DoorDash, Inc. (DASH) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Great. Thanks, everyone, for joining. Saving the best for last. I'm Jack Atherton. I cover U.S. TMT spec sales here at JPMorgan. We're pleased to have DoorDash CFO, Ravi Inukonda, with us today. So DoorDash's mission is to empower and grow local economies. DoorDash has become one of the world's largest local e-commerce platforms, and we estimate that its industry-leading food delivery share in the U.S. is north of 60%. Ravi joined DoorDash in 2018 as VP of Finance and Strategy, became CFO in March 2023. Prior to that, Ravi spent about 3 years as Head of Finance at Uber Eats and prior to that was in the VC space. So welcome, Ravi.

Thank you for having me.

So kicking off with background, big picture. As I said, DoorDash's mission is to grow and empower local economies. You started with restaurants and have now moved to grocery, convenience, retail. As we look 5 to 10 years down the line, how do you think about incremental opportunities within these categories?

Sure. We also do alcohol, by the way. 5:00 p.m. on a Tuesday evening. I'm sure Doug and Jack here are not offering alcohol but I would open up your DoorDash app and get yourself a beer. But yes, I mean, the mission of the company has always been the same since day 1. Our goal has been to help local businesses. We want to grow local businesses. We want to support them in a digital economy. We want them to thrive. We think we want to support local businesses, both on-premise as well as off-premise because they're getting more and more integrated. We want every local business to be omnichannel. We started the business about a decade ago with 1 product, which is restaurant delivery in the U.S. And today, we have many products. We cover over 30-plus countries. But the ultimate goal has always been the same, right, continue to focus on the product. As we've thought about the business, there are sort of 2 dimensions sort of strategy-wise that we've taken. The first one is our Marketplace business. Think of that as our demand generation engine, think of that as our consumer acquisition engine. We started that with restaurants. Today, we've expanded that to many more categories outside of restaurants. But when we look at the opportunity, to your question, I mean, we still feel like it's very, very early. I mean, if you just imagine, right, like we offer categories that people use on a daily basis but consumers still don't come to the app on a daily basis, right? Like the number of users that come to us, order with us every single day or every single month is still a small fraction of the people that we cover. Just take Mother's Day, for example, right? Like this past weekend, we were #4 on the App Store because people started to realize DoorDash is maybe more than just restaurant delivery, right? People are ordering flowers, people are ordering other products. But when I look at the selection or the quality or the categories available on the platform, I think there's still a lot of opportunity for us on the core Marketplace or the demand generation side. The second approach to strategy we've taken is what we think of as a business-to-business services strategy. We started that. We call that our Commerce Platform. We started that business about 7 or 8 years ago. The first sort of product that we released there was Drive, which essentially was logistics-as-a-service. We said we want to help merchants power their own channel so we said the logistics comes from DoorDash but the consumer entry point is on the merchant's own channel. We extended that a few years back. We said we are going to power the merchant's website as well. That product is called a Storefront. Now the more recent acquisition that we've done, SevenRooms is essentially an extension of that strategy where we are going and saying, "Hey, what other services can we provide to merchants?" Because ultimately, we want merchants to be able to do their business both online with us with the Marketplace as well as power their own interfaces, power their own in-store experiences as well. The advantage we have is we have a distribution network. We have the technology. We have the data. We have the analytics that can power some of the merchant services solutions along with the Marketplace that we have. So when I think about the opportunity over the next 5 to 10 years, going back to your point, a lot of opportunity to grow users, a lot of opportunity to grow the use cases on the Marketplace side. A lot of opportunity for us to, A, build and extend the services that we have today as a part of our B2B offering but also extend more services in the future.

Great. Obligatory macro question. So you guys have continued to see healthy consumer demand despite everything that's going on around us. How do you think about the resilience of restaurants and other verticals?

