Storytelling at Scale
Liz Jarvis-Shean, VP of Comms & Policy at DoorDash, on the tenets of great organizational storytelling—with lessons learned from stints at Airbnb and Tesla and years spent working with Candidate and President Barack Obama.
Episode Notes
Liz Jarvis-Shean grew up with an engrained love for public service—a devotion that was realized in her work for Candidate and President Barack Obama. When she eventually moved to the private sector, the motivation was less about what she was leaving behind, and more about what she was able to bring with her—her mission to effect change at scale through story.
In her talk with Jesse, Liz describes the importance of her family and their examples of public service early in her life; the formative impact of the time she spent in post-apartheid South Africa; the way she brought together facts, circumstance, vision, and persuasion to connect with citizen audiences on President Obama's team and Candidate Obama's team; the important parallels that she sees between the emotional connections we seek from people and the excitement we want from products; how she made the decision to move into the private sector and into tech; and her reflections on driving impact at scale at Tesla, Airbnb, and DoorDash.
(6:17) How time spent at Berkeley and studying abroad in South Africa drew Liz to storytelling
(10:08) Life as an opposition researcher on an historic presidential campaign trail
(14:26) Telling stories of ‘promises kept’ to make emotional connections with citizens
(20:28) Finding an opportunity to affect massive change in the private sector at Tesla
(23:32) Blending the inspirational, the aspirational, and the practical to make a compelling narrative
(27:19) Airbnb’s impact at scale, in her own words
(30:04) How DoorDash achieves its mission to empower local economies by being customer-obsessed, not competitor-focused
(35:46) Advice for organizations: ‘Don’t just tell your story better. Have a better story to tell.’
Guest Bio
Elizabeth Jarvis-Shean is Vice President of Communications and Policy at DoorDash, leading the company’s policy, government relations, social impact, public affairs, and global communications initiatives. Liz sits on DoorDash’s Executive Management Team. Previously, she oversaw Airbnb's global public affairs and corporate communications teams, and has managed strategic communications at pioneering companies, including Tesla Motors, healthcare technology startup Nuna, and data science firm, Civis Analytics.
Liz helped shape and drive research, rapid response and messaging for both of Barack Obama’s presidential campaigns and his White House, and held leadership positions at CNBC and political research consultancy IMS, Inc. She graduated Phi Beta Kappa and valedictorian in Political Science from the University of California, Berkeley.
Helpful Links
Liz describes DoorDash’s partnerships with food banks
Learn more about the WeDash program
Liz on Newcomer’s Dead Cat podcast
+ Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Liz Jarvis-Shean: It is important not just to tell your story better, but to make sure that you always have a better story to tell. No amount of spin is going to improve your story if the facts on the ground don't change. If you don't do a better job on behalf of your constituents or your customers, it's my responsibility and my team's responsibility, not just to take what we're handed, but in fact, to make a better story to tell and then tell it better.
[00:00:42] Jesse Purewal: From Qualtrics Studios, this is Breakthrough Builders, a series of conversations with people whose passions, perspectives, instincts, and ideas fuel some of the world's most amazing products, brands, and experiences. Hey everybody, I'm super excited today to introduce you to Liz Jarvis-Shean. Liz is the VP of communications and policy at DoorDash, and I feel like even though that's such an amazing company and such an amazing brand, DoorDash is just the latest place where Liz has driven impact at scale in her career spanning the public and private sectors. Liz has run global comms at Airbnb and Tesla, and she's been a director of research and deputy director of content for candidate Barack Obama and President Barack Obama. She's worked at CNBC and a million other places and had some outstanding impact. I'll let her tell you all about it. Liz comes from a family of California public servants who believed that giving back was both an obligation and an opportunity.
Today we touch on the importance of her family and their examples of public service early in her life, the formative impact of time she spent in post-apartheid South Africa, the way she brought together facts, circumstance, vision and persuasion to story tell to citizen audiences as somebody on President Obama's team and candidate Obama's team, the important parallels that she sees between the emotional connections we seek from people and the excitement we want from products, how she made the decision to move into the private sector and into tech, and her reflections on driving impact at scale at some incredible high growth companies. So without further ado, Liz Jarvis-Shean.
