iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Tony Xu's actual vision for DoorDash has nothing to do with delivery: "Our goal over time is to be the first phone call for any business, for any issue. If done right, DoorDash can be your first phone call to start any business."

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Most people wait until they have everything figured out before they start. Tony Xu and the DoorDash team didn't: "We viewed it as a project more than we viewed it as a company. In fact, we were barely incorporated. No one is able to know everything about the future."

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For three years, every headline said DoorDash was doomed. Tony Xu focused on the internal metrics.

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Tony Xu and I discuss how he thinks about growing DoorDash: "There are tens of millions of items inside of a city that you could deliver. DoorDash delivers a fraction of those items today."

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"We'd rather die trying to be excellent — or at least die trying to do the thing that we want to stand for — than to live to be mediocre and not something we'd be proud of." — Tony Xu, founder of DoorDash

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When DoorDash had no money, no marketing budget, and their competitors were spending millions, Tony Xu only had one way out: "You have to build a product that has better retention, better engagement. You have to. There's no other way."

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@t_xu's rule for surviving the hardest stretch of building DoorDash: "If I obsessed over anything else — the markets, what people were writing about us, another rejection from an investor — if I just obsessed over what was not in my control, I think I was going to go certainly nuts."

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In 2013 Tony Xu noticed that nearly 1 million restaurants in the US didn't offer delivery. Then he decided to fix it. "There were about a million restaurants in the States and maybe 20 to 25,000 of them offered delivery."

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DoorDash started as a $9 website with PDF menus and a Google Voice number. "It was a static page where you saw eight PDF menus of restaurants we frequented in Palo Alto." — Tony Xu

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"Every high quality minute of thinking has a million dollar impact." A half hour meeting improved Tesla's outcome by $100M. That's why Elon Musk runs no schedule. The jet goes wherever matters most.

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"What matters to me is winning, and not in a small way." — Elon Musk Eric Jorgenson spent a year studying him: "His inherent personality would dominate whatever industry he went into. How lucky are we that he's working on some of the most important problems that humanity faces?"

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"Failure is essentially irrelevant unless it's catastrophic. Elon Musk pushes these things to the breaking point, pushes the materials, pushes the designs. He wants to reach the point where he knows for sure that it's the most efficient version of the design." — Eric Jorgenson

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If you put David Goggins, Richard Feynman's and Napoleon together you get Elon Musk. "He's David Goggins' level intensity, he's Richard Feynman's level of unconventional technical brilliance, and he's Napoleon's strategic genius and insane bias to action."

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Elon didn't want to be CEO of Tesla. He was the main investor, the chairman, deeply involved in the product — but he resisted taking control. Until he had no choice: "If I didn't do that, the company would've died."

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Elon Musk thinks we have too many lawyers and finance bros. "There is an over allocation of talent in finance and law. Too many smart people are going into finance. We should have fewer people doing that, and more people making stuff. I've got mad respect for makers of things."

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