Founder Friday: DoorDash

At the time of DoorDash’s IPO on 12/9/2020, the company had a valuation of $32.4B. By the end of its first day of trading, that valuation increased to $71.3B dollars. And though the market cap currently sits at $18.38B, it’s still not a bad return on the $2.5B they raised in funding.

So what’s DoorDash’s founding story? Here is the cliff’s notes version…

DoorDash had four co-founders originally; Tony Xu, Andy Fang, Stanley Tang, and Evan Moore.
The four co-founders were trying to build an SMB feedback app, but as Xu and Moore were interviewing with a macaroon store manager in Palo Alto during the fall of 2012, she identified a far greater need; deliveries and driver management.
They quickly pivoted to creating Palo Alto Delivery after interviewing 200 other SMB owners.
The co-founders were students during the day and did the deliveries themselves at night.
After six months, they applied and were excepted to Y Combinator.
Early investors included power players from Square, Yelp, Google (the creator of Gmail), and Benchmark.
Evan Moore left the company in 2014 after 17 months. But don’t worry about Moore; he became an early team member at Opendoor and is now an investing partner at Khosla Ventures.

And while DoorDash has never made a profit, it has seen its market share increase dramatically and has expanded into other service offerings. It wouldn’t be the first time we’ve seen a major tech player dominate the playing field before reaching profitability (Amazon didn’t turn a profit for nine years).