The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 55 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Östberg: Large competitor balance sheets are not a threat in food delivery
“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…”
Rabois: Google's 20% time policy is catastrophic for non-monopoly startups
“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…”
Arora: Consumer applications will be rewritten for AI agents within a decade
“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?”
Jason James: DoorDash beat Instacart by capturing suburbs and expanding faster
“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 …”
Lehmann: Every scaled market was profitable for Postmates and DoorDash
“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.”
Paik: DoorDash and Instacart succeed by price-discriminating consumer laziness
“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.”
Khosrowshahi: Uber Eats is as big as DoorDash globally
“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.”
Emil Michael: Uber Eats would have beaten DoorDash under original leadership
“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.”
Singlehurst: Founder zeal matters more in growth investing than competitive analysis
“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…”
Friedberg: DoorDash succeeded because Travis Kalanick left Uber
“They do not think they would have as successful as they were if Travis was still CEO of Uber.”
Sacca: Uber's IPO would have gone differently without SoftBank's DoorDash funding
“Uber's IPO would have gone very differently if they hadn't funded DoorDash.”
DoorDash tested job candidates by having them acquire 100 customers for $20
“We would ask candidates to acquire a hundred new customers in eight hours with 20 dollars. And that was the entire interview.”
Tony Xu: Onboard new executives with embarrassingly small initial scopes
“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…”
Borrero: Rappi's dollar retention cohorts are twice as good as DoorDash's
“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.”
Platforms With the Largest Selection Always Win at Population Scale
“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…”
Suburban Focus and Merchant Selection Drove DoorDash's Market Victory
“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…”
Gurley: Ignore Airbnb and DoorDash valuations until post-lockup expiration
“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”
DoorDash outmaneuvered Grubhub and Uber Eats by subsidizing economics for market dominance
“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. …”
Rajaram: AI cannot replicate DoorDash's liquidity and marketplace density
“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.”
O'Driscoll: Consumers will not delegate food ordering to AI agents
“No one wants to delegate to an agent how to decide what food they get and then have the thing come up.”
Stebbings: DoorDash bought Deliveroo for $2.9B at a $1.4B premium
“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…”
Uber is the top global food platform but lost US to DoorDash
“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.”
Jeff Jordan passed on early DoorDash investment over defensibility concerns
“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”
George missed DoorDash by underestimating unit economics and localized network effects
“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.”
DoorDash executives still perform deliveries and take customer support calls
“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…”
DoorDash Cut Over $100 Million in Restaurant Commissions During COVID-19
“He slashed commissions for a period of time that totaled over a hundred million dollars during that time.”
Sequoia Led DoorDash's Series C as a Flat or Down Round
“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…”
Hsu claims DoorDash is the only major startup built from landing-page testing
“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 …”
DoorDash waived all restaurant revenue share for one month during COVID
“And ultimately we decided to not take any revenue share from these restaurants for a month.”
Mansour: DoorDash defeated Uber Eats through product superiority, not capital
“Uber Eats had, I mean, infinite capital to, compared to DoorDash, but Tony Bell's a better product and Tony won, right?”
Nayak: Scale AI labeled e-commerce data for Meta, Instacart, and DoorDash
“Like I started the e-commerce team at scale where we were labeling e-commerce data, like from Meta, from Instacart, from DoorDash.”
Hamid: Prefers capital-efficient startups over capital-intensive models like DoorDash
“I, I'm, those are not my kind of businesses. I like more capital efficiency but I can get behind them.”
Uber-Instacart partnership strengthens their position against DoorDash
“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.”
Ohanian: Angel City FC Secured Record Low Seven-Figure DoorDash Sponsorship
“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 …”
Brex Built Its Enterprise Platform in One Year to Acquire Major Clients
“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…”
Singlehurst: Baillie Gifford passed on multiple private investment rounds in DoorDash
“One of the ones we really missed was DoorDash. We had a few opportunities to invest in that privately.”
Yanisse: Checkr suffered 2019 headwinds when gig economy clients went public
“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…”
Thrive Capital passed on DoorDash due to market depth and pricing concerns
“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 …”
Hans Tung: DoorDash scaled by targeting fast-food chains over high-end restaurants
“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”
DoorDash spent six years striving for decision-maker diversity parity
“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 …”
External executives must obviously accelerate internal talent's careers to succeed
“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.”
Corporate culture should iterate continuously like a software product
“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…”
Many DoorDash leaders have zero direct reports
“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.”
Sequoia Passed on DoorDash Seed Before Leading Series A
“We missed the seed, but we made it up by leading the Series A, and we invested in every single round after that.”
Tony Xu's DoorDash Seed Pitch Was the 'FedEx of Local'
“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 …”
DoorDash Showed Exceptionally Sticky User Retention at Series A
“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.”