If you’re writing an email to Tony Xu about a DoorDash issue, be detailed.
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The CEO told podcaster David Senra in an interview posted on Sunday that he appreciates receiving long messages from customers and delivery workers, whom the company calls “Dashers,” particularly when they explain a problem they had with the app.
“I love the 2,000 word emails, especially from Dashers, who will give many use cases of why the logistics algorithm broke for them,” Xu said on the podcast.
Xu said that many of the short emails he gets don’t contain helpful details. Longer ones, meanwhile, contain “a lot of gold” that he can use to figure out what went wrong on the DoorDash app.
In some cases, he looks at the order data from DoorDash’s backend to see where the delivery went wrong and how to fix the issue.
“I go in through our debugging tools, and I literally track the order and every single step,” Xu said.
Xu’s email responses are among the few ways CEOs in the gig economy say they keep tabs on what’s happening among the gig workers who make their businesses possible.
Xu, Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi, and Lyft CEO David Risher say they’ve also driven passengers around or delivered food on their apps.
Xu said last year that he gets hundreds of messages each week from DoorDash delivery workers and customers. Many address issues with specific orders, such as a delivery worker showing up in the wrong parking lot.
Many of the messages “are not very positive emails,” Xu said on Senra’s podcast. He said he responds anyway because he feels a responsibility to solve the problems that they face.
“The greatest killer of a business is usually silence,” Xu said. “Here, they care enough to actually let me know something went wrong in their experience.”
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