[00:02:27] Liz Jarvis-Shean: I am a California kid born and raised. On my mom's side of the family we came out during the Gold Rush, on my dad's side of the family we were Italian immigrants to the Bay Area in the 30s, and I also come from a family of public servants. And so growing up in California for me meant growing up in Sacramento. Both my parents worked for the state, so it was a family of folks who not just felt a responsibility to give back through public service, but to really be engaged. We always read the news or watched the news and then talked about it actively, and we were asked as my brother and my sister and I, what do you guys think? What would your opinion be? What would you do differently? So even at 10, the 1988 presidential campaign, and we actually had to run campaigns in my fourth grade class, and I was the campaign manager and my best friend Daniel was... We ran him for president and we were the presidential ponies.
We had no idea what we were doing, obviously, but we knew it was important and we knew it was something we wanted to be a part of. I think we probably had a platform that included things like less homework and more recess, but even then, I knew that politics and government and being an active participant as a citizen was something I wanted to do and really be a part of.
[00:03:40] Jesse Purewal: That was the time of great change in the history of our nation. I mean, not to be dramatic about it, but I think there was a lot of escape from the 70s in terms of some of the hyper inflation and these high fuel prices and what was going on behind the red curtain. And a lot started to get seeded in terms of the... Let's call it the paramount importance of capitalism on one side in the 80s, Reagan administration, et cetera, and then this advent of globalization happening on the other, and it was all a hard thing to figure out.
I can remember watching the movie Gung Ho when I was young in the late 80s, and it was the first time I was like, oh, wait a minute. So all cars aren't just made in Michigan and this is a global thing that's happening. It's like you mentioned local politics in California, but then the presidential election must have been a time where you're like, well, wait a minute, there's huge opportunity to go have impact, certainly in Sacramento, but really well beyond too, and at a time when a lot of Americans were really starting to wake up to what's happening with the global economy.
[00:04:45] Liz Jarvis-Shean: Yeah, no, it's a great point. So I remember as a kid watching the Berlin Wall fall on the news and not really understanding what that meant, but knowing that it was a big deal, knowing that big things were happening, and to your point, Jesse, that there were going to be big opportunities to make a difference and to shape what the world could and should look like. So it was incredibly exhilarating. I think it was also growing up as a young girl in that time, a lot of the mothers, including my mother, had either worked for some period of time or were continuing to work. You had dual income households, latchkey kids, and sort of a cascading understanding that you as a girl growing up into a woman could and should think of yourself as an absolute equal participant in school, sports, academia, the workforce, which was an incredible gift that the previous generations had conferred upon us is the idea that you could think really expansively about your future career and the impact you could have. That it didn't have to be so narrowly prescribed as it had been in previous generations.
[00:05:55] Jesse Purewal: So as that young woman, you then go to the University of California at Berkeley for college. You study-
[00:06:01] Liz Jarvis-Shean: Go bears.
[00:06:01] Jesse Purewal: Political science. There's this amazing alchemy of things that's then happening. You're in the belly of the beast for where a lot of the ethos for change and the action for change ostensibly is happening. Take me back to those years and some of the foundations that helped set for you.
[00:06:17] Liz Jarvis-Shean: I loved going to Berkeley. I had the absolute best time, but so in particular for me, the real tectonic change of my experience was getting to study abroad. The University of California has a fantastic study abroad program, and I ended up going to study in Cape Town, South Africa for a full year, and as a student of politics, both loving American politics but also international relations, it was a period of time, the year 2000 where Nelson Mandela was no longer president, but there had been that successful transition to Thabo Mbeki's administration, and if you love democracy and you love seeing it come to life and a country grappling with those early stages of democracy, there was nowhere more interesting and exciting to be than Cape Town. And so I think Berkeley itself was a fantastic experience, but that opportunity afforded by the University of California to go spend a year in a nascent democracy like South Africa was an incredible opportunity that just changed and really enriched my appreciation for what we have here in the United States and the importance of strengthening it and protecting it and again, participating in it fully.