Sure. I mean, we don't spend sort of like a lot of time on macro because we're not waking up to the Journal saying, hey, the economy is doing well or the economy is not doing great, right? Like if you think about it, we get 8 million signals every single day, like the volume today is going to be about 8 million. So we look a lot at our own internal metrics to see what we're seeing. We have a team of analysts that are focused on poring through the data to figure out like, hey, what's actually going on in the business. And when we look at the underlying cohorts, I mean, they've been pretty strong. We look at low-income versus high-income zip codes. We look at the various parts of the country, whether it's the coast or the middle of the country. The demand patterns continue to be very strong. And we ask, why has that been the case? And even if you think about the last 4 or 5 years when the economy went through like a bunch of different gyrations, whether it's COVID or markets reopening or peak inflation, the business continued to be pretty resilient. And I think there's 2 broad reasons. One is the category itself is pretty resilient. If you just think about it, like people spend the most amount of time on food. People eat 21 times a week. Whether it's food or groceries, the categories themselves have been very defensible. And if you look at the defensibility of the categories over the last 5 or 6 decades, even at different times of economic downturns, food, in general as a category, has been pretty resilient, not just on our platform, in general, food services. And the second one is the product has gotten better. If I look at our product compared to 5 years ago, if you look at our product even 2 years ago, the product continues to get better. We have more categories today which we didn't have before. We have more stores today which we didn't have before. DashPass has continued to grow. So I think the combination of the resilience of the category itself plus the fact that the product continues to get better, which is obviously what's something that we work on, on a daily basis, I think that's partly the reason for what you're seeing in terms of the overall demand continuing to be extremely strong on the platform.

And hypothetically, if you were to see some impact from the macro, can you talk a bit about how that would change your approach to running the company and potentially other areas of cost that you can leverage to ease through that?

Sure. I mean, I think it's a good question. I mean, I think we are not looking for sort of signs of weakness to change on how we operate the business. I think one of the commonly misunderstood concepts about our business is, we take a very long-term view to investment. We've always talked about the fact that we're constantly reinvesting back in the business. But at the same time, we operate the business on a weekly basis. Even at this scale, $90 billion-plus of run rate GOV, we look at the business on a weekly basis, we have weekly goals. Every single week, we are poring through every line of business, metrics, underlying input metrics to see what they're performing, right? Because constantly, what we're trying to adjust is where can we double down, where are opportunities for us to increase the velocity. And we do that consistently no matter what. If you think about the performance of the business over the last 4 years, I mean, that's what's contributed to the growth in the business. So even in times where we feel like, hey, the consumer conditions are different, we have enough levers at our disposal that we can adjust the business. A natural hedge in the business is Dasher. In times where we've seen weakness on the consumer side, Dasher just becomes a natural hedge, which helps us manage the P&L. But this is a business where we are focused on 2 things, right? One is the product experience and the other one is the underlying metrics. So it's almost like a mathematician's dream because if you love math and if you love the product experience, it's a business where we're constantly managing minute changes almost at a basis point level to ultimately drive the long-term retention and order frequency that you're seeing in the business. All that to say, right, like we have a great handle on the business and we do that on a weekly basis.

Great. So delving into the different business lines, you've called out 5 key focus areas, U.S. restaurants, U.S. new verticals, international commerce, and ads. So starting with U.S. restaurants, food delivery is now still high single digit or single-digit penetration of restaurants. What do you think is going to take to drive that penetration higher from here?

Sure. I mean, I think it's -- again, I go back, right? Like I mean the product itself, when we think about it, it's not quite where we want it to be. And we think of it across 3 dimensions: it's selection, quality, and affordability. Selection, I mean, the 1 thing consistent about restaurants is new content continues to get created. 20% of restaurants go to business sort of like every single year, net new restaurants. So selection is a game where you continue to need to add more content and more selection. It's almost like a never-ending thing that we have to go after. And if you don't have the selection, then the consumer is going to turn away, right? So that's why we have to constantly keep up with new selection on the platform. Quality, again, we've made a lot of improvement. If you think about where the product was, whether it's in terms of delivery times or credits and refunds are missing or incorrect, or the experience that the end consumer has but still a lot of opportunity for us because we still make a ton of mistakes. We still have a lot of defects. The goal is to continue to fix those defects as we go ahead. Finally, affordability. I mean, DashPass has been a key affordability lever for us. There's many consumers that can benefit today by being on DashPass but they're still not on DashPass. Still a lot of low-hanging fruit for us to continue to improve the value proposition of DashPass. So if you think about the growth sort of like how we think about it, it's improvement in the product driven by underlying improvements in selection, quality as well as affordability.

Okay. And thinking about that growth algorithm, how do you think about MAUs versus order frequency?

