Acquired - DoorDash

Episode Date: December 10, 2020

Live from the scene of its blockbuster IPO, we recount the crazy, roller coaster journey of this "Palo Alto delivery company". From Sand Hill darling during their Series A and B fundraises to all but left-for-dead during the great unicorn massacre of 2015/16, DoorDash has clawed their way back from the brink and emerged as America's dominant meal delivery service, and its only unit-economic positive standalone logistics player. Is this the dawn of the next great Amazon-like story, or is the company simply benefiting from temporary tailwinds due to the pandemic? As always, we dive DEEP to find out. Sponsors:ServiceNow: https://bit.ly/acqsnaiagentsHuntress: https://bit.ly/acqhuntressVanta: https://bit.ly/acquiredvantaMore Acquired!:Get email updates with hints on next episode and follow-ups from recent episodesJoin the SlackSubscribe to ACQ2Merch Store!Playbook Themes from this episode are available on our website at https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/doordashCarve Outs:David:Hades on the Nintendo Switch: https://www.nintendo.com/games/detail/hades-switch/Ben:Watchmen on HBO: https://www.hbo.com/watchmenSuccession on HBO: https://www.hbo.com/successionPalm Springs: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt9484998/

Well, first of all, is there like some rule that the graphics that you put in your S1 have to be just like painfully low resolution? Welcome to Season 7, Episode 7 of Acquired, the podcast about great technology companies and the stories and playbooks behind them. I'm Ben Gilbert, and I'm the co-founder of Pioneer Square Labs, a startup studio and venture capital firm in Seattle. And I'm David Rosenthal, and I am an angel investor and advisor to startups based in San Francisco. And we are your hosts.

The year was 2013. Everyone had just finished cracking their jokes about how every startup is just another photo sharing app. But the wave of yet another food delivery app was just getting started. Tony Hsu and his co-founders were launching Palo Alto Delivery.com, which we all know today as DoorDash. On this episode, we'll dive into how these Stanford students became one of the very few winners in the cutthroat food delivery category, how they raised two and a half billion dollars from VCs, the SoftBank Vision Fund, and even sovereign wealth funds around the world, how they went up against incumbents like Grubhub

and Seamless, and the even more well-funded startup on a warpath for world domination, Uber. This is the story of insanely fast growth, a company currently tripling year over year. And that's the December 2019 number before the global pandemic created the ultimate tailwind at their back to IPO at the greatest possible time in the business's history. Yeah, they kind of nailed the timing on this one, didn't they? They did, David. Today, we will dive into the question that we're all wondering, is it even possible to build a sustainable business with positive unit economics in this category? And if so, will DoorDash actually be the one to do it? All of this and more coming up

on Acquired. Ben, your hooks and intros are getting so good. Do we even need to do history and facts? I feel like you covered everything there. Oh, you know we didn't. You mean we should go through these 15 pages of notes that I have here? All right. Well, lots to do. Let's get to it. As always, if you love Acquired and want to hone your own craft of company building, you should join us as an Acquired limited partner. You'll get access to the LP show where we dive deeper into the fundamentals of company building and investing, in addition to our monthly LP calls where we talk with all of you directly, and of course, our book club and the Zoom calls with the authors.

This is really where we have gotten to know so many of you personally. And frankly, this is like the set of people who have most influenced the direction of the show and kind of the set of topics that we want to tackle. So thanks to all of you who are a part of that community and welcome if you're thinking about joining. If you do want to join, you can click the link in the show notes or go to acquire.fm slash LP and all listeners get a seven-day free trial. Okay, listeners, now is a great time to tell you about longtime friend of the show, ServiceNow. Yes, as you know, ServiceNow is the AI platform for business transformation, and they have some new news to share. ServiceNow is introducing AI agents. So only the ServiceNow

platform puts AI agents to work across every corner of your business. Yep. And as you know from listening to us all year, ServiceNow is pretty remarkable about embracing the latest AI developments and building them into products for their customers. AI agents are the next phase of this. So what are AI agents? AI agents can think, learn, solve problems, and make decisions autonomously. They work on behalf of your teams, elevating their productivity and potential. And while you get incredible productivity enhancements, you also get to stay in full control. Yep. With ServiceNow, AI agents proactively solve challenges from IT to HR, customer service,

software development, you name it. These agents collaborate, they learn from each other, and they continuously improve, handling the busy work across your business so that your teams can actually focus on what truly matters. Ultimately, ServiceNow and agentic AI is the way to deploy AI across every corner of your enterprise. They boost productivity for employees, enrich customer experiences, and make work better for everyone. Yep. So learn how you can put AI agents to work for your people by clicking the link in the show notes or going to servicenow.com slash AI dash agents. David, let's do it. Let's do it. Okay, so today in non-typical acquired fashion, we're actually going to start with the founding of the company. I thought about going way back, you know,

doing the history of restaurants. It's just too much. We got a lot to get through here. All right. Yeah, when was the first restaurant? I don't even know. That's a good question. But anyway, that is a question for another day because this story in and of itself stands on its own okay so we start as ben you alluded to on the stanford campus in the fall of 2012 i remember it very vividly and well because i was there i was starting at gsb uh that very fall uh but unbeknownst to me, right across the kind of made their two main quads right across the way in the class was called startup garage. And this is kind of a legendary class at GSB is co taught with GSB and the design school, the D school, and it was interdisciplinary is a two, two quarter class. And the idea was you apply as a team, a fully formed team, to go build a product or service.

And the idea is you're going to build a company and actually launch a company as part of this class. And so there were four Stanford students, two from GSB, two undergrad computer science students who had applied to the design garage class that fall and entered. Andy Fang and Stanley Tang were the two undergraduate computer science majors. And the two GSB business school students were Evan Moore and Tony Hsu. So I think the story behind how they came together is that Evan and Stanley had worked on a project in another class the previous year. Evan and Tony were second years at GSB. And Stanley and Andy were, I think, juniors. Yeah, they were juniors undergrad. So they'd worked together in another class. And then they brought in their two friends and said, okay, the four of us,

we're going to be the stellar team. So you have this like good mix of business school students, computer science undergrad. Yep. The dream team. Yeah. And interestingly, I mean, this is a fairly common thing in at universities for an entrepreneurship program to like go start a company class. And it's always the dream. If you're the, you know, instructor or professor that one of them actually goes on to become this big successful company but the vast vast vast majority time it ends up just being an academic exercise yeah and the crazy thing at stanford is like design garage is not the only class that does this there are like probably 16 classes across campus that all have similar

premises so regardless here we are they get the class, and they start thinking about what they're going to focus on. Now, Tony had just finished interning that summer at Square. And Square, of course, that we all know and use and love today, public company, just about $100 billion market cap. When he was there that summer, this would have been the summer of 2012, it was about 30 employees, much, much different. It was just the credit card reader, but it was focused on, as we covered in our episode, this idea of empowering merchants and local businesses to accept credit cards. And it was clear already, at least for people on the inside, like Tony, that this was unlocking a huge amount of commerce and commerce activity for local merchants. So they

thought, okay, what else can we build? We know that this is a big opportunity. The internet is coming to all these businesses. And like most of these places don't even have Wi-Fi, you know? Right. And the amazing square innovation there was like so many of these people that could never take credit cards before. They were like independent merchants that were, you know, selling things at craft fairs and food trucks that could only ever be cash businesses were now, you know, brought online. Like they were sort of trackable GDP of these categories of now digitally enabled businesses. Yep. And we'll get into this more as we go throughout the episode.

But this was a huge insight that was completely not obvious yet to the rest of the world. I remember I was starting at GSB that fall. I had been at Madrona as an associate before that. And every time we looked at a company, a startup that was going to sell to smaller local businesses, help them with the audio, it was like, no, this is a bad category. Can't invest there. Acquiring these customers is too hard. They're not online. It's not going to work. These customers are notoriously difficult to serve because they have razor thin margins.

They have low willingness to pay. They churn like crazy. It is expensive to acquire them. And then they obviously don't retain well because either they don't know how to use your product well, or in fact, they go out of business. and so you have to reacquire someone else like is notoriously the worst customer segment as a venture capitalist to be investing in yeah if tony had gone and pitched this on sandhill road at the time uh he definitely would have gotten a lot of rejections but as we said like square was starting to change this. And really what changed it all was the mobile phone and the smartphone that proprietors and managers within stores were using. The class sends them out into the streets, the mean streets of Palo Alto. They go and they have design conversations with local store owners. They ask them what their problems are. They start thinking about an idea.

And the iPad was big at this point. It was about two years old, two, two and a half years old, and had cellular connectivity. And they're like, huh, well, Square's taking payments. They're using iPads. These store owners are buying iPads. They have them there. What if we had an app also on the iPad that when customers came in the front door, the iPad would be there and it would ask, how'd you hear about us? And they could see, you know, all these little... Wait, that was the initial business? That was the initial idea. They had a couple of initial ideas, but this was the one that they were testing. I think they'd actually maybe built an MVP of this app. And then like these, you know,

business owners could now track their customers where they came from. They could market to them more effectively. Yeah, great. So they're doing these design interviews and famously as the story goes, and by all accounts, this is is actually true they sit down with a woman named chloe who owned the chantal guion uh macaroon shop in downtown palo alto i never frequented that but it was probably too expensive for the uh the broke students at the time of serving the vcs in palo alto not the uh not the students and the startup founders uh and so they sit down with her they're pitching her this app and she's like, and then they're about to leave. And she's like, actually, you know, I do have a problem that you guys might want to think about. And they as they write on their

medium account, when they launched the business, just as we were about to leave, Chloe bursted out, well, there is one thing I wanted to show you. She took out a thick booklet. It was pages and pages of delivery orders. This drives me crazy. She said, I have no drivers to fulfill them. And I'm the one doing all of it. She's the proprietor. She's running the store. She's managing the storefront. She's making the macaroons. She can't take time to go out and do these deliveries, even though probably all the Sandhill road venture firms want their macaroons and so they say like huh okay that's interesting i wonder if other businesses have the same problems they go out and interview more restaurants and food businesses and they hear the same thing all these restaurants like you know

the pizza guys are doing delivery but like nobody else is you know the thai place isn't doing delivery most importantly orange hummus is not doing delivery most importantly and most importantly and so they say huh okay well let's spin up a little mvp and uh and see what happens here which is actually pretty amazing to think about this like when i was growing up in ohio if you wanted to order delivery, like there was pizza delivery was a category, then takeout food was another category where you'd go and you'd pick it up. And like, maybe there'd be a Chinese restaurant or a Thai restaurant that would have figured out delivery on their own.

