that's an expert in the field, it may be unlikely you're going to achieve that 10x outcome because they're likely to do things the way things have always been done. So you might achieve incremental benefits.”
2023-02-09 · Lenny's Podcast · Leading with empathy | Keith Yandell (DoorDash, Uber) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source