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Ravi on Scaling Strategic Planning

Guests:
Ravi Inukonda

Table of Contents

Ravi’s Role in Scaling DoorDash

Ravi joined DoorDash as the VP of Finance in 2018, and was recently promoted to CFO. He’s helped DoorDash scale for several years from 1000 employees to almost 5000. Prior to joining DoorDash, he served as Head of Finance for Uber Eats from 2015 to 2018. 

1. Financial Planning

Operationalize Goals Through Inputs 

  • DoorDash rigorously defines and plans input metrics to drive accountability on outputs on a daily and weekly basis
    • DoorDash’s culture emphasizes structured, rigorous planning even 2-3 years before becoming a public company.
  • Early on, DoorDash aligned on number of transactions as the most important metric, not revenue or GMV. They broke this down into how many unique users were placing orders and how frequently they were ordering to drive delivery volume. 
    • As nuanced understanding of the business increased, they refined their view of inputs. The core input shifted from transactions to order frequency and retention

‍Example: How DoorDash Uses Their ‘Walk’ Framework to Drive Outcomes

  • A walk is a bar chart highlighting the path from one state to another. Every bar represents the impact of an input or desired action. 
  • Use a waterfall chart to visualize your walk (example below):

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  • Their theme for 2018 was growth at scale, with a focus on closing market share gaps with Grubhub and Uber: 
    • They started with the high-level goal to grow deliveries from ~20M to ~50M the next year. They only set one hard constraint: cash burn. 
    • They then built the walk to go from 20M to 50M
      • Existing markets goes to XM (+YM)
      • Launch 40 submarkets gets to Y deliveries goes to Y (+XM)
      • Increase spend to scale Drive to 50M
    • From there, they determined Gross Profit targets and cascaded the annual plan into quarterly, monthly, weekly, and daily goals to hold teams accountable.
    • DoorDash ended up doing ~80M deliveries in 2018.

Build Systems to Drive Accountability and Continuous Discussion

  • Given how effective the WBR is at DoorDash, teams all have their own WBRs as well. 
  • Smaller companies with limited time and resources can decide themselves what level of detail goes into these meetings
    • You can start small, with one mission-critical input metric and build the habit of accountability around it. For years, Ravi emphasized just one key metric (MAU) across the org to build alignment and focus.
  • Over time, they found that even new hires who initially found the process overwhelming came to appreciate the structure, and that DoorDash alum often took WBR into their next companies.
Tactic: Establish a Weekly Business Review to Maintain Accountability at Scale
  • DoorDash’s Weekly Business Review (WBR) has been a constant since Series C and remains the backbone of their operational discipline, even now as a public company. Ravi believes that even though SaaS businesses can’t have daily goals, having weekly accountability is important.
    • Every Thursday, 30–40 cross-functional leaders across product, ops, sales, and marketing spend ~4 hours reviewing each business line: restaurants, grocery, Drive, platform, and international.
    • The WBR covers shared dashboards of red/yellow/green input metrics like MAUs, trial rate, DashPass subscribers, and active consumers.
      • If a metric is red, the focus is on collective problem solving, not finger-pointing. If it’s green, the team discusses how to double down
  •  Teams present: 
    • Plan vs. actuals for the current week, previous week, quarter-to-date, and full-quarter forecast. 
    • Commentary on performance, key wins, challenges, and asks. 
    • Investment requests backed by data (one team secured $10M to double down on high-efficiency geos after making the case mid-quarter)
  • Finance and Analytics act as independent scorekeepers to maintain objectivity and clarity:
    • These teams own the dashboards, facilitate the WBR, and ensure accountability. 
    • Their role reflects a deliberate “separation of church and state” — performance cannot be self-evaluated by the business owners alone.

Planning is Not Static

  • At DoorDash, teams start with an annual and quarterly plan, but update forecasts weekly to reflect new opportunities and market signals.
    • Every week, DoorDash runs an investment committee meeting to deploy dollars relative to what’s happening. If certain areas are showing signs of promise, DoorDash may reallocate budget mid-quarter, add contractors, or spin up teams to capture growth.
  • For example, in Q1 of the prior year, DoorDash set a goal to sign 1,425 top merchants (high-profile restaurants). Three weeks into the quarter, Tony saw the team was ahead of plan and immediately raised the target arbitrarily to 4,000, with the team landing at 3700. 
    • This style of leadership and planning won’t suit every company: highly creative or design-driven orgs like Airbnb may not rely on goals as rigorously as operationally intensive businesses

