- DoorDash became the No. 1 food-delivery company in the US in 2019.
- It surpassed Grubhub with a strategy of going after suburbs and developing its own tech.
- Here’s the list of 17 power players responsible for the food-delivery juggernaut’s success.
DoorDash was founded in 2013 by the Stanford University students Tony Xu, Evan Moore, Stanley Tang, and Andy Fang, who put their “coding hats” on to help small businesses with local delivery.
Six years later, DoorDash became the No. 1 food-delivery operator in the US, surpassing the market leader Grubhub. The San Francisco-based delivery operator has remained a food-delivery juggernaut ever since, thanks to an army of leaders responsible for logistics technology, restaurant partnerships, marketing, app design, data, legal, and its gig drivers.
Executives like Xu and Christopher Payne, DoorDash’s president, are well-known front-and-center leaders, but many others have worked behind the scenes to push DoorDash to the top and its eventual initial public offering in 2020. Insider has come up with a definitive list of these executives — some of whom were among the first 20 employees at the company.
Many of these leaders slept on air mattresses set up in local offices during DoorDash’s early days as they worked tirelessly to scale the startup across the US with a strategy of developing their own tech and delivering in suburbs, not just big cities. They helped bring products like the membership program DashPass and the white-label delivery platform DoorDash Drive to market. These products increased order frequency and lured in top chains like Wingstop and Chipotle, crucial partnerships made during the heat of the delivery wars.
Here are DoorDash’s 17 power players: