Kareem Zaki, General Partner at Thrive Capital, reflects on passing on an early investment in DoorDash due to misjudgments around market size and pricing sensitivity.
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“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 up, yes, it was an amazing experience, but it was more expensive. You're maybe paying 10 dollars more on a 30 dollar basket order. And so while it was working and it was growing, we just didn't know how deep it was going to go in the market and at what point maybe they were going to hit price sensitivity. And obviously the market was much bigger than we thought.”
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Insight
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PredictionNot checkable as stated
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Disclosure
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