Day 1

I spent thirty minutes yesterday with one of my mentors, whom I shall reveal one day and he encouraged me to start a blog about the things that I consume (read and listen to). Hence the blog that we have today. I will be sharing my key takeaways from some of the things that I consume.

Today I read an article by Justin Gordon about DoorDash, an American food delivery company that did $53 billion in gross order value in 2022. The article is about the story of Tony Xu, DoorDash’s Co-founder and CEO. Here are my key takeaways.

1. Getting to the core of the problem that you are trying to solve. The article emphasizes the need to fully understand what problem you are trying to solve as a startup. The team at DoorDash was able to do this through multiple ways, two of which were doing the five whys analysis (https://www.mindtools.com/a3mi00v/5-whys) about every problem they encountered and writing things down. I’m a huge fan of writing things down and I have started using Lucid chart as a great tool to build flow charts and mind maps about different stuff. What I like about mind maps is that they help me digest information to “first principles” and its easy for me to recall them at a glance.
2. Validating your concept. From the article, I got to know that the team at DoorDash started with a simple website and pdf menus as their initial concept for DoorDash. I think validating your concept boils down to this question “What’s the simplest form through which I can test my idea today?” It probably could be through looking for people with the problem you are trying to solve and asking them about it, or writing an article about it, or building a website. I started being intentional about this MVP (minimum viable product) thinking after I attended a few classes of startup school online and learnt about MVP’s. If you are thinking of launching your startup, check out startup school by Y-Combinator, I learnt a lot there. Here’s a link (About | Startup School — The Best Resource for Founders)
3. Contact time with customers. Tony Xu wrote that one of the best things that happened to the company was that every single person did deliveries and customer support every single day for the first year. They still do this once a month today. This goes down to one of the most important rules of business which is Know Your Customer (KYC) and as a founder, I think the one of the best ways to know more about your customer is through spending a lot of time with your initial customers. Paul Graham explains this concept extremely well in his article Do things that don't scale. Check it out (http://paulgraham.com/ds.html)
4. Hiring- look out for candidates with a bias for action. At DoorDash, they would ask candidates to acquire 100 new customers in 8 hours with 20 dollars and that was the entire interview. This “bias for action” thing is really important because life and learning is iterative in nature. I have started to take a more pragmatic view towards life because the world belongs to doers. All you need to have is a deep love for learning and the willingness to do things repeatedly. Tony Xu goes on to elaborate that they were looking for folks who have a strong bias for action, who have really high standards for everything they do, who are always trying to get better and who are competitive in nature because a lot of work they did had no other players involved.

Tony Xu’s key lessons on competing with incumbents are also highlighted in the article:

1. Build a better product. This starts with an intense obsession over that customer experience.
2. Compete on your own vector where you don’t want to play someone else’s game, especially if you can’t do it better.
3. Think about where the industry is in terms of its growth and evolution because there is always disruptive moments in industries and that’s really where you have the opportunity.
4. Hyper growth entrepreneurs normally find themselves firing themselves from what they do quite often. This is because there are too many problems to solve. And the best way to fire yourself is by finding out who the best in the area you are trying to get out off. I think that this “Hire the best” strategy is possible for companies with a lot of resources, but here I think we should lean more towards “Hire the most trainable”. Tony goes on to talk about managing your time as an entrepreneur at the hyper-growth stage because the return on your time is not uniform at all. He says that he has found that the return on time is highest in recruiting.
5. Always have to-do lists. I personally recently discovered how beneficial it is to have a diary. Try it out!

The article ends with a summary of Tony’s wisdom.

Justin is an amazing writer and you can find the full piece here(DoorDash’s Dominance: The Tony Xu Story | Just Go Grind by Justin Gordon). You should subscribe to his newsletter if you are interested in anything startup related.

Thanks, guys, for reading my first ever article, kindly share your comments on Twitter and LinkedIn( Jason Sentomero, FMVA | LinkedIn) . I look forward to hearing from you.