Xu: Every DoorDash employee, including CEO Tony Xu, does deliveries yearly
Tony Xu · DoorDash CEO: Customer Obsession, Surviving Startup Death & Creating A New Market · Y Combinator · Mar 26, 2025 · at 17:14
Tony Xu, CEO of DoorDash, explains the company's ongoing operational policy of having corporate employees make deliveries.
0:00 / 0:12exact quote · 12.1s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“We had done all the deliveries ourselves, and we actually kept that going for about two years straight after, And even to this day every person at DoorDash, myself included, does deliveries every year.”
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 Tony Xu
Xu: Suburban delivery economics beat cities due to family basket sizes
“Where in the places outside of city centers, the suburbs, you tended to have a greater percentage of families, which have more mouths to feed. As a result, you tended to have higher baskets. Higher baskets meant larger revenues. You also tended to have easier …”
Xu: DoorDash spent millions on pandemic ads promoting competitor platforms
“One was running a national TV campaign where we spent millions of dollars advertising on behalf of the industry, basically saying whether you order on us or any of our peers, just order.”
Xu: Cutting pandemic merchant commissions in half cost DoorDash over $100M
“And the other decision, which we were the only platform to do, we cut our commissions by half, which cost us over a hundred million dollars.”
Xu: Only 1 of 40 UberX drivers took a raise to switch
“One of the earliest tests we ran was we recruited two groups of drivers. Roughly speaking, 20 drivers who drove for UberX at the time and 20 who deliver for DoorDash. The control, if you will, variable was that they both earned 20 dollars. An hour, each group.…”
Xu: DoorDash has over 7 million drivers; nearly 60% are women
“Today, DoorDash has over seven million drivers in on the platform. Of these dashers, the drivers on the platform, almost 60% are women.”
Xu: Incumbents only served 20,000 US restaurants with existing delivery fleets
“There were 20,000 maybe restaurants offering delivery at the time, and that's who Incumbents would work with, you know, the Grubhubs or the Seamlesses. They would partner with these restaurants that had their own delivery fleet, and they would, you know, just …”