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we want door dash to be, it's just, it's just going to be one of many companies that's going to help enable that transition.
like a warehouse or, or a virtual or what, what they call ghost kitchens or ghost convenience stores, which we're, um, making a big push, it's, it's, it's, which we call dash marks
COVID kind of made merchants realize kind of the importance of having a kind of a, what I call like, I guess like an online or e-commerce strategy, right? And then the crop applies to restaurants and also just any local business. I mean, I think before COVID, like, I'm like less than like 20% of, or maybe even less have, have, of, of, of small business businesses had like an online presence. And that number has obviously jumped significantly higher now. And, and door dash is a great platform to
we decided, okay, like we're going to reduce our, our commission, our cut from the restaurant... we kind of slashed everyone's commission by 50% across the board. Uh, you know, which, you know, in the short term costed us a lot of money, but we felt like it was the right thing to do long term.
during COVID, it kind of just, you know, yeah, I remember like every week, like it was like a record week and it was just, it was just a lot to just even keep up.
if you're spending all the money to subsidize and there's a result, you have negative unit economics, but you're getting a lot of growth. That's very different than, um, you know, if you have positive growth and, or positive unit economics, but then you're spending that money for maybe geography expansion, or you're spending it on customer acquisition, where, you know, you're, you, you know, what your payback period is like, it's like not every dollar burned is like the same, right?
always, you know, kept us in check and, and, and said, Hey, like you, we, you know, it's important to continue to stay super efficient.
when the soft bank round did come in, in 2018, late 2018, then all the work we did between 2015 and 2018 sort of paid off because now we were just, uh, structurally, we were just much more efficient than our competitors. Like we had better unit economics. Uh, we had better product, better quality, uh, you know, much more efficient.
I think, and I whenever people ask me, well, what's the word actually super power, you know, it's our ability to execute and our, you know, maniacal focus on like unit economics, operational excellence. ... And between 2016, 2018, that was when I felt DoorDash was a company was built because we didn't have the money. ... we had to get to unit economics, profitable.
for a very long time, we actually couldn't raise money. Like, like, I think I remember between 2015 and 2018, when everything started, you know, Uber was going crazy, like all these funds, he started coming in, we weren't actually one of the beneficiaries of it. Like we, um, you know, we, we struggled to raise money.
And I remember one day we walked into this macaroon store ... she started showing me this book label, which just turns out was her order bookkeeping ... and majority of them she had to turn away. ... And as I started talking to Chloe and she said, well, I don't want to turn them down. I wished there was a solution out there, but unfortunately ... if I have a delivery request that comes in, I pretty much have one of two choices. First is I could do it myself ... it takes time away from the store
we had like eight restaurants on a landing page called, it was called PaloAltodelivery.com.
So, I mean, so we started 2013, and I'll get to the PaloAltodelivery bit later. But I mean, it's funny because we really weren't trying to do a startup. It was literally one of those typical Stanford dorm room class projects. We weren't trying to do a startup or even a food company or delivery company. The, I think, I think me and I met my co-founders, Andy and Tony, through, I met, Andy was in my freshman year dorm. And then Tony, we met through a, one of those project-based classes at Stanford