Self-taught programmer now leads $700-million startup
Image: Website/DoorDash
How do you make it from banking to heading a team in a start-up worth $700 million? For Jessica Lachs, it was learning coding on her own—something totally new after a Wall Street career and going to business school.
According to Business Insider, she was initially with Lehman Brothers, but was forced to leave when the company filed for bankruptcy. She then entered University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School where she took an MBA, hoping it would help her figure out what she wanted to do. However, she admitted feeling uncertain even when she had to create her own business for a class.
Jessica Lachs, head of business operations and analytics at DoorDash. Image: Website/DoorDash
“It’s really easy to tell the story and say ‘Oh, I went to business school to figure out what I wanted to do.’ But to actually live through that and not know what I wanted to do and not know where I was going to be was a pretty scary thing,” she shared.
The business was GiftSimple, a concept that allows friends and family to chip in for a pricey gift. But this wouldn’t be a permanent job for her, and eventually she started looking again.
She would soon join DoorDash, a growing food delivery business founded by Tony Xu, a Stanford graduate. His company needed a general manager for expanding in more cities in the United States.
Like most startups, the team of 30, including Lachs, took on multiple roles from sales to driver orientations. She managed the information needed through Excel spreadsheets, which she drew from her banking experience.
But it came to the point that the data became overwhelming, considering the differences in markets from Palo Alto to San Jose.
Image: Website/DoorDash
With no one assigned to that task, she decided to take initiative. “I love having answers to things,” Lachs said in the interview. “That became my role, to be the sort of Q&A center for DoorDash.”
She realized that to answer questions on popular food on weekends and dollars earned by couriers, or Dashers, for each order, she had to get past spreadsheets and go into programming.
With limited time, Lachs dove into online courses for SQL, a “basic programming language” used with databases to retrieve information. She also had to ask for advice from colleagues, finding that what she learned in classes and the real world were quite different.
In two months, with her programming know-how, she could tackle 80 percent of questions the company needed. For instance, to stay competitive, DoorDash needed data on how much a Dasher should earn in various markets so that they would not be pirated by other delivery companies.
While DoorDash’s value has grown to $700 million, Lachs still keeps pushing herself, bookmarking links she finds in a computer folder called “Learning.”
Lachs is the perfect example that in the digital age, particularly for business, learning never ends, and that to grow a startup, one should be open to taking advantage of an opportunity by developing new skills. Niña V. Guno/JB
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