Starting a business from your dorm room? Read this.
DoorDash: A startup story we all can learn from
While looking for a startup idea, a bunch of Bay Area college kids overheard a restaurant owner turn down a delivery order. One of the co-founders recalls it like this: “If there was a lightbulb moment, this was it - why couldn't businesses send things across town, on-demand? An on-demand FedEx.”
That was the start of Palo Alto Delivery, which would become DoorDash.
A startup story we all can learn from:
Watch this 2013 video as the founders apply to one of the world’s biggest startup accelerators 👇🏼 on an iPhone 5?
There sat:
Tony Xu, @t_xu - Born in China, got his bachelor’s degree in industrial engineering and operations research from UC Berkeley, worked at McKinsey, eBay, and PayPal, Stanford MBA, now the CEO of DoorDash
Stanley Tang, @stanleytang - Born in Hong Kong, Amazon Best Seller at 14 yrs old, studied computer science at Stanford, worked as a software engineer at Facebook, previously the CPO of DoorDash and now the Head of DoorDash Labs
Andy Fang, @andyfang - Grew up in the Bay Area, BS in computer science at Stanford, previously the CTO of DoorDash and now the Head of Consumer Engineering
Evan Moore, @evancharles - Founded the idea with Xu while at Stanford, but left the company after 17 months, worked as Head of Product at Opendoor, and now is an investing partner at Khosla Ventures
The business was anything but proven, but they were doing exactly the right things.
Takeaways:
They Didn’t Just Hope for an Idea
They wanted to start a business that related to local businesses. In order to find that idea, they went and talked to 100’s of them.
They didn’t assume, they didn’t hope for an idea. They took action, found a problem, and built a solution.
They weren’t initially DoorDash.
There’s no need to land on a name and logo when first thinking of an idea. Just be paloaltodelivery.com!
A Team Matters
When the chemistry is right, the power of great minds thinking together is exponentially better than one person working alone.
They Started Slowly
They didn’t aim to initially build a solution for the country. They focused on a single geographic area (Palo Alto) to prove their solution worked.
They found their differentiator (fast delivery) and stuck to it. They didn’t let their aspiration for growth compromise their value proposition.
Talk to Your Customers
They talked to 100s of Palo Alto restaurant owners and delivery drivers to understand them - their needs, aspirations, and problems.
Through this, they found a major problem they could solve ➡ Restaurants wanted to deliver but couldn’t + Delivery drivers had a lot of spare time and wanted to make more cash.
The Founders Started as the Delivery Drivers.
They hustled. It allowed them to get insight into the practicalities of what they were building, especially from the delivery POV.
After their time in the YCombinator program, DoorDash pitched on demo day to a room full of investors.
Watch it here. Needless to say, they’ve succeeded. Beyond measure.
"Meeting startups at the very start of their journey is one of my favorite parts about working at YC. By the time a company is successful enough to IPO, the many doubts and uncertainties of the early stage startup are largely forgotten, replaced with a hindsight that makes their path to success seem so much more obvious and predictable."
-Paul Buchheit, YC
DoorDash is now worth $60b 🚀
