 fantastic to have you. I know the audience would love to hear all the details of the 7 billion deal announced three, four weeks ago, but unfortunately we can't go into the specifics of that. But I wanted to give a bit of a flavor, though, to everybody around here on how you felt. So Tony, you've quoted Myangelo very smartly, saying that people won't remember what you did or what you said, but they'll always remember how you made them feel. So when you met for the first time, what were the feelings? Yeah, we met for the first time, I think at the end of 2017. But I think like the time when I really had kind of this feeling about Tony was when we spent a couple of days together in the same city. And I remember thinking to myself after those couple of days that like, it could be really cool to work together. I think I think the thing that surprised me was like this strong feeling of humility that came from you that I think is like something that we share as two cultures in our in our companies. Like you're going to have high ambition levels. But if you're not grounded to earth, if you don't like really care about your customers, really care about what you're doing, you're not going to be like a long term success. So I think that kind of humility, that feeling of like this could be really fun to work together. And also that I could learn from you. I think that's something I recognized like after those couple of days. So I'm an only child. But I guess if I were to imagine what it felt it feels like to have a sibling or to have a brother. That's kind of how it felt, you know, it in many ways, you know, both teams and organizations grew out of the same circumstances. And as a result, had similar context and obviously a very similar space and set of problems where the approach in terms of building the best service for all of our audiences really resonated, not just really with Mickey, but really with everyone that we were able to meet. And so that's really how it felt. Long lost brothers. But let's get to the main topic of the day, which is about scaling yourselves at the companies you've built from idea to IPO and this deal now taking place. Let's be very pragmatic and to the point, give advice to the founders in the room. Starting from the seed and early stage, Tony, could you share a time or story from the days that you think has really molded the culture and ways of working at DoorDash? Sure. You know, I guess in the third month of the company's life, you know, the DoorDash was, you know, obviously very young, maybe just a handful of people weeks away from running out of cash. We actually experienced, unfortunately, a very large outage that caused, you know, all of the orders to be over an hour late, which certainly was very disappointing. And, you know, we had a decision to make, which was whether or not to refund in full all of the customer orders that day. The challenge was that, you know, the refunds would have totaled to north of 40% of our bank account, which was, you know, fairly low to start with. So the weeks would have probably turned quickly into days in terms of cash left. It took the founders and I maybe 30 seconds to make that decision to give everybody a refund. And actually, we stayed up all night. The entire team did to bake cookies for everyone, to drop them off on top of the refunds, you know, before they would wake up the next morning. I think for me, that probably was actually how we derived one of our core operating principles today, which is still around customer obsession and not competitor focus. And, you know, I think that the thinking, even though we're very, very, very small, was we'd rather die trying to be excellent to our customers than, I guess, to have made it in a more mediocre way. And that really resonates, I think, even to this day when we have new hires joining every single day, week, month. And that still becomes, you know, one of the stories that ultimately makes the value actually livable and understandable. Yeah, certainly a good example of doing common things uncommonly well, which is something you, Mickey, also say very often. How do you do that as a CEO, like set the bar of quality insanely high? Yeah, I think for us, like, we've always tried to just focus on focus on the customer. I think it varies. Like a lot of people start with the mindset that, hey, we want to build a big service, we want to have in the millions of customers. And you try to only focus on things that, you know, scale to the millions of people. But, you know, you'd rather should focus on getting like the first person, the first 10 people, the first 100 people really to love your service and to really try to make something amazing happen for them. And I think our focus has always been that let's try to just love every one of our customers and do everything that we can to provide a great service for them. And I remember in the early days when we founded Walt, one of my technical co-founders, his mother told him, which is a great thing to say to a product founder that, Walt is a mediocre service with a world class customer support. And I think like, you know, why we always like put our put so much effort in the customer support was that like, hey, our product is not ready. Like, we're still figuring out a lot of things and doing this kind of last mile delivery optimization efficiently