Your food delivery driver? He’s the company’s co-founder

Category: (Self-Study) Business

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Andy Fang is chief technology officer and a co-founder of DoorDash, the largest food delivery company in the US.

Once a month, he gets into the shoes of the contractors the company hires to pick up food from restaurants and hand-deliver them to hungry customers at home or at the office. One time, Fang was trying to find the restaurant where he needed to pick up two orders, but the DoorDash app wasn’t pointing him in the right direction. Searching for the restaurant’s address online gave him the right address. It’s this kind of error that Fang wants to encounter to be able to solve.

Fang is one of a growing number of executives who occasionally do the hourly work that makes their companies hum. Starbucks’, Uber’s, Lyft’s and even Air New Zealand’s CEOs are clocking in a few hours of work to understand their employees’ perspectives. Amazon also has a program encouraging employees to shadow operations workers for a week.

DoorDash requires thousands of its salaried employees in the U.S., Canada and Australia to complete at least four deliveries per year under a program called WeDash. Employees are strongly encouraged to make deliveries monthly. They can use work time to complete those shifts, and they keep any money they make.

DoorDash was founded in late 2012 by Tony Xu, Stanley Tang and Fang. Ten years later, more than 6 million DoorDash drivers — all independent contractors — fulfilled 1.7 billion orders worldwide just in 2022. Fang says he has made real changes to DoorDash’s app based on his experiences.

Another new feature, introduced recently, arose from employee feedback in WeDash. The feature, Dash Along the Way, lets drivers specify where they want to start making deliveries and then assigns them orders that they can complete en route. “It’s kind of a habit in some ways, I try to do it monthly, and I think you just enjoy doing it. And if Stanley or Tony are available, sometimes we’ll do it together. But it’s just an opportunity for me to kind of get to know the product.”

This article was provided by The Associated Press.

Script

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[Andy Fang, chief technology officer, DoorDash, driving]

[DoorDash app]

[Fang crossing street to pick up food order]

[Fang looking at phone, says location is wrong]

[Fang walking to Bonchon stand in food court]

[Fang waiting at Bonchon stand]

[Fang picking up orders and carries them out]

Andy Fang (interview): “This program actually originated all the way back when we started the company 10 years ago, where Tony (Zu, CEO), Stanley (Tangand, chief product officer), myself, when we were students at Stanford, we actually did all the deliveries ourselves. One of the reasons is because we had to, because there’s nobody else to do them. But what we quickly found out was that by doing these deliveries ourselves, we learned a ton of insights into what it took to actually get these deliveries fulfilled as a Dasher.”

[Fang walking with food to make hand-delivery]

Andy Fang (interview):”We also saw that when we’re picking up these orders at merchants that there’s operational complexities that we had to solve for and even dropping things off at the customer address, office complexes or apartment buildings. There’s logistical challenges that we observed directly by doing these, and we felt like we just learned so much by doing it ourselves. And that’s why we constantly encourage people to do it. And we formalised WeDash officially in 2015.”

[Fang walking back to his car carrying food order]

Andy Fang (interview): “There’s a mistake in the restaurant address, so we had to walk a block and a half to get to the actual restaurant. And then figuring out how to get to the customer. We were fortunate enough to walk instead drive there. So now we’re on to delivery number two.”

[Fang sitting in car]

Andy Fang (interview): “So if it happens with one restaurant, it might actually be happening with a lot of other restaurants as well. So if we can see why that happened, maybe we can fix it.”

[Fang walking to make a hand-delivery]

[DoorDash app showing how much Fang earned from two deliveries]

[Fang driving, view from backseat]

[A person on a scooter with DoorDash delivery backpack]

Andy Fang (interview): “It’s kind of a habit in some ways, I try to do it monthly and I think you just enjoy doing it. And if Stanley or Tony are available, sometimes we’ll do it together. But it’s just an opportunity for me to kind of get to know the product.”

[DoorDash employees working at the company headquarters]

This script was provided by The Associated Press.