Yes. I mean, I think from a modeling perspective, I know people think of it as an equation which is MAUs times order frequency. But I'd say that's probably a wrong way to think about it because any improvements that you do in the product ultimately will drive both. If you think about it, right, like if consumers come back and order more with us, do you think of that as order frequency or do you think of that as retention, right? It's 2 sides of the same coin. For us, what we're trying to do is continue to increase the number of users on the platform so users are still growing at a very healthy rate. At the same time, the order frequency continues to increase. So just in the Q1 results itself, MAUs have hit an all-time high. They continue to grow at a very nice clip. Order frequency was also at an all-time high. And when I look at the underlying cohorts, the cohort behavior continues to be very healthy. So newer cohorts are joining at higher order rates than before. Older cohorts still continue to engage with us. Even cohorts as old as like 8, 9 years ago, they're still engaging and ordering more with us over time.

Great. And net revenue margin take rate, it's a little bit lower in Q1. It was a sticking point, it felt like, on the earnings call. Can you just talk a little bit about the drivers that gives you confidence that it will step back up into Q2 and then accelerate into the back half?

Yes. Maybe I'll talk about the drivers and then talk about what's the confidence in the step-up in the back half of the year. I mean, 2 simple things, right? One is Q1 is usually a stronger volume quarter for us. We see good volume in Q4 and Q1 just because the weather is colder, people order a lot more. So we invest in Dasher supply. Very seasonal, happens all the time, happened last year, happened the year before. The second one, we found an opportunity to reduce average consumer fees structurally for grocery consumers within DashPass. So those are the 2 reasons on why take rate was lower in Q1 compared to Q4. I think more people thought of it as like, "Hey, did the promo activity go up?" And the answer is flat out no. When I look at the promo activity in Q4 versus Q1, it's fairly consistent. It actually didn't go up at all. But I think the second and the more important thing is, which is important to understand is the way we operate the business. I think what we're trying to do constantly is generate improvement in unit economics, invest that back in the business as long as it meets our IRR threshold, and it drives retention and order frequency. So in Q1, we were sitting there, we had a lot of goodness from cost of revenue. We had a lot of goodness from other parts of the P&L. We had 2 choices to make. We can let it drop through the bottom line. That gives rise to more EBITDA. Or if you find good opportunities, we can invest that back in the business. Going back again, this is a highly manicured, highly managed business, right? We are managing the levers of the business on a weekly basis. When I looked at the EBITDA, that was pretty good, right? Like when you looked at EBITDA dollar growth year-over-year, that's roughly about 60%. We found good opportunities where we can structurally lower the fees, and that leads to more retention, more order frequency, for grocery specifically, but the business is growing. We added about 6 to 7 points of order volume share year-over-year. This is a great opportunity for us to continue to extend that lead. And again, we're doing this in a manner because we are comfortable with the unit economics of grocery. We're comfortable with the overall EBITDA dollar generation in the business. So we said this is a great opportunity for us to invest. Now I think to your second point around what gives us confidence, right, remember, Q2 take rate, I said on the call, is going to be higher than Q1. Second half is going to be higher than the first half. It's a couple of things. One is ads is going to continue to grow as a percentage of the overall business. Two is unit economics is business as usual. We continue to improve unit economics. So what happens in our business is business as usual, unit economics continue to increase. There's going to be pockets in time where we say this is a good opportunity for us to take some of that and reinvest that back in the business. Q1 was one of those things because ultimately, what you're trying to do is drive retention and order frequency. So you'll see some of these variations. But again, when you think about the GOV growth that's been very strong not just in Q1 but for the last several quarters, when you look at the EBITDA dollar production, we feel very comfortable because that continues to be pretty healthy, and that continues to grow at a nice clip. So we said there's a great opportunity to invest. We've taken advantage of that.

Great. So moving to grocery and new verticals, you said on the Q1 call that you expect to be the order volume share leader over the course of this year. So can you talk about what's driving those share gains? What gives you confidence? And then maybe just dig into the distinction between orders versus dollar volume?