[00:07:28] Jesse Purewal: Yeah, you strike me also as someone who appreciates the power of a story well told. So talk about where maybe along the journey you started to not just appreciate story for what it is, but really grasp the power of a narrative and of a hook and of a through line for people to be able to understand what's happening around them and be able to take action around it.
[00:07:52] Liz Jarvis-Shean: I think that the real first kind of aha moment was my freshman year, and I took Political Science One from this amazing professor named Sandy Muir and he had been a speech writer before he became an academic, and so he taught us. So Political Science One was American government, but instead of teaching it like a civics class, he taught it as a study of power. And so we read not just de Tocqueville, but we read Robert Caro, we reread the Power Broker, we read The Godfather as a study of power. And the way Professor Muir talked about it is exactly as you sort mentioned, Jesse, that the bully pulpit, whether it is the president at the bully pulpit or any individual, the convincing of people, the telling of a convincing and compelling story and bringing them along with you is a hugely powerful thing to harness for good or for ill. He sort of articulated as the most important element of soft power was storytelling.
You weren't always going to be able to get people from one opinion to the exact opposite, but just beginning the conversation and making them feel respected and heard and engaged in the story itself was the beginning of building those connections that could lead you to convincing them, but also just leads you to engaging them and making it a participatory process as opposed to, I think storytelling of just talking at someone, which is very different.
[00:09:21] Jesse Purewal: Yeah, well, we're creatures of story, and it turns out that's been true since time immemorial. So that's great.
[00:09:26] Liz Jarvis-Shean: Yeah.
[00:09:27] Jesse Purewal: So Liz, you start off your career in DC I think as a political research analyst, you basically have been doing a bunch of opposition research to be able to go build a story, the research, the analysis, the synthesis for making an argument, but in the context of what's called opposition research, you're starting to figure out what the rhythms are of a newsroom and what anchors and reporters are looking for. And then you get into an opportunity for what I think you and many others would say, probably qualifies as a dream opportunity, which is to work on Obama's presidential campaign in 2008. Talk about how that came together and what your reactions were and what you did about that opportunity.
[00:10:08] Liz Jarvis-Shean: It's also, I think, a great lesson both in making your own luck and being lucky simultaneously. It also for me is a big lesson in opportunities do come along a second time around. So I share that because I actually did not get onto the Obama campaign in the early days, the roles that I was interested in, they hired for very quickly. I didn't even get my hat in the ring or resume on the desk. And in some ways I thought that was the closing of the window of that opportunity. Obama was my guy in 2008 in the Democratic primary. So I had another amazing opportunity. I moved to New York, I was working at CNBC, but the window opened again as he needed to staff up for a bigger campaign. And I mean, Jesse, you talk about storytelling, he is the ultimate storyteller. He was the person who restored my faith that you really could do big things and that it was... You didn't need to feel cynical about politics or the process.
It feels sort of corny to sit here and say now in 2022, but it really was like you felt hopeful and you felt like you could change things. And so the opportunity came up. I got a call from a guy named Dan Carroll, who's a former opposition researcher like me who had of expanded his remit. He had joined the campaign to help out with some stuff. He's like, "Look, I can't pay you, but I have a desk and a computer. Can you be here in two weeks?" And I said, "Absolutely." And I broke my lease in New York and I packed one suitcase. I threw my stuff into storage. I found a probably illegal sublet on Craigslist, and I bought a one way ticket to O'Hare, and that was how the journey began for me.
[00:11:45] Jesse Purewal: Talk a little bit about what the experience was like. I mean, are you on buses? Are you in motel rooms drinking cold coffee? Are you just meeting hundreds of people a day who are kind of rooting for you and a few people who maybe are rooting against you? What's the whole experience once you start ensconcing with that team?