is very difficult to do. So we're going to realize that, you know, there's always going to be a certain percentage of problems that we just want to make sure that even those customers, like we can take good care of them and give them a world class experience. Yep. Rather have 100 people love you than 1000 who like you. And both companies have gone through also very rough periods of time in the early and also maybe later stages. So maybe Tony, you start with both. How have those molded your cultures? And what have you learned? Yeah, I think it's really easy sometimes to look at startups on the outside, especially, you know, some of the press articles, and just see this up and to the right chart that happens very quickly overnight. That certainly was in our experience and probably not the experience that, you know, most of you who will become successful will have. We were for the first six and a half years out of our eight and a half year journey, quite cast strapped compared to all of our peers, we had a fraction of the operating budgets that we were running on. We had no marketing team, not because we dismissed the function, but because we could not afford a marketing budget and therefore a team to actually, you know, use their talents against that. And those are very difficult years. 2016, 17, 18, in particular, we had a very hard time raising financing. And we're always on the brink of running out of cash, trying to also, you know, build the best service. I think the things that ultimately got people through that, and it wasn't like all rosy, you know, we actually did see some attrition during those years, is really the commitment to one another. You know, I think that it's very, very hard to manufacture constraints, or a sense of urgency, or a sense of wanting to, you know, commit and fight for one another. If that's how you feel right now as a founder where maybe you're in your garage or your, you know, proverbial dorm room, that's an awesome thing. It probably doesn't feel that way. Certainly not all the time, but those constraints are really what allows you to come up with the creativity, the energy, the innovation, the uniqueness that ultimately will allow you to persevere. And for us, that group that's stuck together in those very difficult years, there's nothing that would have penetrated the loyalty of those team members for one another. Yeah. Moving on to growth stage and operators and building companies, at least what I've learned is that ideas don't matter that much. It's really how you execute and operate. And maybe starting with Mickey this time, what what does an outstanding growth operator look like for you? Yeah, I'm like, I've come to realize in the years that I've been building world that, you know, attitude has a funny way of trumping experience. So if someone has this kind of mindset that, you know, let's figure it out, like being optimistic about problems, trying to learn wanting to become better. You know, that tends to go a very long way when building companies where very few people in the world know how to do something like what we are doing. So I think when it comes to world-class operators, I think, you know, you should like one of the best advice I was given on hiring came from K school and the former CEO of booking.com. And he said that, you know, look at the person that you need, look for that person in another company and look at what they've done. And you don't need that person after they've done what you need in the previous company, you need them before they did that thing for the first time. And I think like you need to look for the people that are going to do these things with you for the first time. And these are not people who did it before. There are people that can do it for the first time with your company. And that's a mindset. That's an attitude. That's a learning capability that you're looking for. Yeah. Tony, what kind of growth stories have you seen with the best operators at DoorDash? I think the best, you know, growth operators are the people who are just learning machines. I mean, if you think about the rate of change that you as founders are going through right now, whether, you know, you're one person moving to five people to 20 people beyond that, the rate of change and frankly, the amount of learning that's happening, you know, candidly, even organically is a lot faster than anything, you know, that anyone has experienced before. So it's really difficult actually for experience to keep up with that. In fact, what I found is that experience tends to decay pretty fast, especially how fast and accelerating the changes around us. As a result, you have to hire people who can constantly, you know, you know, teach themselves what excellence looks like at that stage, at the next stage. And so the best growth operators are learning machines. Yeah. Any concrete examples of a completely unconventional background, for example, who end up doing something different than their education? Sure. So we we've had a general council who started, you know, doing an excellent job in that area. That's his training as a, you know, a lawyer and a partner at a law firm. You know, but over the years, you know, that general council has gone on to lead the marketing team, the customer support team, the HR team, at times, you know, the business development team. And, you