Andy Fang - CTO of DoorDash

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(Joel Beasley at 00:01:21) Speaking of companies who are rapidly growing, today, we are talking to Andy Fang, the CTO of DoorDash. And we discuss how they took a small startup at Stanford and grew it to a company valued at $1,400,000,000. Having an open mind to be aware of what you don't know and how to celebrate the victories while still pushing forward for more. All of this right here, right now on the Modern CTO podcast. Here we go. This is the Modern CTO podcast.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:00) What is up, man?

(Andy Fang at 00:02:01) Hey. Good. It's great to be chatting with you today.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:05) Oh, I'm so excited. What time is it over there?

(Andy Fang at 00:02:08) 9 a.m. Where are you located?

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:10) We're actually over on the East Coast, so it's about noon for us.

(Andy Fang at 00:02:14) Yeah. You're in Florida?

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:16) Yeah, man. I'm in Florida.

(Andy Fang at 00:02:18) Awesome. Very cool.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:19) I'm excited. You excited?

(Andy Fang at 00:02:22) Yeah. I'm very stoked to chat with you and to see where this conversation takes us.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:29) Me too. It'll probably explode. You are a nightmare. No. So are you familiar with how we record? We just talk like we're recording right now, and so there's really no official start. We just chop it up to make us sound awesome.

(Andy Fang at 00:02:43) Awesome. Yeah. I've done one or two of these before.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:46) So DoorDash. Right? Tell me a little bit about DoorDash.

(Andy Fang at 00:02:51) Yeah. So DoorDash, we're a little over five years old now. We started actually when we were all students at Stanford back in 2013. Our goal at the very beginning was really to build something to empower local businesses of any kind. And at the time, we interviewed a bunch of small businesses throughout the Bay Area. I mean, retailers, salons, toy stores, and then restaurants. And we really landed on a compelling use case that we heard from a lot of these different local business owners, which was really around local logistics. And so from the beginning, we wanted to build this local logistics network to really help empower these local business owners. And so the first use case was always restaurant delivery, and that was a very natural use case for us at the time. And that's primarily what we do today is restaurant on-demand delivery.

(Andy Fang at 00:03:58) This year has been a very exciting year for me personally because this is the first year where we've really started to expand beyond just delivering restaurant food. And so for example, we have a partnership with Walmart delivering their groceries for them. There's some other exciting opportunities as well that we have lined up, but in general, you know, very excited about really how we build a logistics platform, and that's really how we view ourselves internally.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:25) I see. You feel like the big awesome problem that you solved was the logistics engineering problem. That's real smart. How did you get Walmart, man? That's awesome.

(Andy Fang at 00:04:36) That is a great question. With any big national company, it takes a long time. As I'm sure you know as well. You've talked to people who've been through this kind of thing as well. I mean, it's multiple conversations. It can easily take over a year. But, you know, we landed the partnership. We had some experience, to be honest, dealing with large national restaurant chains.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:04) Mm-hmm.

(Andy Fang at 00:05:05) So we kind of built that muscle internally to really, you know, build these relationships with these bigger companies. And so Walmart naturally came out of that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:14) Did you get involved with that as the CTO? Did you show up? And, well, you're also the co—so you're cofounder and CTO.

(Andy Fang at 00:05:19) That's right. Yeah. That's actually a good question in terms of getting involved with these kinds of deals. So with Walmart in particular, I did not get directly involved. The way—and I've read about this with, you know, how CTOs view their function as well. You know, some CTOs view their function to really be very involved with these kinds of deals. For me, the way I view my role with those kinds of relationships internally is really thinking about evaluating these deals, how it affects our technology stack, how it affects how productive our team can be from it, how our team can leverage these kinds of deals to build on top of our platform. So for example, signature upon delivery is a feature that was requested to make these grocery deliveries work. Turns out that's also something that we would need to make alcohol delivery work as well. Right?

(Andy Fang at 00:06:13) So those kinds of decision points—there's also more technical platform choices as well that we think about when making these kinds of business decisions. And so I don't really feel like I need to be in the room necessarily with, you know, the other people on the other side of the table there necessarily, but definitely considering, you know, the business feasibility, technology feasibility of these kinds of deals behind the scenes. If I feel like I need to get involved, I definitely will, but we have a lot of talented people on the BD side as well as on our product management and engineering management side. So, yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:52) Nice. I'm so curious. We were talking about this on the show, I think, like, two or three months ago. Because I saw Amazon and their big push for—you know, they started with their own delivery trucks.

(Andy Fang at 00:07:03) Mm-hmm.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:04) But then they started pushing, like, the fact that you could buy delivery trucks and Amazon small business delivering stuff. I don't know if you've seen that. That just came across my plate recently. But when I saw them doing that, I said, "Oh, well, you know, they purchased Whole Foods. Right? So I was like, "Well, the next step is I wonder if they're going to mix that at all, if they're going to do some delivery with the Whole Foods." And then you've got the Uber Eats. And when we were talking about it on the show, we actually brought up Walmart. And the reason why is because in my city, Walmart's, like, right next to it. I was, like, how's Walmart going to compete with that? You know? And I actually—when we got off the episode, I can't remember. I'll have Jake look it up later for reference. But when we got off the episode, I actually went on LinkedIn and hunted down one of the leaders of technology at Walmart, and I sent him a message about the topic of the conversation. And I said, "Hey." He didn't respond, but yeah. So that probably just, like, was another thumbs up recognition that they need to close that deal.

