 Live from New York, it's the queue. Covering AWS Global Summit 2019. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services. Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman, my co-host Corey Quinn and we're here at the AWS Summit in New York City where I'm really happy to welcome to the program a first time guest but somebody that has an app that's on my phone, so Andy Fang who's the CTO of DoorDash, give a great presentation this morning, thanks so much for joining us. Absolutely happy to be here guys. All right, so before we dig into your Amazon stack, bring us back, you talked about 2013, your mission of the company was to help empower local businesses, I think most people know, DoorDash, delivery from my local businesses, whether that is a small place or Chipotle or the like there and I love the little anecdote that you said, the founders actually did the first few hundred deliveries but it gives a little bit of the breadth of the scope of the business now. Absolutely, yeah, I mean when we started in 2013, we started out of a dorm on Stanford campus and like you said, we were doing the first couple hundred deliveries ourselves but fast forwarding to today, we're obviously at a much, much different level of scale and I think the one thing that I mentioned about in my keynote is just we've been trying to keep up pace and more than doubling as a business every year and it's a really fascinating industry that we're in in the on demand delivery space in particular, I mean Dara, the CEO of Uber himself said in May, which is a month and a half ago, he said that the food delivery industry may become bigger than the ride hailing industry someday. So just one quick question on kind of food delivery because like I think back when I was in college, I worked at a food truck, it was really well known on campus and there are people that 20 years later, they're like, Stu, I remember you serving me these sandwiches and I loved it and the community and we gather and we talk. Today on campus, nobody goes to that place anymore because maybe I know my delivery person more than I know the person that's making it. So I'm just curious about the relationship between the local businesses and the people. How that dynamic is changing, the gig economy, I mean you guys are right in the thick of it. No, it's a great question. I think for merchants, a lot of the things that we talk to them about is you're actually getting access to customers who wouldn't even have walked by your store in the first place and I think that's something that they find to be very captivating and it shows in the store sales data when they start partnering with Adore-Dash. But we've also started building our products to really get customers to interact with the physical neighborhoods they're in. The most concrete example of that is we launched a product called Instore, an Instore pickup product where you can order online, skip the line and pick up the order yourself in the store and I think the way we can build the app experience around that, you can actually start building kind of a geospatial browse experience for customers with the Adore-Dash app, which means that they can get a little bit more familiarity with what's around them as opposed to just kind of looking at it on their phone themselves. All right, so the logistics of this are not trivial. You talked about 325% order growth. Your database is billions of rows, just the massive scale, massive transaction. Therefore, as a, you're an app and at the scale you're at, technology's pretty critical to your environment, so you've got to bring us inside that a little bit. Yeah, I mean, we're fortunate enough, and you and I were talking before the show, I mean, we're kind of born on the cloud, right? And we started off actually on Heroku back in 2013. We adopted AWS back in 2015 and there's just so many different services that Amazon Web Services has been able to provide us and they've added more over time. I think the one that I talked about was one that actually came out only in early 2018, which is the Aurora Postgres product. And we've been able to scale our databases, scale up our analytics infrastructure. We've also used AWS for things like, you know, real-time data streaming. They have the cloud watch product where it gives us a lot of insight into kind of how our servers are behaving and so the AWS ecosystem in of itself is kind of evolving and we feel like we've grown with them and they're growing with us and so it's been a great synergy over the past couple of years for sure. As you take a look at where you started and where you've wound up, can you use that to extrapolate a little bit further as far as what shortcomings are you seeing today that ideally would be better met by a cloud provider or at this point, is it such a simpatico relationship as you just alluded to where you just see effectively you're continuing to grow in similar directions just out of, I guess, happenstance? Yeah, it's a good question. I think there are some shortcomings. For example, AWS just recently launched MKS which is their in-house confidence solution. We're looking for something that's kind of a lot more vetted so we're considering do we adopt the AWS version or do we try to do it in-house or do we go with a third-party vendor that's- Confluence hard to say no to these days. Yeah, exactly and I think we want to make sure that we are building our infrastructure in a way that we feel confident in, can scale. With Aurora Postgres, it's done wonders for us but we've also kind of been one of the pioneers for AWS for