Don't Let Crisis Go to Waste — Jeff Li Chronicles

While working at DoorDash, my CEO, Tony Xu, said something that altered my perspective on the world.

Rewind to February 2020, China enforced crippling lockdowns across the country. Covid-19 ran rampant and the virus had swam across the Pacific and onto U.S soil. The United States was not prepared for a pandemic.

My initial emotion was worry. Worried if my parents would be okay and seeing many people suffer and die is always a horrible event to witness. But that worry sparked a jolt of life into my body. I was driving my life on autopilot and the virus just changed my mental gear. As Tyrese Gibson says in Fast & Furious 7 (Paul Walker Tribute): Things are gonna be different now.

As governments around the US started implementing lockdowns, food delivery services witnessed an explosion of demand. I was at the right company at the right time. While many companies were laying off their workforce, DoorDash was hiring like crazy.

Leadership had mixed feelings. They didn’t plan for a drastic boost in demand. Nobody likes seeing people die and lose their jobs. Small businesses needed our service now more than ever. Our CEO, Tony Xu, was sympathetic to this and then said: Don’t let a crisis go to waste. (Not verbatim).

Tony didn’t say this as a way to take advantage of people suffering. Quite the opposite. It was an opportunity to exponentially increase our impact on small businesses. These were the people who needed us the most.

We expanded into other categories: convenience, groceries and take command of the delivery market share. Post-pandemic, DoorDash increased their market share by nearly 50% and now owns 58% of the delivery market.

I wrote this post right after I broke my collarbone. It’d be a stretch for me to call this a “crisis” but nobody wants their bones broken. It sucks. It limits your life. I can’t play the sports I love.

But what I love about “Don’t let a crisis go to waste” is that crisis become opportunity. When something negative happens, don’t let it go to waste. Life plants difficulties for everyone. Every person will experience heartbreak, death, getting fired or some negative event.

So the takeaways is, don’t just overcome it, be 10X the person you were before.