(Andy Fang at 00:08:07) Oh, absolutely. Yeah. I mean, the Amazon, Walmart stuff can be very competitive. And I think we do pay attention to what's going on in the landscape with particularly a lot of these bigger players in the retail space. And even Amazon's been trying to get into the restaurant delivery space as well. But, you know, so far, we haven't seen them really place too many bets behind it. And so we feel pretty good about our offering to kind of power these grocery deliveries for a company like Walmart or even for these national—I mean, one thing we're kind of trying to do as well is using the product that we actually use to integrate with Walmart. It's called DoorDash Drive. And so that's basically our fulfillment product. We're now trying to use that to power other kinds of deliveries from things outside of restaurant food.

(Andy Fang at 00:08:58) But even some big national chains, you know, they want to use that product to help them, you know, power their own logistics and stuff. So really cool opportunities that we're considering there.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:11) So I'm really excited for you as a leader. Right? Because we have a large audience, but about 60% of them are the next generation. And so they're really excited to step up in leadership. They're really excited to grow. And you've just gone through all of this. You went from, you know, graduating about five years ago. Right? And then creating this and now you guys are—I think you're over a billion dollar valuation. Right?

(Andy Fang at 00:09:39) Yep.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:40) Yeah. So you'd be called a unicorn leader.

(Andy Fang at 00:09:43) Right. That's right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:45) We're going to try to get that to catch on, but no. But it—at the end of the day, it's rare. Right? It's just—

(Andy Fang at 00:09:54) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:54) It's reality of life. It's not good or bad. It's literally it's rare. And so you had this experience, and everybody's always—I've had successful exits where the company grew and we built teams. And, you know, once you get past teams of teams, it's—I mean, you're at teams of teams. Right?

(Andy Fang at 00:10:09) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:10) And so going through those motions and when you get all that experience, it's amazing. So a couple questions for you. I'm just going to barrage you with them and you can—

(Andy Fang at 00:10:18) Yeah. Totally. All of them.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:19) Okay. Like, when did you notice that all—like, what was the feeling like? When did you notice that it started to do well and take off and grow? And then how did you begin to resource yourself? Tons of books, grabbing smart people, just a little bit about that.

(Andy Fang at 00:10:33) Yeah. Absolutely. You know, that's a question I've gotten a few times in the past is, like, when did we actually know this is going to be a big thing? And quite honestly, there wasn't a singular moment at which it was, like, an "aha" moment for us. You know, when we started the company, before we launched as DoorDash, we were actually called Palo Alto Delivery, and we were just doing it every weeknight while we were still at school. And we were doing, you know, 10 to 20 deliveries a day, you know. And 20 at that time was a big deal. And now we're doing, you know, much more than that, obviously. But when you're in the very early stages, a lot of the growth comes from the founders willing it into existence. And there's a myth out there—I'm sure you're maybe familiar with this—but there's a myth out there that, you know, if you have a great idea, people are just going to latch on to it and, you know, you're going to grow like crazy. And that's absolutely not true, particularly in our experience where we were doing the deliveries ourselves in the early days. And we learned so much from that, to the point where today, one of our big cultural traditions is to have all of our employees actually go out on Dash every month. But, anyway, that was a big kind of driving force. It was just us getting down into it and doing the grind and hustle to actually make these deliveries happen.

(Andy Fang at 00:11:55) And in terms of how I kind of caught up with it and how I was able to scale with the growth as we saw it coming in, I think a lot of being able to scale and grow—first of all, you have to be willing to put yourself in an uncomfortable and chaotic environment. And it was very chaotic and uncomfortable for me. Thinking about, for example, you're managing—you're hiring your first few engineers. All of them have more experience than you, and you haven't managed anyone before as, you know, someone coming out of college. You can either run away from that. You can either say, "Hey, I think we need someone more experienced," which to be honest is not always the wrong call. But just even being willing to dive in and say, "Hey, I got this," and "I'm going to figure it out." I think it's a big mentality that is really important to be able to wrangle these tough challenges. And later on, you know, I'm talking about the really early days now, but then later on, there are some pretty challenging times we've had. And, you know, startups—they always call them roller coasters for a reason. And during down times, if you let up or you—you just can't give up, I guess, that mentality. And in hindsight, both me observing myself personally as well as observing people that I've managed—the people who go through the tough times and stick through it, it's almost always come out of it having learned much, much more than they have. So that's the one thing I would call out is just being able to handle the chaos and just be willing to dive into it. And another one is just having an open mind and self-awareness about what you don't know.