But like, if you were ordering delivery food, it was pizza. Yeah, that was it was Domino's. It was Papa John's. It was Pizza Hut. And that's kind of the crazy thing to hear. Like, they was it was Domino's. It was Papa John's. It was Pizza Hut. And that's kind of the crazy thing to hear like, they figured it out. And nobody had made the leap yet in the US at least to hey, people like getting pizza delivery delivered to their house. They might also like other food getting delivered to their house too. And you got to think like pizza has to lend itself

better to like a more regular type of delivery than other sorts of food that with more complex menus and stuff. I mean, I'm sure we'll get into that. But like, it's interesting to just think about like, why? Why was this so obvious and prevalent and decades long for pizza companies, and yet no one had really done it for other food categories? Well, it's good. I think there's a very specific answer about why DoorDash made it work, which we'll get into in a sec, but it's a good question. I mean, in New York, it was happening with Seamless and then Grubhub, which merged with Seamless. And, you know, when I lived in New York, yeah, you could use Seamless

to get any food you want to deliver it, but it didn't really happen anywhere else in the country. So, okay. So they throw up this MVP. They, uh, they buy the domain name paloalto delivery.com. They take PDF menus of a bunch of the top name, Palo Alto delivery.com. They take PDF menus of a bunch of the top restaurants in Palo Alto. And they had some really good ones. They had Orin's, they had Pachi's the pizza place. I don't, I guess Pachi's probably didn't deliver. Um, Pachi's really good pizza in the Bay area. Um, life kitchen was great. Like bunch of good places. They had the Thai place, they had the Indian place. Um, so they put it up and then they have on the website, a phone number. So you can order on the website is just on the web. It's a phone number and it's a Google voice number that rings all four of their cell

phones when anybody calls it. And so on January 12th, 2013, this would have been the start of the second quarter of the winter quarter at stanford it's the second quarter of design garage they'll they put this up and literally within an hour they get a call so they put it up and then they put it on a couple like uh they blast it to a couple email distribution lists uh on at stanford and within an hour they get a call from a guy who wants to order i think it was thai food and they're like wow wow, holy crap. So they drive over, they get the food, they go and they drop it off. And they're like, Tony talks about this. He actually gets out his phone and they interview him. They want to know like, how'd you hear about us? What's going on? Why'd you order this? And it turns out it was this guy named Bruce Barcott,

who lives on Bainbridge Island in Seattleattle and he works for uh for uh leafly the marijuana company he had written a book called weed the people about legalizing marijuana and uh he was a visiting author at stanford and he was staying i don't know if it was on stanford housing or something over on alpine road which is kind of behind the the dish if you know uh if you know the stanford campus and um, there's not like, like you're pretty far from university of there's no food over there. And so he was probably like, yeah, I just didn't want to get in my car and drive all the way over to go get this food. This is great. Perfect first customer. Yeah. Pretty, uh, pretty great use case. so they do this and they just put it out on the email

distribution list um so people start using it like all over the gsb people are using it the undergrads are using it jenny and i used it uh the total move was get orans on this especially you're having people over your big party get a big thing of orans and palo alto delivery will come and uh come and make it happen for you so they were just and like you remember it being called palo alto delivery the well i remember i think by the time i was trying to recall i went back and i looked through my email history i think by the time we actually did our first order they were nyc and they had they had uh changed the name to doordash but everybody knew that this was happening like people like my classmates were easy to go to a party and like the food was there from pallet to delivery. So they had hacked it all together. This was total, like find a problem, solve the problem, you know, not design focus,

design focus, just in terms of like solving the problem. So they were using square to take payments. So you would call the number, it would ring their cell phones via Google Voice, one of them would pick up, they would take your order down, they would then call the restaurant, put the order in with the restaurant, they would go and pay. And then when they would drive it over, you know, drop it off. And then they would take out a square reader, and you would swipe your credit card to pay them back for the real. was uh totally well that sounds like a tax and accounting nightmare are you basically losing money because you have to pay taxes on the income that you're uh well they didn't actually incorporate the company until they applied to yc

so this is all lost to history in terms of the accounting uh and it was also super cool the other really smart thing they did once they started bringing on some other drivers to do delivery for them they used find my friends on iphones to track the deliveries in real time smart so they they could like route people and be like okay this courier is closer to this restaurant we got the order coming in over there like hey you when you finish this like go over grab this you know it's so crazy thinking this is probably the first company we've covered on acquired on the main show here that is started sort of in this modern the iphone is already ubiquitous era like you think about uber's founding or airbnb which we'll do tomorrow or so many of the companies that we covered in the 2018 2019 IPO booms like all those

stories developed like alongside the mobile revolution and here you are you already have a very modern set of tools there's google voice there's square and there's find my friends all of which were not available to like the previous of startups. Exactly. And that was the key point that made this work, even though probably people had tried this in different ways in the past. And Grubhub actually, Notorious, so Grubhub had merged with Seamless. We'll get into their model in a minute. They acquired lots and lots of local delivery companies. And actually, one of them was one of

my classmates in the year behind Tony and Evan. Uh, he had sold his company in Atlanta, I think to Grubhub. And so he showed up, uh, he had the second nicest car in the GSB garage behind the guy who had started a Zynga clone in college, but like didn't raise money and just kept all the cashflow. I feel like there's a lesson in there somewhere but uh i don't quite know what there's many lessons there yeah that's uh we'll unpack that on an lp too uh so anyway with a psychologist yeah back to why now with palo alto delivery and and mobile and these tools, it's actually this find my friends thing was really important. Because unlike Uber, where it was, you know, you just had the consumer,

the rider, and you had the driver, you had these two pieces, and like, you could give the driver smartphones and like coordinate everything. With DoorDash, it's like the 3D chess version of ride sharing. You have this third element, which is the restaurant, which is a participant in the system, both from an operations perspective and from a business model perspective. So like consumers need to be able to place the order easily and efficiently, like fine, mobile helps with that. You've got the dashers, right? What they end up being called the couriers. They need to be tracked just like rideshare drivers, but they need to be routed to the restaurant and to people's homes. So it's like doubly difficult. Then you've got the restaurants, you got to know where the restaurants are. You got to know the status of the food.

You got to have them get the orders coming in, accept them, know that they've gotten it. This is super hard. And there's no way any of this could have happened without all of these players having smartphones. Again, restaurants, still today, most restaurants don't have Wi-Fi. Right. It's such a good point. And to flashback to a previous era of business that's working really well now, but failed previously, you look at Instacart, you look at Webvan, like, aside from there just weren't enough people on the internet yet, there definitely weren't people doing this on mobile phones yet. And they're the, frankly, the technology stack wasn't sophisticated enough in that web 1.0 era to facilitate all this real timiness and keeping

everyone in sync at the same time. As you were talking there, David, it hit me that not only, of course, do you have to split the money one additional way in food delivery, because you've got the, you know, in addition to the dasher and the person ordering the food and the company facilitating the transaction, you have the restaurant involved, which is different than ride sharing. So there's sort of money has to flow into four different or out of one pocket into three others instead of out of one pocket and into two others. But there's also an unbelievably operationally complex component here where the timing has to be perfect. get there too early or too late and that be okay, you know, just in the kitchen, let alone then having it sit out for a while, then having, you know, the, the right, you know, amount of time that it takes a driver to get to a person's house. Like everyone's very familiar with, uh, thinking

through this problem from a consumer perspective, but just thinking through the technology infrastructure is really crazy. Yeah. I was talking about this with some friends, uh, in doing research for this episode who are former Uber employees. And the thing is like, you know, Uber and Lyft and ride sharing, right. You know, canonically everybody found like, Hey, once you get the wait times down to, you know, five, maybe 10 minutes, like that's fine. It's all good. But to your point with food, it's not all good. Like the degree of diminishing returns is much, much higher for food delivery because like, I want it fast, but it also needs to be high quality and like still good if it's fast, but it's only halfway cooked. Like I'm never going to use your service again,

you know? Yeah. And the far more forgiving side is it took too long and you know, the food can stay, you know, warmish under a heat lamp for a while but like i think everybody knows when they've gotten food that's been sitting under a heat lamp for too long yep totally so okay so like they're they're hacking these pieces together this is kind of cool from the beginning the business model was was basically already there and they haven't they haven't changed it much since. Under the hood, a lot has changed. But so initially, it was a flat $6 delivery charge to the consumer for getting your food delivered. And obviously, that has changed since then in terms of how it's calculated. But Jenny and I ordered Chinese food last night from Mama G's here in San Francisco,

great Chinese place. they're on dash pass uh we paid a seven dollar tip to the dasher and got our food like it was basically the same from our perspective uh they also started going to the restaurants really early on this is even i think during the palo alto food delivery days and said hey we're bringing you these incremental orders will you pay us a cut of the revenue so that we can make this work the $6 $7, you know, delivery fee, that'll go to paying the couriers. And then we're bringing this revenue to you, we'll take a little bit of cut of the food. And the restaurants said, yeah, I mean, Tony's talked about this, like they basically never had a problem with it. And I think it was because there for many restaurants,

this behavior had already kind of been established with the Grubhub and seamless model. So this is probably a good time to take a step back and say like, okay, what's what is unique and different here? Because I think we were texting before the show, like most people i think don't understand the difference between grubhub seamless and and what doordash and eats are doing i mean it took me until actually diving in and doing the research to realize like and i'll just spoil one little bit here that it was only pretty recently that grubhub started actually having fulfillment like drivers as a part of the thing and not just a you know

dumb pipes that you order through yep so okay we rerun back um grubhub i think grubhub was started maybe like early 2000s seamless uh brad stone writes about this in the upstarts had been started in 1999 in new york um and they were the same thing they merged in 2010 maybe i want to say um but uh their models were you could go to their websites or you could call them in the early days it was calling seamless it was calling grubhub just like palo alto delivery they would take down your order they would call the restaurant just like tony and team were doing in the early days but then they'd stop at that they just say like hey you know ben wants um ben wants pad thai go ahead go forth and so then the restaurant by it was 2013 um so then the restaurant the onus was on them to have a driver that could actually get the order to you have a courier

a driver and do the fulfillment yeah and um in many many ways- That's true, courier. Yeah, New York is probably a bike messenger type person. Exactly. So this is why this caught on so well in New York. And then other cities this existed, restaurants were on, it was mostly Grubhub outside of New York. And then they acquired all these small local players. This was a pretty good model.