scaling that product and I think we got kind of lucky in some ways there in terms of how it's been able to pan out but we want to make sure the stakes are a lot higher for us now and so when we have issues, millions of people face issues and so we want to make sure that we're being more thoughtful about it. AWS certainly has matured a lot over the past couple of years but we're keeping our options open and we want to do what's best for our customers and AWS more often than not has a solution but sometimes we have to consider other solutions and consider the fact that AWS may or may not solve some of the future problems we're facing. Oh yeah and I think that what's easy to overlook sometimes with something like a food delivery service it's easy to make jokes about it of oh what, you're too lazy to cook something and sure when I was younger, absolutely. Then I had a child and when she wasn't going to sleep when she was a baby and I only had one hand how do I feed myself? There's an accessibility story if people aren't able to easily leave the house so it's not just people aren't able to get their wings at the right time this starts becoming impacting for people it's an important need. Yeah and I think it's been awesome to see just how quickly it's been adopted and I think another thing about food delivery that people don't necessarily remember about today is it was primarily just a very dense urban area phenomenon, right? Like obviously in Manhattan where we are today food deliveries exist forever but the suburbs is where the vast vast majority of the growth of the industry has been and it's just awesome to see how this use case has flourished with all different kinds of people. Yeah I have to imagine there's a lot of analytics that are going on for some of these as you said in the rural areas, the suburban areas you've got, it's not as dense and how do you make sure you optimize for the people that are doing so what are some of the challenges you're facing there and how is technology helping? Exactly yeah I mean with our kind of a business it's really important for us to get into the lowest level of the detail, right? Just because we're growing 325% year on year in 2019 maybe we're growing faster in certain parts of the United States and growing slower in others and that's definitely the case and so one of the awesome things that we've been able to leverage from our cloud infrastructure is just the ability to support real-time data access and our business operators across Canada and the United States, they're constantly trying to figure out hey how are we performing relative to the market in our particular locality meaning not just the state of New York but Manhattan, which district in Manhattan, all that matters with a business like ours where it's just a hyper-local economy and so I think the real-time infrastructure particularly with things like with Aurora the fast replicas, we're able to actually get a lot of read hits to these replicas because it's not affecting our right volume so that's been really powerful and it's allowed our business operators to just really run and sprint. So Andy, I have to imagine just data is one of the most important things of your business. How do you look at that as an asset? Is there new things, new services that you can be putting out there both for the merches as well for the customers? Absolutely, I think one of the biggest ones we try to do is we never give merchant direct access to the customer data because we want to protect the customer's information but we do give them insights into how they can increase their sales and target customers that haven't used them before. So one of the biggest programs we launched over the past few years is what we call Try Me Free so merchants can actually target customers who've never placed an order from their store before and offer them a free delivery for their order from that store and so that's a great way for merchants to acquire new customers and it's a simple concept for them to understand and over time we definitely want to be able to personalize the ability to target these terms of promotions and so we have a lot of data to do that and we also have data in terms of what customers like and what they don't like in terms of their order behavior in terms of how they're rating the food, the restaurants so that kind of dynamic is something that is pretty interesting data set for us to have. You look at other local companies out there like Yelp and Google Maps they don't actually have verified transaction information whereas we do so I think it's really powerful for merchants to actually have that to make decisions off of. It's a terrific customer experience and it almost seems to some extent to be aligned with Amazon's professed customer obsession leadership principle to some extent and the reason I bring that up is you mentioned you started on Heroku and then in 2015 migrated off to AWS was it a difficult decision for you to decide first to effectively go all in on a single provider and secondly to pick AWS as that provider? It wasn't a hard decision for us to go to a cloud provider that was ready to do show time. I'd say Heroku is more of a student project kind of scale at that time, I don't know what they're doing today. But I think AWS at that time was still very, very dominant. I think we're considering Azure and GCP I think was kind of becoming a thing back then. AWS was always the most mature and they've done a great job of keeping their lead in this space. Google and Azure, I've propped up obviously Oracle Cloud's coming up too. And