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.
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Tavel: DoorDash beat Postmates by targeting uncontested suburbs instead of cities
“You know, I would say Postmates could be executing a 10 X DoorDash's execution, but because DoorDash had a strategy that let them just be, you know, so much better than any substitute because it's a lot better to be Better. It's a lot easier to be better than …”
Sequoia passed on DoorDash's seed round over student spending concerns
“It started on a, on, on a college campus, and the reason we pass on the seed round at Sequoia is we're concerned that the, this is, like, just something that college students did with their parents' money.”
Lin: DoorDash proactively digitized merchant menus during COVID lockdowns
“They decided, like, these merchants are going to be hurting, and we need to help them, and so they proactively went out and uploaded menus from different merchants onto DoorDash and said, hey, I know you guys are hurting. The only thing you can do is delivery.…”
Lin: DoorDash expanded delivery market beyond Grubhub's existing-courier restaurant base
“The only restaurants that would be on Grubhub's website were all the companies that already had delivery staff available. So what DoorDash did was to expand the market. And by expanding the market, they were very focused on that problem.”
DoorDash used suburban market profits to fund its major city expansion
“There's the reason why small towns, there's a main street where everything happens, and so then you start realizing that the density problem is not as complicated as you might think, and they won because they were able to take the profits of the suburbs to go …”
Lin: DoorDash faced difficult Series C and D rounds before fixing unit economics
“They grew very fast, they probably grew too quickly their unit economics wasn't great, they had a few hard fundraising rounds for the C and D, they fixed the
The unit economics.
So in 2019 it was a walled oiled machine”
Lin: DoorDash unlocked driver supply via introverts and sub-rideshare vehicles
“It turned out that, well, A, there's some people who would prefer to deliver Food or a package over delivering people. They didn't want to have to have social interactions. And then there's other people with perfectly fine cars, but they're not perfectly fine …”
Tavel: Startups should maximize for easily tippable markets
“I wouldn't say that you should choose a market necessarily to pick the hard thing. I actually think that you want to pick something that is easy to win, to tip the market, you know, and it, you know, there was ways in which going after the suburbs was harder t…”