 Good afternoon, Slush. How are you guys doing today? Good. Awesome. How are you two doing? Little drags. Great. We won an ice hockey match. Founders versus investors. Founders won. Fine. Founders always win. Great morning. So about this partnership that you couldn't talk about the last time that you two were on stage. But Mickey, why didn't you give us a little background on how I came about and what happened before announcing this partnership? Yeah, so we had known with Tony. I think we met for the first time in, like, in 2017. So we knew each other, and we knew of each other. But I remember when we started having, like, a deeper conversation during the summer of 2021, the reality was we were raising a round of financing. And actually, when the DoorDash transaction was signed, we were supposed to sign that transaction's definite agreement the next day. So we couldn't always tell our investors that we decided to go with DoorDash instead. So they found out in the media that we are not raising a 1.1 billion euro round to vault as they thought it would be. You're raising 1.1 billion? Yeah. So we had terms that can have the agreements done. Was that cash or crypto? That was cash. And like, the reality was that when we started the conversation, like, I don't think I've ever really said this to Tony, but I was super uncommitted. Like, for me, it was having heard from a lot of investors that, like, there's a lot of similarity between DoorDash and vault. We didn't know each other as well, because, like, you guys were focused on the US, we were focused on Europe. So I figured there's a lot to learn, and it made sense to build the relationship. But we were not really looking to do what we ended up doing. And that's really something that, you know, in the process of getting to know each other better, I also realized that, like, actually, there's more here that we can do than we could do on our own. And that's why we're here. If the partnership didn't come together, what would you have done? I mean, we would have signed the round of financing. I think, like, the biggest change for Vault would have been that we would have had to be a lot more short-term focused. I think the biggest benefit from a Vault perspective out of the DoorDash partnership has been that, you know, we can be a lot more long-term focused. Like, we launched two new countries this year. We're doing dark stores in 20 different countries. We've launched Drive in Europe. We've launched Vault Plus in Europe. Like, we continue to expand and we continue to obsess on not just how to build a better service, but also how to serve more customers, more couriers, more merchants around the world. So, long-term focus. And, Tony, how much did you end up paying for Vault and how's it going? 10% of the company. 10%? Delusion is permanent. Delusion is permanent. And so, obviously, it's something that, you know, we took very, very seriously as it was a very consequential decision. But many times, I think, in these kinds of decisions, it's a conviction-oriented bet. Because, as Mickey said, you know, before you enter any sort of marriage, it's very hard to know a priori whether or not you're going to make the right decision or what life is going to be like, you know, afterwards. And so, the biggest question in my mind was, you know, how are we ever going to manage a founder, especially one that is in 23 different countries, many, many thousands of miles away from us, and someone we just really got to know, you know, seriously in the last few months? You know, I think that was the burning question. But, you know, I think the thing that always came up for us was, you know, from the first interaction where, you know, we were talking about different markets and how they were performing, and Mickey's instinctual reaction, as well as Ricky and others on the team, was just to pull up the dashboards. Very, very reminiscent of a DoorDash value of operating at the lowest level of detail. Or the fact that, you know, we went back to the VOLD office and I saw Mickey literally cleaning up, I mean, like shreds of trash that was laying around, you know, from a late night that the team was probably working hard after. And, you know, that sense of humility and servant leadership that we look for in, you know, anyone that joins the team at DoorDash, that ownership mentality. And so, I think very quickly we found ourselves, you know, meeting a team that always just wanted to find the right answer, as opposed to care about who got credit for it, someone who had a very similar long-term view. And, you know, how is it going? I mean, we've effectively retained everyone, you know, at the company, you know, two years after closing. And I think that's a great, you know, sign and leading indicator of what has happened, what's going on in the future. And they've tripled the business, you know, since we've teamed up. I don't know, I think it's going pretty well. I mean, they're growing at rates that are multiples of their peers in this geography and many others. Sounds like it is going pretty well. Mickey, this is a question that I think is quite interesting. You could probably sense that there is a similar, you two are very similar in many ways, and you have similar values and culture. It's kind of what Tony talked about. But you're an entrepreneur, which makes you almost unemployable. So, how did you decide that you could make this partnership work and work inside of... From a personal perspective, this works for me, basically, because of Tony. Like, because we're both entrepreneurs, we're both funders and CEOs of our companies. And like, you know, we've gone through this, like, you know, close to a decade or over a decade of like, building a business in this industry, and we share a lot of battle scars and experiences, even as we build these companies on the other sides of the world. And like, you know, from my perspective, I'm still the founder and the CEO of world. I'm still the entrepreneur running and building the business. And now, of course, not just building the both business, but also the DoorDash business outside of the