[00:12:04] Liz Jarvis-Shean: So for me, it was in Chicago, this hive of energy at the headquarters, and it was just nonstop. I think most of my days started with calls at 7:00 AM from my furniture-less apartment where I had an air mattress, and that was the only furniture I had. And then we were there probably till about 10:00 or 11:00 at night. We'd take a quick break, usually around eight, go to the gym, a couple friends and I come back. But it was nonstop. And for us at headquarters, it was less about that interaction necessarily with voters on the ground, but it was much more of what is the opportunity ahead of us. And I think in particular from my teams, the trajectory sort of changed when Senator McCain chose Sarah Palin, Governor Palin to be his running mate, and all of a sudden she was on, I think the third tier of our list of the candidates that we had had research on who we were like, oh, this is the likely universe of folks who he might choose to be his running mate.
We just didn't know that much about her. And I honestly, in some ways, I think unparalleled in modern American political history to have such an unknown person come onto the scene. And there's essentially, I think at that time it was probably 10 weeks between her selection and election day of what do we know and is this the right person to be considered to be a heartbeat away from the presidency? And so my team was responsible for gathering all that information and on the phone with folks in Alaska who are looking through their basement for things that they had recorded on television years ago, but how can we learn more because we need to educate voters as to what's happening. And so that just completely changed everything that we were working on. We sort of shifted focus and very squarely working on that and then preparing for the debates and everything like that.
[00:13:47] Jesse Purewal: So obviously the election goes well and not to be missed is this is a historic election in US context, world context, but obviously the real work starts post inauguration and you stay on the team and are involved in the administration for this first term. So once you get through that moment of, okay, we worked really hard and now we have this euphoric mini finish, what's it like when you have to start building a new administration around a set of new policies that you then have to go story tell around? And what did you discover about your own voice as a storyteller in those years?
[00:14:26] Liz Jarvis-Shean: Yeah, it's such a great question because both candidates have teams working pre-election to prepare for if you become president, because then you have to staff the whole federal government and lead the country and do all those things that you're talking about doing in the election. So there was some groundwork laid, but to your point, I don't think I really appreciated until we walked in the door the day after inauguration, so January 21st, 2009, just how much building we had to do and in some ways how much we had to also learn on the job. I think that the campaign had been so inspirational, and to your point, you'd had this euphoric high, but we had to build in a very different way. Governing is very different from running for office. And I think that the gravity really sank in over the course of the transition.
And then in particular, that first week we got the first jobs numbers and it was 880,000 people had lost their jobs, and the weight of that responsibility feels very profound. And so we had a very small team, you're constrained by budgets of the federal government and had to start building a little bit of that, the old Ross Perot running mate question of who am I and why am I here? We had to answer that question of what were we going to do to make a difference? And so we made a lot of promises on the campaign about things we were going to do. How do we make sure that we tell the story of those promises kept? So my team was responsible for building that record, the understanding of that record so we could go tell those stories. We promised X, we delivered on it, we promised Y we delivered on that plus 100. We promised Z and it turns out we're not going to maybe make that happen and how do we want to talk about that as well?
And I think it also, Jesse, what we needed to do over the course of the two years I was there is we had to both build and then build differently or evolve because the circumstances changed. I think the rise of the Tea Party was not something that we necessarily saw coming. And so a lot of what we thought we were building for in terms of storytelling and convincing people didn't turn out to be super effective in some of those early days. We had to make adjustments to combat misinformation around the Affordable Care Act and think differently about where and how we reached audiences that we couldn't just stay in the White House and have pronouncements come down from Washington, DC. We had to do a better job of getting out into the country of reaching people where they were and addressing the concerns that we started to really hear from them about what does a big change to healthcare actually mean for me as an individual, for me in some ways as a customer of the federal government? What does that mean?
