Vijay Mehrotra

And he's actually done some problem framing, uh, coursework, I think for informs.

One of their modules is from Shannon, but, uh, Vijay, I mean, we go back in the whole spreadsheet revolution when Steve Powell from Dartmouth was all about problem framing.

It's all that kind of stuff, right? It's a structured process, influence diagrams, start with a messy enough problem that nobody knows what the heck to do, right? Right.

And so, and, you know, I know, Mike, you put some stuff out recently, which I loved on sort of project classes.

It doesn't have to be, but...

SQL prompting.

Vijay and I had a talk before this podcast and he said, what about contextualization? And I was like, you're right, that should be in that course, providing context.

So in the AI course, it's all about Essentially using AI to make sure that you are a critical thinker and can ask the right questions and understand context to get to a core issue is how I think about artificial intelligence.

But when you look at a company like DoorDash from the outside, now that you're on the outside looking in, what do you think people underestimate about how challenging the problems are?

Yeah, that, that's a great question, Vijay.

I think, uh, often, um, and again, this happens all the time, people forget how different markets are.

You know, when in, like, m-marketplace theory, uh, markets are these, you know, standalone entities that operate in semi-isolation.

... eight only do food delivery.

Um, and, and so, like, there's a lot of, uh, nuance into, uh, that aspect as well.

But basically, going back to, uh, Vijay, your question, uh, that level of kind of coordination that has to happen to be able to make a decision like that used to be quite manual.

So it used to be in a spreadsheet that would get reviewed weekly by, uh, you know, operational team and finance team, and it was at a very high level.