US. So, my role hasn't really changed that much. But it's more being that like, you know, we can have a much bigger ambition and a much longer-term perspective than we could have ever have done on our own. So, like, from a personal perspective, like, I'm here. I'm here because I like what I do. Tony, have you had to change your management and your leadership style to manage a founder? Well, I mean, I think it helps that I kind of know what the end product wants. You know, having worked as a founder and also having, you know, actually, many founders at DoorDash. I mean, there are hundreds of founders that join DoorDash, as well as hundreds of founders now, you know, who've gone on to raise venture funding from, you know, awesome investors to build their own companies in their own right. And so, I think seeing that ecosystem and, you know, literally understanding how do you craft that product is very, very helpful. You know, one of the first things to make you is, you know, there's the part about being the most patient capital for him, where he doesn't have to make, you know, decisions based on the quarter or based on the next fundraising milestone. But then there's also the partner aspect to it, where, I mean, we gave Mickey and team the ability to run all of DoorDash outside of the US, including many of DoorDash's markets, which, you know, I think took a leap of faith from, you know, everyone on the DoorDash side. But I think it became obvious. It's almost like when you hire someone excellent into your team and you see how much better they are than you, that you get pretty excited to, you know, just try to win together. And then I think secondly, you know, just because we wanna build the same things in relatively speaking the same ways over the same time horizon, I think it was really easy to wanna learn from one another. Got it. I don't think the audience quite knows how large your numbers are from a financial standpoint. I just heard the numbers from a delivery standpoint, 6 million deliveries a day. I think you wanna share some of the numbers from the last quarter, over $2 billion in revenue, $343 million of free cash flow, which- You're doing a good job of citing them, so. Which, you know, equates to over a billion dollars of free cash flow a year if you run rate that. And the last, that's very, very impressive. You talk about unicorns having a billion dollar valuation or raising them around, that's a billion dollars. You guys are generating a billion dollars of free cash flow. You always capital having to be capital disciplined. I'll start with you, Mickey. Build a capital intensive business or capital efficient business? So I think like building any business is always a balance between growth and profitability. And how do you like balance the two? And, you know, we are in a very big industry. We are very early in this very big industry. So I think it would be very dangerous for us to be like obsessing only about like short-term profitability. So I think like if I look at, you know, what we're doing, like we are very much a growth company. We're still very early into that journey. But like if I look at Walt, we were always a capital efficient business from the get go. Like the reason we were able to succeed as a company was that like we didn't have access to large pools of capital for a very long time. We came from a small home market and we just needed to be very smart about like choosing our bets and how do we build up the business and how much we invested into it. And that's similar to what DoorDash had to do within the year. Can you expand on that? Because I think some of the, we got some Twitter questions from the audience that suggested that today is different. Fundraising is much harder now. What would you be doing differently if you had to fundraise to, you know, in today's environment versus the time that you were building? This reminds me of 2017. We raised our series B in 2017. Every investor except one that we spoke with told us that this business doesn't work. The internet economics are never going to make sense. And even if they do Uber is going to kill everyone. No one wanted to invest into our business. Actually, we were very close to having to sell the business for I think over a hundred million, a hundred million dollars at the time because we couldn't get anyone to believe in what we were building. And then finally we found one investor that led our series B that was 83 North and Laurel Bowden, who had been like an early investor in JustEat. And she recognized what we had done was unique. A lot of people didn't give us that credit. And if I think about the fundraising environment right now, it reminds me of the fundraising environment back in 2017. Like most of the time fundraising is really difficult. Like it is not something that like just magically happens because the market is great. Like my assumption is that any round you raise you should assume that it's going to be very, very, very difficult to make it happen and go from there. So the message is not that different today than it was back then. These like time's going waves. And then there's a perception that it's easier to raise money in the US versus in Europe. Tony, was fundraising easy for you? I mean, it was similar to Mickey's journey. I mean, in the same time era of 16, 17, parts of 18, I mean, DoorDash had about a thousand days where I was wandering in the desert, asking for a penny of cash and I came up empty pretty much for a thousand days. So it was a thousand days of wandering. And so no, it was definitely difficult. And I think, especially if you're an early stage founder, the most important thing is to find that bet that gives you the disproportionate outcome which is going to be finding product market fit. So the best advice I think in a tough fundraising environment right now is to focus on building the product and making sure that you truly have built something that people want so that, and product velocity and how fast you ship your experiments is gonna help you achieve that the fastest and the earliest. And if you can do that, then the rest