October 31, 2024

How DoorDash Hires "General Athletes" Instead of focusing on experience

John Kim

Co-founder @ Paraform

In this blog

Hire “general athletes”, in the beginningDoorDash’s “Attributes of Excellence”Culture perpetuates cultureCreate unique challengesHow DoorDash continues to win

Succeeding with any startup is hard. Succeeding with a marketplace startup is even harder because incumbents have giant advantages. So how on earth did DoorDash succeed with a marketplace startup 14 years after the first incumbents launched?

The most common answer you’ll hear is a combination of strategy and execution: DoorDash focused on suburbs and lower-tier cities to sidestep the advantages of incumbents. And then they out-executed all of them, shipping and experimenting faster than any competitor.

But those stories are only symptoms of an incredibly talented team. Great strategies come from great people. Fast execution only happens in functioning teams of high-performers. And it’s not just me saying this: CEO Tony Xu considers recruiting one of his superpowers.

That’s why we dove into how DoorDash built its incredible team. Here’s what we learned:

Hire “general athletes”, in the beginning

Many startup founders believe their dream hire is someone with years of experience at FAANG companies. The thinking goes something like this: Big Tech has super high bars for hiring and stringent interview processes. If anyone passes the bar there, they’ll crush it at a startup.

But working at Big Tech is different from working at a startup. At Google, you might be the product manager for Google Maps reviews for Eastern Europe. There are layers upon layers above you and a mountain of data so big you’ll never sift through it all. You know exactly what to work on and your role only changes after years.

At a startup, you usually have much more ownership and responsibility. Your role might change overnight. Data is scant. That’s why Tony Xu believes in hiring “general athletes”.

By this he means people who might not have a ton of experience, but who have characteristics that set them up for success at growing the company.

Basically, people who can operate in this early DoorDash office:

What you can implement

• Realize that FAANG experience often pigeonholes people into operating the exact way they’ve learned at Big Tech, which is rarely how your startup operates.
• Hire “general athletes” who are very skilled, even if they lack the experience you might normally look for.

DoorDash’s “Attributes of Excellence”

To find the people who are likely to succeed at DoorDash, Xu and his team defined a set of attributes they’ve found lead to good performance. These are independent of role-specific skills and more about the personality that helps people crush it in their jobs.

Here’s what DoorDash defines as the Attributes of Excellence:

• Bias for action: Being willing to take action and make mistakes instead of deliberating for too long. Especially at early-stage startups, the opportunity cost of waiting is usually higher than the downside of making a reversible mistake.
• Holding two ideas in your head at the same time: Good people tend to be opinionated, which compels them to take decisive action. But few people are able to not just accept, but seek disconfirming evidence and update their mental models when they need to. But this trait is what leads to being less wrong over time—which is exactly what DoorDash hires for.
• Getting 1% better every day: We’ve all heard the adage that growing 1% every day leads to some giant outcome over a year. If you’re hiring for people who can grow (as early startups should), this trait is important. DoorDash hires people who show a willingness to learn.
• Operating at the lowest level of detail: People who are used to management roles tend to stop seeing the details. DoorDash wants to find people who can get down to the nitty-gritty.
• Fellowship: If you’ve ever worked on a great team, you know how important it is to genuinely enjoy being around your coworkers. DoorDash hires for people who others feel naturally drawn to. This preserves the culture.

What you can implement

• Define your own attributes of excellence—personality markers that predict success—and hire for them.
• Never treat role-specific skills alone as sufficient for getting hired.

Culture perpetuates culture

One of the saddest things is when a scrappy startup becomes a sclerotic corporation. Those who drove early growth move on. Bureaucrats thrive. New launches become sparse. People spend more and more of their time in meetings.

Nobody ever intends to do this. But it happens when the wrong people end up in a culture. As Tony Xu put it: "The first 10 people will help you recruit the next 10, and the next 50 after that, and that's really how your culture can continuously grow."

Those first 10 decide which next 10 will feel drawn to your company. If your culture is scrappy, action-biased and growth-focused, that’s who you’ll attract. If it’s slow, corporate and bureaucratic, that’s who you’ll attract.

What you can implement

• Understand that one bad hire will deteriorate the culture over time.
• Make sure that the types of people you hire are the types of people you’ll keep hiring, especially once you’re no longer the main person hiring.

Create unique challenges

This one isn’t for everybody. But on the 20 Minute VC podcast, Tony Xu recounted that he once gave candidates $20 and one workday to acquire 100 new customers.

Sure, this is an extreme example of a hiring process and probably won’t work for all company stages and candidates. But it’s a great way to test how scrappy and ingenuous a candidate really is.

And you don’t need to be that extreme. Many companies now do work trials as part of their interview process. Instead of doing case interviews or coding tests, they pay the candidate to work on a real task that showcases how they handle things.

This will show you much faster what it’s like to work with the person than any standardized test.

What you can implement

• Focus on learning what it’s really like to work with a candidate instead of gameable case interviews.

How DoorDash continues to win

DoorDash has close to $70 billion in market cap, employs over 6000 people full-time and has more than 1 million delivery drivers. This is in large part because they’ve built a team that can execute better than their competitors could.

They did that by focusing on building a culture that rewards excellence and continues to attract excellent people—and by figuring out how to spot those excellent people early.