(Andy Fang at 00:13:44) That would be the second thing I would call out, which, for example, saying, "Hey. I haven't managed anyone before, but, you know, I think I know what it takes to manage people." You know, if you get too overconfident there and think you know all the answers just by reading a few books, that's not super self-aware. So just understanding what you don't know. And I think one thing I've learned a lot too from being a founder is there's a couple of things that you get as a founder that other people don't get as immediately. One of which is trust because you have such a big stake in the company. You've been there since day one. People trust your intentions, and so people are willing to give you a lot more slack. So for example, someone like me, they're willing to give me a lot more slack because they know I'm trying to do my best for them. And that's a very unique position to be in as a founder. And, you know, I think that combined with, you know, being self-aware and being willing to throw myself into the chaos has kind of really allowed me to grow into the role and help scale the company.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:54) You're speaking like the person who's been through it.

(Andy Fang at 00:14:58) I have. Yes.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:59) I love it. Did you ever have, like, false starts before with other projects, like, things that you wanted to do?

(Andy Fang at 00:15:07) When—so one of my cofounders, Stanley, we were, you know, dorm mates at Stanford. And so we would work on projects together every now and then, but it was really just tinkering. One thing I would actually encourage for people who are, you know, out there—particularly people who are still in college—is, you know, take the time to really play with apps and build things that actually hit live traffic on your own. You know, one project that we did kind of earlier on was figuring out ways in which we can get people to carpool with each other a little bit more. And that was kind of something that inspired how we thought about our dispatch system. It turns out, actually, the system we were building at the time was kind of very similar to what Uber Pool and Lyft Line are trying to do today. But we didn't really think about it that way at the time. So that was kind of an interesting project we did.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:02) And how did that stop? Like, at what point were you, like, "This is a cool project. We're just tinkering with it. Let's move on and do something else"?

(Andy Fang at 00:16:12) It depends. I mean, at that time, our mentality was so different. It was really about learning about different technologies and the excitement of launching products that people actually use versus, like, is this a real company or not?

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:26) And so with DoorDash, you went into it as—or I forgot you mentioned the previous name.

(Andy Fang at 00:16:32) Yeah. So Stanley, my cofounder, and then Tony, our third cofounder and the CEO—we are in a class together. Actually, it was a joint class. It was in the graduate school of business and I think the design school. So that class was kind of more oriented towards—I think it was called Startup Garage, but basically, that was like a class dedicated to, hey, here's some things that you can try or tools that you can use to really bootstrap your own idea. And so that was kind of a different mindset than just tinkering with projects. But Stanley and I and Tony, the three of us, you know, we took the class not with too much hope coming into it, to be honest. I mean, it ended up being a great opportunity for us to meet and help us with the origin of DoorDash.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:22) So with the origin, you went into it with more than just tinkering?

(Andy Fang at 00:17:27) I mean, we were thinking about, hey, how do we service local businesses? So this was kind of talking to a point I talked about earlier in the podcast where we were really passionate about figuring out a way to help out local businesses. And that was a really different opportunity to really talk to customers or end users versus tinkering with the project, being like, hey, there's new technology that came out. How do I make that into a product? Whereas the mentality here was, hey, this is something we're passionate about. Let's talk to people and figure out what pain points they actually have. So it's a pretty, yeah, different mentality.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:04) Doesn't that make it so much better too? Like, I started out and I had some early success and then I had some not-so-much success in between other successes, right? And in building these products, I found that it's so much worse when you're just in the background building, building, building, and you're just building against what you think should happen. But when you get people involved, it's like you get this different energy and you get this momentum, and it's this whole different world. It's like it's not even what you thought product was before. It's like now that you've got people involved, it's amazing.

(Andy Fang at 00:18:36) That's one of the big emphasis points we have here at DoorDash too. It's one of the biggest reasons why we encourage all of our employees and engineers to go out and dash every month, is because we want them interacting with users. And that's so important. And particularly, you know, for us, when we think about DoorDash as a three-sided marketplace, there's consumers, there's Dashers, there's merchants. It's hard for you to grok that as an engineer if you're just building code. And dogfooding the product, you're really only able to dogfood the consumer side of the product on a habitual basis. And so even dashing every month is good, but even then, you're still not scratching the surface as much on the merchant side. And so for us, that's why we really try to emphasize, you know, talk to people, go visit stores, go and dash every month. And another thing that's kind of interesting to us about our business too—and some other businesses out there—is it's a very hyperlocal business. So your experience in Florida is going to be totally different than my experience in San Francisco for a variety of reasons due to the logistics, restaurant selection, preference of the people who are in the market. So it can be tempting as an engineer to kind of sit in your ivory tower in HQ and just kind of figure out things just by intuiting them, but, you know, that's a very dangerous trap to fall into. Totally agree with that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:01) So I subscribe to the mentality of, like, always ask questions even if people think they're dumb, right? So I've never heard dogfooding a product before. Can you explain this to me?

(Andy Fang at 00:20:10) Oh, yeah. Totally. So dogfooding a product is essentially having your engineers or your employees use the products internally before it gets launched.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:20) Oh, eat the dog food. Okay.