will almost take care of itself. The money in some ways will find you because that will be the best formula to achieve this growth and profitability conundrum which is sometimes hard to do in the same time period. Since you mentioned product velocity, I'm gonna ask you this question. How do you measure product velocity inside of DoorDash? And then I'll ask you inside of vault. To me, product velocity is really, function of a few things. But I think in the earliest stages, it's really how fast you can understand something and de-risk something. For example, in the case of DoorDash, if we were to add the 13th Japanese restaurant in Citi A or if we were to decrease prices by a dollar or if we were to reduce delivery times by one minute or increase our customer support generosity by X percent, what does that translate into the outcome? That's a very, very hard set of things to actually understand. But if you were to understand it, it's a quite valuable relationship between the inputs and the outcomes and it makes you a very efficient company that can grow as well as achieve strong unit economics so that you can actually build a business over time that gets to profitability. And so to me, it's really about how fast you can understand something. So you can de-risk the most important parts of your company. Anything to add, Mickey, on product velocity? Yeah, product velocity is one of the most difficult things to get right. Like, we have, in vault, we have around 700 people building, like doing product and design and engineering. And the reality is that when you have a small team in a single room, you're building something from a scratch, it's a lot easier to have a high level of velocity. But then you come to an environment where you have tens and tens of teams building interconnected things. There are things that you have to refacture. There are things that you have to build on top of other things, being built by other teams. And velocity is not an easy topic to get right or even to understand. I think what we've learned at Vault is that it's just a continuous journey. We try to figure out that what are the things slowing us down, how can we make, how we work together more simple, what are the teams that have great velocity? What are we seeing there? How about the places where we're seeing that things take much longer than what we thought? How can we improve there? So it's just this ongoing, continuous process. Now, at Sequoia, we like to use the term crucible moments. There are certain moments along your journey that you have to make the right decision because you're going to veer off on a path. One path is much better than the other. What are some of the crucible moments in your journey, Miki? Yeah, for Vault, I remember 2014, we had our six founders in a room discussing about Vault. We hadn't incorporated. We hadn't raised funding. And we had a conversation like, doesn't make sense to do this. And one of my co-founders said that if Miki has a good day, this is happening. If Miki has a bad day, this isn't happening. That was the decision process, whether you have a good day or a bad day. And he said that this is 50-50 whether we're actually going to do this thing. And ultimately, I remember that we just decided that, fuck it, we're just going to do this. And there were a lot of these kind of moments where competitor X was doing something and times were very difficult. And I think we had three times when we had less than one month of cash left. There was a time when we had to lay off one third of our employees before our series B. Because even as we had gone in the business to a good place, we had hired to quickly compare to our growth at the time. There was a time when we didn't pay salaries to our founders because we didn't have enough capital in the bank before we raised a new round. So the reality is that you go through these kind of moments where your resolve that you build as a team in those moments is what really carries you over the next leg of the journey. So for us, it was a lot about the founding story and each of those moments where we had to raise a round of capital. And that was kind of a conjuncture of like, is this going to happen or is this not going to happen? How about you, Tony? What are some crucible moments inside of Dordache's journey? There are several, but I think the through line, though, including what Mickey said, is really that I think optionality is very, very expensive, especially if you're a young startup because time is your most precious resource and it's always running against you. And optionality slows you down, which is very, very tricky. And so you kind of have to just commit and then almost find out what happens afterwards. For us, one of the first things that comes to mind was three months into Dordache's life, we're running out of money, days away of running out of money. We get passed over by an awesome investor, Alfred Lin. And we also pretty much a week later run into an outage where every single order is laid by over an hour and to refund every single customer that would have cost us about 40% of the bank account, leaving even fewer days of cash remaining. And the founders, we took 30 seconds to make the decision to refund everyone. And maybe this is survivorship bias and there's certainly some of that here, but it was this desire that we'd rather live up to our own standards of what we deemed to be excellent than to cater towards staying alive and being mediocre. And that's what ultimately penned the value at Dordache of customer obsession over competitor focus. And I think these crucible moments tell you a lot about what the thing to do is because oftentimes you only have one choice. The hard thing you have to do is to fight your own psychology and go for it because the rest usually does take care of itself. It doesn't always end up in success, but it certainly makes clear for you what to do. Some of the things that you both do really well, I think, is not well understood. You both embrace constraints. And you've had to partly because it was hard to raise money. How do you think about constraints? Does