In the spring of 2013, four founders sat down together to fill out a Y Combinator
funding application for a food delivery startup they co-founded.
At the time, this startup only had roughly 150 customers and USD 10,000 in sales.
When asked how much they think this company could make, the co-founders gave a rough estimate of USD 100 million in revenue.
By 2018, this company reached that revenue target. Fast forward to the first quarter of its 2026 fiscal year, the firm made USD 4 billion in revenue.
The name of that company?
DoorDash
!
DoorDash spent the 2010s building itself up as a food delivery giant, slowly grabbing market share from rivals Uber Eats
and GrubHub
. By the end of that decade, the company had become the biggest in its industry.
In 2020, the firm went public, raising over USD 3 billion in the process at a valuation of USD 71 billion.
The food delivery company now has around 56 million users and owns around 60% of market share in the food delivery category, making it the undisputed market leader of its space.
Looking back at its history, DoorDash went from a small startup to a food delivery giant in less than a decade.
That said, its massive success didn’t come from nowhere. Transforming DoorDash into a humble startup to a food delivery juggernaut required not only hard work but also ambition.
Speaking of hard work, this trait is embodied by none other than one of DoorDash’s co-founders and current CEO, Tony Xu
.
Big Dreams, Humble Beginnings
Xu (born Xu Xun) and his parents migrated to the U.S. in 1989.
He earned his industrial engineering and operations research degree from UC Berkeley
. In 2013, he earned his MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business
.
Prior to co-founding DoorDash, Xu interned at digital payments and financial services firm Square
, worked as a business analyst at McKinsey
, and as a corporate strategy consultant for eBay
and PayPal
.
In 2013, Xu, along with Stanford classmates Andy Fang, Evan Moore, and Stanley Tang founded DoorDash. The firm’s founders initially worked together and launched its predecessor, PaloAltoDelivery.com in 2012.
Xu, alongside DoorDash’s employees, handled deliveries themselves during the company’s early days.
DoorDash continues to dominate the food delivery industry today, with nearly 615,000 merchants and roughly 56 million users on the platform.
What enabled Xu’s success?
- Dreaming Big
In an interview with Fortune
, Xu emphasized the importance of having big ambitions.
He said entrepreneurs have to take the “greedy algorithm”
and “to keep going all the way and seeing if there’s more.”
According to him, those qualities are part of his warning to entrepreneurs not to put a limit on their ambitions like he once did when building DoorDash.
- Working Hard
Xu attributed his success to hard work, citing his mother’s example as an inspiration.
His mother worked three jobs a day for 12 years just so she could open a medical clinic in the U.S. and make ends meet so that he didn’t have to defer his life and goals.
- Simplifying Problems and Learning By Doing
Xu said one of the factors that made DoorDash a fast-moving business was the company’s commitment to simplify questions the firm and everyone in it were trying to solve.
Aside from simplifying problems, he also said one of the most important principles that helped him and DoorDash succeed was learning by doing.
They didn’t have a background in logistics or delivery, so what they did to compensate for this was to learn by doing and using those lessons to acquire the expertise they needed to succeed.
These principles clearly show why Xu succeeded in building an industry giant. More importantly, they show why he’s such a successful executive.
His belief in working hard, dreaming big, and learning by doing are traits that today’s aspiring leaders and entrepreneurs need to have.
In other words, if you want to attain success in today’s fast-paced world, you need to dream big and work hard to turn those lofty ambitions into reality!
Hope you’ve found this week’s topic interesting and helpful.
Stay tuned for next Monday’s Marketing Marvels!
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