(Andy Fang at 00:20:22) Yeah. Drink the Kool-Aid. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:25) All right. I got it. That's interesting. Okay. Cool. Yeah. See, I'm glad I asked.

(Andy Fang at 00:20:29) Yeah. No. Great question.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:31) It's like we translated it. It's like I have a phrase for that. Yeah. No, it's good. We're expanding our vocabulary right now, my friend. This is exciting. Absolutely. So I saw some of your writing or the things you're posting online about, you know, starting engineering functions from the ground up, challenges and successes, starting a team at DoorDash. Real quickly, what comes to mind as some of the big lessons that you've learned with scaling your engineering?

(Andy Fang at 00:20:59) There's quite a few. That's good. Yeah. I think one thing I would like to talk about is—I just started posting on Twitter mainly because I got inspired by a few things to start sharing my thoughts more publicly. One topic I want to talk about, which I suppose a little bit about on Twitter, is I've gotten to see over the past five years how people either really accelerate their career growth in a chaotic environment like a high-growth startup or they don't. And one of the biggest things I've seen is the people who are just willing to throw themselves—it kind of goes back to my own scaling experiences. And a lot of the reasons and motivations why engineers or people in general want to join startups is because they want to learn a lot. And so what I try to tell people is if you want to do that for yourself and you want to expedite your career growth, you have to join places where there's a lot of things going on and they're actually experiencing growth. I think people sometimes mistake startup with career growth, because there are some opportunities out there that are really awesome if you want to have high ownership over the product or you want to have a really tight-knit community with your team. And that's a totally great motivation. But for some people I've talked to who are really interested in, like, how do I become a senior manager or get into executive level really quickly—joining a startup to gain those kind of senior skills, you have to go into a place where those opportunities will come into existence. And for example, as a manager, if you want to grow into a management role really quickly, you're not going to be able to grow into a management role quickly if the team you're joining is not growing very quickly. Because literally, the opportunities for management will not come around unless, you know, a manager leaves or what have you. And so that's something that I've tried to encourage people: I don't want to just talk about team growth, but look at the growth of the business, look at the growth of the team. Valuations can be deceiving at times, but sometimes that's all the information you have. But it's not really about the valuation. It's really about how the business is growing and how the team is growing. And if you join a place where those things are changing very rapidly, then you're going to throw yourself in an environment where you're going to have to learn to adapt. So that was one of the big lessons I've learned and I've tried to convey to people when they come to me and ask, hey, how—one, how did you get into the position you're in today? How do I get into a position where I can quickly scale into doing, quote-unquote, senior things, whether as an IC or a manager? That's the advice I'd give.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:55) Yeah. So I like what you're talking about right now because this is something that has—you know, I talk about so much and with so many different people. So I have this, like, condensed 130, 140 CTOs, like, perspective on it. And when all that started to happen, I started to see these different ways of looking at the same thing. So when you're talking about going to, like, a larger existing company and versus a smaller one, the thing that was going through my head when you were saying that is I started to look at business in a very literal way of the systems of repeatable, scalable processes. Essentially, you know, here's the program, run the program. Yeah. This is how we respond to this. This is how we do that. And so all these processes stack up, and then that's how you can scale them. And so when you're at a large existing company, those processes are well thought out, and they don't change very much.

(Andy Fang at 00:24:46) Mm-hmm.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:46) Right? They change as the market demands them. But when you're at a company that's growing and rapidly expanding, those processes are being created and modified rapidly until they find some sort of, you know, semi-permanence or permanence. And so when you get to be a part of that creation of systems and processes and understanding—and that's why everyone says, oh, it's okay to fail at startups. You're failing a lot more, but you're getting a lot more experience. What you're doing is you're finding the repeatable thing. You're finding the thing that's going to work, and then you're ensuring that you transition from creation of it to management of it to delegation of it.

(Andy Fang at 00:25:19) Right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:19) Because those are the—you've got to create it, then you've got to manage it on its initial as the manager, and then you have to delegate out a manager and then go up, and then do it again and then do it again and do it again.

(Andy Fang at 00:25:29) I think—

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:30) It's not—like, it's not—if you learn to love it, congratulations. You could do anything in life. Like, I love it. But first of all, it's not that clear or obvious. And so when you do figure it out—how to move between the stages and grow it—it's a lot of fun because it gives you a lot of power and confidence. So I see you smiling right now as I'm talking about this.

(Andy Fang at 00:25:51) It's exciting at times, definitely. And I think one thing that particularly with cofounders and CTOs and non-CTO cofounders is really finding the balance of figuring out how to learn those things on your own versus bringing people from the outside who've kind of seen it before. And that's a really tricky thing to navigate is figuring out, you know, bringing in directors, bringing in—as a CEO, bringing in other executives into the team. It can be a tricky balance because you want to bet on the people who are growing internally. At the same time, there's a big cost to kind of learning on the fly as well. And so it's kind of a double-edged sword in that sense.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:36) You're balancing it out.