And Grubhub went public, was a well-regarded internet stock, because this was a super capital light model. Yeah, notably, they're a very profitable business. Yeah, very profitable. They acquire customers, and they did all sorts of interesting things, shall we say, to acquire customers via some SEO hacks. And then they would pass on the

orders. Restaurants would pay them a commission fee on the orders for bringing the orders and then call it a day. And so this worked super, super well. Now what Tony and DoorDash is doing is obviously very different. And the downside of the Grubhub model is that most restaurants don't want to, aren't equipped or aren't even thinking about doing the logistics. And even if you were thinking about this, you're saying, okay, great, I'm going to hire a courier. Okay, you're going to hire one, maybe two couriers. You're going to use those heavily during the rush hours for eating or whatever your type of food is that you're preparing, you know, whether that's breakfast, lunch or dinner, probably lunch or dinner, the rest of the day, they're going to sit around. But then when you need them,

you're only going to be able to fulfill a couple delivery orders like this is a nightmare. Right. And probably not fair of me earlier to use the term dumb pipes, but I guess more to say what they really were, were a demand aggregation company where their primary business activity was consumer marketing and retention. You keep the people, you are the mechanism by which they order, but then the market is still constrained to the set of restaurants who are willing to take on this delivery stuff on their own. And in a place like Palo Alto, which is not a very dense city, even though there are a lot of people that live on the San Francisco peninsula, it really doesn't make sense. And so you didn't have any of this really operating again outside of the Domino's, the Pizza Hut's and the Papa John's. So this is another super cool thing that Tony and team do. They realize as they get going on this, like, Hey, we're not building Grubhub and seamless. We're building dominoes. We're building

FedEx and we're just taking it to every, we're building a logistics network. We're taking it to every business. So what do they do? They go and they work for dominoes and fedex for a couple weeks just to like learn how their logistics systems operate oh no way yeah so they signed up tony was a driver for dominoes delivered pizza for a week or two and uh took notes on how everything worked and um and he talked about this he was really surprised like well a these are world-class operations and so you learn a lot and realize like, Hey, this is a complex business that we're going to have to build. And delivery times are super important. Density is super important.

You like to make this work. Um, but these aren't tech businesses. So like Tony talks about dominoes being run on, you know, paper and, uh, uh uh not on not with find my friends and not with uh you know smartphone technologies and mobile ordering systems and mobile app logistics at the end points uh and so he's like oh okay this is really interesting um and so that he then he talks about like it's basically during this period that there were three questions that they wanted to answer, one of which was just simply like, do people want this? Is there a reason on the demand side where food delivery of non pizza restaurants doesn't exist really outside of big cities? And the answer to that was like a resounding yes.

Like everybody in Palo Alto and Mountain View wanted this. Two was, can they find a way to do this to pay the drivers enough and keep them utilized enough with making trips that they look more like Domino's and FedEx than they would like a restaurant trying to do this themselves and not being able to utilize their drivers enough to make it worth it um that clearly is a yes well and how well how do they do that like so people want food from 12 to 2 and from you know 5 30 to 8 like how do they handle off peak ah well you're coming to this is going to show up later in the story but this is the gig economy that makes this work oh Oh, I see. So since there are variable expenses,

it's not, you know, the business doesn't have to worry about paying people during the hours where there's no demand. Yeah, exactly. Like you can, you can do this as 1099 contractors. You don't have to go. I don't know what Domino's and FedEx was, was doing in those days if they were W-2ing their employees or if they were 1099s. But Uber clearly, you know, already started to pave the way for this whole- Right. Show this was ostensibly legal. Yeah, exactly. Ostensibly legal. And now post Prop 22 in California, definitely legal um so that makes it work on the driver's side and then on the restaurant side would the restaurants be happy to pay us for these incremental orders that

we're generating for them and again like yeah apparently it was super easy they were all willing to pay them and so do you know at this, had they started thinking about getting back to my question on like, what uh chloe at at chantal macaroons um you know that's not a that's not a meal yeah um but i suspect what happened was just that the food the meal delivery became so big and like clearly had product market fit that that just became all consuming but now you read the s1 and they talk about, hey, we do want to be the local, the on-demand delivery, local logistics network, FedEx for small local businesses. We want to do flowers. We want to do groceries. We're already experimenting with that. But it's a small, small percentage of the business. Okay. So question number one is, do consumers want this? question number two is um about can we make this

work for drivers yep and question number three then is the restaurants is the restaurants and so yeah so then at this point how are they thinking about like how much can we take from restaurants without them a getting mad or b having an unsustainable business and then how little can we take and still have a business ourselves that's a good question i don't know but i do think as we'll get into as we go along the story one thing similar to bezos and amazon in the early days um one thing about doordash is they've been willing to fly very low to the ground, so to speak on this. And Tony talks about this a lot, though, like, hey, by us improving our density, and being able to do more, fulfill more orders more, more quickly, that improves the economics in the system.

If we can give that back to consumers they've definitely given it back to consumers uh i mean it's crazy that you pay five six seven dollars to get somebody to drive across the city and deliver food for you um uh and we also give it back to restaurants that'll allow us to grow the market more yeah or grow our share more okay Okay. So they figure all this out in the Palo Alto delivery days, and then the school year is coming to an end. They apply to Y Combinator. They get in and say, okay, we're going to go do this for real now. They ditch the Palo Alto delivery name because, you know, it's hard to imagine that playing well in Wichita. By the way, do you know the other famous example

of someone that had to do this, but took a little bit of a different track? Also in the restaurant space, also in the food delivery space. Ooh, I don't know. People from St. Louis will know what I'm talking about, if that's a clue. Panera Bread.

Oh, Panera Bread, wow. To this day in St. Louis is called the st louis baking company st louis bread company something like that but i remember my first trip to st louis i was like what that's the panera logo and it's like called the st louis what is this and when they expanded outside of that region they just decided we're going to leave the ones locally here the same with the same name and you you know, everywhere else, it'll just be called Panera. And just to wrap this full circle, um, they actually went it alone and they basically run their own single client DoorDash and, and are sort of the black sheep

that created their own version of a, um, full end to end fulfillment system order on their website and app. And they deliver to you. I think they're one of the few restaurants who actually does that independently. Interesting. Even to this day? I think so. It was true as of Q1 2019. Interesting. There is this other, I guess, category of restaurants that have done this historically, which is the kind of lunch catering, office catering, sandwich type shops,

of which Panera is obviously consumer facing. But I think about like specialties, right? I think they're in a bunch of cities. You know, you're doing a lunch business meeting. They'll deliver and cater that for you. That's true. That has totally been a market that has existed for a long time.

And there's a different set of startups going after that. And obviously DoorDash and these folks are starting trying to create an offering for those business customers too. But yeah, that that's, that's a little bit of a different market. Yep. Yep.

Okay. So they do YC coming out of YC. They raise a $2.4 million seed round in the fall of 2013 which you know was like good great to run but nothing crazy here like we're at the same time there were companies coming out of yc raising five six seven million dollar seed rounds already this is you know the go-go days and it's led by interestingly keith raboy who had just joined cosla now keith before that of course paypal mafia member uh and now a partner at founders fund um he had been the coo of square while tony was there over the summer so i'm sure yeah did you know tony from i guess it was only

30 people so they had to i'm sure they knew each other um so that was uh that was and would have also uh explained why he probably was more likely to get this than other vcs at the time right you saw the sort of like onlineification of of independent merchants and um particularly around food yep so he leads the seed uh crv sb angel and pear also come in in the seed and uh you know to this question of that you said about like what types of delivery are they doing what types of logistics they write a medium post at the time saying ultimately our vision is to become the local on-demand fedex we are a logistics company more so than a food company we help small businesses grow,

we give underemployed people meaningful work, and we offer affordable convenience to consumers. We're tackling some of the most difficult logistical challenges that come with on-demand delivery, true, both in engineering and operations. And I think as Tony tells the story, that was also part of what helped them raise coming out of YC was pitching this bigger vision of like, hey, this isn't just, you know, meal delivery. You've already heard of this. Grubhub exists. But like, this is actually a logistics network and this is something different. Yep.

Okay. I want you to name those all those firms, again, that participated in this initial round. So it was Cosla, CRV, SB Angel, and Pear. None of those appear in the S1. Those are all below 5% shareholders. And as we will talk about later, this company underwent a tremendous amount of dilution in order to scale the way that they did. Oh, yeah. We are still in act one of this story here. So, okay, let's wrap up act one. They raised this seed, 2.4 million, and they realized, okay, we're going to change the name to DoorDash. We're going to expand beyond Palo Alto. Let's go to our first bigger market. Uh, let's, let's go, you know, to our first bigger market. Now the natural thing to do that all the ride sharing guys did was go to San Francisco and you think like, Hey, the city,

like natural use case for food delivery. Like it was for a ride sharing. You should go there. Tony had the insight. He had, uh, he grew up in, um, Illinois, uh, in Champaign Urbana, but in high school, his family moved to San Jose. So like, you know, Champaign-Urbana and San Jose, like these are, while San Jose is a big metropolitan area, it's much more suburban in feel than it is dense like a city. Tony said, you know, actually like the mass market is out there. It's not in San Francisco. It's not in cities. They launch in San Jose and in East jose and in east san jose

specifically as their first market and this was just brilliant it's been talked about elsewhere but going to the suburbs versus the cities there was no competition like it was dominoes or doordash yeah it's really interesting thinking, and much ink has been spilled on this concept, but I think it's really worth diving into here. Intuitively, you would think launching in cities is better because there's much more density. It's been working in New York for a long time. People really value convenience there. It's sort of the convenience economy. People have lots of disposable income. But what that meant was, number one, they didn't have any competition in the suburbs in terms of other mechanisms of delivery. Number two, drivers were

much easier to come by in the suburbs because everyone has a car, whereas in cities, like 10 to 15% of people have a car. So there's much more available sort of dasher supply. And on top of all of that, there's no traffic and parking's not anher supply and on top of all of that there's no traffic and parking's not an issue and so you can actually deliver a higher quality of service at a lower price point with greater supply of dashers like there's all sorts of reasons why it was actually great to be out there and they had a wide open lane to themselves because these incumbents weren't playing there at all. Well, that's the thing, you know, the, um, one of the door dashes, uh, core values, which usually core values are a bunch of baloney. But in this case, uh, I think actually makes

sense is operate at the lowest level of detail. And Tony talks about this, like, yeah, in cities, you've got this density, but like, think about what that means. You know, this is not ride sharing where you pull up to the curb, somebody gets in and you drive off, you pull up to the curb, you got to park, you got to get out, you got to go get the order. And if you're getting the order at the restaurant, and there's a queue, you got to wait in the queue, and then get the order. And then you got to go drive and then you got to drop it off. And you might be dropping it off at a 12th floor apartment building. You know, in New York, this can work okay, because everybody's couriers are on bicycles. And as we'll talk about later, DoorDash did really embrace different forms of vehicles for dense cities. But in the early days, like, even bicycle, even in San Francisco,

you're gonna bike around and do this, like, no, you need cars and motorcycles. Yeah, this operate at the lowest level of detail thing is really, I think one of the things that makes detail thing is really, I think, one of the things that makes this company special. I think the quote is, averages in our industry are meaningless. It's the distribution that matters. No consumers care if our average delivery time is 35 minutes if they receive their food in 53 minutes. And it's such a great point.

