7 Questions With DoorDash’s New Chief Revenue Officer, Tom Pickett
We’re thrilled to remotely welcome Tom Pickett, our first Chief Revenue Officer (CRO), to DoorDash! Tom will be joining the company’s Management Team and will oversee the merchant organization and lead our efforts and strategy around our merchant partners.
As DoorDash expands into different products and geographies, we couldn’t be more excited to bring on a dedicated leader to help shepherd the next wave of strategy, accountability, and alignment across our merchant operations and be the voice of our merchant partners on our management team.
Joining during unprecedented times, Tom has been intimately involved in helping to shape DoorDash’s response to support local restaurants in the age of sheltering in place. As regions across the country begin to transition, he will continue to advance DoorDash’s mission of empowering local communities by driving programs that support the growth of restaurants big and small.
Before joining us, Tom spent five and a half years as the CEO of Ellation, a leading global direct-to-consumer digital media company with several fan-focused video services, including Crunchyroll, VRV, and Rooster Teeth. Ellation was acquired by AT&T in 2018 and now is a WarnerMedia company.
Earlier in his career, he spent over 10 years at Google serving across various roles of increasing responsibility, and ultimately served as Vice President of Content and Operations at YouTube where he was a key member of the YouTube executive leadership team.
Tom is a proven leader with the ability to connect the dots between where DoorDash is now, where we want to be, and how we will get there. He’s shown a capacity to lead by fostering inclusion and demonstrating a passion to develop every individual to do the best work of their careers.
This has all been clear right from the outset of Tom’s career, when he not only served in the U.S. Navy as an F/A-18 pilot but was a “Top Gun” graduate, reaching the rank of Lieutenant Commander!
To get to know Tom better, here are seven questions we asked Tom before his first day:
1) What attracted you to DoorDash?
I’m super excited to be joining DoorDash, particularly at this moment, because of the impact DoorDash is having helping merchants through this challenging time. From my first meetings, it was very clear that DoorDash is laser-focused on merchant success and is constantly innovating on ways to better serve them — and this has only accelerated in importance throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. Through efforts to help merchants generate more sales, mitigate cash-flow challenges, and/or sharing best practices, the DoorDash team has been rolling up their sleeves and I’m thrilled to help continue that charge.
2) What’s your go-to restaurant on the DoorDash platform?
The Melt, Stanford Shopping Center. With four kids, you can’t go wrong with comfort food.
3) Tell us one thing about you that someone couldn’t find on your LinkedIn profile?
I love to windsurf and hope to learn to Kite sometime soon. The secret is that my wife taught me to Windsurf and its become a great getaway activity for us. There is nothing better to clear your head than getting out on the water and focusing all your attention on the task at hand.
4) Most formative career experience / most impactful career advice you’ve received?
I’ve had the pleasure of doing a wide variety of things in my career from being a Navy fighter pilot, to strategy consulting to leading large operating teams in technology companies. What I learned early in my military career was to focus on operational execution and to learn from one’s mistakes. As a pilot, you learn that the debrief of the mission is more important than the brief, and you are required to break down what went well, where things went wrong, and what you could do better next time. This continuous learning process is just as critical to business success, and something I was excited to see is built into the culture at DoorDash.
5) What have you found to be your most successful attribute of leadership?
If you are going to be successful you have to be able to recruit and retain talented team members and make sure that team brings a diversity of thought and experiences. It’s easy to say, but harder to do as we often have implicit biases we don’t realize, and we like to hire those that think and look like ourselves. I believe that the best answers can come from anyone — ensuring that I hear and seek out different voices and that I actively empower others lead — is critical to being able to execute at the top of our game. We expect our leaders to really develop this attribute, so we recently rolled out an accountability mechanism to ensure that we are walking the talk.
6) What are you reading right now?
“What you do is who you are” by Ben Horowitz. I found Ben’s previous book “The hard thing about hard things” as a great companion during my years as a start-up CEO and am enjoying his follow-on book about company culture.
7) Quote to live by?
“There is no elevator to success — you have to take the stairs.” In short, success is built over longer periods of time by passionate folks who put in the work — there are no short-cuts.
Welcome to the family, Tom. We are so excited to have you!
