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David Senra: Tony Xu, DoorDash

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Tony Xu is the co-founder and CEO of DoorDash, the largest food delivery platform in the United States. Before he was a tech executive, he was a dishwasher. Xu was born in Nanjing, China, and immigrated to the U.S. at age four with parents who arrived with $200 in the bank. His mother had been a licensed doctor in China. In America, she waited tables at a Chinese restaurant in Illinois. Xu worked beside her, washing dishes. That experience became the animating idea behind everything he built. At Stanford, he and three classmates noticed that restaurants in Palo Alto had no good way to handle delivery. They built a basic website, called restaurants, and started driving orders themselves — skipping class to fulfill them. That crude experiment became DoorDash. They went through Y Combinator in 2013 with $120,000 in seed funding and a product that barely existed. What followed was a decade of improbable dominance. DoorDash entered a market that Grubhub had largely defined, absorbed punishing losses to win share city by city, and eventually surpassed every rival in the U.S. In December 2020, the company went public on the NYSE at a $32 billion valuation, making Xu a billionaire at 36

David Senra: So I want to start with the fact that you said that paloaltodelivery.com, which was DoorDash before DoorDash was the most minimal version of a minimal viable product. Tony Xu: Yes. David Senra: Can you explain how you built it? Tony Xu: Well, whenever you can ship something in 43 minutes to test your idea, I think that's pretty good. And certainly, this is 12, 13 years before the rise of LLMs and AI tools to make it so easy to do that. But basically, the four of us wanted to test this idea that if you wanted to offer delivery from places that never offered delivery before, what…

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