<p>The earliest version of DoorDash didn't begin with a full two-sided marketplace for consumers and dashers. They needed to prove the thesis that consumers<em> wanted</em> food delivered from restaurants that hasn't offered it before.</p><p>To do this, the founders only built the software for dashers and the restaurants. All orders were placed over the phone and answered by the early DoorDash team. They focused on providing a <strong>fast delivery experience </strong>instead of the best ordering experience.</p><p>This choice helped them narrow their initial scope and find their market fit.</p>

Building a Marketplace at DoorDash

<ol><li>They can go high-low, and they can really go to the lowest level of detail.</li><li>They have a very strong bias for action, they have that get-going movement indoctrinated inside their bones.</li><li>They're great recruiters because they recognize that it takes a team to win.</li><li>They try to intentionally get 1% better every day. There's this humility that no matter what standard or benchmarks they've set for themselves are cleared, that there's always something that we can do better. </li><li>They have great followership. That's actually my definition of leadership. It's not how many people report into you or how many people listen to you, it's how many people want to follow you.</li></ol>

Attributes of Excellence

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Tony Xu is the co-founder and CEO of DoorDash. Tony started DoorDash 7.5 years ago, and today it is one of the largest food delivery and logistics platforms globally, with operations in the US, Canada, Australia. In our conversation, we discuss the initial problem that DoorDash set out to solve, DoorDash’s counterintuitive approach to building their product, and the surprising benefits of capital constraints in DoorDash’s early days. DoorDash’s business model is an equal parts logistics nightmare and a human coordination problem, or as Tony puts it, a human and math problem.

Tony Xu - A Human and Math Problem

Building a Marketplace at DoorDash

Attributes of Excellence

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