Example: DoorDash’s 2024 Planning Process

  • They started with key customer problems: Customers want more choice, affordable options, and the ability to rest more restaurant options.
  • Each vertical within DoorDash identifies the customer problems they want to focus on, and uses them as a North Star to guide their planning process. ‍
  • The process began with a detailed 20-page document written by a senior operator to set the company’s aspiration:
    • Grow GMV (gross merchandise value) 20–25% to $100B in 2025
    • Grow revenue faster than GMV
    • Target $80B GMV and $2B EBITDA in 2024
  • Strategic priorities for 2024 included:
    • Growing DashPass subscriptions
    • Expanding restaurant selection
    • Investing in affordability and order quality
    • Improving operational efficiency with only ~200 net new hires
  • By this time, DoorDash was operating five businesses: restaurants, grocery, international, ads, and platform.
  • The plan outlined how much to invest by priority and geography, including $330M and 115 headcount in the U.S. alone.
  • To create long-term alignment, the team proposed:
    • Using stock price as a North Star and a benchmark for employee compensation and long-term enterprise value
    • DoorDash was targeting a 20% increase in stock price over three years to join the top 175 public companies

As CEO, It’s Your Job to Push for Clarity in Planning

  • At DoorDash, Tony often challenges the team on the metrics they choose to track, pushing for clarity on what truly drives outcomes.
    • When your team approaches you with a set plan, it’s the CEO’s job to pressure test the team’s goals, assumptions, and approach. 
      • Tony asking his team “Are we investing to drive market share or growth?” helped them crystallize that the real goal should be investing in product quality and long-term scale.
      • In marketplace businesses, scale is a more reliable and sustainable driver of unit economics than market share alone.

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Center Planning on Solving Real Customer Problems

  • Instead of starting with financial goals, DoorDash starts planning with customer outcomes
    • For example, they identified gaps with consumers aged 55+ and in tier 3–5 markets — both underpenetrated segments.
    • Teams documented merchant expectations, customer pain points, and long-term right-to-win strategies across grocery, alcohol, beauty, and other categories.
  • These customer problems  directly informed the 2024 annual operating plan, which included:
    • Specific initiatives tied to selection, quality, affordability, and consumer experience
    • Clear investments in areas like DashMart, international markets, and Drive strategy
    • Detailed resourcing plans by team (ops, product, design) and capital allocation by region
  • In weekly business reviews, teams would report on progress and make the case for additional resources based on execution and results.

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Founders are the Only People Capable of Constantly Driving Ambition at Your Company

  • DoorDash is aligned around increasing total enterprise value, not the perceived success of individual teams.
    • This mindset helps unify cross-functional teams and reinforce shared accountability across departments.
  • Ambitious people always want to meet or exceed expectations. At DoorDash, Ravi saw this create a culture where people sandbagged their goals out of fear of underperforming. 
  • Only the founder or CEO can reset the ambition level of the company. It’s your job to push on input metrics and test the team’s conviction. 
    • At DoorDash, Tony reframed how they view success – hitting 70% of a truly ambitious goal is still a win.
    • The challenge is to find the right level of discomfort – ambitious enough that the team pushes itself, but not so aggressive that they disengage.
  • Now, finance leads the top-down planning, Tony pushes for stretch goals, and product, engineering, and ops pressure-test targets to ensure they’re achievable and can be tied to actionable input metrics.
    • This process is deliberately collaborative to prevent any one function from dominating the company’s goals

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Introduce Custom Metrics That Align Closely with Your Company’s Goals

  • DoorDash found raw restaurant count to be a misleading proxy for sales performance. To better align quality with impact, the Analytics team developed a custom internal metric called P-Time.
    • P-Time reflects the quality and desirability of restaurants added to the platform — selection that meaningfully drives GMV.
  • Sales teams are goaled on P-Time adds per quarter, creating clearer alignment between sales activity and selection quality

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2. Capital Allocation and Experimentation

Ability to Monetize is the True Measure of Value

  • DoorDash’s north star has always been user growth — but not at any cost. Ravi shared how they could get more users by giving food away at extreme discounts, but that isn’t the company’s goal. 
    • Instead, the team focuses on cultivating sustainable behavior, even if that means slower growth in the short term.
  • Ravi stressed the importance of monetization being value-driven – you’ll make money when someone pays more than it costs to build the product, but only if they truly value it. 
  • DoorDash deliberately avoids over-monetizing too early. Instead, it focuses on building frequency, loyalty, and product strength. This increases their pricing leverage over time as network effects and retention compound.

