DoorDash

“In my portfolio alone, We've already done follow-ons or multiple follow-ons into companies like DoorDash, Compass, Katerra, Opendoor, as some examples”

“DoorDash in particular that was able to raise an incredible amount of capital, and they were competing against Grubhub and Uber Eats, both of whom were at that point public companies, and then were being evaluated by a completely different rule book in a way. …”

“The only case where I know this might potentially have worked was I think it was paloaltodelivery.com or something, which then became DoorDash. I think it's the only sort of recorded case of this ever actually working, but if you look at all the other sort of …”

“I wouldn't put too much on an Airbnb or DoorDash valuation. I'd wait until you get, you know, three to six months past the lockup release when you have full of”

“The paradox of choice is an individual issue, not a population issue. And on the population level, you and I Both love sushi, but our favorite sushi restaurants could be very different, and that's multiplied across all of your customers. So some people fail to…”

“He slashed commissions for a period of time that totaled over a hundred million dollars during that time.”

“We missed the seed, but we made it up by leading the Series A, and we invested in every single round after that.”

“DoorDash won because they did have a differentiated strategy, which is focused on the suburbs. They were, had a differentiated strategy on focusing on the merchants as well and on selection. So those were two prong on the strategy that were quite different. An…”

“Tony's whole notion was not just food delivery, right? He wanted to build the FedEx, his initial pitch was the FedEx of local, and he wanted to deliver almost everything, but he was going to start out in food, because if you can deliver a pizza before it gets …”

“We broke it down into from GMV to retention, to the cohorts, and the cohorts were just really sticky, even at the early days. We don't see that very often. I've seen that in very few companies where that's the case.”

“He had a fairly easy series A raise in my opinion, because he had five term sheets and we were competing with five term sheets and I had a jump on the competition, but it happened fairly quickly.”

“The Series C that Sequoia decided to lead was quite hard. I think the company had thought that because it had doubled or tripled GMV, and the unit economics was getting better, that the valuation from the B to the C would be double or triple, and in fact, it e…”

“Our dollar retention is world-class. DoorDash just published their dollar retention cohorts. And are amazing. Rappies are twice as good as them because of the multivertical approach.”

“DoorDash is an example. We're going to be the 12th player in this market. The market is big enough for multiple players, but it didn't mean that just entering the market Enables you to be a big outcome. They had to figure out their wedge.”

“The one that has quite a lot of influence on the building of DoorDash is The Score Takes Care of Itself by Bill Walsh, and just this notion of trying to chase excellence as opposed to the scoreboard. That has been, I think, the defining history of the company …”

“We're almost there where the representation at the company and the representation of the decision makers are even, but we're, I mean, 2015, 20, 20, 21, so six years out of our eight years, we've been working on it. 75% of our lifetime history, and we're still …”

“We would ask candidates to acquire a hundred new customers in eight hours with 20 dollars. And that was the entire interview.”

“My parents' journey into this country, it kind of is that classic immigrant story where dad was getting his graduate degree, mom was putting food on the table because we had a couple hundred bucks in the bank, and so she worked three jobs a day for 12 years to…”

“I think the only success criteria here I've seen is you have to hire someone excellent, where it's so obvious for the person on the inside that this person on the outside can really help their careers and really grow them.”

“It's why in the earliest days, even to this day, all of the leaders at the company try to do all of the jobs in the early days. And actually, even to this day, that means doing deliveries. That means taking customer service calls. That means making menus for m…”

“But I think when the person is in the door, in order to set them up for success, you probably want to start small because of the information asymmetry of how your organization works versus how they may think your organization works is very, very large. It's al…”

“I mean, just like your product, you know, I think an organization would be embarrassed if their product looked the same a year later versus today. Why is that not true for your culture? You know, maybe it changes more slowly because, you know, you're talking a…”

“If there was one, it really happened inside of a local macaroon store in Palo Alto where the founding team met a store manager who had to turn down hundreds of deliveries. She literally showed us a notebook with payment information of customers and how she had…”

“In fact, when I think about even people at DoorDash, there are many leaders at the company that have zero direct reports, but have lots of followers because of their influence and because of how they show up and how they show their work.”

“I missed a lot in DoorDash, not just the unit economics, you know, the power of the market size, the localized network effects, and probably most importantly, the best founder in the space building in that area.”

“If I look at some of the misses we had, you know, I did not invest in Chime. I did not invest in DoorDash.”

