ananddass

Disclosure: I am on the B.D & partnerships team on Postmates.

We haven't shifted focus away from restaurants. We have about 3000 Plus partners today of which a majority are restaurants. We've always done more than restaurants. Food is most of what we do but there are also grocery, apparel, electronics, essentials retailers on Postmates.

It really depends on the order distribution of distances for a specific store but on average its ~7 minutes from pickup to dropoff. Regarding difference in temperature, the coffee travels in insulated bags and so we aren't seeing significant differences. We are monitoring customer satisfaction scores on these orders and will tweak as we go along as we find opportunities.

Actually, Postmates & Starbucks have been working on this partnership for a while now. We began operationally testing this in the last couple of months. As with all tests, there were kinks that needed to be worked out and new problems to be solved. Transporting coffee, spill-proof, at scale was one of those.

We were optimizing for speed so didn't really shoot for optimizing costs as much. It cost us about $6.61 in material costs and $5.25 in laser cutting time.

Microsoft needs systemic changes. There may some truth in the fact that ballmer is to blame. But a new ceo will face the same challenges. Markets are irrational.