Good morning. Tony Xu and three fellow Stanford students began developing the idea for DoorDash in late 2012 and officially launched the company in 2013. Twelve years after its founding, DoorDash is the clear U.S. market leader in restaurant delivery, with Xu as CEO leading a data- and tech-fueled, forward-looking trajectory.
DoorDash controls roughly 60% of the U.S. food-delivery market—more than twice the share of its closest rival, Uber Eats. A new Fortune feature by tech correspondent Jason Del Rey, “How DoorDash became a $85 billion behemoth and won the delivery wars,” offers a deep dive into the company.
DoorDash is pursuing expansion both into new retail categories and into additional geographies. Xu showed Del Rey how the company’s in-house-built mapping technology advises Dashers on everything from the optimal place to park near a customer’s door to the specific entrance they should use in a large corporate building. DoorDash leaders believe the data adds up to meaningful advantages in the delivery-app wars.
“[With] all of this data, we are trying to build the catalog for the physical world,” Xu told him. “This repository of information does not exist on Google Maps. It doesn’t exist on ChatGPT.”