we're considering, I mean we've considered the capabilities of something like Google Cloud, their machine learning services are really powerful. They actually have really sophisticated probably more so than AWS. Kubernetes service is actually more sophisticated. I guess it's built in-house at Google so that makes sense. But we've considered the landscape out there but AWS has served a lot of our needs up to this point. And I think it's going to be a very dynamic industry with the cloud space and there's so much at stake for all these different companies and it's fascinating to just be a part of it and kind of leverage it. Yeah, so Andy, I'm guessing you know when you look at some of your peers out there and you know when a company files an S1 and everybody goes, oh my God, look at their cloud bill. You know, how do you look at that balance? You said in your keynote this morning, you have less than a handful of engineers working on the data infrastructure. So that line item of cloud, I'm guessing is non-trivial from your standpoint. So how do you look at that internally? How do you make sure you keep control and keep flexibility in your options yet focus on your core business and not the infrastructure piece of it? That is such a great question because it's something that we get, we think about that trade off a lot. Obviously in the early days, what really mattered ultimately is do we have product market fit and do we have something that people care about, right? So optimizing around costs obviously was not prudent earlier on. Now we're at a such large scale and obviously the bill is very big that optimizing the cost is this very real thing. And part of what keeps you satisfied with staying on one provider is kind of the ease of the setup and what you've already have configured there. And we've done optimizations over the years. We have folks on our finance team now who's basically looking at, hey, where are areas that we're being extremely inefficient? Where are areas that we can do bulk spend? And this is not just on AWS, but this is on all our vendors. Obviously AWS is one of our biggest and not the biggest line item there. And we just kind of take it from there and there's always trade offs you have to make, but I know there's companies out there that are trying to sell the value proposition of being able to optimize your cloud spend. And that is definitely something that there's a lot of, I'm sure there's a lot of places to cut costs in that we don't know about. And so yeah, I think that's something that we're being mindful of, I'd say. Yeah, the challenge too you see across the board is that there's a lot of things you can do programmatically with a blind assessment of the bill, but without business insight, it becomes increasingly challenging. And you spoke to it yourself, where you're not going to succeed or fail as a business because the bill winds up getting too high unless you're doing something egregious. It's a question of growth, it's about ramping, and you're not going to be able to cost optimize your way to your next milestone unless something is very strange with your business. So focusing on it and do course is almost always the right answer. Yeah, I mean when I think about increasing revenue or decreasing costs nine times out of 10, we're trying to provide more value, right? And so increasing revenue is usually the go-to option for us, but there are some times where it's obvious, hey, there's a low hanging fruit and cutting costs and if it's relatively straightforward to do, then let's do it. And I think with all the cloud infrastructure that we've been able to build on top of, we've been able to focus a lot of our energy and efforts on innovating, building new things, cementing our industry position, and yeah, I think it's been awesome to flourish on top of it. What, want to give you the final word? Any interesting insights in your business? You know, it's like, I like food and I like eating out and it feels like we've kind of flattened the world a lot. It's like, I think it was like five, six years ago, the first time I went to Hawaii and I got interested to poke. Everybody in California knows poke, but I live on the East Coast. Now I've got like three places within half an hour of me that I can get it. So, you know, those kind of things, what insights are you seeing? You know, what's changing in the marketplace? What's exciting you these days? Yeah, I mean, for us, we've definitely seen a phenomenon where different food trends kind of percolate across different areas and kind of start in one region and then spread out across the entire United States or even to Canada. I would say, I don't know, we don't, we try to have as much merchant selection on the platform as possible so that no matter what the new hottest trend is, that more likely than not, we're going to have what you want on the platform. And I think what's really exciting to us over the next couple of years is, you know, last year we actually started, we started satisfying grocery delivery fulfillment. So, in fact, we power a lot of grocery deliveries for Walmart today, which is exciting and a lot of other grocers lined up as well. We're going to see how far we can take our logistics capabilities from that standpoint. But really, we just want to have as many options as possible for our customers. Well, anything, thanks so much for joining us. Congratulations on the progress with Dora Dash. For Corey Quinn, I'm Stu Miniman. We'll be back here with more coverage from AWS Summit New York City 2019. Thanks as always for watching theCUBE.