it motivate you? Does it distract you? How does it crystallize your thinking in this world of operating? Miki, why don't you go take that? Yeah, we founded Vault in 2014. So that's like nine years ago. And what's really kept this exciting for me on a personal level is that we've had to go through so many different phases and stages and what's that required from me as a CEO. I remember when EQD Ventures led our series, a K-School in the first CEO of booking.com told me that, Niki, the most important thing you need to do is that you have to hire a great recruiter. Because that's what growth companies are about. They're about recruiting. You need a great recruiting leader. And I'm like, great. I have never met a recruiter in my life. I have no idea what I'm looking for. And I'm like, trying to figure out what is a recruiter and what do they look like and what have they done before and how do I know someone is a great recruiter. And it's like these hundreds of these kind of things that have to do like, have we raised our serious fee? I remember we started fundraising. I have no idea how you raise a serious fee around the financing. What materials you need, how you do it. I'm like, we have four months to do this. If we don't, the company's going to go bust. And it's like, so these can be very demotivating moments because the obstacle looks so big and insurmountable. But ultimately, you just figure it out. You just learn. You go day by day and you try to figure out the next step. And that's what we've done like a hundred times in this company, both personally and on a company level. Antoni, one of the things I think, one of your superpowers is that you have this ability to think very high and strategic and go operate at the lowest level of details. One of your values is to be able to operate at the lowest level of details. How did you learn that? And then how do you make sure that the rest of the organization hire for that? Well, some of it has to do with what your company needs to be successful. If you're building the next Apple and where everything is about perfection and it's maybe less about experimentation and gathering data in a world that you cannot control, some of these things may or may not apply. So at DoorDash, we live in a world where we certainly don't get to control whether or not consumers order or when they order, whether or not dashers, drivers, couriers, accept or reject orders, how long orders take to produce or make or whether or not the inventory is available. These are the uncontrollable things. And so to be successful in that environment, you need to be very good at measuring things. So recognizing what are the skills of emphasis that you have to design an organization to be very, very world-class in is step number one. Step number two is how do you actually build the system or the set of mechanisms to reinforce that? So at DoorDash in the early days, I didn't know much about management, but I studied math and so I was able to teach everybody SQL, especially those who are non-technical or less technical. And so everyone, including our customer support team, probably up to about 500 people wrote their own queries. And so that had a nice effect that effectively stapled the culture of truth-seeking while allowing us to have a very fast bias for action. So a very, very fast experimentation of velocity, shipping velocity, again, trying to understand what were the important questions, which things didn't matter. That was one way in which we were to staple down the details, but sometimes you also have to understand where you are in the game. Mickey said a lot of times, all you can do sometimes is just to improve your position, but sometimes you have to know when to bet big and maybe relax some of those constraints so that you can disproportionately increase your movement, whether it's to serve your audiences better or to potentially take share on the field. And so knowing which of those muscles can get used and what are the mechanisms that are authentic to your organization? And then when you deploy them on the field, I think those are the important parts to getting it right. And how do you... So that sounds like the system that you're trying to build. How do you recruit exceptional talent? Well, this is hard. Recruiting exceptional talent, I think, is one where maybe best case you can get right 60 to 70% or at least that's what I've experienced in meeting thousands or tens of thousands of candidates at this point. I think the first thing is you have to know what exceptional looks like, and it looks like different things in different stages. The person who's gonna be the amazing executive or even individual contributor today at DoorDash is not the individual when DoorDash was founded in my apartment with four of us. And so I recommend, especially for the founders in the audience to spend time with whoever tells you is exceptional in their field at a stage that might be one step or two stages ahead of you and just watch them, observe them to understand what exceptional looks like. The second thing is to understand what are the hallmarks of your culture that's gonna make the exceptional person who is awesome in one type of system also fit your system, whether you have it written down or it's just organically developed. At DoorDash, we have six of these things, and we look for them pretty carefully, but that took a while to understand these are the six things that we really need to be successful at our company that may or may not be what was true for this candidate in their previous environment. If you can get those two things down, I think you're batting a pretty good score, but it's gonna take you probably dozens of hours with each candidate to actually get to that level of understanding. Coming short on time, I have to tell you, Mickey, I'm very impressed with Slush. It's really, really impressive. You started this how many years ago now? 2011 was the first one we did with our team. So there's probably 20 to 50 people that work on it full-time, but 2,000 people that volunteer. The fact that you can get this production