My Journey (Part 1)

I have a job that I would never be hired for.

I joined DoorDash over a decade ago as its first General Manager. I have no formal data science training, but today, I lead a global Analytics organization for a $40B+ public company. So, how did I end up here?

Tony Xu believes in superpowers and I don’t give up easily.

Tony believes that everyone has something that they’re uniquely good at. He encourages people to identify their superpower and look for opportunities to match that superpower with a company’s needs. He recognized my superpower before I did.

A few years into my tenure, I asked Tony why he hired me. It wasn’t surprising to hear that it was NOT my investment banking experience or my MBA. He used to tease a few of us early folks with MBAs about our Master’s degrees—which he also had!—because he saw a lot of resumés with similar credentials. What he found interesting about me was that I had tried to start my own company. Starting a company showed courage and demonstrated that I had the entrepreneurial spirit he was looking for in a General Manager (GM).

I’ll talk more about my startup, GiftSimple, and what its failure ultimately taught me about entrepreneurship and success, as well as my decision to join DoorDash and my experience as the first GM in subsequent posts. For now, we’ll start with my transition from the Operations team to Analytics. It was the spring of 2015, and after making it through the snowiest winter on record in Boston, I had hired and onboarded the permanent GM for the market. It was time to move on to the next city launch. During our conversation about which market I’d go to next, Tony noted my penchant for asking questions. With our future launch plans growing, we started to compile a launch playbook to establish what a good launch looked like. I asked a lot of questions and had a lot of opinions on how we should set goals for each launch.

I felt strongly that the goals for each market should be different—depending on factors like total addressable market and competition—and I wanted to set goals on the input metrics that the local teams could control. I had spent time trying to understand how the core fundamentals of the Boston launch—selection, quality, and price—drove growth. And I was determined to find a way to measure the ROI of our marketing efforts during the initial months of launch, so we could learn what tactics worked for the next one. Given all this, Tony suggested I pack up my suitcase, deflate the air mattress I’d been sleeping on in downtown Boston, and move to headquarters in California to help ask and answer these key questions, full-time.

Tony recognized that I could be more effective working across all geographies rather than focusing on one. He encouraged me to lean into my strengths: asking impactful questions, a love of complex problems, and a relentless drive to get the right answer. I saw an opportunity to both answer my own questions and uplevel the overall business by creating a new function. At first, I was hesitant to make the move, as the scope of the role was ill-defined and the goals unclear. The GM role was a known entity. Ultimately, what swayed my decision was excitement about the problems I’d be working on—and the promise that if I hated the new role, I could go back to being a GM. At the time. this felt like a major pivot, but in hindsight, it was a natural progression.

I called the new team BizOps (Business Operations & Analytics) after learning about a cool-sounding team at Yahoo and LinkedIn, through Dan Yoo. I was a jack-of-all-trades trying to identify and solve the most important problems for the company, whether that was setting the right goals for new market launches, digging into the drivers of consumer retention, or making sense of our customer complaint data. No matter the problem, I kept the “operator” mindset so core to DoorDash’s culture and focused on quickly driving business results.

I won’t pretend I had a grand vision for Analytics in the early days. That time was a chaotic scramble to solve problems, only to encounter new ones along the way. I was a one-woman Swiss army knife playing whack-a-mole with an endless supply of business questions. I got my first headcount when I showed Tony the backlog of work I wanted to get done—a list full of things that were also top of mind for him. For my first few hires, I wanted folks who were generalists, but who possessed complementary skills to me. Hiring folks who possessed skills I didn’t have was a key part of my success at DoorDash. Much of what I learned about data science, I learned from my team. I will talk more about my hiring philosophy and process in a later blog post, but I will say that I owe a lot of my success to the amazing folks who have surrounded me on the Analytics team over the years.

The complexity of the problems increased, requiring the sophistication of our analysis to increase in parallel. This meant hiring more specialists, including data engineers, machine learning data scientists, and statisticians. For me, success was always measured by impact, and I held my team to the same bar. I expected recommendations—not research—and that all of our work connects to a company goal we were trying to achieve. We used the power of analytics as a force to increase the speed and quality of our execution, and I believe this was a key part of DoorDash’s success in those fundamental years.

Today, I lead a 600+ person global Analytics team across DoorDash, WoIt and Deliveroo. As DoorDash, Inc., we operate in over 40 countries, worldwide. The team’s reach has expanded over the years—and the depth of our analysis has grown—but our goal to drive real business impact has not changed.

Over the last 12 years, I have been a GM and I have led teams across data engineering and business intelligence, experimentation, machine learning, data science, and bizops. My journey was not planned but came about organically as needs arose and opportunities presented themselves. I was intentional about never saying “I can’t do that” and replacing it with “How might I go about doing that?” —learning from the DoorDash value to “choose optimism, and have a plan.”

Click here for part two, how I started my finance career in the midst of the financial crisis.