know, when you ask, I think, what allowed that person to be able to be successful? It was his ability to learn very, very, very rapidly, you know, you know, what were the problems? How do you actually just solve them in a very pragmatic, tangible way? And frankly, you know, learn from the benefit from the experiences of others, you know, going out to other companies and, you know, asking, what does great HR look like, you know, to the head of HR at a company that might be at the next stage, as well as learning from the team, you know, I think one of the things we oftentimes forget is some of the best, you know, lessons that we can learn are right in front of us, because our teams are the closest to the problems. And that's where the maximal learning happens. Yeah. Continuing with Tony, we do a lot of hyper-theses when building companies like this, and we need to test them as fast as possible, also makes us make mistakes every now and then. So what would be a lesson learned the hard way on the journey? Well, there are many mistakes. We could choose all of them. I guess when I look at, you know, the jobs of the CEO, one of them is to never run out of cash and to make sure that you can, you know, raise the amount of financing to allow the company to keep making progress. And I know that there's a lot of activity out there in the investment world, and there's probably more money than ever before deployed, which makes sense at times. But sometimes you can get ahead of yourself, and that happened to Dordash in the 2015-16 era when our industry was actually quite hyped at the time. We decided to raise, I decided to, you know, take a very high offer for our Series B, which later on cost us, because, you know, when the market did turn, and it turned very, very quickly, unpredictably, that was, which was out of my control, the company actually struggled to raise our Series C the next round because of some of the choices I had made in our Series B of taking that high price. And so, you know, that's an example of where, you know, when I look at the things that were in my control and the things that were not in my control, maybe I scrapped the things that weren't in my control. But the thing that was in my control was actually raising, you know, the previous round at a high price, which made it more difficult. And when, you know, the conditions did change in the market, made a tough situation for the company that didn't need to be there. And I think that these are things that are easy to say in hindsight. But at the time, I wish someone, you know, gave a little bit more caution to the wind to me. Yeah, great story. Miki, I wanted to ask you on a topic that I feel personally, it's a bit of a taboo in this industry, which is about founding teams and, you know, how founders at some point of the past do leave the company. So I wanted to ask from you, what advice could you give to other founders on this? Yeah, I think when we start a company on you have like, we were six founders in a room building product for the first nine months of our existence, you know, basically just like coding, making designs, talking with customers, talking with like merchants and so forth. That's a very different exercise than if you look at Walt today, we're over 4,000 people. We operate in 23 countries over 200 cities. Like it's a very different operation and product and technology company. And the reality is that people scale very differently and people have very different kinds of ambitions. Like, you know, what it is like to build kind of the first version of the product and talk with the first customers in that kind of six person room situation is very different from, for instance, where we are today. And like, you know, it's normal that, you know, people are going to change along the journey. It's not just about founders. Like, you know, this like, you know, before, before Walt, I worked also on Slush, like I kind of got used to the fact that, you know, some of the people are going to remain the same and they're going to go all the way with you and they're going to learn and they're going to take new roles and so forth. And some people are just going to, you know, figure out that, you know, I love the early stage. And now I'm going to go back to doing the early stage and you're going to have other people that are really good at doing the scale up stage. And that's fine. So I don't think it should be such a taboo because there's nothing to be ashamed about it. Like every founder of every company by definition will leave one day. The question is when, like, Jeff Bezos now is no longer working full time at Amazon, taking 30 years to do that. But like eventually that happens. And the question is more about how do you do it in a way that makes the company stronger, not weaker as a result? Fantastic advice. When we're on the time of scaling and, you know, getting a lot of new people in, have there been moments when US CEO have had to go and intervene with the way towards which the culture of the company has been going to maybe Tony first? I think culture is one of these things where just like most big things, they tend to be very hard to course correct or reverse once and maybe goes in the direction that you don't like. So my big advice here, especially if you're thinking about this topic or other topics where you have less reversible