(Andy Fang at 00:26:38) Exactly.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:39) Yeah. That's a fun one. Those are the ones that are, like, the real difficult decisions. Those are the ones you think about quite a bit. All right. Well, if I move Mary over here or if I bring John in for this, how would this person perform? And then you're just—you're balancing, all right, am I spending too long making a decision? Now I just got to decide. And it's just—it's a lot of fun. So you're clearly very passionate about the work. When did you first fall in love with technology? When did you first get introduced to code or the whole world of this?

(Andy Fang at 00:27:14) I grew up in Silicon Valley, so I had a very unique opportunity to be exposed to code and technology pretty early on in my life. I probably—I don't remember when I wrote my first program, but it's probably when I was, like, seven years old. And I was kind of around computers all the time. And that was something that was always kind of a hobby or a passion of mine growing up. And when I went to college, I was pretty set on doing something related to computer science, and going to college and meeting people who come in from literally across the globe, you come to realize how fortunate you are—in for me, being in that position to have been that long of an exposure to technology. And, yeah, I mean, it's kind of something that I've been doing for a very long time.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:10) So you're not in, like, the crazy big city. You're just in your hometown.

(Andy Fang at 00:28:13) That's right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:14) I love that.

(Andy Fang at 00:28:14) I mean, I grew up in Cupertino, so that's a tech, tech, tech area too. And I guess when I went to college, I didn't really think that much about Cupertino, but then people are like, Cupertino, that's where Apple is. And so, yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:30) Oh, yeah. Oh, man. I love it. Because yeah, I'm in my hometown too, and it's like—it's a vacation town, so there's, like, a lot of older people. But in one sense, I was very lucky. So my father was an engineer. And so he actually—he got his education in the Air Force and they taught him to put GPS systems into the B-2 stealth bombers. So they're like, we have a very stealthy plane. Now we just need to add some GPS to it, right?

(Andy Fang at 00:28:57) Oh, I see.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:58) Right? So he was on that team that did that. And so he got his education there with some embedded systems and programming technology, and then he did that when he got out of the Air Force, and then he taught me. I was about eight years old when he had me writing my first programs, looking through memory buffers and stuff like that. But were your parents into technology?

(Andy Fang at 00:29:20) Yeah. They were. My parents were into technology. And, I mean, I think one thing I've come to learn about that is even though I kind of had a long tenure being exposed to technology, my cofounder, Stanley, he actually didn't have that much exposure to computer science until he got to college. And so one of the things I'm pretty fascinated about now is just how accessible it can be now to kind of train yourself up on things related to computer science and technology. And one of the things that we're trying to figure out is how do we tap into that to really expand the talent pool that's in the industry. And that's something that I've come to realize as I've grown up is even though I had that long exposure to technology, that advantage kind of evaporates very quickly in an environment where so many people have that exposure. My cofounder, Stanley, is a great example of that. And I think that's a positive thing. And so now—I mean, this is kind of switching topics a little bit—but now thinking about how there's so much more exposure to computer science. Computer science recently became the most popular major at Stanford. And there's different kinds of things that open up for people who haven't—like, people like me who grew up in Silicon Valley aren't the only people who have an opportunity to kind of have the impact I have. So—

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:47) You're going to give a commencement speech? You've got to give a Stanford—I was listening to Elon Musk's Stanford commencement speech as I was driving to work the other day. And you've got to give one. You've got to get on that list.

(Andy Fang at 00:30:59) Oh, yeah. I mean, yeah. Maybe in a long time.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:04) That would be a lot of fun though, right? Because it makes sense more because you are a native, right? So—

(Andy Fang at 00:31:10) That's right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:10) To the area. You're native to the region. Even though I'm, like, 45 minutes away from Tampa, like, I'm a native to Tampa to the rest of the world, you know.

(Andy Fang at 00:31:18) Totally.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:19) So discipline, right? You have to have discipline to get to where you are today. I learned a lot of my discipline when I was first getting really excited about deals happening, you know, the first time you get a big check or the first time you have some, like—or that first rush of users. You're just, like, sitting there and you're in the shell and just continue, like, refreshing user.count. Like, come on.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:42) Come on. Come on. Like, look how many people are joining. Getting all pumped up. And then I realized that getting that excitement is detrimental if you allow yourself to get caught up in it or spend too much time in it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:57) And so I learned, and this is just from my experience, I learned, alright, when I get excited, acknowledge, alright, I'm excited. And then go back to work because your work is what created that excitement. And if you run off in the excitement, then the work that you did to replicate that's not gonna happen.

(Andy Fang at 00:32:13) Oh, absolutely. We're kind of, I think with DoorDash, because we're in such a big space and it's a very competitive space. And I think a big reason why it's competitive is because the opportunity here is so big. But because it's been so competitive even from day one, the names of the players have changed over time. But, you know, it's always been a very exciting competitive space.

(Andy Fang at 00:32:37) And what that's really drawn out of us was kind of a little bit what you're saying is that mentality of you got the win, but there's so much more you gotta do. And being able to live that grind and always looking for the next thing is very crucial actually to keeping yourself motivated and keeping your team motivated to get things done. And even today, I don't think we're nearly where we could be as a company. I mean, just thinking about the restaurant delivery space just within the United States is so massive. And then you think about the grocery opportunities we have.