It's a very Amazonian way of looking at it, where you're obsessed with every customer on an individual basis rather than rolled up metrics. And I think for this business in particular, one bad experience, you could lose trust and never rely on them to deliver your dinner again, especially if you have company over or you're really hungry or whatever the thing is. You can blow it with one bad customer experience. Yeah. So this going to San Jose was brilliant and it works amazingly well. So they did YC in the summer of 2013. By the beginning of 2014,

so we're now just about a year since they had that first delivery to the Weed the People author on paloaltadelivery.com, literally one in six people on the San Francisco Bay Peninsula, so not San Francisco itself, but the peninsula below San Jose, Mountain View, Palo Alto, Cupertino, there are millions and millions of people that live there have used DoorDash. They just ran the table on the market very, very quickly. So on the back of this in May, they raised, you know, they went from being like middle of the pack NYC raising a, you know, good seed round from great people, but like clearly not as large as some of their peers. Uh, there is a $17 million series a from Sequoia at a 73 and a half million dollar post money valuation led by friend of the show, Alfred Lynn, former Zappos COO. Uh, and, uh, it's, you know, off to the races here. So they say,

okay, we're gonna use this money. We're going to expand out to other markets. Later that summer in June, they go to LA. They run the same playbook in the suburbs there. And then they go to Boston next, which was interesting. I assume also in the suburbs, but they also go into the urban core in Boston with cyclists. So that, and Boston's a great city for this because it's flat. Oh yeah. So you do this in any West Coast city, and Boston's a great city for this cause it's flat. Oh yeah. So you do that. This is any West coast city.

You're a, you're in a world world to hurt. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And this is before e-bikes, uh, and scooters of all various types had really become a thing. Um, so that's all. So it's all going great off to the races this was uh summer and into fall of 2014 by early 2015 so we're now less than a year after the series a they are live in eight markets they raise a 40 million dollar series b uh again we're two years removed from Palo Alto Delivery.com launching, led by Kleiner Perkins

at a $600 million valuation. Holy crap. John Doerr basically comes out of retirement. He's ready to move along. I think he's chairman of the firm at this point. He joins the board. And for folks who don't, I mean, if you've listened to the show for a long time, you know the name John Doerr, but like Google.

Amazon. Amazon. show for a long time you know the name john doerr but like google amazon amazon the point to drive home here is john is arguably the greatest venture capitalist of all time and he came in personally did this deal if you think about that 40 million on on 600 they sold what is that like eight percent of the company like less than 10 of the company in that series b and got freaking john doer john doer to do the deal so like uh the way to read into this is like the company is going gangbusters and has a lot of leverage at this point absolutely i mean today it's not uncommon to see series b's happening within two years of a company's life raising this amount of money at that valuation with less than 10% dilution. This was not common back in those days. Like, yes, seed rounds were

happening at expensive prices already, but this hadn't trickled down or trickled up to the Series A and Series B parts of the market yet. This was an eye-popping round that happened. And let's talk about what it takes to launch a city, because now they're ubiquitous in the U.S. They're in every suburb. It's crazy. I think there's some stat that it's either 85% or 95% of the U.S. population lives in an area

that has DoorDash at this point. But at this time, for them to launch any city um because they haven't really signed a lot of big national chains yet it's just as hard to launch your eighth city as it is your second city because you need to go get all the restaurants you need to go get all the drivers you need to do all the consumer marketing because people don't move that much between cities so just because you're live live in Palo Alto and Boston doesn't mean that someone in Tallahassee has heard of you. Exactly. So it was actually in July of 2015, shortly after the Series B, that they signed their first partnership with Yum! Brands to do Taco Bell in the markets

that they're in. And then later, owns kfc they had kfc later um this was another brands yeah great company it's um it was part of pepsi uh it spun out of pepsi it was pepsi's restaurant brands taco bell and um and kfc that spun out now it's an independently traded public company and i don't remember if it's if there's uh if it was if it's still this way but at some point pizza hut was sort of lumped in there and that's why you had those kentaco huts at uh highway rest stops i think pizza hut is now independent i'm not 100 sure on that though yeah that's actually when acquire drifts into conglomerate land and out of tech

that'll be a fun one to cover oh yeah uh but that's a good point that they start you know again like the theme here is these guys figure out what it takes to operate at the lowest level of detail and make these launches and this crazy business work um having these national brands to be able to go in and open markets with like hey you've never heard of us but um do you want taco bell and kfc delivered like well especially if you live in the suburbs right i mean and lots of people want that but it's an appealing enough value proposition even before they sign any local restaurants exactly exactly um so after this round and with this going on this big national partnership they start to attract some attention and specifically they attract attention from, um, well two audiences, uh, but first Uber pretty early on in Uber's life. I think we talked about

this on the Uber episode. They started experimenting with other things. They had Uber everything. They were delivering ice cream. They were, I remember one, one one year early on they had like um like puppy hugs or something like that they had like cars yeah jamming around with puppies in 2015 they did uber health so you get a flu shot that was a nurse that got ubered to your office um in fact you mentioned the ice cream thing i remember from promotion, I actually still have the t-shirt that I got when I got my Uber delivered ice cream cone. So yes, they were- That must have been a marketing stunt.

Totally was, as was Uber puppies. But they definitely were experimenting a lot with like, well, what else could take an Uber to your house or your office besides a person? Yep, because they also get, as much as anyone besides doordash at this point like density is super important utilization of drivers in the network is super important um so they're looking at this and they launch eats in 2015

but this is this is how hard what it is that DoorDash was doing. Uber said, I don't think we can really make this work in the same way because this is so hard, all the reasons that we said. So the first version of Eats that they launched, I don't know if you remember this, listeners may. It was they partner with some restaurants in a city, a small number of them. And they load up in like the late morning, food in heaters in the back of Uber drivers and have their Uber cars just driving around the city waiting for orders to come in for like salads or, you know, hot meals. David, yeah, a mutual friend of you and I who did operations for Uber at this time, was telling me about the massive industrial strength refrigerators that they had purchased and kept in the uber engineering office because they didn't have a separate facility

for this yet and so like the mad rush at like 10 30 was all of the uber drivers showing up to get the food out of the refrigerators and that had been like heated up and then put into the heaters in the back of the ubers to go and start the delivery routes yeah and of course uh montree would try similar things as well at dinner i can't remember if eats eats was definitely the first version of eats was big at lunch i don't know if they did dinner as well they probably added it at some point and was it was the name not eats like the name was something slightly different too. I think it was Eats. They first had Fresh,

but Fresh I think was more groceries and like drugstore type things. Interesting, if I have my history right. So quickly Uber then is like, wait, actually what people want is what DoorDash is doing and we need to invest in building out the infrastructure to do that too. Well, it's interesting.

They do get there. And they get there in 2016. They realized that pretty quickly. But the narrative shifts so hard on this space here. And I think, I don't know if this is true, but looking back on this now with the historical perspective i wonder if what uber did here was part of how everything shifted so hard perception wise against doordash like here you've got uber this titan you know of startups along with airbnb everybody says

you know one of the two canonical at this time the two canonical next generation uh you know company internet companies being built in silicon valley and uber is basically voting with their feet that you can't make this operate profitably the full logistics network that doordash is doing they're having to resort to doing this driving food around in cars to make it simpler. Interesting. Meanwhile, DoorDash has raised all this money. They're growing quickly. Consumers at least love the service.

They're entering all these markets. They raised the $40 million Series B. Their plan is to spend the money. They're going to blow through it and keep raising. And to do that, of course, as you're launching these markets, it does take a huge amount of capital. As you were saying, Ben, you got to go acquire the consumers, you got to acquire the restaurants, you got to acquire the dashers. So then, this is another moment of an acquired history, in November 2015, another blow against the perception of businesses like DoorDash, Square goes public.

And we covered this on the show. This was such a great, one of my favorite all-time acquired episodes, our Square IPO episode. And I got to just like, we don't do this often, but like we nailed that. I just feel so good about that episode, even today. I mean, it was a little bit in our sort of older style. So the, you know, it's not as enjoyable to listen to, I don't think, as more recent ones. But like in terms of the analysis, I think certainly the market had decided when they IPO that it was not a good stock.

But for years afterwards, I think people had a lot of hate toward this company. And like they just grew 30 percent year over year over year over year and still are and i think the narrative have has shifted now where people love square especially with you know cash um but uh and bitcoin yeah well yeah i mean to get meta for a moment we were texting um yesterday about about the store dash episode and the airbnb episode we're going to do tomorrow. And Ben, I think you had such a good point about us at Acquired. You're like, when we do these live, you know, on the scene episodes,

it's actually when we're at our second best. We're still good. Like they're better than the average Acquired episode. Not that the average one is bad, hopefully. But our best Acquired episodes are when we have a view on a company that other people don't and don't realize yet. And that was the case with Square. So what all are we talking about for people who don't remember the history?