[00:17:03] Jesse Purewal: Yeah, And you're doing this all in the context of operating within a leadership construct that by rights I think inherited more of the challenges maybe than it created. I mean, there was a lot of challenge happening with respect to what had happened after the mortgage crisis unfolded or as it unfolded, and as banks were getting bailed out and people on Main Street were like, "Wait a minute, what's happening with me?" And should they be able to not just say, Well, here's the checklist and here's how we're doing, and we have some green checks and we have some red stop signs and a few in between. It's like you didn't just get to grade yourself on the administration's performance. You actually had to put it in the context that was completely without precedent probably for the last 35 to 40 years in American history. So how did you balance owning it, the leadership ethos of the narrative with the idea that, hey, we're going through a macro time right now that has certain challenges associated with it, some of which might be beyond the immediate control of folks in and around the administration.
[00:18:11] Liz Jarvis-Shean: It was something I think that we really wrestled with, and if we are all being honest with ourselves, I don't know that we ever got fully right. I think that probably in some of the early days we over-rotated a little bit to we inherited these problems, to your point of these bigger macro factors, and we're doing everything we can. The truth of the matter is that the American people, they don't want to hear why you as the presidency and the White House can't do things to make their lives better, and nor should they have a high tolerance for that. Your job is there to do the things that you promised to do and to make their lives better.
It is to deliver on that. So I think that we learned that lesson and had to start to be better about, again, connecting with people through storytelling and through the right channels that even if we couldn't deliver on the change that we wanted to as quickly as we did, at the very least that people felt that we were trying, that we were out there fighting for them every single day to make their lives better.
I think that that at its core, Jesse is like, that's the fundamental mission of a storyteller in government or politics is because you cannot get done everything you want to get done. And because the reality is your ability to affect that change is constrained even if you are a president who has won a historical election, your party has control both houses of Congress, you still don't get to do everything you want to do every single time. Everybody is constrained. That's table stakes.
Your responsibility is not only to try to do the right thing and make people's lives better, but also make them feel like their lives are getting better and feel that you are fighting for them. It goes back to your question about how do you use the bully pulpit? How do you connect with people the importance of storytelling as part of leadership? People need to feel that emotional connection.
[00:20:21] Jesse Purewal: What was it that drew you to consider and then ultimately make the decision to step over into Silicon Valley?
[00:20:28] Liz Jarvis-Shean: Truthfully, I had never really thought about going into the private sector. Again, I come from... My grandfather had gone to the Naval Academy and then had a career as a submariner and officer in the Navy. My whole family is in some type of government service, overwhelmingly. It really wasn't in the consideration set until I started to take a look around at what companies were doing and how they, number one sort of had the metabolism of a campaign to moved quickly and wanted to both move at that pace and effect change. I think that was one of the things that drew me. I started, my first job after leaving Obama land was at Tesla, and for me, I'm a car nut. I grew up loving Formula One and all of that. And so I love the product because driving a high powered electric vehicle is like driving nothing else I've ever experienced in my life, but I also love the sustainability elements of it.
And I love that Tesla was a part of revitalizing an American auto industry that maybe had not been as innovative as it needed to be. And it struck me, I think during some of my first meetings with Elon that I could have as much of an impact, if not maybe even more at a private company like Tesla as I could if I had gone back into the administration and say, worked at the Department of Transportation and something like that. And that is no slight on those folks. The work they do is super important and much needed, but it was eye opening that I could also have impact at scale in the private sector and build towards a world that I wanted to see without having to necessarily do that from politics or government.
[00:22:09] Jesse Purewal: Well, it strikes me there's possibly a parallel if I think about this in an analogous sense, and I look at Barack Obama and the brand of Obama vis-a-vis the brand of the Democratic Party at that time. And I think also about the brand of Tesla and the US automotive industry, the Obama campaign, and Obama as a person offered this new sort of perspective on inclusivity and empathy, almost a radical level of inclusion that on its face seems kind of intuitive and expected, but that wasn't even really par for the course that either the parties were playing. And you think about Tesla, you're like, well, of course, why wouldn't cars be sustainable? Why wouldn't they also be beautiful and high performing and be objects of desire? They totally should be, but they definitely had not been that.