“Tony has done extremely well since they found that working with a fast food chain restaurants made a huge difference for them and then make the address market even bigger. It's not working with the niche high end specialty restaurant, but for the mass market”

“Uber's IPO would have gone very differently if they hadn't funded DoorDash.”

“One of the ones that comes to mind is DoorDash. We had a chance to invest pretty early on in the business, even after it was kind of obvious that it was And we love the founder. We obviously thought it was an amazing experience. One of the things that held us …”

“They do not think they would have as successful as they were if Travis was still CEO of Uber.”

“2019, you know, was starting to get some business headwinds because we grew very fast in the gig economy and with tech customers and those companies like, you know, Uber, DoorDash and others went public at those days and then started to suffer themselves. So t…”

“One of the ones we really missed was DoorDash. We had a few opportunities to invest in that privately.”

“The thing that I should have placed a much greater weight on. Was the founder of DoorDash and, you know, why he'd started the business and the level of commitment that he had to these small businesses that he was wanting to help and kind of bring online and he…”

“So I would have beaten door, we would have beaten DoorDash, guaranteed. We were ahead by 30 points when Travis Night left, so letting that atrophy was not an option.”

“The biggest miss I think was I had an opportunity to do DoorDash early and I loved Tony as a founder. I had the theory, a thesis on the food delivery market that you shouldn't, there's no defensible barrier to entry”

“Uber Eats is actually as big as DoorDash on a global basis, and so when we think about Uber, we think globally, right? And we are the global leader along with DoorDash.”

“The genius behind Instacart and DoorDash and other companies like that is that they, Perfectly price discriminate laziness and the value of like a leisure hour.”

“If you have a monopoly, for example, Google has this 20%, you know, side project bullshit where they used to. If you have a monopoly business with 99% gross margins or 90% margins, maybe letting your employees waste time once in a while maybe isn't catastrophi…”

“And with DoorDash being the, clearly the market leader in most of the U.S., but not in California and certain regions that That are very attractive. Where we were the number one.”

“No, I think Tony and I knew from the start that, that this is a tremendous business. If you can scale it and every market that you had at scale was profitable for us, and I know that the same thing was also true for DoorDash.”

“And it took us, you know, a year to get something that worked. And that's how, you know, ultimately, we closed customers like DoorDash, like Coinbase, like Robinhood, you know, like all these large enterprise customers that would not have traditionally come to…”

“And she's talking to some of these brands and she's trying to secure the biggest ever front of kit deal in women's soccer, maybe even women's sports. And it was a seven figure deal, low seven figure, but it was a seven figure deal. That was record breaking at …”

“I think DoorDash has something in the sixties. Uber has something in the twenties.”

“Uber's the number one food delivery platform in the world, but I think we really fumbled the bag in the US with DoorDash. I think we missed out on a huge opportunity.”

“I was reading about the deal that they made with, between Uber and Instacart, and I think that's brilliant, like, both of them, right? Like, it positioned them much better in restaurant delivery against players like, you know DoorDash.”

“I, I'm, those are not my kind of businesses. I like more capital efficiency but I can get behind them.”

“I don't think that the balance sheet matters. I don't know. In the end, that is not what limits any compared to spend money. It's going to be the return that is going to limit a compared to spend money. So it's going to be hard for a door dash or Uber or somew…”

“Like I started the e-commerce team at scale where we were labeling e-commerce data, like from Meta, from Instacart, from DoorDash.”

“Delivery is also getting bought by door dash for 2.9 billion. Just to put that in context for you guys, and I don't mean that rudely, but I'm sure you're not aware of public markets in the UK. It was valued at between 1.4 and 1.5 billion. That is a 1.4 billion…”

“So yes, DoorDash did beat Instacart. I mean, why did that happen? I think the main thing is they expanded faster, went, you know, beyond restaurant sooner. I think also their key insight was when the suburbs, they got there first, beat, you know, Uber Eats to …”

“Uber Eats had, I mean, infinite capital to, compared to DoorDash, but Tony Bell's a better product and Tony won, right?”

“No one wants to delegate to an agent how to decide what food they get and then have the thing come up.”

“And ultimately we decided to not take any revenue share from these restaurants for a month.”

“AI can vibe code the ability to access restaurants, but it can't vibe code liquidity, courier density, reputation history, all of those things. So marketplace density is a network effect, which is structural.”

“I think every consumer app will get rewritten in the next five to 10 years. You know, why would I not have my agent talk to my DoorDash app or Uber app?”