How DoorDash Turned Food Delivery into a Local Commerce Platform | Vassili Samolis, VP of Product

To most people, DoorDash is an easy fix when you just need food. Our guest today would argue that's the least interesting thing they do.

Vassili Samolis has been VP of Product at DoorDash for 5 years and counting, leveraging lessons from Instagram & Pinterest to help turn a simple food delivery app into a high-trust local commerce platform for the more than one million merchants who use it to help drive their businesses.

In this episode, Vassili shares:

• How DoorDash built a successful local commerce platform based on extreme alignment - they only get paid when a business gets a customer and a consumer finds the food that they want
• Why he thinks there's never been a better time to be a PM - not in spite of code getting cheaper but because of it
• And how a crowded field of a million restaurants, bodegas, and local shops taught him that the best products often start with a single, very specific customer story

Links

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vassilisamolis/
DoorDash: https://www.doordash.com/

Chapters

00:00: Introducing Vassili and DoorDash's mission to empower local businesses
02:29 Why local restaurants struggle to survive and grow
04:27: TL;DR into Vassili's product background: From Instagram and Pinterest to DoorDash
05:39: Turning a delivery app into a full local commerce platform
07:23: Product lessons and first principles thinking
12:00: The most unexpected customer insight Vassili and his team discovered
14:10: AI and the future of product teams
17:52: What AI deployment looks like on Vassili's team
18:50: Conclusion

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