Leading with empathy | Keith Yandell (DoorDash, Uber)

**Keith Yandell** (0:00)
Every business that you have heard of has gotten rejected by at least a handful of venture capitalists at one point or another. And so, that drive to keep going, if you believe in the business, is critical, absolutely critical. I mean, we were weeks of runway situation and have been told no by everyone.
And it was just Tony's drive really to keep going. And the way he explains it to me is it's just the difference between a founder and a non-founder. Like, if you're really a founder, you just have to find a way. You have to keep going. There's no question.
And I mean, that's the only advice I can give folks is it only takes one yes. You got to keep going.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:44)
Welcome to Lenny's Podcast, where I interview world-class product leaders and growth experts to learn from their hard-won experiences building and growing today's most successful products. Today, my guest is Keith Yandell. Keith is a long-time leader at DoorDash, where he's been for about seven years. And in that time, get this, he's led the legal team, the HR team, the marketing team, the customer support team. And currently, he leads the BD and corporate development teams. Before DoorDash, he led litigation at Uber. He's also managed folks like Gokul Rajaram, who was previously on this podcast, and who suggested that I have Keith on. And damn, was he right. Before I had this chat with Keith, I didn't know that much about him, but now you can count me as a huge Keith fanboy. I suspect you'll feel the same way after you listen to this episode. I'm just going to jump right in and bring you Keith Yandell after a short word from our wonderful sponsors.
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Keith, welcome to the podcast.

**Keith Yandell** (3:15)
Thanks so much for having me Lenny.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (3:17)
First off the bat, I just want to give a big thank you to Gokul Rajaram and Micah Meroey for suggesting you be on the podcast helping make this happen and also just suggesting a bunch of questions to ask you so I hope you're ready to be in the hot seat.

**Keith Yandell** (3:29)
Definitely as ready as I'm going to be and those are two good folks to talk to.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (3:33)
Awesome and Gokul has been on the podcast. Maybe we'll get Micah on the podcast at some point.
I wanted to start off with a story. Apparently there's a story of you interviewing what is now your VP of engineering and I hear that in the interview you called him an asshole and more interestingly he joined DoorDash because you did that. Can you just talk about that story and share that story?

**Keith Yandell** (3:55)
Yeah, it actually wasn't during the interview. We were debriefing and for me one of the top things I always hear about DoorDash from an executive standpoint when we do the internal survey is it's a no politics, no asshole culture and I'm not one to swear a lot, but after interviewing Ryan Sokol who's now our VP of Eng, he was just kind of aloof. He came up as aloof to me, really curt answers and I just didn't have a great feeling about him. I pride myself on being able to discern when people are really engaged or not. I went to Tony Xu who's our founder and CEO. I said, Tony, I think this guy is a jerk. I don't think we want him at the company. Tony was great. He said, Keith, I want you to just have dinner with him, please, because I got a completely different impression. If you have dinner with him and you still think he's a jerk, we won't hire. I ended up meeting Ryan down the street. We actually live in the same general area. We went out to dinner and I started right away. I said, Ryan, during the interview, you seem like an asshole. Are you an asshole?