decisions is to take time to get it right from day one. And so the time I spent the most on, you know, all things culture was really in the beginning, you know, the first two years watching the behaviors of the team that made I think us who we were, because I believe fundamentally culture is 80% who you are and 20% who you aspire to be. That's the best way in which you can authentically live it every day where you don't have to recite it off of some, you know, website or, you know, writings on the wall, but you can actually use the stories as well as just frankly, you know, the natural behaviors of people on your team to actually carry forward and scale that culture. So the time in which I injected myself the most was really at the beginning, you know, watching our team writing down the stories of real things that actually happen and then turning them into principles that ultimately became our culture. Yeah, how about Mickey and Waltz? Yeah, one of the best advice that was given on culture came from the ilk of the pharmacy of Supercell. We were maybe 50 people back at the time and he told me that you should really take the time to write down what your culture is about. And I remember like sitting down we're working on it with my co-founder, you honey, it took us like a year to really figure out how we codified the things that, you know, who we are as a team. How do we write it down and explain it to someone who's new and joining the company to explain what we're about as a company? And it was really difficult to do and it was really frustrating. But now I kind of get it because like we wrote it down back at the time. Now we're over 4,000 people. And you know, when you're when you're scaling culture, it's about understanding what has made you great understanding the things that describe who we are as a team and making it more scalable, like those stories that explain to new people that explain to people that are interviewing with the company that, you know, what kind of a group of people are we? And I think like writing it down was one of the most important things we did. It felt frustrating at the time, but in hindsight it was a really important thing for us to get right. Yeah. Moving on to talking a little bit more about becoming an established company. Miki, if I'm not wrong, Walt is the biggest company you've ever worked in. And you have to make world-class decisions every day. So how do you know what world-class looks like without having seen it before? Yeah. This is the, you know, the sucky and the cool thing about being a CEO in a company that grows because you constantly have to do things where you have no idea like what excellence looks like in that thing. Like, I remember when I was given an advice in, like, 2014, 2015 that one of the most important hires you make is going to be a great recruiter. And I'm like, great. I've never seen any recruiter, not alone, like, talking about what a great one looks like. Or when we started hiring a new CFO two years ago, like, Miki, you need a CFO that's a really great growth stage CFO. I've never seen a growth stage CFO. So, like, you have to become very good at learning about different things you're working on. And like, for me, it's always being that, okay, I need to understand what a great recruiter looks like. So I probably should try to find a lot of great recruiters and just learn from them and understand what they're like as people. And when we started hiring for a CFO, I asked our top investors that, you know, who are the best CFOs in the different portfolio companies and can you make an introduction. And it's just hoping to call and ask a lot of questions, trying to understand why is this person a great CFO? And by the time you've talked with 20, 30 people, you start to form a picture. So it's about learning about the things you don't know and setting that kind of bar for excellence. Yeah, Tony, you lead a company that's today valued tens of billions already stock listed in everything. How do you measure your success as CEO? Well, it's certainly not from the stock price, you know, I think, you know, one of the hardest things about, you know, what we do as founders and later on as, you know, maybe CEOs of larger teams is to try your best to not focus on what you cannot control and to focus instead on what you can control. And when I look at the jobs of the CEO, I mentioned one of them was never running out of cash. You know, the second one of them would be hiring the senior team. The third one is setting strategy. And the fourth one is, you know, building a great culture and sustaining that great culture, especially as the organization evolves. That's really how I judge success, you know, I judge success on, you know, those input metrics, which are way more in my control than, you know, certain outcome metrics that are not in my control. It's hard at times, certainly to, you know, focus, you know, and fight human nature to maniacally focus on that. But chasing excellence really is about mastering the inputs so that you can achieve the outcomes you desire. Right, right framework. Question for both. What's the proudest moment in the history of your companies? Mickey first. Yeah, for me, like, there's not a single proud moment, but there's a lot of these tiny proud moments and they all have to do with people really with, you know, our