Square had been also a Silicon Valley darling, raised money from Sequoia, plenty of other great firms, multibillion dollar valuation. They were in this first group of unicorns talked about alongside Airbnb and Uber and Lyft and the like. And then they made the crazy decision relative to their peers to go public. So they go public in fall of 2015 and the market completely turns against them. This was the down round IPO. they price at nine dollars a share for a less than three billion dollar market cap oh my goodness today they are trading at 213 dollars a share and a hair under a hundred billion dollar market cap um but memes start popping up all over the valley and like tech crunch and the like about dead unicorns and this is going to be the

reckoning and the bubble has popped and and the impact on that for employees there was the that that um price that share price was under the last two um rounds so anybody who got stock options in the last like two and a half years before they went public were completely underwater and and worthless unless you held them all the way through you know the the stock recovering. People did. But yeah, ratchets too, which those private rounds have been at high valuations, but had terms in there that if the company were to go public at a lower share price, they would get those investors would get trued up to the new lower share price. So it was just a bloodbath. And I think one of the things that the public markets really penalized Square for was this question of like, hey, this payments business looks like a bad

business. It looks like poor unit economics on like, you're basically operating these payment rails for your small business customers at lower margins than say visa or mastercard or mx um this seems bad you're selling dollars for 90 cents uh we're gonna put you in the penalty box um and of course no tony had worked at at square so there was that connection but it's a similar sort of story here of like we're serving small businesses uh and we are operating this crazy complicated logistics network for them in a way that like grubhub wasn't doing just like square was operating this this payment rails for them in a way that visa and mastercard weren't doing um and everybody's like yeah you're just giving away free value here. Right. Like this doesn't make sense. Infinite customer demand

when you're selling dollars for dimes. Like I don't doubt you can grow fast. So meanwhile, well, the other thing that happens here is the first big lawsuit hits DoorDash. They had been delivering In-N-Out in California without In-N-Out's permission. They didn't have a deal with in and out but they were you know making the argument like hey people want to order it we'll come in

the non-partner restaurants so in and out sued them in november 2015 um and then there would be many other lawsuits along the way uh with doordash um so okay so you've got you've got uber and square that are like creating these really bad public narratives for DoorDash for their prospects. And you've got lawsuits hitting. Meanwhile, through all of this, DoorDash is investing capital they've raised. They're growing super fast. Clearly, consumers like this. Sequoia and Alfred say to the team, I think you're going great.

You're going to need to raise another round. Uh, we're in, uh, we're in for, you know, our Prada. We're even in for more than our Prada in the next round.

We're going to commit that we'll do up to $40 million in your next round, um, at up to a billion dollar valuation. Uh, but we want somebody else to come in and price it. And the last round had been that 600 million 600 million um uh the year before and uh okay so sequoia is like we're not gonna lead but we're not gonna lead but but we're in our money's good and i gotta imagine this is gonna be this was a

huge lesson for sequoia as well this is before the global growth fund you know it was later after this that they just said like we're not gonna to mess around with anybody else. We'll lead the rounds. But they said, we're not going to lead. And Tony goes out to fundraise and it is just like a slog. Nobody wants to lead this round and invest in this company. And I remember this so well. I graduated from GSP at this point. I was back at Madrona talking with all my other VC friends. Tony didn't come pitch us at Madrona. We only did early stage at the time and wouldn't have led this round anyway. But everybody was like, man, DoorDash came to see us.

Unit economics are terrible. It doesn't make sense. I can't believe Sequoia is putting their money in here. So what was it that Sequoia saw then if, if the, if people believe that unit economics were terrible, because what we can kind of see now is like cohorts over time. And we'll, we'll touch on this later,

but basically when people retain, like they start spending more and make this a regular behavior and need less incentives. Yeah. Um, I don't know. It's a good question. I mean,

it's hard to tell. Uh, certainly we don't have that time frame in the S1. Because the only time frame disclosed is like the last 18. Two years. Yeah. 24 months. But for whatever reason, you know, whether it was blind faith or actually based on the numbers, knowing Alfred and Skoy, I think it was probably based on the numbers.

They did really believe in the company um so the net of it is tony's out there fundraising for like six months he doesn't he can't find a lead uh nobody wants to invest in the company so ultimately in march of 2016 um even though sequoia had said they didn't want to lead, they do lead the round. They lead a $127 million series C. Uh, they bring in the GIC, the sovereign wealth fund from Singapore comes in as part of the round as well. And they bring in some of Sequoia's LPs as well to bolster the round.

Um, and it happens at a 700 million post money valuation so 127 at seven post flat a little down down so the share price is actually down um this is a down round that happens and this was so hard i mean for all of this uh uh i don't really know uh tony personally at all i haven't spoken to him since gsb but i just have to imagine uh this was crushing um and just complete uh says so much about him that he persevered through all of this right and and the whole team that stuck with because at that point you know you're you're starting to see stars in your eyes because the, all the internal numbers are going up, you know, you hold a number of shares and the way people probably think about it is really, I hold

this percentage of the company and you're told it's going to get, you know, diluted down over time, but you sort of in your head, you're like, well, not that much. And then something like this happens and you're like, Oh wow, I can get diluted down a lot. Yeah. And we're just getting started here. We're only in act two. So Tony writes on the company's Medium account announcing the round. He says, it's easy to look at the landscape over the past few months and think that the technology industry has had its best days behind it. However, at DoorDash,

at least I take the contrarian view. We are growing fast while building a scalable business that is built to last. I mean, other VCs must have just been laughing in their shoes reading this. In 2015, we added 19 markets to DoorDash, including two in Canada, and have completed millions of deliveries across our footprint. We've built a business based on first principles that is helping grow local businesses across North America. And we have more than doubled our staff by recruiting great, you know, blah,

blah, blah. Uh, the fact that we were able to raise the fact that in a tough economic market and in a crowded space, we were able to raise more than 125 million. Here we go. Without resorting to valuation gimmicks and employee unfriendly terms

is a testament to the incredible team technology and opportunity at doordash oh man because yeah that's right at this time everyone was so obsessed with being a unicorn and being a billion dollar company that people were taking crazy like participating preferred terms and like um yeah basically really high liquidation preferences like the ultimate downside protection many rounds before you would have that sort of downside protection built in yep uh really private equity style capital coming in and it was private equity firms like it was tpg was doing this you know you saw uh big traditional private equity firms come in and say oh yeah yeah, I'll make that

trade. You're basically guaranteeing me my money with some upside. So that you can write your medium post and say you're a unicorn. Yeah. They have this capital though. They pull back on market growth. So they finished 2016 with 28 markets that they're in broader markets. So they're individual cities and towns within the broad geographic market. Um, they only add six that year, even though what did Tony say? They added 19 the previous year.

Um, so clearly they're trying to conserve cash. Um, same deal in 2017. Uh, and actually in, in 2017, towards the end of 2017, they signed their next really big

national distribution deal with wendy's yeah before we move on to it is worth in the blog post there's two words in there um or three words where tony talks about the economic climate it is worth remembering that there was a macroeconomic stock market hiccup in, I think, Q1 2016. I'm trying to remember exactly when that hiccup was. But there was all this narrative around the longest bull run in history and the S&P is at an all-time high and tech's a bubble. And there was a moment where the market got scared and obviously came roaring back.

And then even through a global pandemic came roaring back again. But I just want to like, the first time I read that Medium post, I was a little confused by the economic climate term that he referenced. And then I was like, you know, you go back and you look at stock tickets and you're like, oh yeah, I forgot about that. Okay. So by end of 2017, even with slowing market expansion, trying to conserve cash, it is still incredibly capital intensive to run this business. Um, and so they're out of cash at the end of 2017. Um, and they can't raise money. So they do, they, this was not announced. Uh, we only found out about this by going through the S one, uh, it's in the S one, they do a $60 million inside bridge round,

uh, just to keep the company alive at the end of 2017. Um, that was led by existing investors and one new investor, according to the S one, not sure who that was. I don't think it was SoftBank yet, but TBD. I'm sure that was, I'm sure one of the existing investors at least was Sequoia stepping up to keep this company alive. And that's, I mean, what you hear Sequoia doing here over and over again, that's how you build a position in a company, especially if you have a big fund. Like Sequoia owns, how much of this company at ipo like 18 or something like that and like you you're seeing in the narrative here how they sort of built that position over time especially having conviction when others didn't and and yeah as you alluded to

at the top of the episode everybody else who had invested along the way they're not in the s1 because they got massively diluted here um so uh then meanwhile just one more quick comparison uber in its private lifetime raised something like eight billion dollars and we're like they ipo'd in 2018 so by 2017 they had already raised the majority of that so this is like you know doordash is a company that's raised in the low hundreds of millions at this point and their biggest competitor is a better part of eight billion dollar funded you know uh juggernaut um yeah that also has this other business other uh synergistic business to well finance what they're doing theoretically synergistic business we'll get into it yeah um okay so end of 2017 we're now uh you know remember it was march 2016 when sequoia stepped up to lead

that inside round we're now end of 2017 18 plus months later companies out of cash have to do a uh i mean it looks like like death's door here and then history turns well i would say on a knife point in this case it turns on a singular man and his vision one might say yes we're now in March 2018, and door to dashes, fortunes change. The big deal happens. And this one wasn't quite in the back of a taxi cab like Adam Newman's was, but I don't think this one doesn't have quite the same story to it around Masa telling Adam that the crazy man beats the smart man or whatever it is in the fight. But kind of the same approach. It's funny. It's the same. I love the... So the quote is Masayoshi Shon, of course,

of SoftBank and the Vision Fund, which is what we're talking about here. When they invest in WeWork, there's the story of back of the Uber, I think, or taxi with Adam Neumann and says, crazy man beats the smart man. And obviously, that went horribly wrong. In this case, actually, I'm going to make the argument and the markets are proving SoftBank right here today. This was the smart, not the crazy bet. Yeah, I mean, SoftBank is looking like a genius out of all this. So David, how did this deal go down? And then more importantly, how did they do this and Uber? Yeah. Oh boy.

Well, that's a, I don't know the answer to that. I mean, I guess the answer is DoorDash was desperate for cash. And SoftBank was already a big investor in Uber at this point. Yes, I believe this is 2018. I'm pretty sure at this point, yes, they're already the largest investor in Uber, I think at this point. Yeah. they're already the largest investor in uber i think at this point yeah um so they come in and do a 535 million dollar series d in the company that's check size not valuation so this company

has raised like yeah what do we what did we say? A little over $200 million previously in all the capital that they've raised. SoftBank comes in over $500 million pumped into the company. So I said a minute ago that I thought this was the smart move, not the crazy move. Why would SoftBank do this? Were they just being cowboys?

Maybe, maybe, and they had some dumb luck here. But I don't think so. They did certainly do plenty of nutty stuff, but there's, you know, remember SoftBank is basically investing in, they're investing globally, but most of their dollars are going into two markets at this point, the U S and North America and China. And they are not investors in a company, in this company in China, in Meituan, which had at this point merged with Yanping. It was Meituan to Yanping, but they were active investors in the Chinese ecosystem,

and I think maybe in one of the competitors. And Meituan is food delivery? Well, Meituan has a very interesting story of its own that we need to tell one day on Acquired, but at this point, Meituan has become food delivery and they are starting to dominate the Chinese food delivery market. They are on a clear path to becoming the winner. This is the dream.