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Use A/B Testing and Experimentation to Test Key Hypotheses 

  • DoorDash runs A/B tests across nearly every initiative to measure impact before scaling.
    • Every decision includes a control and treatment group, and the team monitors the delta between the two over a few months to evaluate effectiveness. 
      • For example, at DoorDash A/B testing informs decisions on new pricing and product flows
  • This approach is particularly powerful in consumer businesses, where large user bases allow for statistically robust tests.
  • This experimentation mindset reinforces a data-driven culture and prevents teams from scaling unproven initiatives, enabling teams to make better, easier monetization decisions. 

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Do Not Over-Optimize Investments in Short-Term Paybacks 

  • DoorDash uses a ‘Horizon 1/2/3’ model to allocate product and investment focus across time horizons:
    • 60% (Horizon 1): Execution-focused initiatives with clear 12–18 month payoff. These are post-PMF and drive core business growth.
    • 30% (Horizon 2): Medium-term bets (18–36 months) with early traction — often moving from 1→2 pizza teams. 
    • 10% (Horizon 3): High-risk, long-horizon innovation bets that may never pay off. These are critical for continuing to innovate to avoid becoming a one-hit wonder.
      • The 30% and 10% will make you uncomfortable, and teams will have to resist the urge to lean more heavily into the 60%. 

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3. Building a Strong Finance Team

A Great CFO Should Enable Teams and Help Solve Their Problems

  • Great CFOs don’t just track variance to plan, they help translate vision into execution and make every team in the company more successful. You should think of a CFO as a general business problem solver with a major in numbers.
    • Ravi believes a successful finance team should help everyone in the company become more successful
  • Instead of making a plan and casting it out for GMs to execute on, Ravi believes finance leaders should deeply understand what each team does well and is struggling with, and then help them become successful. 
    • At DoorDash, every GM is paired with a dedicated finance lead, and both are jointly accountable for hitting the business’s goals. This allows them to push back together on unrealistic targets or misaligned budget requests, and ensures that finance is seen not just as a gatekeeper, but as an enabler of team success.
  • Ravi named Kiran Choudary at Rubrik and Elena Gomez at Toast as two strong B2B CFOs
Example: How DoorDash’s Finance Team Helped Fix Their Customer Acquisition 
  • Traditional finance heuristics like LTV:CAC and margin targets often break down in real-world consumer businesses.
    • At Uber, teams defaulted to long LTV assumptions. At DoorDash, they shifted to requiring monthly payback periods as a more practical way to think about ROI. 
  • DoorDash’s analysis in 2018 revealed that they were under-spending on customer acquisition. Once the team increased spend, they saw better returns.
  • Ravi emphasized the value in running the business for gross dollar generation, not just margin. Instead of optimizing for margin percentage, DoorDash now optimizes for free cash flow dollars. 
    • DashPass (a subscription product) had a lower margin but drove much higher ordering frequency, making it more profitable in absolute gross dollars.
    • This shift in mindset unlocked DoorDash’s aggressive push behind DashPass, taking US market share from ~17% to 65%.
  • DoorDash’s key learning was to question default financial targets and translate numbers into business context before codifying them into goals.

Your CFO Should Not be a Yes-Person

  • Your CFO doesn’t need to be experienced – a first-time CFO can succeed too.
    • Instead, look for someone who is deeply curious about the business, not just the numbers.
  • The best finance leaders are not yes men – they act as thought partners, not just operators. You want someone who can push back, bring independent judgment, and help you see around corners
  • Ravi looks for finance leaders who are:
    • Generalist problem solvers — often with backgrounds in banking, investing, or consulting
    • Able to zoom in and out to handle both tactical detail and long-term strategy
    • Comfortable holding two opposing ideas at once, and willing to change their mind as needed
  • Ideal candidates approach interviews like operators:
    • They come in with a point of view on the company — where it’s headed, what gaps exist, how they’d invest, and follow up with ideas. 
  • Don’t over-index on technical finance skills (e.g., closing books, hiring a tax lead). Those are table stakes and are only 20% of what matters. The other 80% is finding an operator who deeply understands the business and increases your leverage as a founder.

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Context is Key for Finance Teams. Build Strong Onboarding

  • DoorDash emphasizes the following methods to onboard strong operators and finance hires:
    • At DoorDash, new team members are encouraged to build intuition by spending 10% of their day simply staring at dashboards to internalize business patterns. 
    • DoorDash uses memos instead of presentations to structure decisions and discussions. This creates space for introverts, encourages clarity of thought, and mirrors the Harkness-style method of collaborative debate and deep learning.
  • Ravi shared how these processes are designed to be learning environments to develop the next generation of leaders within DoorDash.
  • A sign that a finance leader is showing strong performance is GMs or product leaders proactively asking for their support

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