Good morning,
“I’ve always been curious about solving problems,” DoorDash CFO Ravi Inukonda tells me. “I think finance is one of those disciplines that help you connect the inputs and the outputs. And that’s how I ended up here. And I love it.”
Inukonda became finance chief at the food delivery platform DoorDash on March 1. He was promoted from his role of VP of finance and strategy as Prabir Adarkar, CFO since 2018, steps into a new role as president and COO. Adarkar succeeds Christopher Payne, who is retiring. Payne will remain as an advisor through the end of May.
This is Inukonda’s first-ever CFO role, and he’s the leader of a finance organization with over 400 people. “I would say, I felt honored,” Inukonda says of his first day in the role. “But at the same time, it felt very natural. The advantage I had, obviously, is working across the company for many years. I’ve had an inside view into how to operate and scale the business.”
Inukonda has an “intuitive grasp of our business’ unique interconnectedness and an intricate understanding of the second- and third-order effects of our decisions that benefits all of our stakeholders,” Tony Xu, CEO of DoorDash, said in the company’s announcement. “Ravi’s impact has continued to expand over his time at DoorDash, and his capabilities as a leader have pushed us to excel. He’ll be a world-class CFO.”
A.I. in finance
Inukonda previously served as the VP of finance and strategy for almost five years. And before joining DoorDash, he was the head of finance at Uber Eats. He actually started his career as an engineer. But Inukonda had a desire to better understand how the entire business works and decided to pursue an MBA at MIT Sloan School of Management. He worked in investment banking at Goldman Sachs, did a few years in private equity, and then switched over to corporate finance.
As Inukonda is tech savvy, DoorDash is using A.I. in the finance function. “We've used machine learning for the last four or five years, and our prediction capabilities have gotten significantly better over time,” he says. When I first started, we used to do it manually in Excel.”
An example of how you use machine learning? “There's a sushi restaurant near my house, and when I go there on a Friday night, I see more Dashers than actual customers,” he explains. “What the owner has done is create a separate entrance where the Dashers come in and out in less than a minute. And that's all science for us, right? We need to be able to predict when the food is going to be ready when the Dashers need to show up and leave the restaurant to get to the customer.”
Inukonda is “personally super excited about generative A.I.," he says. And he’s been reviewing use cases for the finance function.
DoorDash's Q1 2023 earnings call is scheduled for May 4, with Inukonda at the helm of finance. In February, the company reported Q4 2022 revenue of $1.82 billion, with a 40% increase over the prior year, beating estimates but had an adjusted loss of $1.65 a share. For the quarter, total orders increased 27% year over year.
Inukonda plans to continue the strategic focus on finance, the organization he helped grow over the past few years. “Finance needs to be an enabler, not a cop,” he says. “Finance cannot just be a reporting function. We’re constantly focused on the business and thinking about how we can further DoorDash’s mission of empowering local economies.”
Before our talk ended, I asked Inukonda what he orders the most through DoorDash. “Chicken salad from a restaurant called Starbird Chicken,” he says. “I probably had the same thing over 100 times. It's wonderful. You should try it.”
Sheryl Estrada
sheryl.estrada@fortune.com
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