LEADERSHIP

The best thing I ever did was hire people smarter than me and get out of their way.

We are stubborn on vision. We are flexible on details.

It is fine to celebrate success but it is more important to heed the lessons of failure.

Culture compounds just like capital. Good culture builds value over decades. Bad culture destroys it faster than any financial mistake.

Culture is simply a shared way of doing something with passion.

The hardest part about being a leader is demonstrating or showing vulnerability.

We will not shy away from the hard things. If we work together, and put the customer first, I'm confident we'll unlock the potential of this great company.

The hard part isn't building the product. The hard part is building a company that continuously builds great products.

I got the CEO thing mostly wrong for the first few years. Turns out, managing people is nothing like managing code.

I would do anything short of an illegal act to keep this company going.

I was fired on a Friday and rehired on a Tuesday. It was the most bizarre week of my life.

Growth is oxygen. Without growth, you are slowly asphyxiating.

Mediocrity is a disease. And it's a communicable disease. Mediocre people hire mediocre people. Urgency is a muscle — exercise it.

I made decisions that were not in the best interest of the company. I own that.

Every new employee at DoorDash does a delivery shift. Including engineers. Including me. You can't build for Dashers if you've never been one.

In March 2020, we went from hiring mode to war mode. We onboarded 300,000 shoppers in 30 days. I didn't sleep for a week.

I studied Marxist philosophy under Habermas in Frankfurt. Now I build tools for the Pentagon. Life is full of plot twists.

Laying off half your team is the hardest thing a founder can do. We built too fast for a market that moved too fast. The technology is right. The timing was too hot.