Neil Mehta
speaker
321 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard 4 May
Neil Mehta’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.
Appearances
It's hard for me to know the difference if I hadn't experienced that, what it might have been like. But having experienced it, there's no question in my mind that there was an appreciation for humans creating beautiful work for other humans in particular, that I really appreciated.
And if you think about the business I'm in today is evaluating founders, building what we think are generational companies and being a partner to them. And I do think there's an artistic form to it. I mean, we oftentimes internally at Green Oaks describe a company as an artist painting a painting.
I tell a lot of our young team, if you're in the business of evaluating painters, you've got to study the types of tapestry you could use, paints they use, different forms. You study all the great artists of every generation through history. You talk to artists all the time. And companies are just really founders painting in many ways.
I think there's an appreciation I certainly got from that of what quality can look like on a comparative basis to something that's not as good quality.
Yeah. JDCE stands for jaw dropping customer experience. If you put five drinks into everybody at Green Oaks on a Friday night and you're just like, tell me about your life. They just talk about jaw-dropping customer experiences and JDCs. It's like we have a tattoo on our arm. And if you step back
There's a fundamental tenant at Green Oaks, which is a very small number of the world's founders are going to produce a significant proportion of the value that humans enjoy. And they're going to move the world forward through the products they build and the companies they build. And everything else is just kind of a shell game along the way.
And there's some tenants around building those remarkable businesses at scale that we think are really important. One of them is building a jaw-dropping customer experience. It's really hard in the world of capitalism to build something that delights humans at a differential rate, what anybody else on earth can do.
Think about when you pick up your iPhone or the first time you might've used an Uber, if you're a developer, the first time you use Stripe for payments, or if you're a trader, maybe you opened the Robinhood. Capitalism is basically full of a sea of businesses that are not really doing anything that difficult. They're just kind of me too products that are swimming in the river of beta, if you will.
And I think the steps to creating a JDCE, a jaw-dropping customer experience, it usually starts with breaking trade-offs. It usually starts with doing something very difficult, either technically or operationally, that would usually give competitors nightmares. You have to do something that was borderline impossible or perceived to be impossible before.
You have to do it from a customer-centric perspective. You have to really figure out what the customer pain points are. You could ask some customers, but usually customers can't even articulate all the pain points they're facing. They just know they're frustrated or this experience is suboptimal. We're lucky at Green Oaks over the last 12, 13 years.
We've been lucky enough to partner with a number of companies that have built jaw-dropping customer experiences. I'll tell you where we created the word. I created the word after spending a lot of time with Coupang right at the beginning of Green Oaks. And in the case of Coupang, so Bomb started a business that was just starting to sell products like any other online site would sell products.
It was really a marketplace. And he made the decision in 2013, 2014, that he'd start to transition that to building one peak capability, meaning that he could pick, pack, ship, and deliver a wide variety of SKUs, everything from soap to tissue paper to golf clubs to fresh groceries over time.
And the early days of that, if you asked people around Korea, they would tell you, we don't need faster delivery. Everything shows up here in two and a half to four days. It's great. It's totally fine. And his view was actually, it's consistent, reliable, fast delivery. You get the stuff you ordered on time, usually within 12 to 24 hours. And that sounds obvious today.
You order something 12 hours later or 24 hours later, it shows up at your door. Now it's called the rocket experience at Coupang. But at the time, building that, it sounds easy. Open a warehouse, put a bunch of stuff into that warehouse, hire a bunch of drivers, work with those drivers to fill up their trucks, deliver it to the door, take it off.
Now, there's a bunch of stuff that breaks when you actually try to build that experience step by step. First thing is the unit economics completely break. Second, to actually drive throughput through these, do you buy from manufacturers? How much do you buy from manufacturers? What do you do about your inventory turns? How do you service the right stuff on a website?
It is extraordinarily hard to go build all that stuff. And it took years. It took two to four years to really start to build that flywheel so it worked. And what did it entail to build a jaw-dropping customer experience? It took new technology. Coupang built not just a new warehouse management system, from what the consumer touches on a website, all the way down to new routing software.
FedEx famously never wants a driver to take the left turn because it takes a little bit more time. It was like that kind of optimization. It was infrastructure. It was building warehouses that were the size of football fields in place that doesn't have a lot of space, by the way, in Korea.
It was building delivery camps and it was building localized distribution points where you have thousands of apartments to be able to make sure you could have even people run up and down the apartment to deliver something. It was making sure that you had the right packaging so that didn't get stuck with lots and lots of boxes.
It came down to where do you leave it outside someone's door so you don't wake them up when you deliver it at 6 a.m. to make sure it's safe. When you add all those things together, actually, the way we came up with the term is BOM would show us, you'd see in the cohort behavior, average retention pre-1P delivery was probably in the 30s overall for the market, not for Coupang specifically.
Coupang for Rocket, which was eventually called Rocket through 1P capability was in the 60s on a core retention basis. So it was clearly working, but that wasn't the coolest part about it. The coolest part is when we would ask customers about their experience. We do these video recordings and Coupang will do them as well. I remember multiple of the videos, the woman was crying.
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