[00:22:57] Liz Jarvis-Shean: Not been-
[00:22:57] Jesse Purewal: At least in-
[00:22:58] Liz Jarvis-Shean: They'd been a little bit more golf carts. Yeah.
[00:23:00] Jesse Purewal: Yeah. So maybe that's a stretch. But I do think there's a little bit of, you probably have the power to be able to say, let me take this person's story. Let me take this product's story and use it in a way to move forward an entire category. Or in the case of US automotive, an entire part of GDP, that is a remarkable way to achieve impact at scale is to take something that might just be a stone dropping in the water, but actually go, How can I get this to ripple 10, 20 times?
[00:23:32] Liz Jarvis-Shean: I love that analogy because I think it's also... It's that alchemy of both listening to what people want and say they need and having a vision for how that could be transformative, both on a big level and in everyday lives. How do you do aspiration and inspiration, but also be practical about the change that you want to deliver? When I think about Tesla, what had been offered up to that point in electric vehicles was just not especially exciting because it didn't meet the needs of what people really had to have for the overwhelming number of people, which is like there were a small number of folks who could have short range, not particularly sexy cars to get around because they wanted to prioritize the sustainability. And that's fantastic. That's the foundation upon which we all built. But most people, you've got a family, you need a car that's a little bit bigger that functions in maybe ways more like a regular vehicle, and you want to be excited about it.
I mean, you want to be excited and delighted by whether it is a politician you really want to believe in or product you really care about or want to get inspired by and adopt. That, I think was the thing that Elon just got right. It was like, people need to want to drive these cars. And even if they can't afford the higher end versions, it's aspirational long term of I want one, or I can't wait until there's mass market. And I think Obama was a little bit of that as well. It was both inspiration and aspiration, but could talk about the real needs of everyday people.
[00:25:06] Jesse Purewal: Yeah. Well, and it's back to story that we like a story well told. And when I would walk up and down Church Street or Sanchez Street in San Francisco in my last place, somewhere around 2012, you'd start to see a few Teslas maybe over the course of five or six blocks to the point where by 2014, 2015, after my kids are born, it's like, okay, every fourth one of these cars is a Tesla. Or at a minimum it's an electric vehicle. I mean, a little bit of it's the status and you don't want to be caught with FOMO, et cetera, but I really believe there is something to the story.
And you don't want to walk into a restaurant or a cocktail party or a meeting and say, you know what? I think we need to be doing a lot more about emissions. I think we need to be doing a lot more about beautiful design. But when you show up to dinner in a Tesla, just like when Leonardo showed up to the Oscars all those years ago in a Prius and made that statement about what his values ostensibly were, these things that we talk about in our lives are sometimes given way better personification through our actions and the things we choose to own or the people we choose to vote for.
[00:26:20] Liz Jarvis-Shean: I would agree with that. I think that the magic is also going beyond what works for of a niche audience in say, San Francisco. The West Coast had much faster adoption of Tesla than most of the rest of the country. But again, whether it's that or when I think about what we built at Airbnb or what we've also built at DoorDash, it's an understanding of what do more and more people need to surprise and delight them to meet their needs, to help them live their lives in a better way and build a better community for themselves. Not just making sure that happens in the 415 area code or the 917 area code. It's how do you take that and have impact at scale? And I think that if I were to draw some of that through line from kind of Obama land to what I've had the chance to build at Tesla and Airbnb and DoorDash is doing that at scale.
[00:27:16] Jesse Purewal: Talk about the Airbnb version of impact at scale.
