Ravi Inukonda: Yeah, look, I mean, Brian, I’ll just add a couple of points to what Tony talked about, right, like what we’re managing the business towards each and every individual market, its retention, order frequency and unit economics. When I look at the dashboard where we look at this by city, we’ve done a major improvement across all three metrics. We’ve seen a material progress on all three metrics over the course of the last couple of years. And the proof is in the pudding, right? I talked about the fact that there’s several countries within the world portfolio as well as our international portfolio. But the core restaurant business is actually contribution margin profitable. And the unit economics across the international portfolio is actually profitable for the last several quarters in a row.
As we continue to add more selection as we continue to make the product more affordable, we are starting to see that response, right? Like, MAUs are growing at a double-digit rate, order frequency continues to be at an all-time high. This is what gives us confidence that the business is doing really well as well as we are gaining share compared to peers.
Brian Nowak: Great. Thank you both.
Operator: Your next question comes from the line of Eric Sheridan with Goldman Sachs. Please go ahead.
Eric Sheridan: Thank you so much. Maybe one big picture, one if I can. When you think about the SKU of an incremental investment dollar in the business, how do you measure where the better dollar might be spent between either end demand generation and driving further GOV growth and penetration in new verticals compared to a dollar of investment in platform innovation, product innovation, and how that maybe sets the platform up over the medium to long term? Would love to get some broader thoughts on evolution of that SKU and relative ROI. Thanks so much.
Tony Xu: Sure. Hey, Eric, I mean, I can maybe start. I guess in some ways it hasn’t changed in the sense that it almost always starts with what new products are we going to build to solve problems for customers better, right? The difference is that the surface area in which we apply that thinking has grown pretty tremendously. Obviously, four years ago or five — or 4.5 years ago, it was really applied towards one kind of line of thinking, the US restaurants business, which was of size, but it was still just more of a singular business unit. But then when I think about the legs of the stool today, you obviously have the US restaurants business, which has been several-fold bigger. But then you have, like, three more that we’ve added that are now at scale.
You have the platform business, the new verticals business, the international business. And then you have a small thing that’s just getting started. It’s like 2.5 years old, which is the ads business. So — but it’s still the same idea where we found that the most capital-efficient way to think about the next dollar invested tends to be what product can we build to solve some problem better? Either it’s the same problem, but we’re solving it better and finding basically the next level of product-market fit for the next cohort of customers, who obviously have higher expectations than the previous cohort, or it’s solving a problem for the first time. When we entered, for example, the grocery segments 3.5 years ago, where that was solving customers — or meeting customers for the first time in that category.
And so that’s in general kind of how we think about it. And then there’s like other types of capital allocation decisions, right? When you start thinking about whether it’s M&A or possible buybacks and things like this, but those tend to be slightly different computations and calculations. But with respect to, like, generally how we’ve done things, it tends to be how do you spend the incremental dollar by best solving the next job to be done for the customer.
Ravi Inukonda: Yeah, maybe, Eric, I’ll just add to what Tony talked about. For us, our business ultimately depends on making the product better for consumers, merchants and Dashers. So when we think about where to invest dollars, the first dollar is always going to go to making the product better, whether it’s adding selection, whether it’s improving the quality, or continuing to make the product more affordable. We are very scientific. We’re very disciplined when it comes to measuring ROI. We obviously look at all aspects of that. We measure that both on a short-term as well as a long-term basis. But sometimes we just set ambitious goals and give the team flexibility to continue to innovate with the goal being if we build the best product, consumers are going to come back, they’re going to order more with us, which builds scale and ultimately that drives long term free cash flow generation in the business.
Operator: Your next question comes from the line of Andrew Boone with JMP Securities. Please go ahead.
Andrew Boone: Thanks so much for taking my question. Tony, can you talk about the drivers of the platform services acceleration that you’ve seen over the last year?
Tony Xu: Sure. I mean, I think there’s been many things there. But I would say it’s really probably two thematic things where, one, we’re continuing to offer fulfillment services through DoorDash Drive, which is the first product we launched as part of the platform services portfolio just into more places, right, whether that’s more countries, more verticals. I think it’s really encouraging to see that every retailer out there, whether they sell food or sell other items, recognizes the importance of delivery and how — also how that’s net beneficial to their companies because the omnichannel customer is more valuable than the other customer who shops exclusively in one channel. And second, it’s really just new products, right?
We’re always building new things. If you think about what platform services or the vision of the business is, it’s to effectively enable any retailer to do what DoorDash does on its marketplace for their own customers, right? And so, that goes much beyond fulfillment. You’re going to have to do everything from online ordering all the way to customer support, right? There’s a lot of activities in between that you have to get right. So the second is just always building new products. So, I think this is a nice example of — I think the answer to the first question around or previous question around capital allocation, which is how do we make sure that we solve this job and how big is that job for the customer and how much is it worth, and solve it as deeply as we can and then move on to the next job, right?
But that’s really what we’ve seen in platform services and it’s just really great to see I think for every retailer — a physical retailer, that’s just increasingly becoming more and more aggressive in investing in digital.
Andrew Boone: Thank you.
Operator: Your next question comes from the line of Ron Josey with Citi. Please go ahead.