(Andy Fang at 00:33:14) You think about the other opportunities to power local logistics beyond restaurant food and grocery. There's just so much to do. And I'm not even talking Canada, right, and other parts of the world yet. And so having that mentality of, you know, there's still so much more to do is extremely important. At the same time, one thing I have come to learn is you do have to cherish those moments every now and then because it can be tough.

(Andy Fang at 00:33:42) It's, you know, it's very much of a grind for you. And, you know, as much of a grind as it is for the founders, you're putting employees through a very similar grind as well. And you want to make sure that you have their back and that you're showing them that you care about them and that you appreciate the work they're putting in. So, relating to a point I said earlier, you gotta find that balance of staying motivated and hungry and making sure you're celebrating some of the wins along the way.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:13) Dude, it's all about the balance. Like, with everything, that's like my asterisk for every piece of advice. I'm gonna tell you to do this, but you have to balance it against everything. Like, I had a moment. I was very excited this month because I found out I got this email and I was like, oh, you've been listed on Entrepreneur's like 40 under 40 for this year.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:32) I'm like, what? I'm like, are you kidding me? And so, like, yeah, I spent the afternoon calling my dad and, like, you know, it's been an hour or two. Like, call my dad, call my wife. Like, you guys won't believe this.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:44) This is, like, I'm really pumped up. And, yeah, so it was pretty cool. But then I'm like, alright, I gotta go back to work.

(Andy Fang at 00:34:52) Absolutely. Yeah. I cherish those wins and then gotta get back to it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:56) Yeah. A little bit of celebration. And then, you know, and like what you were saying, it's about falling in love with getting to the next level. Like, you have to love completing the level you're on and then that transition of like, alright, I'm on level six of 52.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:10) Like, we've got some, I'm not done yet. Like, I'm young, man. Like, let's do this. I'm just so pumped. I get excited for the anticipation of, like, where I'm gonna be when I'm 50. You know? It's like, if you can fall in love with the hustle and then the business and, you know, I think for me it's more like growing myself.

(Andy Fang at 00:35:30) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:31) Really, like, I'm always improving. Like yesterday I went to the dentist and I'm like, hey, how can I improve my teeth to be a little bit better? And then about a month ago, I started going to the gym.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:45) And I was like, yeah, you know what? Like, I want bigger arms. Like, I'm always doing my, like, oh, my finance, like, my business side of things, my sales, my marketing, my code, my, you know, learning different things about structuring objects and, everything I could, efficiency, like, you know, what's going on with Kubernetes, how do I scale, how do I this, that. Yeah. I'm always so focused on, like, filling my mind with stuff and then I was like, you know, I'm gonna shift some of this and balance it. There we go. I'm gonna balance it out and put some of that love towards my body because you only get one of those, man.

(Andy Fang at 00:36:16) Yeah. Right? Taking care of yourself is very key to living and surviving the startup roller coaster for sure.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:25) Yeah. And you got me all motivated. I don't usually talk this much in the podcast. I usually just ask questions, but I'm all, like, fired up. Like, yeah. You're right now in, how far are you from San Francisco?

(Andy Fang at 00:36:36) We actually relocated our office to San Francisco now. So even though we started the company in Palo Alto, we moved to San Francisco back in 2015. So, yeah, we're dead center.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:48) Do you know Fred from SIFT Science?

(Andy Fang at 00:36:51) I do not.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:53) I would suggest that you know him because he's in, I was just out in San Francisco, like, a month ago meeting a bunch of past guests from the show. We got this lovely mug from Williams-Sonoma.

(Andy Fang at 00:37:02) Oh, fun.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:03) Yeah. Dude, they're an awesome company. Do you know who they are?

(Andy Fang at 00:37:06) Yeah. Yeah. Well, I'm just gonna know. They're local.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:08) Yeah. So I went and did some research for the show, and so I went to experience their system. So I went into a Williams-Sonoma and bought a mug and everything. And then when I went to talk to them, I found out that they're this larger group, and they own Pottery Barn. And they just bought this AR, digitization style company because they have so many products.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:31) And they were digitizing them and putting them into the, you know, AR style applications. I'm sure you've seen those. See what it looks like on your kitchen countertop.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:41) Man, he is really smart. He is really great, really great on leadership too, Yaser.

(Andy Fang at 00:37:47) There's a lot of great leadership talent in San Francisco. I think a big reason why there's a pull, because people realize that talent in San Francisco is so expensive. At the same time, a big reason why startups tend to gravitate to staying or moving to San Francisco is because a lot of the leadership talent is here. Yeah. I'm not surprised to hear you talk about it that way.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:12) But if you want to talk to, if you want to be connected to Fred or Yaser, I will email you, connect you if you find any benefit from them. They're both, you know, like forties and fifties. But I got to hang out with them in person, at least Fred, you know, last month when I was in San Francisco and just really great people.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:34) And, you know, he wrote Google payments and sold a startup to Google and then he went and did SIFT Science. And, anyways, I always like to connect great people. Yeah. And the next time I'm out in San Francisco in a couple months, might be giving a talk, and I'll stop by and say hi to you.

