Tony Xu is the co-founder and CEO of DoorDash, a technology company that uses logistics services to offer food delivery from restaurants on-demand.
Early life and education
At the age of five, Tony Xu and his parents emigrated from China to the US with $200 to the family name in 1989. Xu’s father had obtained an H-1B visa to work as a post-doc researcher at the University of Illinois, prompting the family to move to Champaign while his mother ran a Chinese restaurant to build up the funds to go to medical school. Growing up, Xu’s family relied on food stamps and welfare to get by, but the tech founder feels incredibly fortunate for his upbringing and his parents’ importance on education.
Xu graduated with high honors from the University of California, Berkeley, where he obtained a degree in Bachelor of Science in Industrial Engineering and Operations Research in 2007, and in 2013, earned an MBA from Stanford Graduate School of Business, where Xu was an Arjay Miller Scholar.
Career
After Xu graduated from the University of California in 2007, he worked at McKinsey & Company as Business Analyst from 2007 – 2009; from 2009 – 2011, as a Corporate Strategy Consultant for eBay and PayPal; and in 2011, as a Head of Business Development at RedLaser for eBay.
While Xu was working at Stanford on his MBA, he and his fellow students developed the idea for a food delivery app, a broadly untapped niche at the time in 2013. In June 2013, Tony Xu co-founded DoorDash, an on-demand food delivery service with other Stanford students, Andy Fang, Evan Moore, and Stanley Tang and launched in Palo Alto.
With the ambition of being the last-mile logistics layer that empowers businesses to succeed in the digital and convenience economy, Xu and his co-founders launched DoorDash. DoorDash connects people with opportunity by empowering merchants to grow their businesses by data-driven insights, offering on-demand delivery, and better in-store efficiency, while contributing delightful experiences from door to door for customers in more than 1,200 cities in the United States and Canada. Xu fancied the idea that it would encourage small entrepreneurs like his mom while employing people who wanted extra income on their way to fulfilling their own dreams.
Xu and his co-founders built a website literally on a Saturday afternoon called paloaltodelivery.com in just 45 minutes. They put up a few PDF menus of restaurants, a Google Voice number that customers could call to order delivery. This was to test if people would want to order delivery from restaurants. The number would dial the mobile phones of the founders and whoever picked up first would take the order over the phone. After 45 minutes after they launched their site, they received their first order.
Xu and his co-founders told some of their friends about it. They emailed some groups on their campus, some dorm list serves, and that’s kind of how they got their first few orders running through the system. They were the drivers, took turns dispatching and delivering.
DoorDash initially expanded around the San Francisco Bay Area and then to Los Angeles before heading to Boston. Since their first launching as paloaltodelivery.com, the company has raised $186 million in funding from top tier Venture Capitals including Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia Capital. In October 2017, CFO Mike Dinsdale left DoorDash just less than a year after he started working with the company.
In March 2018, led by the SoftBank Group, the company raised $535 million in a Series D round with the participation from existing investors including GIC, Sequoia Capital, and Wellcome Trust. The following month, DoorDash ventured into grocery delivery through a partnership with Walmart in Atlanta. In December 2018, DoorDash overtook Uber Eats to hold the second spot in total US food delivery sales, behind only GrubHub. By March 2019, DoorDash had exceeded legacy leader GrubHub in total sales, at 27.6% of the on-demand delivery market.
In February 2019, DoorDash raised a $400 million investment and reached a total valuation of $7.1 billion. The round was led by Coatue Management, DST Global, GIC, Sequoia Capital, SoftBank Vision Fund, and Y Combinator.
DoorDash has raised more than $700 million over several financing rounds from investors including GIC, Khosla Ventures, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Sequoia Capital, SoftBank, and SV Angel. DoorDash has more than nearly 900 employees. DoorDash currently serves 56 markets, works with 40,000 local businesses, received more than 10 million orders, and more than 600 cities across North America with 850 numbers of employees. In 2018, DoorDash reached $1.4 billion valuations during a round of funding.
Personal life
Tony Xu got married to his wife, Patti, the same year his business began.