This is what everybody was chasing with Uber and Lyft. And in theory, the same thing here with food delivery was, yeah, you might have competition. Yeah, you might have bad. Yeah, you might have bad unit economics while you're investing and growing the market. But at a certain point, you're going to get to a spot where you have enough density that you can have low enough prices to all participants in the ecosystem and just have enough volume of transactions going through that you're still able to eke out a marginal profit at that while having way lower prices than any competitor, you tip the market, you become

a monopoly, essentially you win. And this is happening in China with Meituan. So now Meituan, real quick, we'll do a whole episode on them someday. They actually started as a Groupon clone in the early 2010s of course they in china of course they did went through a whole long you know crazy history but by this point they had pivoted into food delivery uh merged with their biggest competitor dian ping uh and they were dominating the food delivery market in china which is even bigger than the food delivery market in the u.s they went public later that year in 2018 at a $50 billion plus market cap. Um,

and today May Twan, which we'll get into later is much more also than food delivery. Uh, now the series a investor in May Twan Sequoia capital China. So they knew what was going on here too. So good. So good. Okay.

So soft bang comes in, they do this big round uh there's a catch though as they're as we chronicle what's the valuation on the 500 million they're putting yeah you think you know oh man 500 million dollar rounds like gotta be like a five billion dollar valuation nope 1.4 billion dollar post money valuation so door dash is now a company yeah door dash is now a unicorn but that is coming at a very high cost 38 percent of the company that they sell in this round to softbank and the other investors and the crazy here's the really crazy thing so they raise all this money 1.4 billion valuation. The actual share price is still

lower than the series B that Kleiner led at a 600 post back in the day, because the dilution is so large here, uh, that while the post money valuation is obviously much higher over two X higher, the share price at which shares are being sold is still lower than the series b that's crazy i did not realize that it was this could possibly be a down round but yeah you're right there were two down rounds that happened um okay so softbank now owns a ton of this company and still today uh at ipo the largest shareholder well i i bet yep i mean hard to dilute that down now other existing investors uh did come in for pro rata as well i assume sequoia and others in this round um but yeah but this changes the game and this

it's a new i mean they're back in it that's for that's a new, I mean, they're back in it. That's for, that's a new breath. Not only are they back in it. Um, I mean this, this deal as costly, literally costly as it was to the company and its, its existing shareholders, um, creates a whole new life and opportunity here. Uh, so DoorDash goes back on the offensive. We're now in 2018. uber is getting ready to go public on their own they've got the new ceo dara they're going through all of this stuff they've got their own investors and prospective public market investors breathing down their neck about profitability path to profitability postmates which we certainly had their own challenges aside from that too exactly we haven't talked about. They certainly had their own challenges aside from that too. Exactly.

We haven't talked about Postmates yet on this episode, but they're struggling. They haven't raised money since 2015. Remember, capital intensive business. Three years without raising. Three years without raising money. Going to be pretty hard to keep winning share here. DoorDash has all this money. They say, we're going big. They go all in. They literally 5X, so multiply by five, the number of markets that they're in during this year in 2018. By the end of 2018, they are operating in over 3000 towns and cities in America, uh, enormously wider footprint

than certainly Postmates or Caviar or their other independent competitors, um, and approaching, uh, and probably even surpassing in terms of footprint Uber at this point. Um, and they start taking a ton of share in the market. They quickly become the fastest growing food delivery company. They overtake Uber during this year for the number two spot behind Grubhub. Grubhub is still the biggest in 2018. And on the back of this, presumably, we don't have access to the data. but as they get this density, even though they're spending all this money to acquire new customers through promotions, the unit economics and their attention starts to work and it starts to play out like things have in China with Meituan, uh, and they build loyalty on the platform. platform so before the year is even out in august of 2018 they raise another 250 million dollars from koto and dst at a four billion dollar valuation so we're now they're feeling themselves again yeah there's six months after less than six months after that highly dilutive soft bank round

now they raise a quarter billion at uh what, what is that? Uh, 5%, less than 5% dilution. Yeah. Incredible. Got the leverage back. Got the leverage back. Um, then in the next year, in March of 2019, they finally pass grub hub, uh, and become literally the number one player in North America, uh, summer of 2019, as we've talked about on the show, they acquire Caviar for $400 million from Square. That adds even more restaurant supply and order, diner demand to the platform. So they consolidate there.

They raise even more money at increasing valuations by the end of 2019 they are at a i think they raised 600 million at a 12.6 billion dollar valuation so now we're 10x the price of the softbank round already within a little over a year and so what kind of amazing what tipped there because they went from like on the ropes to i mean being a darling um obviously having 500 million dollars to spend can give you the opportunity to do a lot of growth quickly which we saw in the new markets but like what was changing around the company that would change people's opinions on why they're willing to bet on this thing and so heavily the two hypotheses i would have are one simply watching meituan in china

and that they are making it work they are becoming a dominant number one player in the public markets at this point in time and their stock is uh performing exceedingly well i think they are now at or over a100 billion market cap as we record today. And then two, all the other players have suddenly either shot themselves in the foot or taken themselves out of the game. So Square gives up with Caviar uh and sells to doordash uber is now public and going through all the struggles that we've chronicled on the show not to mention pre-public with travis you know that's in the past but early 2017 was no uh no cakewalk for them either so they've had many self-inflicted wounds yeah multiple years now of self self-inflicted wins postmates can't raise money um meanwhile

doordash is out there spending money they're the only player doing it um i think that's the the window finally opened i think to realize or attempt to realize this dream you know the dream of become a number one player in a highly competitive market right and then you know a thing that we see in markets is an explosion and then consolidation especially when they're these low margin highly competitive ones um and so you're right as everything started to consolidate around them and they suddenly had a large balance sheet it became possible to see how they would be the one left standing who would roll up others rather than um you know being forced to you know join one of the big guys on unfavorable terms yeah and as

we've seen i mean i think it's even become a question of do they need to roll up anymore or are they just gonna right take so much share it doesn't matter yeah um so by the end of 2019 uh they finish with 800 this is the first year uh i guess the second year we have full financials for them in the s1 885 million in net revenue up over 3x year on year uh 263 million orders also also up over 3x, 8 billion in total gross order value. And this is, I thought, really interesting too. 60% year over year, same store sales growth on the platform. So taking out new market launches, taking out new restaurants added to the platform just for existing restaurants that were on the platform last year, doing 60% more sales the next year in 2019. And the question you're asking yourself if you're one of those restaurants is, is all 60% of that new customers? Or is that

some of my old customers shifting their behavior toward ordering through this thing where I don't make as much profit. Yeah. Before we get into that, the other thing that happens in 2019, which like we've told, hopefully it's come across. I'm so, we're so excited and, you know, laudatory of just this journey that DoorDash has been on because it's, they have really faced the fire here and pulled out of it. On the other hand, we can't let them off the hook. The other thing that happens in 2019 is tips. Yeah. So this, we're going to dive into it because it's a really important thing to know about the company. For this may just sound very familiar to lots of you. I, I want to open this by saying the company's response to their tipping scandal is completely nonsensical.

Like I have listened and watched and read many interviews with people at the company trying to explain what they thought they were doing. What the hell they were doing. It is like just absolutely predatory and wrong. And honestly, none of the explanations make any sense to me. But David, what was happening well so what was happening was um always or at least from the early post palo alto delivery days early doordash days as a consumer on the platform you would order you would pay for the food and then there would be a service charge and then you'd have the option to add a tip for your Dasher. Well, it comes out, I think the New York Times did a big investigative

piece in mid 20, it was July, 2019, that that tip that you assume when you're tipping your courier, that money is going to the courier, like it would in a restaurant when you tip the waiter and it goes to the waitstaff and the cooks in the kitchen. And, you know, maybe there's a tip pool, but it's all split between the employees. That tip is going to DoorDash. And DoorDash is combining the tip into the total value of the order. And then they are splitting up the economics of the order according to their, you know their their fee splits right basically what they were doing is they were only paying the tip out uh to the driver if the uh driver basically didn't make enough in their base from doordash from the order that they delivered and they're

like oh i guess we have to give you some of your tip because you didn't hit the minimum but if you did hit the minimum then doordash was keeping the tip yeah it was like the minimum and the maximum yeah yeah so that's not a good look it for anybody who wants to listen to like the company's response to this it kind of like sounds good and you're nodding your head until you're like wait i that literally doesn't make any sense like they they try and blame it on a ux issue sometimes they try and blame it on it's actually originally intended to help the dasher and you're like how could it possibly have been trying to help the dasher um you know it just goes to illustrate what a freaking tight margin business this is and what a what a you know tightrope they're walking to make this thing profitable yep that's it there's no excuse for it um nope so they fixed

it they did a complete 180 the tips are real tips now as they needed to do. Exactly. Uh, and I think that's interesting. Like it was, um, maybe it was, there's no way to know. Maybe it was part of what helped make the unit economics work during this period. That doesn't make it right to do it makes it wrong, uh, still, but now they fixed it and now the business is unit economic positive even with uh not stealing the tips uh so let's pick back up how does this happen um basically 2020 has been a rough year for a lot of people it has been the opposite of a rough year for a lot of people. It has been the opposite of a rough year for DoorDash. Yeah, DoorDash had their Zoom moment. Yeah, they basically had their Zoom moment in the private markets.

