In the earliest stages of building a business, founders may shy away from dreaming big, and make conservative estimates of how successful they’ll be. But DoorDash cofounder and CEO Tony Xu is now warning entrepreneurs not to cap their ambitions, like he once did.
“I think a lot of times you kind of, as an entrepreneur, have to take the greedy algorithm,” Xu recently said on the Uncapped with Jack Altman podcast. “You have to keep going all the way and seeing if there’s more.”
It’s a lesson he’s learned when trying to secure seed funding for DoorDash in the spring of 2013. Just months after the company’s inception, with only around 150 customers and $10,000 in sales, the four cofounders submitted an application to start-up accelerator Y Combinator. When asked how much they think their business could make one day, the entrepreneurs gave an estimate that seemed aspirational in the moment—but pales in comparison to how much the $87 billion giant reels in now.
“I estimated something like $100 million of revenue,” Xu continued. “Thankfully, we’re a few orders of magnitude off.”
In reality, the company reached that annual revenue in 2018. DoorDash’s first quarter revenue this year hit a whopping $4 billion—40 times more than the founders’ original revenue projection in just a single quarter. Meanwhile, total orders across America and more than 40 other countries have also increased 27% over that same time, amounting to 933 million.
