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

“It's a great way to weed out people that maybe we wouldn't want to work with, right? Because not everyone wants to, not every software engineer wants to hop in their Tesla and go out and deliver McDonald's to some kids, right? It takes a certain level of humility, a certain amount of customer obsession to even sign up for that. So we're really vocal during the interview process that this is something that's expected. And it serves as a governor to attract the people that we think are going to be most successful at the company.”
2023-02-09 · Lenny's Podcast · Leading with empathy | Keith Yandell (DoorDash, Uber) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it's a good point that not everyone is able for a host of reasons that DoorDash to do it. And so there are alternatives. So you can do customer support, for example, in lieu of actually going and doing deliveries. It's just about making people have empathy and get closer to the product. It's also going back to the culture point you raised.”
2023-02-09 · Lenny's Podcast · Leading with empathy | Keith Yandell (DoorDash, Uber) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I probably do it once a month And there's all kinds of great redash stories, but I don't know how interesting they're going to be to the broader public because for me, it's just about getting out and experiencing the product. I almost always find something that's broken. And I sent an email to, we have a Slack channel that's devoted to experiences via Wash. It's everything from, I found a bug once where it wasn't routing you necessarily the fastest route. It was going using straight line as opposed to road. That was something that we fixed. And for me, the best parts about Wash are the experiences, interactions with the restaurants, the interactions with colleagues. So I'll go delivering with Ryan Sokol, the head of engineering. I'll give him a hard time about.”
2023-02-09 · Lenny's Podcast · Leading with empathy | Keith Yandell (DoorDash, Uber) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I kind of sucked in my breath and said, Well, that's how my time at DoorDash ended. But Tony was great. He was like, hey, Ellis, we have people who do deliveries for months. We have people with deliveries for years. And they're always providing me feedback. And this is one of the most insightful pieces of feedback I've gotten recently. And you've only been dashing for like a few different times. And by the time we got home, he'd actually sent an email out to the product organization calling out the problem, suggesting the fix, and they were already working on it. And that shows the bias to action that I think really is at the heart of DoorDash alongside that customer obsession. And it's not unusual for Tony to do customer support. It wasn't like just because he heard this from my daughter that he actioned it. He does support every day. And again, this goes back to that level of humility and companies really taking on the ethos of their founder.”
2023-02-09 · Lenny's Podcast · Leading with empathy | Keith Yandell (DoorDash, Uber) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it was not the best delivery. There's clearly something wrong with the system. We got a sandwich and a coffee and we're supposed to drive 18 and a half miles to drop costs. And that didn't make sense for the customer, it didn't make sense for us as drivers. And she'd gotten to know Tony over the years. And she said, I really want to call Tony and tell him this thing's broken. Honey, I like my job. I'd like to keep my job. Can we not call it Tony right now? But she was adamant and I was so proud of her for feeling so strongly that she wanted to fix this thing that was broken. I figured he's not going to answer anyway. We can just call. So call. Tony picks up on the first ring. And I'm like, oh, this might go badly. And she just lays into him. She said, this is going to take us 36 minutes to drop off. The coffee's not going to be hot. How could you allow this experience if you really care about your customers?”
2023-02-09 · Lenny's Podcast · Leading with empathy | Keith Yandell (DoorDash, Uber) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To go put those together. This is a very smart woman who I think Tony recognized could add more value. And he said, whoa, whoa, you stay here. I'm going to go put together the champagne flutes. And he called the other two co-founders, Andy Fang and Stanley Tang. They came, stayed up all night, put together, I don't know, 500 champagne flutes, plastic ones for this cheap champagne, and let the people who are closest to the problem try to work out the comms piece. And I do think that's one great example of the culture. The other thing I think that really exemplifies DoorDash's culture is a level of customer obsession. And that manifests in a few different ways. We have a program called WeDash where four times a year all employees are required to go do deliveries. And I love doing it. I do it more than four times a year. And I usually take my daughters with me. And one time I was out with my daughter who was eight at the time, we got a delivery.”
2023-02-09 · Lenny's Podcast · Leading with empathy | Keith Yandell (DoorDash, Uber) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Founder led companies tend to take on the personality they're founders. And if you spend time with our founder, Tony Xu, you realize that he's a humble leader. He's competitive. He really wants to win. And he'll do whatever it takes to win. And the example you're referring to, I think, is when we raised our Series D funding, which was a really tough fundraise for us, we had very little runway left. We almost went out of business. And it was a huge relief when we had finally gotten the funding secured. And I remember I was in a meeting. I was running policy and communications, among other things at a time. And I was in the meeting with a couple other folks. And we were talking about the press release strategy. Tony was there. And someone ran down and got some, I think it was like Corbell or something, champagne and some plastic flutes. And one of the women who was in the meeting with me was going to leave.”
2023-02-09 · Lenny's Podcast · Leading with empathy | Keith Yandell (DoorDash, Uber) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think about it, right? And if someone really was a jerk, they probably wouldn't have taken it very well, right? It's just like when you're interviewing someone, giving them tough feedback after the interview if there's an area of concern but you otherwise like them can be a really great way to see how they would interact with you personally as well as how they take feedback. And so that was my learning from this situation is to if you really enjoy an interview except for maybe something on the culture side to give the direct feedback and see how people engage.”
2023-02-09 · Lenny's Podcast · Leading with empathy | Keith Yandell (DoorDash, Uber) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And by the end of the dinner, we ended up staying super late. We had a couple beers afterwards. Ryan and I have become really good friends. And six months later, he told me that one of the reasons why he joined DoorDash was that we were going to blackball him potentially from joining just because of his attitude. Because his perspective is life's too short to work with people you don't really enjoy. And a lot of people pay lip service. And he knew he was going to be a tough hire for us at the time. And the fact we were willing to go all the way down the path and have someone super qualified but didn't need the culture bar for him was what pushed him over the edge to join the company.”
2023-02-09 · Lenny's Podcast · Leading with empathy | Keith Yandell (DoorDash, Uber) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think this guy's a jerk. I don't think we want him at the company. And Tony was great. He said, Keith, I want you to just have dinner with him, please, because I got a completely different impression. And if you have dinner with him and you still think he's a jerk, we won't hire. And so I ended up meeting Ryan down the street. We actually live in the same general area. We went out to dinner and I started right away. I said, Ryan, during the interview, you kind of seem like an asshole. Are you an asshole? And it was so great. It completely changed my perspective in a good two minutes. He wanted to know what he had said. He said, I'm super embarrassed and what could I do differently regardless of how this works out for me in this circumstance? It's just not how I want to be perceived. And we talked and joked about the things he had done and he kind of told me the background for how he reacted or why he reacted the way he did.”
2023-02-09 · Lenny's Podcast · Leading with empathy | Keith Yandell (DoorDash, Uber) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, actually it wasn't during the interview. We were debriefing. And for me, one of the top things I always hear about DoorDash from an executive standpoint when we do the internal survey is it's a no politics, no asshole culture. And I'm not one to swear a lot. But after interviewing Ryan Sokel, who's now our PP of Eng. He was just kind of aloof. He came off as aloof to me, really curt answers. And I just didn't have a great feeling about him. And I pride myself on being able to discern when people are really engaged or not. And I went to Tony Xu, who's our founder and CEO. I said, Tony.”
2023-02-09 · Lenny's Podcast · Leading with empathy | Keith Yandell (DoorDash, Uber) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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. You got to keep going.”
2023-02-09 · Lenny's Podcast · Leading with empathy | Keith Yandell (DoorDash, Uber) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source