(Andy Fang at 00:38:52) Sure. Yeah. That'd be awesome. Good to have you here.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:54) What advice would you, are you fan of Elon Musk?

(Andy Fang at 00:38:58) Yeah. I mean, I respect a lot of what he's done. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:00) I know he's in the news a lot right now.

(Andy Fang at 00:39:01) I try not to stay too close to that, but you can't argue with some of the accomplishments he's had.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:10) Right. So he calls you up. He says, what up? You know, maybe he's driving through Stanford or San Francisco in his Tesla or he's boring under the city. And you go over and hang out with him.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:21) He's got a time machine. You go in a time machine, you go back ten years. Right? Your previous self, you get to give yourself one piece of advice. What would it be?

(Andy Fang at 00:39:31) I think the advice I'd give myself is, I don't know, it's a profound kind of question. The advice I would give myself is there's no one right way to get to where you want to go. And I think particularly when you're younger, you always think about, hey, what did this person do? What did that person do? In reality, you gotta forge your own path. So, that's the advice I would tell myself and encourage myself on.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:01) Beautiful. It was poetic. I love that. I enjoyed it. And then you right now, you've been hanging around a little bit online on Twitter. So if people want to go follow you or look you up, what's your Twitter handle?

(Andy Fang at 00:40:12) It's just Andy Fang.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:13) Andy Fang.

(Andy Fang at 00:40:14) I got lucky. I got my full name.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:17) A-N-D-Y-F-A-N-G?

(Andy Fang at 00:40:19) That's right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:20) That's a pretty sharp name too.

(Andy Fang at 00:40:21) Because my brother used to work at Twitter, so he was able to get me that handle. That's actually how we got the DoorDash Twitter handle too.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:29) Nice. Older brother? Younger brother?

(Andy Fang at 00:40:30) Older brother.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:31) How much older?

(Andy Fang at 00:40:33) Two years older. He's actually working at LimeBike now, which is one of the scooter companies. And we're actually figuring out how to potentially leverage partnerships with companies like LimeBike or Bird or what have you to use alternative transportation models to power our delivery. So that's been kind of exciting.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:56) Is that like they, like, you rent them or something?

(Andy Fang at 00:40:59) Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:02) I saw some scooters when I was in San Francisco. It was just, like, a dollar to start. And I was like, that's kind of cool. Have you seen those hanging around?

(Andy Fang at 00:41:09) Yeah. So that's what I'm referring to.

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:12) Oh, that's it. Yeah. Yeah. Alright. That's pretty cool.

(Andy Fang at 00:41:16) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:16) Plus, Andy, we did it. We made a podcast.

(Andy Fang at 00:41:20) Wow.

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:21) We won. That's great. We get some points. We win today.

(Andy Fang at 00:41:25) Is there anything else that, I guess we're approaching time, I guess. So.

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:30) Yeah. We don't really, I have, like, things I really want to ask Andy.

(Andy Fang at 00:41:36) I guess, I mean, I think one thing that, I guess would be good to talk about is just thinking about DoorDash and some of the technology challenges we have. I think for people who use the app, it can be easy to overlook some of the kind of technology problems that we have. So I think maybe just glossing over those really quickly. One of the big challenges we have, and I mentioned this earlier in the podcast too, is just how we have to balance out a three-sided marketplace. So you think about drivers, you think about merchants, you have consumers.

(Andy Fang at 00:42:06) So there's a lot of product surface area that we have to cover there. And then when you dive down into making a delivery experience seem easy and intuitive, a lot of things that we have to figure out in terms of how do we make our drivers as efficient as possible. When you're thinking about potentially partnering with other companies or building alternative vehicles in-house and figuring how do you match drivers to orders in the most optimal way possible. That can be a pretty challenging, not only a machine learning problem because you have to predict supply and demand as well as be able to predict, for example, how long it takes for a restaurant to prepare an order, but it's also an operations research problem.

(Andy Fang at 00:42:51) So you think about, like, a traveling salesman problem, how do you optimize that in real time? That's a pretty challenging task at hand. And so, you know, there's a lot that goes on underneath the surface that makes it a very exciting space to try to grow into and get coverage in.

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:11) So I'm curious, and I don't even know if I'm allowed to ask this question, but with all the GDPR stuff going on, although we're in the States, like, I would just, when you were saying that, what was run through my head was, oh, I would keep, like, my own proprietary data on, like, typical, like, individual restaurants and when they happen to be delayed. So I could, you know, structure that into my delivery because you want people to have hot fresh food and you don't want drivers to wait and you want everyone to have expectations. Do you guys have to do that type of stuff?