So when the pandemic hits in March, in the US at least, DoorDash grows over 20% that month, which was already coming off an eight billion dollar plus base which is pretty incredible right like for context a company growing 20 percent a month is like way it's like what a really good seed stage company with product market fit can do and this is a company that did eight8 billion the previous year in gross order volume. Yeah. And I actually don't have the stats for the other platforms

handy right now. They grow too with the pandemic, but nowhere near the degree that DoorDash grows. So their share taking of the market just accelerates further throughout COVID such that by the time the S1 hits, which we'll get to in a sec, DoorDash now has 50% of the entire food delivery market in America up from 20 something the year before. Yeah, I mean, it was like over the year and three quarters between the beginning of 2019. And when the, um, IPO,

uh, S1 was followed, was filed. They just had an extraordinary run of, of becoming the dominant player in the space. Um, and I, it's,

it's actually, it's kind of hard to figure out why, like, I don't really know why they smoked Uber eats so so hard. And Uber Eats grew too. But in terms of share, how DoorDash went from like a one of four players on customer acquisition you know just in san francisco at least i noticed especially at the start of the pandemic way more billboards for doordash than anything else than any of the other i don't think i saw like i've ever seen an eats or a postmates billboard uh i'm sure they exist somewhere. Two, though, it is, I think, also related to this being willing to fly low to the ground that DoorDash has always operated with. The prices that you are paying as a consumer are notoriously opaque in this space. But I do generally think this is a feeling more

than any data that I have, that generally ordering on doordash i am relatively paying a fair or pretty close to price of the food that i would also pay if i were to go order from the restaurant directly now i'm also paying the the tip to the courier to deliver it whereas and the additional fees and and the service fee you know what but like it's all reasonable and doordash but there's a delivery fee there's a so the food may or may not cost more you're saying it doesn't there's a delivery fee there's a service fee there's a tip yeah and then there's uh i think doordash just has the service fee if you're ordering with dash pass ah so that's yes that's the important

distinction is that the delivery one of the fees drops to zero and one of them gets shaved by like three delivery yep drops to zero um well the other thing that we didn't talk about is they do a deal with chase and the sapphire so wait but before i looked it up because i i hate just like throwing out wrong numbers on this show so uh in the two and three quarters years from january 2018 to october 2020 um they grew from 17 market share to 50 market share so just an extraordinary last two and a half years well i guess the to finish the point i was going to make before certainly on post Postmates, and also, again, it's a feeling to an extent on Uber Eats. I've ordered from those platforms and then looked at the bill and been like, this is crazy.

How am I paying $70 for two dishes from a Thai restaurant just from all the markups that they were doing on the food? Yeah, I think that's really fair. I think it's totally fair. I will say it feels nicer as a dash pass member. The prices do somehow feel more reasonable at the end of the day. Like the, the prices go down just enough for you're like, okay,

it's, it's meaningfully cheaper to order than Uber compared to Uber eats. And we should explain what, what dash pass is. Um, you pay $10 a month. Um, it's basically amazon prime so they

knock off your some amount of the fees um and uh you know it it it makes sense for you if you're ordering a lot of doordash uh some numbers on that and they do call this they call it a a membership program to the physical world which i i think is an interesting way to we're gonna get into discussing that when we get to narratives. Yes. So they've got 5 million customers on DashPass. So if you actually, you know, if everyone paid for that, it would be a $600 million revenue business on its own, just DashPass.

Now, obviously, there's some internal accounting there because they are losing the fees that they would be making if you weren't on DashPass. But much like amazon prime i'm sure they make up for it in the amount that you are now loyal to and conditioned to have a habit of using door dash um instead of uh um uh competitors or frankly just making food on your own you know i think the way i mean they're retaining your platform right the way amazon prime famously works is, originally they were like, well, if we can just break even, then it'll be nice to be able to increase the number of orders people make. And now I think it's very much the mindset of, we actually don't need to break even because we just know how much more that makes people invested in the Amazon ecosystem.

People can correct me if I'm wrong on that, but that's my impression of, despite the price hikes, how they feel about it. I mean, it's gotta be. The amount of value you get as a consumer out of that, what is it, $129 a year? It's crazy. And David, to your comment earlier on Chase Sapphire Reserve,

the way that I have DoorDash is not at all because I felt like I should pay ten dollars a month to have dash pass is because my credit card came with it for free this year and so uh interestingly enough i do think it worked at least for me personally wildly anecdotal this is not data it did make me a more loyal doordash customer to the point where I think maybe three times I compared my exact same cart in DoorDash versus Uber Eats and it was like five, eight, 10 bucks cheaper on DoorDash. So I was like, great, I'll keep it. And I don't check anymore in the same way that I don't price check Amazon anymore. So that totally worked. And the thing that is interesting to me about that Chase

Sapphire Reserve deal is the customer segment they're going after because the Sapphire Reserve deal is the customer segment they're going after. Because the Sapphire Reserve is a fascinating credit card. It's a $550 annual fee of which you can get some meaningful amount, 300 bucks or something back in travel credit. But then you can basically get the rest of it back in these other benefits in Lyft Pink, which is the same thing as DashPass, but for Lyft in the DashPass, which, which you know has a value of 100 ish dollars a year um now they're crediting back your peloton um uh some amount of your peloton membership yes they're uh were we still flying you effectively get a um it's like an effective seven percent uh back as long as you redeem it for travel because you get the,

what is it? 5%. But then it has the 50% kicker. So it's like seven. So it's this amazing card if you like have a particular lifestyle where you eat out and you travel. And, you know, frankly, they, it was, I think famously a wildly successful program. They ran out of aluminum.

They were printing them on paper for a while in the initial batch and they couldn't sell enough these things very interesting for doordash to say we want to throw in with um with this lot and and get this crowd to be doordash customers because i do think it probably skews a little bit more city um then so like the suburb strategy was a great go-to-market and now they're I think saying like, okay, now we need all customers and I'll be very curious. I don't think they'll ever disclose it, but how many of these 5 million, uh, people that are currently using dash pass, uh, are via this chase Sapphire reserve program and how many of them are actually paying.

And to contextualize that 5 million number, how many people are currently DoorDash customers, David? Do you have that off the top of your head? 18 million, I believe. So that's a meaningful chunk. I mean, that's a little under a third of their total customer base are on this, you know, reduced fee program. Yeah. So the net of all that, you know, in in q1 of which it's only march in q1 that is the pandemic month for the company uh they because they're so u.s based like they have almost no international penetration and canada and australia but very small in each right so it wasn't till march that they would have seen anything. And really the end of March, yeah. They reach overall, for the whole company,

positive contribution margin in Q1. And to define contribution margin for a second, why this is so important, contribution margin is, so you've got your revenue, their, what was it, 885 million-h revenue that the net revenue that they did in 2019. If you take out all of the variable costs associated with that revenue, cost to serve support, and most importantly, sales and marketing, how much sales and marketing spend, how much, how many promos are you doing to acquire all the customers and retain all the customers that goes

into generating that revenue base. Take that all out for the whole rest of the company's life up until this point, they were losing money at this point. Like they were literally giving away dollars for less than a dollar, 97 cents or something. Yeah. Yep. At this point in Q1, it flips. So they're now contribution margin positive. Now they're not, uh, either cashflow or net income positive as a company at this point yet because they still have their fixed costs, their engineering base, their GNA, their headquarters, their rent. We'll see if they keep that. All that they're paying. But this is a huge moment in any company's life. and i believe i did some work uh based on what i could tell from uber's uh 10k for 2019

uber only in 2019 just barely hit this mark they were essentially contribution margin break even in 2019 despite being way older way bigger having multiple products around for a long time. DoorDash hits this in Q1 and then continues to accelerate throughout the pandemic and the rest of the year. Accelerate in growth or get more contribution margin positive? Well, the answer is both definitely growth and contribution margin. So in the last quarter, Q3 ended September 30th, uh, contribution profit improved to 215 million, which a year ago they had lost 52 million in Q3. And I believe the total contribution profit for the nine months of 2020 so far is $433 million. So they did half of that in Q3. So spread across Q1 and Q2, it would obviously be less. So they're accelerating. Yeah. So their contribution margin was negative 70%,

then negative 20%, then negative 20%. And then exactly what you're talking about in Q1, it flipped where they were positive 7%, then Q3 positive 29%, or I'm sorry, Q2, and then Q3 was positive 24%. So like having 25-ish percent contribution margin is great. The big question will be, will this continue after the pandemic, after they have, I think I was in one of the sources that you can check out in the show notes. I remember reading that someone was like, they're effectively essential infrastructure for the country right now. I sure hope they can be profitable with that kind of demand. But yeah,

I mean, all power to them there. Yep, totally. So then two more things to wrap up history and facts on election day, November 3rd, 2020, a huge moment for the country, but also for DoorDash and Uber and the whole gig economy. Prop 22 passes in California. This was super controversial. We said we would get back to gig labor here. We won't go into all the ins and outs here, but like basically the TLDR is California has a really crazy legislative and legal system where citizens actually vote directly on propositions that impact the laws instead of a republican representative type system and uber and doordash as well as the other gig economy companies had put forward this prop 22 to basically permanently create space and classify their labor as contractors and gig economy workers

this idea of a third type of work you have pure contractors who are 1099. You have pure W-2 employees. And California and other states have been trying to classify gig workers as make companies classify them as W-2 employees. And Prop 22 says, no, they are contractors. They will be paid as 1099s. But it's this third class of business. And it basically opens the way for the company's sustainable economics on their labor supply uh so that was a huge win for the companies regardless of what you think politically whether this is good for gig workers or not it happened

it removed an existential threat to the business uh so literally 10 days later, on November 13, 2020, DoorDash releases their S1 and files to go public. Yep. As we wrap up history and facts here, should we talk about some of the interesting nuggets revealed about their... Absolutely. All right. So one thing that I sort of found interesting was trying to put into context the size of their business. And I think that this was useful for me because we talk about all these different companies and numbers. Once you get to a certain level of big number, there's like big number syndrome that takes over where you're like, I don't even understand how many billions are normal. You know, like you get into this weird headspace. So there was $8 billion in gross order volume in 2019, as we've talked about, which basically means $8 billion of food were paid for, including taxes. And of course, DoorDash kept, I think it was 880 million of that as revenue. So that's an effective take rate of like 11%. When you think about it of like, you know, all their cohorts have different take rates, they started at different take rates,

there's different incentives applied to each one. So it's kind of this like 11 to 15% or 10 to 15% floating thing that starts high and then goes down over time as you receive less incentives. But anyway, about 11% of what the incentives that the consumers are getting, but the take rate for DoorDash gets higher over time as they're paying out less incentives, right? Sorry. Yes. I said that backwards. So then of course they had monumental growth. You can sort of back into, depending on how their Q4 goes, that their run rate right now is something like a $22 to $25 billion gross order volume on an annualized basis. So for 2020, it would seem like they'll probably come in around $25 billion in gross order volume.

