DoorDash launched in one afternoon using static HTML and Find My Friends
Diana Hu · Tips For Technical Startup Founders | Startup School · Y Combinator · Apr 21, 2023 · at 13:37
YC Group Partner Diana Hu describes how DoorDash built its initial MVP in an afternoon without custom backend architecture.
0:00 / 0:48exact quote · 48.1s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“DoorDash, at the beginning, they slapped it in one afternoon, and they were actually called Palo Alto delivery, and they took PDFs from menus, And literally put their phone number. That phone number there is actually from one of the founders. And there's, the site is not dynamic, static. It's literally just plain HTML and CSS and PDF. That was their front end. They didn't bother with building a backend. The backend quote unquote was literally just a Google forms and Google docs where they coordinated all the orders. And they didn't even build anything to track all the drivers or ETA. They did that with Using Fancy on your iPhone. Find my friends to track where each of the deliveries were. That was enough. So this was put together literally in one afternoon, and they were able to launch.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Diana Hu
Diana Hu: Supabase is the default backend recommendation across all LLMs
“Whenever someone asks how to set up anything that you need, some sort of backend, Firebase type of transaction, the default answer from all the LLMs is actually a Superbase.”
Hu: Anthropic surpasses OpenAI as top API for YC applicants
“And, shockingly, in this batch, the number one API is actually Anthropic. It came out a bit more than OpenAI, which who would have thought?”
Diana Hu: AI's future Google- and Facebook-scale startups have not started yet
“Startups like the future Facebook or the future Google are yet to be started because those come in in the deployment phase, because right now I think these things, things are still getting built up.”
Hu: A YC startup's 8B model beat OpenAI on healthcare benchmarks
“There's this particular YCE startup that told me that they collected the best data set for healthcare. And they ended up performing better than OpenAI and a lot of the benchmarks for healthcare with only eight billion parameters.”
Hu: Cursor scaled from $1M to $100M revenue in one year
“We've seen crazy growth unlike anything, only possible with, right now with AI, like all these companies that we work with, zero to twelve million in 12 months. The cursor story where they went zero to one in one year, the next one to a hundred. This is, like,…”