(Andy Fang at 00:43:38) We definitely try to keep track of, like, how long it takes for a restaurant to prepare food, for example. We don't expose it to the end user necessarily, but we try to use it to inform, for example, when do we send a driver over to pick up the order. Because one of the biggest inefficiencies in the system can be if you send a driver to a restaurant and they're waiting for the order to get made. And so that's what kind of kills the efficiency. That makes the system kind of slow down.

(Andy Fang at 00:44:04) So that's really one of the primary ways we use it. And we also use it to inform merchants on how they can better their own in-store operations as well, which is a really key part of making the whole flywheel work.

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:17) Yeah. So you own some of your vehicles. Right? Do you do deliveries?

(Andy Fang at 00:44:21) We are piloting the alternative vehicle types. I mean, the vast, vast majority of our deliveries happen through, you know, people driving their own vehicles with their bikes, scooters, or cars to deliver orders.

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:35) That's awesome.

(Andy Fang at 00:44:37) Yeah. We do try to have in-house stuff, but some of that is, we're piloting, I would say, and experimenting and tinkering internally, but nothing too crazy out there yet.

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:49) Nice. Yeah. Because and not to, you know, talk about your competitors, people like, or if they are competitors, I don't even know because I'm not super in this business. Yeah. There's this one that's called, like, something Bite that they look almost like a franchise.

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:03) They popped up next to the place I take guitar lessons, so I saw them. They were just called something Bite. And, do you know what I'm talking about?

(Andy Fang at 00:45:13) You cut out a little bit. I think we're talking about Bite Squad?

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:17) Yeah. Yeah. Bite Squad.

(Andy Fang at 00:45:18) Okay. Yeah. Yeah. I think they actually, I'm not too familiar with kind of how they do things in a much detailed level, but that's definitely a name that's come up every now and then. And I think they have their own branded vehicles, which might be what you're referring to.

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:34) I just saw their vehicles wrapped Bite Squad, and I was curious if, are they a national thing? Are they a franchise? I don't even know if they're on your radar as, like, a competitor.

(Andy Fang at 00:45:45) I mean, we always try to keep everyone on our radar. That's one of the skills we've learned as we've kind of tried to navigate this massive industry with players. You know, I think one thing that we appreciate is that a player like Bite Squad has presence in particular localities. And one of the big challenges we have trying to grow our business, which makes it very difficult, yet very kind of defensible, is figuring out how to navigate all these hyperlocal competitive landscapes. And Bite Squad's kind of an example of a solid local player.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:22) So they'll just, like, appear in some very specific markets?

(Andy Fang at 00:46:26) Yeah. I mean, in different places, there's different players. And I think over time, we've seen the market somewhat consolidate. And so over time, we feel very confident in our ability to gain our presence in different areas, but being able to understand the different local players and why they've been successful is really key to us building that intuition ourselves and improving the product in given markets.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:54) Nice. Well, I'm team DoorDash, by the way. Yeah. I gotta get a shirt made. It's gonna be hashtag team DoorDash.

(Andy Fang at 00:47:01) That's great.

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:03) Do you guys have cool swag and stuff like that that your people wear?

(Andy Fang at 00:47:06) We always now and then have swag. We did a brand redesign, I think, at the beginning of the year that was really well received by folks both internally and then people externally that we surveyed out to. So, you know.

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:24) I love it. It's modern and clean, man.

(Andy Fang at 00:47:26) Yeah. Thank you.

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:27) Your website's beautiful. It makes me hungry. Right?

(Andy Fang at 00:47:31) Thank you. And I think one thing we're trying to do over time is figure out ways in which we can make it accessible not only to restaurant delivery, but, you know, grocery delivery or other kinds of things as well. So always constantly evolving the product.

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:45) You're gonna do great. I mean, you're already doing great. You're gonna have continued success because look, I mean, I talk to companies of all sizes all the time and you start to see when you hit a volume of, you know, the billion dollar companies do things that billion dollar companies do.

(Joel Beasley at 00:48:01) Yep. The successful people do things that successful people do. You're at the top. You just gotta not let up and keep grinding. You're gonna be exactly where you wanna be.

(Joel Beasley at 00:48:10) I mean, DoorDash is gonna dominate. Right?

(Andy Fang at 00:48:12) Absolutely. Absolutely.

(Joel Beasley at 00:48:14) Because I'm wearing the shirt. I'm wearing a team DoorDash shirt.

(Andy Fang at 00:48:18) Great.

(Joel Beasley at 00:48:21) Awesome. Man, this has been like, I really like you, Andy.

(Andy Fang at 00:48:25) Yeah. Thanks, Joel. It was great to have, you know, thanks for having me on your show, and it was good to have this conversation with you.

(Joel Beasley at 00:48:31) Awesome. Talk to you soon, Andy.

(Andy Fang at 00:48:33) Alright. Take care. Thanks so much.

(Joel Beasley at 00:48:35) See you. Thank you so much for listening to the Modern CTO podcast. Share this. Get the word out. Thank you guys so much.

(Joel Beasley at 00:48:45) I couldn't do it without you. I appreciate it.

(Andy Fang at 00:48:48) You

(Joel Beasley at 00:48:48) guys are the absolute best.