Celebrating one year as part of DoorDash

Today, we celebrate one year of being part of DoorDash. 🥳 Over the past 12 months, we’ve received questions from our candidates about how being part of DoorDash shows in everyday life here at Wolt. While that depends a lot on which team you're in, we wanted to share a few examples of how we work with our still new-ish colleagues in the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, and what our role in the wider DoorDash team looks like. 

We focus on learning from each other

While Wolt is now part of DoorDash, we have continued to operate independently with our own team, brand, and product. In other words, this hasn’t been a “typical” transaction, where we would have integrated everything from tools and processes to products. In fact, one of our leading principles has been that we only do integration where it makes sense and adds value. 

Instead, our partnership is based on learning from each other and proactively sharing best practices. One example of this is our Wolt+ subscription program, which we launched in 2022, leveraging from the knowledge that DoorDash had accumulated when developing their own subscription program DashPass years earlier. Thanks to this, we got a valuable jump start and were able to scale Wolt+ a lot faster than if we had worked on it alone. 

Another area where we’ve collaborated is product development, where we recently united our engineering efforts to build a best-in-class global advertising platform. At Wolt, we were able to learn from DoorDash’s experience and adopt their advertising technologies, which helped us launch advertising products faster and with advanced capabilities right from the start.

However, it’s not only Wolt that is learning from DoorDash. DoorDash has, for example, also adopted a lot of best practices from Wolt’s customer support philosophy and leveraged our expertise in motion design, which plays a key role in our user experience, when developing their own app. 

International is one of DoorDash’s key investment areas

When we closed the transaction with DoorDash a year ago, we announced that our CEO Miki Kuusi would also assume the role of Head of International at DoorDash, meaning that he runs DoorDash’s business outside the US, reporting directly to DoorDash’s CEO Tony Xu. 

International (meaning Wolt plus the DoorDash business in Canada, Australia and New Zealand) is one of DoorDash’s key investment areas, which means it gets a lot of spotlight and management attention at DoorDash. Tony Xu often visits our different non-US markets, and the internal All Hands calls, to which all DoorDash employees are invited, also focus on International at regular intervals. 

In other words, Wolt and the International business are not a side note, but one of the biggest drivers of growth for DoorDash. In fact, we just launched two new countries (Austria and Iceland) in May, bringing the total number of countries DoorDash operates to 29, and have more than 400 roles open at the moment in Wolt alone.

We have very similar cultures and have found good ways to work together across time zones

Every now and then, candidates also ask us whether Wolt has changed in terms of culture and ways of working now that we’re part of a US publicly listed company. Sure, there are certain regulations when it comes to, for instance, how openly we can share about our performance, but other than that, not much has actually changed. 

In fact, our CEO Miki has often shared that when our two companies were still considering joining up, one of the deciding factors for the partnership was that our cultures and values were so similar.  Both companies are known for our culture of ambition, taking ownership, and getting things done – as well as the fact that we treat others kindly and justly. Several of our team members have shared that when we started working together with our DoorDash colleagues a year ago, it felt like they had always known them. 

One of the challenges of working in a multinational environment is, of course, the difficulty of having to juggle multiple time zones (hello, 17 hour time difference between San Francisco and Melbourne! 🥵). For roles which require collaboration with people in other timezones, we've emphasized the importance of rotating call times to ensure that it’s not always the one person who has to adjust, and reminded people that if they have evening calls, they absolutely should start their day later. For company-wide calls, we also always provide a recording afterwards, allowing our people to watch them whenever it suits them best.

Our partnership also offers our people interesting growth opportunities

Lastly, another area which seems to be of interest to our candidates is what kind of job and growth opportunities the DoorDash partnership has offered Wolt people. We’re seeing more and more internal talent exchange across Wolt and DoorDash - both in the form of short-term assignments outside of one’s home country as well as more permanent moves, and team members are also welcome to apply for open positions across Wolt and DoorDash as internal applicants. Also, we recently piloted a mentorship program together with DoorDash, and based on the positive feedback from our people, we’re looking to make this a permanent way to collaborate and share even more personal learnings. 

Overall, it’s been a fun year with a lot of learning together - and we’re just getting started. If you’re interested in joining the fun, check out our open roles here. 🚀