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- Unheard Roots of Doordash 🛵
Australia 🇦🇺,
Canada 🇨🇦,
Germany 🇩🇪,
New Zealand 🇳🇿,
Japan 🇯🇵,
and The USA 🇺🇸.
“But Neo… where are you going with this list?”
Do you know what all of these countries have in common?
A giant startup with a 28,000,000,000 dollar market cap (as of June 16) operates in every single one of those countries.
That giant is… Doordash 🤯
But how did a bunch of college kids start this company?
Well you’re in the right place to learn how. Because we’re here today to dissect the growth of this beast of a company.
The story of a immigrant 🏔
Like every great story - the story of Doordash begins with a protagonist.
That protagonist is Tony Xu.
The man that moved to the United States from China when he was only 5 years old with $200 to his families name.
No English, no money, no friends.
“My parents came here with maybe $200 in the bank and it was we’re going to make it or not situation. There wasn’t much of an in-between road.”
Tony’s parents started out by working odd jobs to pay the bills.
Eventually Tony’s father secured his PHD from a university in Illinois - but he isn’t the person that shaped Tony’s future ambitions.
That person was his mother who worked at 3 different restaurants to pay the bills.
In fact, she would even have Tony help out by washing dishes in the kitchen for extra money.
“But I think when you have nothing to lose, you also have a lot of upside as a result. And that was probably one of the earliest lessons I took.”
A seed is planeted 🌱
Tony didn’t know just yet but his experience growing up working at restaurants would be the foundation of his future business idea.
But before that - Tony had a couple more key steps.
The first obvious priority was learning English.
And Tony ended up becoming fluent by playing basketball with other kids in the neighborhood.
Despite Illinois being the first place Tonys parents moved - as Tony grew up the Xu family moved to San Jose.
Beautiful San Jose
That is where Tony became a “heads down” academic student and despite being 2 years behind his class mates, became valedictorian.
His academic success + immigrant background helped Tony secure admission into Stanford (Fancy huh 😉).
The Spark ⚡️
During his time at Stanford, Tony met his co-founders Andy Fang and Stanley Tang.
There they took an entrepreneurship class called Startup Garage.
It was in Startup Garage where Tony learned one of the most important lessons on entrepreneurship.
Always simplify the problem you’re tying to solve & focus on the fundamental problem.
This insight would go on to become one of the foundational principle of Doordash.
Now that the trio were learning about entrepreneurship, they wanted to apply their new found knowledge.
And the obvious choice for Tony - having grown up around a mother who first worked at then owned restaurant - was building something for local restaurant owners.
Getting to work 🎯
So the trio got to work - they started interviewing all sorts of restaurant owners trying to learn about their pain points.
One of the massive problems they kept coming across was logistics / delivery.
Almost every single local restaurant they went to would show the young aspiring entrepreneurs booklets of delivery orders they had refused.
“The idea for Doordash really came from this lifelong interest in helping these physical business owners - really people like my mom. So we talked to hundreds of small business owners and it was surprising to us that even in 2013 delivery was not a solved problem.”
All because they didn’t have the capacity to deliver food they made.
“There were business owners that would show us literally booklets of delivery orders that they would refuse. I mean we’re talking about thousands of dollars per week. Which is sometimes the difference between making payroll and actually surviving.”
Although Tony, Andy, and Stanley had a pain point to solve - there was a massive obstacle…
And cut 🎬
You want to know what the obstacle was don’t you?
Well you’re going to have to wait for next week.
Why? Because I hate long emails and I like to build up anticipation.
In the meantime feel free to reply to this email to let me know what you thought.