[00:27:19] Liz Jarvis-Shean: For me, the way I thought about it at Airbnb was the impact particularly for the traveler, for the guest, and then for the host. And I'll take the guest first because I thought about it even as sort of my experience living abroad. South Africa, there was no Airbnb. So where we got to travel throughout sub-Saharan Africa was in some ways constrained by where there were hotels or hostels or where we were comfortable camping in our cars or outside of our cars. And I speak to students who now go down there for that same one year program that I did, and the places they are able to go, the communities they are able to visit, the things they are able to experience, the horizons for themselves that they are able to broaden are so much bigger because of platforms like Airbnb that enable them to stay in places and see places and meet people.
Those things just aren't as available if you're having to stay in sort of a CBD central business district in a hotel. And so I think it just opens the world up in an incredible way that has an enormous impact for the ability of people to understand the world differently and better, I would hope. And then I think for hosts, whether it is you are renting out a room in your house or apartment, or you are fortunate enough to own a second home and you rent it out there, it is an opportunity to take a fixed cost for yourself and build some incremental income.
There are periods of time when the economy is doing really well and people feel that's maybe not... Doesn't feel like as compelling of a story, but times like right now where inflation is super high and mortgage rates are... I mean, the Fed literally just, Jesse, just before you and I started talking, the Fed announced another three quarter point increase. Folks need to find incremental income. And so if you have a fixed cost with a home or something like that and you're able to squeeze a little bit out of that and that helps you pay your bills, that's an impact that you can have both at scale and for each individual person, that's really important.
[00:29:18] Jesse Purewal: And so what was the landscape like within DoorDash when you joined? I mean, obviously sitting here a couple of years into the pandemic, it's very obvious the impact that DoorDash has had on our lives all across North America and beyond. But talk to me about what it was in the days before the indispensability of all of those service offerings came to the fore, and how you organized your thinking around taking the career opportunity at DoorDash and then how you experience the continual pivots, not just from a comms perspective, but now really from the perspective of a member of the leadership team and thinking about where is this brand going in terms of an indispensability to society?
[00:30:04] Liz Jarvis-Shean: So among the key things that drew me to DoorDash was the mission, which is it is fundamentally to empower local economies. We are a local business at scale, and I love the idea of being able to be a very active participant in shaping a future for local economies and local communities that is vibrant and thriving, where local brick and mortar stores can connect with consumers who increasingly expect to be able to pick up their phone and get what they want in minutes, not hours, not days. Helping those local businesses not just have a fighting chance, but have a really good chance at thriving in a future and all of the kind of things that cascade from that.
And when I joined in 2019, that was the mission. That had been the mission long before that is the mission that Tony Xu, our CEO built upon, inspired by his mother who ran a restaurant along with a bunch of other jobs that she had when he was growing up to help put his father through school after they immigrated from China. That has always been the mission. In 2019 to your point, it felt a little bit more like incrementality delivery and e-commerce channels for local businesses were additive to what they already had of the foot traffic of folks who came in. And so it was really exciting to come in and to be able to, like I said, have an active role in a vibrant future for local economies. That was true in 2019, but the gravity of it hit in 2020.
The pandemic hits, the world sort of shuts down. Almost every local merchant has to close their doors to foot traffic, and then it becomes an existential question of how do those local merchants reach customers? I have not had as exhilarating and fulfilling an experience since I had been at the White House to especially those sort of early months of the pandemic. Everybody from Tony on down, our CEO on down is manually inputting menus onto the marketplace because you have tens of thousands of local merchants of all kinds who need to reach customers. We have people calling third cousins to source PPE for Dashers to make sure that people could stay safe. And the product team built contactless delivery in five days to make sure that you could drop things off.
And it was just such a profound moment of the responsibility and the opportunity we have to build something that helps these folks stay in business during a crisis like the pandemic, but then build their businesses going forward. When I think about Breakthrough Builders, we build at DoorDash for the people who are building in local communities. For us, it's about what are the products and services that we can offer? How can we help them tell their stories? How can we do the things that we are great at so they can do the things that they are great at?
[00:32:58] Jesse Purewal: And how do you counsel other builders about how they should steward and live by with their actions, those kinds of core values, vis-a-vis the initiatives, the partnerships, the decisions about the business model, especially for cases where, oh, maybe the founder in that story isn't so close, the company might have been around 30, 40 years, they're pivoting, et cetera. How do you coach builders to get close to values and ethos and then take action around that as a centering mechanism?