Sure. The share gain that we talked about that we're going to be #1 is based on volume, not on spend. For us, I mean, what we're seeing in the business is, I mean, grocery is a 4-year-old business for us, relatively new compared to our restaurant business. But today, what you're seeing is more than 1/4 of our monthly active users order from categories outside of restaurants. And the thesis has always been when users order from multiple categories, the overall retention on the platform continues to be higher. And that's exactly the same behavior that's actually happening right now on the platform. What's driving the growth that you're seeing in the business is compared to 2 years ago to today, we have a majority of the top 20. We have a majority of the top 100 grocers on the platform. So selection on the platform has gotten better. And if you've experienced the product a couple of years ago to today, overall quality of the platform continues to get better. So you have a combination of, A, the selection getting better as well as the quality getting better, which is driving more users to come back and order more with us. But the key difference is we have a structural advantage because we have tens of millions of users that come to the app every day, every single month to order restaurants. We've already spent performance marketing dollars to acquire them. We've already enrolled them in DashPass. It's easier for us to point them in terms of grocery or retail versus a stand-alone where you have to go recreate the consumer acquisition engine. The same thing exists for Dasher, right? You already have millions of Dashers on the platform delivering restaurants. What grocery does, in fact, is it increases the density of the platform, which means there's more volume, which means the efficiency is higher, which again gives rise to unit economics. So we are sitting there saying, hey, this is a business where we think we can go solve the user experience. The unit economics look pretty good. They're improving when I look at the gross margin. The flow-through from gross margin to contribution margin is pretty high. And we think we have a unique advantage where the consumer experience, we can actually solve. So we actually think this is going to be a pretty large business for us over time.

Great. And I want to dig into the customer portion and then the merchant portion in a bit more detail. So starting with customers, you're adding 1 of every 2 new customers to the category. Is that coming from cross-sell, DashPass, or is it new customers to the overall platform?

For our 2 new verticals?

Yes.

Yes. So I think a broader question is what's the customer profile for new verticals look like, right? Still, a majority of the consumers to new verticals join the platform for our restaurants and then they cross-sell over to grocery. But what you are seeing is today, some new users start their journey with grocery as the first order. And that percentage and that number is continuing to increase. So people are discovering DoorDash for grocery as their first order and that number continues to increase. But the majority is this concept of cross-sell where consumers are using both the restaurant as well as grocery. And I get a lot of questions from investors saying, "Hey, what does the grocery business look like? What does the restaurant business look like? Are you acquiring consumers just for grocery?" No, we're acquiring consumers to join the platform. And eventually, you'll get to a point where users will just come to us. They'll use us for everyday local needs, right, whether it's grocery, retail, Sephora. You're just going to have a marketplace where people continue to use us for multiple categories and the overall retention will continue to increase.

And then taking the merchant side, you mentioned that the majority of the top 20 grocers are with you at the moment. So can you talk a little bit about how those conversations have evolved and how it's changed over time?

Sure. I mean, if you asked me about 5 years ago, I would have said, selection was going to be a hill to climb. But today, we feel pretty comfortable, right? We have most of the major grocers on the platform. And when we go talk to some of these grocers, what they tell us is 2 things, right? One is, A, it's incremental to the sales that they're already seeing. That's why this concept of exclusivity, I don't think, will exist in a few years. I think every grocer will be on every platform. Two is we're driving same-store sales growth for them. Two, what we hear is the quality of our interaction is much better because we've spent so much time on the integration of quality between us and the grocer, between us and the consumer so they're pretty happy with the quality of the platform. What we're just starting to see is in some of the top 10 to 20 grocers, we are already #1 in terms of volume share, even though many of those grocers we've just onboarded in the last couple of years. So overall as a platform, we think we're going to be #1 in the next, call it, a year. But even in some of the individual labels or individual brands, we've already gotten to being #1 in terms of order volume share. In terms of the unit economics, we feel pretty good about where they are.

Great. Shifting to international. Can you talk about how you think about your current level of scale? You recently announced the Deliveroo acquisition, and where you think you need to get to over time?

