How DoorDash Turned Food Delivery into a Local Commerce Platform | Vassili Samolis, VP of Product
DoorDash's VP of Product, Vassili Samolis, on why the best products start with specific customer stories and how a true CPA ad model tied the company's success to its merchants'.
In today’s episode, we're joined by Vassili Samolis, VP of Product at DoorDash, where he's spent the last five years turning a food delivery app into a commerce platform serving more than one million merchants worldwide. Before DoorDash, Vassili built and monetized products at Pinterest and Instagram, and he’s now applying those experiences to help local restaurants, bodegas, and shops grow.
In this episode, Vassili shares:
Why he thinks DoorDash’s mission has always been about empowering local communities, not just delivering food
How DoorDash built a true CPA advertising model that ties the company’s success directly to the merchant’s success
Why the best products almost always start with one very specific customer story, not a big strategic insight
Why he believes there’s never been a better time to be a product manager — not despite AI, but because of it
1. From delivery app to local commerce platform
To most people, DoorDash is a reliable place to get late-night food. But Vassili is quick to reframe this: the company’s real customer base is the local entrepreneurs who are trying to survive in a challenging industry — one that often demands they be experts in marketing, ops, and tech support.
“ I talk to local entrepreneurs every week, and I think the challenge is that these folks are being asked to be marketers. They're being asked to be operators. They're being asked to cook food in an environment that is highly dynamic. Being a local entrepreneur is, is a really hard thing.”
Vassili’s vision of DoorDash is to empower these local businesses and communities by giving them the tools to grow — and, increasingly, the tools to run their entire business, from online ordering and reservations to table management.
Product takeaway: The biggest platform shifts rarely come from a single strategic pivot. They come from staying obsessively close to a customer’s concerns and building outward from there. DoorDash didn’t wake up one day and decide to become a commerce platform; it kept asking what its merchants actually needed and let their product expand accordingly.
2. Building an advertising model that ties DoorDash’s success to the merchant’s
When Vassili’s team built DoorDash’s advertising business, they made a deliberate choice to set it apart from most ad platforms: DoorDash only gets paid when a business actually gets an order.
“That was a very big thing for me early on, which is why we built the true CPA model. We only get paid if we drive an order. That tied our destiny. Because, for me to get paid, I need to drive value for the customer.”
Product takeaway: Alignment isn’t a nice-to-have in a marketplace business — it’s what will actually earn you trust. If your monetization model can succeed even when the customer doesn’t, your customers will notice. Structuring pricing or incentives around the outcome you actually want your customer to have will change how your product roadmap gets built.
3. The best products start with one customer's story
Vassili has interviewed thousands of local business owners over his career at DoorDash. His take on where great product ideas actually come from is more personal than data or strategy decks:
“I think that all, most, if not all of great products start with simple customer stories. Start with getting on the phone with somebody and saying, ‘Hey, I bought too much beef and now, I need to figure out a way to sell more burgers.’”
Product takeaway: The specificity of one real customer’s problem is often more useful than an aggregate trend line because it forces you to build something concrete enough to actually solve it instead of something generic that just checks a box.
4. There’s never been a better time to be a product manager
Vassili is refreshingly optimistic about AI’s effect on the PM role.
“A big role of the product manager is to translate the customer needs into products and features that then, in partnership with engineering teams, design teams, data teams, turn into great product. There’s never been a better time to be a product manager because now you can spend a lot more time with customers and thinking about what to build.”
Product takeaway: As AI collapses the cost of building, the bottleneck shifts from “can we build it” to “should we build it, and why.” That’s a judgment problem, not a technical one, and it’s exactly the kind of problem product managers are best positioned to own.
Chapters
00:00: Introducing Vassili and DoorDash's mission to empower local businesses
02:29 Why local restaurants struggle to survive and grow
04:27: TL;DR into Vassili's product background: From Instagram and Pinterest to DoorDash
05:39: Turning a delivery app into a full local commerce platform
07:23: Product lessons and first principles thinking
12:00: The most unexpected customer insight Vassili and his team discovered
14:10: AI and the future of product teams
17:52: What AI deployment looks like on Vassili's team
21:27: Conclusion
Links
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