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We probably took "do things that don't scale" too far. It was absurd. But there was a major upside to doing so many orders ourselves: we understand the details:
The best alley parking spot for each restaurant, which expeditor at Orens Hummus forgets the hot sauce, how to deliver to large apartment complexes, what happens when you lose cell signal in Los Altos, how a hangry parent looks at you when her order is late ... every detail.
We knew the unit economics weren't terrible because somehow as we were doing this, the bank account wasn't going down. (It was still running out of my personal account. What an irony that while at Stanford b school we didn't know the first thing about starting a business)
Soon, the conversation with restaurants totally changed. "I see you here all the time -- why are you buying so much food? How can we work together?"
Our first restaurant partner showed us how they receive orders from GrubHub via fax and asked us to do the same. I was excited to have a programmatic way to send orders, and then noticed one more thing -- GrubHub took a huge commission!
GrubHub didn't even do the deliveries, they just forward orders, so if we were doing both, surely we could generate a similar commission.
That restaurant delivery was such a large opportunity was counterintuitive even to us. There were many (crummy) local services around. But at this point the latent demand for restaurant delivery was slapping us in the face.
A few months in, we explicitly decided to reset our lives, move in together, and devote 24/7 to building DoorDash. After YC, we made the same commitment again. A business like this doesn't get built without sacrifice. I can only imagine what it's been like to do this for 6 years.
Our friends were like “oh interesting” in a way that we knew actually meant “this is weird why are you delivering food.” But it's fun to have discovered a secret. We had more than enough evidence to endure being misunderstood for awhile.
There was another startup that launched the same week in the same town with the same model. They spread lies about us to restaurants and tried to poach our drivers. They met our eventual seed investors before we did.
We ignored them. We stayed focused on delighting customers, merchants, and drivers. That company is long dead.
We were maniacal about growth - 10% weekly. We wrote down on a whiteboard the number of orders we needed per day to hit that target, and the result at the end of the day. We made a simple order counter that we could obsessively check from our phones while we were out driving.
One of our most memorable lessons from YC was "do all the things." We came with a list of 20 ideas for how to grow, and asked the YC partners which to prioritize. I think it was @paultoo who said something like "How would I know? Do all the things."
There was no shortcut. We had to do everything, fast and well, and double down on what worked. (Later I'll write down how this became a simple growth framework I've used since)
We did everything to grow -- from standing on the street talking up strangers, going to a birthing convention to figure out how to reach new parents, competing on who could hang more door hanger flyers in a day... most of it didn't work but some did.
We worked out of a few houses, and at one point had about 15 people working from a two bedroom apartment. We liked the cozy vibe, especially since we were there all of our waking hours, and some of us slept there.
When one of our first employees arrived for her first day, Tony was sleeping on the floor of the apartment. I tried to quickly deflate and hide the air mattress while he distracted her out front. We wanted to seem like a real company. I'm sure we did not.
I'll stop for now and make a couple points. (there is no climax, sorry, this is just a tiny window into the very beginning)
We would never have come up with this idea in a conference room on a whiteboard. We needed to be with customers trying things out, learning until we found a set of insights that were obvious only in retrospect.
The idea of a prototype is not mutually exclusive from pursuing product excellence. We rapidly found insights, and then built a business on them, with a clear definition of quality for our customers and relentless pursuit of it.
We never slapped the Uber model onto delivery. We solved our problem from first principles. I won’t explain it but we were able to be far more efficient than our competitors even before our series A, just from smartly solving for an on-demand model with three sides.
The qualities that make DoorDash effective at execution are outlined in the S-1, under "how we operate." It's a great distillation of the culture. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1792789/000119312520292381/d752207ds1.htm
Even today, I can recognize people who worked at DoorDash by their intensity. Founders like @ryanbroderick and @therealmikechen are carrying it forward and building more great companies. I'm sure more will follow.