Sure. Let me start 3 years ago, we partnered with Wolt. That was middle of 2022, roughly. It's been about 3 years. Partnered with Miki and team, who we thought very highly of at the time of the acquisition. That was part of the criteria for the partnership there. We're very pleased with the performance. Overall, international is growing substantially faster than peers. It's obviously growing faster than our core restaurant business. We've gained share. We are either #1 or #2 in terms of spend share in more than 20 countries. The overall international portfolio is gross profit positive. We feel really good about users, order frequency, which continues to increase. We launched Wolt+ roughly about 18 months ago. That business continues to scale, which is similar to DashPass in the U.S. So overall, when we look at the current footprint from an international perspective, we still see a lot of opportunity. We continue to grow users, continue to grow out of frequency. But at the same time, the other key learning we've had is our team has executed extremely well. So we looked at it and said the team actually has bandwidth to do more. That's part of the reason why we said we're going to partner with Deliveroo because Miki and team have done a great job with Wolt. Now we're saying, hey, we can expand that and we can cover Continental Europe with the partnership with Deliveroo, which gives us access to 9 countries, which are complementary with no overlap at all.

And then thinking about structural differences, U.S. versus international. We touched on this briefly off stage, but I've spent some of my career looking at the European players. One of the things that surprised me, U.S. versus Europe, is just the inherent cyclicality of Europe. So maybe if you can touch on what you think about that cyclicality and any other structural differences you'd call out.

Yes. I mean, I think -- I don't think too much about the structural differences because, I mean, it's very similar even in the U.S., right? Operating in New York is very different from operating in Wichita, Kansas. I mean, you have just very different in terms of operational behavior. Same thing is true, right? We operate in Israel. We operate in Finland. It's very different in terms of how we operate. But the core is consumers want convenience. Merchants want more sales. Couriers want flexible earnings. I think that core fundamental principle has not changed. So when we look at that and we say, hey, let's apply the same playbook. Let's apply the same operational excellence to all of the countries that we operate in, the end results are retention continues to improve, order frequency continues to improve. But the core, and this is where we started, right, the fundamental principle for us, it always goes back to having a better product. This entire business works on 2 things. It's product and math, right? If you're focused on building a great experience not just for the consumer, for the merchant as well as Dasher, that drives retention higher. That retention paired with operational excellence and data and analytics ultimately drives the results that you're seeing in the business.

And then thinking about new verticals in international markets, I can definitely see a world in which alcohol would do quite well in the U.K.

Absolutely.

But how do you think about those adjacencies and the expansion there?

Sure. I mean, similar to what we're seeing in the U.S., I mean, new verticals, I think, is a newer category in the international business. They're all growing. In fact, in some of the countries, because there is no traditional organized e-commerce such as an Amazon.com, people rely on Wolt for many of their nonrestaurant purchases as well. So when I look at the penetration, which is volume in those countries that goes through grocery and non-restaurants compared to the overall volume, some of the percentages are actually higher in what we are seeing in the U.S. So overall, when I think about the expansion of categories and the opportunity available, it feels similar to the U.S., and in some cases, might be even better.

Great. Shifting to commerce. So you've ramped the Commerce Platform over the past year. You just announced the acquisition of SevenRooms. Can you talk a little bit about the broader strategy, merchant enablement and the rationale for this deal and how you expect to see that monetize over time?

Sure. Bunch of questions in there. So let me start with the overall strategy, right? When we started DoorDash, the fundamental thesis for us is we want to be a merchant services company. We want to help both grow as well as empower merchants. The grow portion was where we started, which is our demand generation marketplace. That was the first product which we started. The empower is we looked at merchants say, "Hey, how can we help merchants even more? What are the services we can provide to merchants?" We started with Logistics as I talked about. Then we added our Storefront business. So SevenRooms is basically an extension of that strategy. What we were looking for is how do you help merchants manage their tables better? How do you help drive operational efficiency? But at the same time, how do you help merchants drive more sales and marketing in a closed-loop system to consumers? So SevenRooms gave us an opportunity where we said, you can market to consumers. You can get to know your guests better. You can bring them back to the restaurant more often. That software platform combined with the distribution network that we have, where we have more than 500,000 restaurants, we have an established sales force so we can sell into the existing base, that was the powerful combination that we were attracted by.

Okay, makes sense. So advertising, some stats from Q4, so more than 1,000 SMB restaurants, 83 of the top 100 restaurants in the U.S. and 21 of the top 25 CPG marketers in the U.S. all advertised on Dash Marketplace. So thinking about those buckets, how do you think about the biggest opportunity? And where are you pushing hardest in advertising at the moment?

Sure. We think of it almost completely opposite. We think of it from a merchant perspective. We are not trying to think of it from our perspective. We're not trying to solve for sort of like a financial metric. Ultimately, what we want to provide is our advertising business, our merchant-funded promotions business is just another part of our business-to-business services that we provide to merchants. Today, merchants spend somewhere between 7% to 10% of their sales on advertising, but they don't really have sort of an analytical way to spend those dollars. We think our solution can give them the analytics behind how to spend their dollars, drive a higher return on advertising spend. And for us, as long as the return on advertising spend is in a superior part, we feel comfortable continuing to extend and grow our advertising business. Just to give you a sense of where we are, right, today, majority of the ad business, the revenue comes from restaurants, that, too, in the U.S. Very early on the international side, very early from a CPG perspective and that largely reflects the size of the business that we have, the underlying GOV that we have.

Great. And thinking about long-term ad penetration, is there anything structurally different for you versus your peers? And where do you think that can go over time?

In terms of like financial?

Just in terms of where the advertising penetration is. Do you think about it in terms of GMV, gross bookings? It's been a metric for some of the food delivery space. Is there anything structurally different? Maybe we think about different verticals, restaurants versus...

Yes, I often find it weird when peers or other companies come out and say, "Hey, here's the long-term target for ad as a percentage of GOV." Because to me, I'm like the merchant is not thinking of it that way. The merchant is saying, "Hey, just give me a better product, which helps me drive more sales to the merchant. And as long as that happens, right, whether it's in-store or whether it's online, I think we can continue to scale that business. When I look at the business, I mean, I think of it in terms of a couple of different angles, right? Is there anything technologically that is impeding us growing the business? No. Is there demand on the platform? Absolutely. Is there retention of existing merchants on the ad platform continues to be good? Great. So as long as those conditions exist and the constraints being consumer conversion is not impacted and return on advertising spend is good, we feel pretty good. We are always going to be very disciplined about growing that business because we don't want to get to a point where either conversion or ROAS gets impacted. So what you'll see from us is provide great product to the merchant but be very disciplined about scaling that business.

Great. Thinking about financials, capital allocation. So gross margin, you've seen a little bit of a tailwind from insurance over the past few quarters. How are you thinking about that going forward?

Sure. Yes, we've done a ton of work around insurance over the last couple of years. I'm pretty happy with where it is. I think we've driven a ton of leverage on the insurance line. But as I think about it from a percentage of GOV basis, I would expect insurance to roughly be sort of where it is today.

Okay. And then capital allocation, you've just allocated a significant portion to M&A. How should you think about the buyback and the free cash flow generation from here? And maybe on that point, if you can talk a little bit about cash balance and minimum levels you might like to maintain.

Sure. I mean, again, roughly, I think I answered this on the call as well. Minimum working capital needed to operate the business is roughly about $1 billion. So anything above that, we've always said, as long as it meets sort of our IRR threshold and framework, we are happy to invest, whether it's back in the business or share buyback or inorganic. But I think the fundamental rule has not changed, right? For us, the core strategy of capital allocation continues to be, we are going to invest as long as there is a good long-term IRR, as well as long-term free cash flow that we think that generates from the investment. The business is cash flow generative. We have a healthy amount of cash. As I think about it from a share buyback perspective, again, we're always going to be opportunistic about it. We might be constrained in the short term, but as we think about longer term, like our view on philosophy and buyback has not changed. As long as it presents a good opportunity for us from an IRR perspective, we are happy to do that.

And given that we've spoken about the 5 different priorities, key focus areas, how are you thinking about different areas that are most exciting at the moment from a capital allocation standpoint? Is there anything that really stands out to you?

I mean, again, I mean, I think we continue to find good opportunities, right? Restaurants is the largest, the most mature business that we have. But still, I mean, we find great opportunities to continue to invest, right? Like we still don't have all the selection that we want on the platform. We continue to invest behind product. We continue to invest behind DashPass. Again, as we think about investment, right, I think there's still a lot of opportunity for us to grow users and order frequency on the Marketplace side as well as when you think about it from a B2B commerce platform perspective, I think there's still a lot of opportunity for us to scale the existing services and continue to add new services as well.

And maybe the point you mentioned on DashPass, is there anything different there that is different that you've seen in international markets so far? How are some of the learnings that you picked up in the U.S., say, how can you take that into U.K., broader Europe?