[00:33:31] Liz Jarvis-Shean: So one of our core values is be customer obsessed, not competitor focused. I think we live that every day from making sure that you are talking to the customers, to actually living the experience of the customers so that you are hearing from your customers what they need. And so we have a program at DoorDash called WeDash, where everybody, again from Tony on down, and Tony is the one who started the program and insists that we do it. Every employee dashes, every employee does deliveries so that you understand where are things working and where are the edge cases where things go sideways and go wrong so that every dasher can make more, save more, do what they need to do and make every dash worthwhile for them. We sponsor restaurant, CEO staff, we all have restaurants who we work super closely with and partner with and have regular conversations.
Mine is Windy City Ribs on the South Side of Chicago, and I talk with Terry, the owner multiple times a quarter. I'm going to be out there in Chicago visiting, getting into the guts of their experience. You have to... In the same way that no campaign is successful if you don't talk to voters and no office holder is successful if you're not talking to constituents and understanding their... And all the time talking to them and understanding their problem, no company like ours is going to be successful if you are not talking to your customers on a consistent basis and getting that feedback, it's not just enough to collect the data. The data is helpful, it gives you signal, but oftentimes the details are in the anecdotes and the individual story. So you have to really dig in there. That's where the richness is, that is much more compelling than just a pure data story.
[00:35:08] Jesse Purewal: And on that point about story, Liz, I think you are a pragmatic and passionate storyteller. You also have had the opportunity to get exposure to and build relationships with a pretty venerable set of folks over the years, and I'm sure the list is longer than I know, but I'm counting Barack Obama, Michelle Obama, Brian Chesky, Elon Musk, Tony Xu and the team at DoorDash. As you look back on your experience with leaders like those people, what do you think you've taken away from that group in the aggregate and blended into your own game as a leader?
[00:35:46] Liz Jarvis-Shean: I think collectively, they have all taught me that it is important not just to tell your story better, but to make sure that you always have a better story to tell. No amount of spin is going to improve your story if the facts on the ground don't change, if you don't do a better job on behalf of your constituents or your customers. And they are all incredible storytellers who also assumed the responsibility to make sure that they had a better story to tell. And I think there are some organizations where the understanding is that, look, guys, this is the set of facts and I need you to go out and tell the story and build the narrative. What I have learned from that group of leaders that you talked about is it's my responsibility and my team's responsibility, not just to take what we're handed, but in fact to make a better story to tell and then tell it better. They taught me about not just charisma, but agency and how to move things forward, to do the right thing and to tell a good story along with it.
[00:36:44] Jesse Purewal: Well, Liz, thanks for making the world a little bit of a better place for builders and for everybody else. I hope we can do it again soon.
[00:36:51] Liz Jarvis-Shean: Thanks, Jesse, I appreciate it.
[00:36:53] Jesse Purewal: Thanks for listening to Breakthrough Builders. If you're enjoying the show, please subscribe and leave a rating and a review and tell a friend. Breakthrough Builders is a Qualtrics Studio's original, hosted, an executive produced by me, Jesse Purewal. An awesome team of people puts this show together, including our show writer, Todd Bagnull and our head of social media, Chelsea Hunersen. From StudioPod Media in San Francisco our show coordinator is Nicole Genova. Editing and music are by producer, Sterling Shore, and executive producer Katie Sunku Wood with sound engineering by Ryan Crowther. At VaynerTalent in New York, Samantha Heapps, Hannah Park and Yvonna Lynn provide publicity and promotional support. The show's designers are Baron Santiago and Vansuka Chindavijak. Our website is by Gregory Hedon. Photography by Christy Hemm Klok. Special thanks to the entire Breakthrough Builders crew at Qualtrics, including Ali Rohani, Ben Hawken, John Johnson, and Kylan Lundeen.