Tony Xu, DoorDash

“We literally put up a website in 43 minutes. It was called Palo Alto Delivery.com. We didn't even have a driver app; we just had a PDF of menus and our own cell phone numbers. We wanted to see if the demand was actually there before we built a single piece of complex infrastructure, so we just started driving the orders ourselves.”

“My mom worked in a restaurant and I worked as a dishwasher. I saw how hard it was for them to reach customers and manage the logistics of a business. We didn't start DoorDash because we wanted to deliver food; we started it because we wanted to empower local economies and give small business owners the tools to compete in a digital world.”

“Data tells you what is happening, but anecdotes tell you why. If you only look at the dashboard, you miss the friction that a customer feels when an order is three minutes late or a bag is stapled incorrectly. I still do customer support because it's the only way to keep the 'why' at the center of our decision-making process.”

“The delivery business is a game of inches and invisible details. It’s not about the flashiest marketing; it’s about whether the food is hot and if the driver can find the door. We spent years obsessing over the physics of the dispatch system and the unit economics of a single delivery because that's where the actual value is created for the merchant.”

“We scaled through what I call earned secrets. Every time we ran an experiment, even the ones that failed, we learned something proprietary about the behavior of drivers or the expectations of a restaurant owner. You can't buy those insights with venture capital; you have to earn them by doing the work and iterating through the chaos of the real world.”