quality is pretty amazing, and it's run by students. What did you learn through that process about entrepreneurship? Yeah, Slush, I think Slush was a funny combination of having a big ambition level. We saw that it felt like the tech ecosystem in Europe was broken, that there's a lot of talent, there's a lot of good companies all over the place, but there wasn't a good ecosystem for these companies to learn from each other, to raise capital, to have this ambition level to build not just locally relevant companies, but globally relevant companies, and that was the ambition level of Slush since the start. We want to help fix the ecosystem. We want to help create more successful companies out of Europe and increasingly globally. But at the same time, we had no idea what we were doing. Our average age was 21 years old. We had no background in event production. It was very much like a don't worry, be crappy. Like, how do you organize an event? You need a speaker, you need an audience, you need a stage, you need a microphone, maybe some food. And you go from there. And if I look at what Slush has become over the years, there's been this incredible culture of learning and perfecting things over time. Like, I was looking at people bringing the chairs and tables and how many were there, the coordination and everything. I was like, this is impressive. And it's just like this incredible improvement that has happened, even as the organization has changed, like 10 times in the last 10 years. That's awesome. Scale of ambition, what's your scale of ambition for DoorDash? Well, I think this is one of these questions where the answer in year 10 heading into year 11 at DoorDash might have been different than day zero. Although it's, even in the pitch deck at demo day in the 2013 summer class for Y Combinator, the pitch for DoorDash was to be the FedEx of local. And that's largely stayed exactly the same because I really believe that it's a much better world to live in when you have every local business, small, medium, and large be successful than maybe just buying things from the hands of one or two large organizations. And the reason for that, well, A, it's great for the economy. I mean, local businesses still are the backbone of every city, every economic GDP growth driver around the world. And number two, it also represents the personalities of the cities that we live in and why we love living in them. And so, for us, it's always been about how do we ultimately become the infrastructure for every one of these cities? And the lane that we've chosen to do that is to power every single transaction, connecting every possible local merchant to every possible local consumer. We're long ways from that. We've done a nice job maybe in chapter one of the company in food. We're starting to branch out into other categories, but there's a lot of work to do to make sure that all of these businesses will be successful. So the scale of ambition, I think, has certainly grown since day one, but I think the mission of growing and empowering local communities has always been true. Miki, can you answer the same question either for Vault or for Slush? Or for both? Are you pardoned? Scale of ambition. Scale of ambition. For Vault or for Slush or for both? I mean, for Vault, we share the ambition with Tony that we want to build globally the most relevant company in our industry. And we are now apparently the second biggest company in the world, or the biggest company in the world outside of China, which is still the second biggest company in the world in our industry. So there's still a lot of things to do. And relevant is not just size, but it's also about relevance to our merchants, our couriers, our customers in all the different cities that we operate in. For Slush, I think about 2011, we were organizing Slush. And I wanted to invite all these scale up entrepreneurs to speak at Slush to talk about things that younger entrepreneurs could learn from them. And a definition of a scale up entrepreneur for me in 2011 was they raised over 10 million in financing. I think I was looking at Northern Europe, and I found 10 companies when I stretched that definition and tried to get the founders of those companies to speak. And I look at what we see in this ecosystem today. Like 10 million round of financing is not even a thing anymore. And we're talking about hundreds of millions and billions of revenue these companies are making. And the funding rounds are in the hundreds of millions if even billions. And I think about where this started a decade ago, how things looked like, and where we've come. And I think about how things look like right now and where we're going to be in a decade. And that's what makes me incredibly excited about Slush. That's what makes me incredibly excited about the tech ecosystem that we can all witness here during this week. And a final question for the both of you. Before you started as a founder, what would you have liked someone to have told you before you started on your founding journey? Well, I know everyone's getting probably lots of advice. I mean, 10 years ago, maybe there were less content available. And it's an awesome thing that you can learn from so many different people and their shared experiences. And I think communities like this one are so great. At the same time, don't forget that instinct that you have that probably already knows the answers to so many questions. But it's fear that's allowing you to take your gut and trusting it. So trust your gut. And just obsess about building something that your users or customers or whoever you are serving can love. Like it's so easy to start to obsess about competition and fundraising and all these things that go on around building a successful company. But this just comes down to doing something amazing for the people that you serve. And I think that can't be reminded many times enough. So that's a great way to wrap up. Do something amazing for your customers and trust your gut. So thank you both, Mickey and Tony. This is a great conversation. Thank you for all your story and your advice. Thanks, Jofi.