Xu: First DoorDash site launched in an hour using PDF menus
Tony Xu · DoorDash CEO: Customer Obsession, Surviving Startup Death & Creating A New Market · Y Combinator · Mar 26, 2025 · at 5:45
Tony Xu is the co-founder and CEO of DoorDash. He describes the rapid creation of the company's earliest prototype while attending Stanford.
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“Yeah, we shipped paloaltodelivery.com Under an hour. I don't remember exactly, but maybe 45, 50 minutes, because all it was a static HTML page with eight PDF menus, and these were menus of restaurants in Palo Alto that we frequented often as students. It had a Google Voice number you can call. That's how you would place the orders. There were no other way in which you can order. Once you call that number, it would ring the cell phones of all four of our All four of the founders cell phones, and whoever picked up first would be the one to take care of that order.”
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