team with, you know, our different groups of customers. Like, you know, for instance, one moment was the last offsite we organized before COVID. We had been 100 people a year prior. Then we have this offsite. We've grown to 500 people. We've recruited a lot of people in different countries around the world. And we're bringing the whole team together for the first time. And I remember being super nervous about does this feel like the same team? Does this feel like the same company? Like, we're bringing all these people from, you know, 10 plus countries that have never met each other. What is everyone just like, who are these people? And we don't feel the same. And the proudest moment for me back then was that, like, you know, spending time with our team, like, I just realized that this feels like family. This feels like very similar people, even though people have joined in such different roles and countries and situations to the company. And then there's a lot of moments when when a customer has reached out and thanked us for we're expanding to an area that, you know, how we've helped them in their life or one courier that came to, you know, recognize me on the street and came to thank me that, you know, thank you for doing what you do. And explained like how he's using Walt as a courier and what we've done for his life. And a restaurant owner that, you know, started crying when when when she heard that I was working with Walt, because like they had had a really tough time during COVID. And we helped them kind of through that period. So these individual small stories of people ultimately are where my proudest moments come from. I think in a very similar way, you know, it's always about the people and the customers, you know, for us, for me personally, watching especially folks at DoorDash who, you know, DoorDash now has been around for, you know, about eight and a half years, watching people who've been around for five, six, seven years, constantly up level themselves and take on, you know, the biggest job of their lives. And really making and watching those bets that we made a few years ago or several years ago on people who had more talent and experience actually now become the experienced growth operators. That's pretty incredible. And watching them, you know, go on to, you know, lead big teams or even some of whom have departed to start their own companies. That's really, really rewarding. I think the other piece is kind of what Mickey said around, you know, our customers, you know, sometimes one of the things I love doing is actually just being a new user on our platform, whether it's a new consumer, merchant or dasher to really feel like, you know, what is this service all about? You know, why are we actually, you know, obsessing over all of these details? It's really to make sure that we can hopefully do an excellent job for our audiences and kind of similar to Mickey, you know, the way that our team showed up during COVID was incredible. Watching the team actually advertise, you know, for example, to all customers to telling them to order for delivery across all platforms, including those of our competitors and literally advertising on behalf of our peers was something that I think is one of the proudest decisions I've seen our company, you know, make because I think a lot of times we just think about how do you grow? How do you out compete out execute? Those are important things in building a business. But the fundamental, you know, truth of why you start and why you work as hard as you do probably has a lot to do with your customers. And that was very, very rewarding to see. Heartwarming. All right, let's end up with lightning round. So one, two sentences, answers to quick questions. Number one, what's the greatest personal sacrifice you've had to make to be here where you are? Yeah, I think it's mental peace. Like the reality is that this is a full time job. Like you don't go home and, you know, you know, take an evening off and next morning get and get to go back to work. You're always up here working. Yep. Same answer. Clear. Two, what habit keeps you sane? I love to run. I mean, it's the one thing that I've been able to maintain as a habit over the last eight years. I, you know, and running every day is, you know, what keeps me very, very grounded. Yeah, exercise and spending time with kids. Makes sense. What's your favorite question when interviewing candidates? What is the shittiest job you've done? Like, you know, you see a lot of people that have amazing pedigrees. So you want to know, can they get their hands dirty? That's a good one. I guess if I were to borrow one from one of our investors and board members, Alfred Lin, it would be, what would your worst reference say about you? Oh, that's humbling one. Last, one advice you'd give in each other five years ago? Don't obsess about competition. Obsess about the customer. Just lead, follow the customer. I would say try to take a longer term horizon. I think one of the things that is so hard when you're in the earliest days is literally, you know, thinking about the next thing on your to-do list. You know, once and again, hopefully once a week or something, you can also make it a habit to make a slightly longer to-do list so that you can always, you know, think slightly ahead of maybe what the next issues will be. Thanks so much.