Sure. In the U.S., DashPass continues to do extremely well. In fact, when I look at the growth rate of DashPass in Q1, it accelerated slightly from Q4, the core reason being the product continues to get better, right? Like you have more categories, you have more sort of opportunity, more benefits that we have created on the platform. So overall, DashPass continues to be very strong. Retention on the platform is strong. The order frequency is obviously higher than people who are not subscribers. In the European markets, it's behind in terms of launch because we launched our Wolt+ business roughly about 2 years ago. But when I look at the slope of the curve in terms of adoption, the slope of the curve is higher in some of the European markets compared to even in the U.S. And part of it is because we have all these learnings from the U.S. that we've been able to transport and help our Wolt team actually avoid some of the mistakes that we made as we started the DashPass business many years ago.

Great. It's a tech conference so we've not spoken about AI yet.

AI or autonomy, you haven't asked any...

Well, we'll touch both of those. So AI, how are you guys leveraging it internally? There have been a few examples from presentations I've sat in today where companies have spoken about driving efficiency improvements across the internal product. We have Lori Beer speak at the start of the day and talking about 20%, 30% efficiency gains that our own developers at JPMorgan are starting to drive. How are you guys thinking about that?

Yes, very similar. I mean, I think we have more than a dozen experiments, maybe even more internally within the company. And I think of it in terms of like 3 broad buckets, right? Like on the far right, you have internal sort of areas, whether it's analysts writing SQL queries to get data, a lot of that starting to get replaced by some of the AI tools. Developers writing code, just like some of the other companies, we are starting to see efficiency gains there where automated code generation is happening. In the middle, you have the classic use case around support, where a lot of the workflows, sort of like you have the contextual workflows that are being generated by some of the AI tools. And on the consumer side, you have personalization, which is like, hey, if you share your account with somebody else or if you and your significant other have the app, it should look very different based on your preferences, based on your order history. We're starting to see that drive conversion impact as well.

Okay, great. Autonomous, it's obviously touching more of the ride-hailing market at the moment than it is restaurant. But you guys have touched on some of the investments you're making on a number of earnings calls. Maybe you can dig into that a little bit and how you're thinking about the evolution of that tech.

Sure. I mean, we've been working on it for a few years. I mean, nothing major to announce, but we think there's a real opportunity for us where a certain portion of the deliveries can be autonomous. We think of it in terms of 2 forms, both by land as well as by air. I think we made a good amount of progress. We feel good about where this is headed. We've been very disciplined sort of about our investments in that area. But overall, we think the technology is pretty promising, and what we need is very different from sort of like ridesharing. It's a different form factor. It's lower in terms of overall cost. We think there's a good opportunity there where it could be unit economic beneficial for us in the long run.

And regulation, it's a moving target in lots of different jurisdictions, both in the U.S. and internationally. Is there anything that stands out at the moment that we should be talking about?

Nothing really has changed. I mean, I think even almost since the IPO, I mean, I think it's the same sort of like a few things that have happened but nothing major to talk about. I think it feels like it's in a pretty good spot right now.

Great. And we've got about a minute left. But as you're thinking out over the course of the balance of this year, the next few years, is there anything that is particularly exciting that you're focused on at the moment?

Sure. I mean, if you just take a step back and look at the journey of the business, right, I mean, the core business continues to do really well. You have a business that's continuing to grow. We've been through a variety of different demand cycles and the business has been very resilient. The overall profit dollar production of the business continues to increase. We're the only company to have gained share in restaurants. We are the largest in the U.S. New verticals, we feel like we've made a lot of progress over the last 3 or 4 years after sort of like a build cycle several years back. We're going to be #1 in terms of order volume share. You're starting to see us drive majority of the growth in that industry now. Our international business continues to do well where that business is gross profit positive. And I think the 2 sort of announcements that we made, both Deliveroo and SevenRooms, I think it's a combination of a couple of things, right? We feel good about the core business. Both of these give opportunity for us to expand the surface area, to invest more, ultimately to drive more profit dollar production. At the same time, we feel like we have the capacity and the bandwidth to be able to do that, just given that the existing business continues to scale as well as grow quite nicely.

It's a great place to leave it. Ravi, thank you very much.

Thank you so much for having me.