Now, how big is $25 billion? To contextualize this, at the smallish order values of food delivery as a category compared to say say, travel, which we will cover tomorrow on the Airbnb episode, it's actually kind of hard to stack all those purchases on top of each other to get to a truly huge, gross business. And those who have done that successfully are in the e-commerce vertical. So DoorDash has $25 billion-ish a year that moves through their platform. Amazon last year had $335 billion. And when you look at Alibaba in China, they had close to a trillion dollars of gross volume through their platform. And even Pinduoduo, which we covered to start this season, had $150 billion in GMV or gross

volume. Man, talk about big numbers syndrome. that's 6x doordash's gross order volume and even crazier to put pinduoduo's growth and scale into context is that they started two years after doordash did but china is like a whole different category you know comparing any numbers to u.s based which by the way total sex we've talked about meituan here Now we're talking about Pinduoduo. Like, I mean, China is so different. We need to do more episodes. We need to do Meituan. But like, it's just crazy. Tencent owns over 20% of both Pinduoduo and Meituan. So you want to index this. Take a look at Tencent. Yeah. Another few interesting things that I thought were

noteworthy from the S1 were the existence of different products that I did not know that DoorDash had. Most notably, so there's DoorDash for Work, which is the kind of competing in that market of office delivery that we talked about. We talked about DashPass. There's these two things that I didn't know about door dash storefront and door dash drive that are worth understanding because basically the way you can think about door dash is they are um the ones who are aggregating all of the customer demand and then they are putting massive amounts of pressure on the sort of back end of the supply chain, the person delivering it to you and the restaurant, because they sort of hold the customer hostage. Like they say, I've got this

customer, I can send them wherever I want. Therefore, I get to have outsized economics in this transaction. And for some restaurants, that's a bummer. For other restaurants, they say, I got my own customers who love me. Sure, your delivery network's interesting, and maybe your little checkout page is interesting. I'm going to operate my own business, thank you very much. And I'm going to pay you sort of piecemeal for these things. And if I can't get it from you, DoorDash, I'm getting it from other people. And so we had Nick Kekonis on the LP show to talk about talk. And we had this fun episode we did with him called arming the restaurateur rebels. And, you know, that was a really fun dive into basically, like, if you wanted to not use DoorDash, and you felt like you had a strong brand and customer relationships and a

big email list, whatever, how do you do that yourself? So of course, DoorDash then realizes, okay, we got to compete. If people are unbundling us, we have to be able to offer our services piecemeal in order to compete with those who are building their own restaurant stack. And so Storefront is an interesting version where they basically say, look, you don't want to build your own complicated ordering website. So it's a white label ordering solution. They launched it in July. I don't think they want to be in this business, but they kind of have to be, otherwise they're just going to lose those customers so this is directly competing with talk talk and um what's the other big online order mark i think yeah yeah uh order mark federates it out to all the others all right all the others but there's a handful of toast

yes they're letting you stand up your own you know checkout page most of those don't offer the delivery because as we talked about that's a very difficult tech tech problem to solve they partnered with doordash i assume with the drive product to do the logistics and delivery right so it's interesting uh the storefront ends up being two bucks in order there's a you know some sass fee that you pay uh monthly along. But basically, it's two bucks out of every order go to DoorDash just for operating the little website that you drive your own customers to. I think is now is that covering the payment fees, though? Might be.

I think it probably is. Might be. Okay. And then the second product is probably the more interesting one, David, the one you're referencing is DoorDash Drive, which is the white label logistics service where restaurants can have food delivered from orders that they generate through their own owned and operated channels like the telephone. Maybe they use DoorDash Storefront or a competitor or they make their own website. That's $7 per order and $1 for every mile after the first. And I was like, oh, DoorDash Drive, that's interesting. I wonder if any... Does anyone use that? I have gotten Chipotle delivered from my Chipotle app many, many, many times and have never realized

that that is actually DoorDash on the back end. A dasher walks into Chipotle, picks it up, brings it to my house. That is a really interesting business to be in. You get to command, obviously, less of the economics because you don't control the customer relationship, if you're the DoorDash in this case that we're talking about. But it lets them leverage this asset that they've built for customers who say, like, hey, I do have my own customer relationships. I still want to pay you to use this driver-based asset that you've created and all the technology to power the whole thing. And it lets them address basically a larger market than they would otherwise be able to address with the pure DoorDash marketplace. Yeah, the analogy I've heard here, and I think it's apt, is DoorDash is both the Amazon and

the Shopify in this space. The Amazon in that day operating marketplace that consumers go to, the DoorDash app app and they'll generate the demand and they'll you know send you marketplace orders fulfill it with their logistics just like you know fba just like amazon does and they'll take a cut of the transaction for doing that and they're also the shopify where like hey you got your own demand just like you're saying ben um that's cool do that we'll give you the tools to service your demand and you'll pay us for the tools yep and they actually encourage their customers if it's like a chipotle to do a list they say look you have your customers like you have an app you should do that we should only extract seven ish dollars of value from you if you've got your own

customers if you've got our you know you probably want access to our customers too. You should also list on the door. Yeah. Why stop there? Yeah. Just like lots of DTC brands sell on Amazon and sell direct. Exactly. It's, it's the Omnitrandle strategy for food. Yeah.

All somehow paying DoorDash along the way. Well, and I think that's like, to my mind, that's what I find. So we'll get into more nuggets from the S1, but that's what I find so impressive about the company, right? It's like they have gone through this slog and built up this thing that everybody thought was impossible. And the thing being a local delivery logistics network that can operate contribution margin positive. Yep.

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and response again this summer. Yep. So if you want cutting edge cybersecurity solutions backed by a 24-7 team of experts who monitor, investigate, and respond to threats with unmatched precision, head on over to huntress.com slash acquired or click the link in the show notes. Our huge thanks to Huntress. analysis that basically shows it costs about $6 for DoorDash to acquire a customer. And assuming that they stick around for five years, and frankly, we don't know how long they're going to stick around, but that seems like a reasonable enough estimate just because the company is so

young that DoorDash can earn about $60 in pure profit from them over those five years. So that's a 10 to 1 CAC to LTV ratio. And it takes about 16 months for them to recover that $6. And it sounds like a little bit of money. But when you think about, you know, you're ordering all this food, DoorDash is only keeping a small percentage of that, call it 11 to 15%. For most people, you're not ordering every night, you know, from DoorDash ordering a few times a month or a year. And in addition, they're doing a lot of incentive-based little subsidies that are trying to get you to order. So the longer someone sticks around, the more they're going to generate,

and a lot of that profit is actually back-weighted for DoorDash. Yeah. And I think the other important point here too too, that, you know, as Bill Gurley has written about in the past a lot about how just looking at CAC and LTV and payback masks a lot of complexity and important things about the business. You got to think about what the levers are that DoorDash is pulling here. They certainly could do things to generate more profits out of every order that they're getting from customers through raising prices. And that would make those numbers go up and that would make payback happen faster. But, because if you think about, what did we say there?

Their contribution profit margin is based on gross order value right now. 2%? 3%? Oh yeah, 2.4%. 2.4%, right. You did that analysis that shows on the average order value of a $30 order, including tip, after allocating all the variable costs and all the sales and marketing costs and

promotions, DoorDash's contribution margin is about 80 cents. So that's how you, to understand why it takes 16 months to earn back that $6. So now, so think about that, right? You're going to earn $50 in contribution margin profit over five years. That means consumers are spending 25x that in terms of the dollars they're spending on the platform. That's a huge amount of economic activity you're generating, right? And so by keeping those margins lower, this is the whole thing about flying close to the ground. Bezos says your margin is my opportunity.

You're generating more value for consumers and for the restaurants and the dashers and the platform, presumably to by keeping that lower. Other people won't be able to match that you get more density, you grow over time, the flywheel spins here. So like, you know, yeah, 50 bucks to you, but what's that $2,500 in spend that the customers are doing over five years? And, you know, can that grow as you add new categories? I think it could. You better hope if you're a buyer of this stock that it can grow as they add new categories. illustration yet of the whole point we've been trying to make on this episode, which is in order to try and be profitable and grow without massive investor influxes of cash, so in order to be a cash flow positive company who is profitable and growing in this category, you have to fly so freaking close to the wire if it can be done at all. And the best possible illustration is for one order,

one $30 and 36 cent order, they get to keep 80 cents and boy, are they working hard to get that 80 cents. So they have to believe that they're providing tons of value all around the ecosystem and betting that there's going to be a crap ton of those transactions in order for you to believe that this business can eventually spit off a lot of cash. Indeed. Well, I think that brings us to our analysis section. Should we talk about the price? Yes. Just to contextualize who currently owns this company before it's going to IPO. SoftBank, the Vision Fund, owns about 22%. Sequoia, 18%. I think that's very evident by the story told of how we sort of got there. Greenview, who we didn't really talk about, owns 9%.

That's GIC. That's Singapore. Oh, I didn't realize. Okay. So I guess we did talk about them. I think GIC stands for Greenview Investment Capital or something like that. Got it. Tony owns 5%. Co-founders Andy and Stanley each own 4.7%. So once upon a time, these guys own the entire company along with a fourth co-founder. And here they are, three of them representing under 15%. That's a story of dilution if I've ever seen one. Kleiner Perkins owns about 2.1%. That was reported. And I don't think that's necessarily in the S1, but... I think the number of shares, because John Doerr is still on the board,

so the number of shares he benefits holds. Ah, right, so that's how that was disclosed. So, okay, that's who owns this company coming into today. I sent David an article last night just to take a trip down memory lane. I should look up the date on this. I think it was November 13th from the Wall Street Journal. Food delivery company expected to fetch valuation of over 25 billion dollars in december market debut so that's not high ben i we we had talked i mean i think the

biggest number we might have mentioned was 13 billion they did raise around at a valuation of 16 billion um so my gosh that would be awesome if they could fetch a $25 billion valuation. That's a great markup for investors. Yeah, nice markup. Share price for that would have been, I'm trying to remember. Gosh, it's hard to remember back that far when the price was so low. Something like that. What were some of the different ranges that then were given in the ensuing weeks? So when they filed the S-1, like all companies, I think the range was blank.

And then the first range that they filed was 75 to 85 bucks a share i think they upped that to 85 to 95 bucks a share and then last night tuesday december 8th 2020 they priced the ipo for a fully diluted market cap of 39 billion dollars it's a lot higher than 16 now to, to be fair, they, so last year net revenue was 885 million. So just under a billion so far in the first nine months of 2020, they've done almost 2 billion, 1.9 billion in net revenue. So, um, you know, hi, we're talking 20 times trailing nine months net revenue. So I don't know, you do some math, extrapolate that out to a year, maybe you're at 15 times revenue, still high.

Still high. So David and I have not refreshed our browsers yet, but as of, you know, we started this episode, it had not, it had priced and sold it at $102, but price discovery was still happening for market open. David, let's pop open the stock and see where it's trading now holy crap i mean i don't have it yet hang on i have i'll tell you the price that it opened this morning It opened trading at $182 a share, which is a market cap of around, what, like 70-ish billion? Wow.

David, where are we now? As I look at the ticker, we're at $177.77. All right, so it dropped a little since the open. Yep. But that is up 75% on day one. And we didn't have time to really research this but maybe you did ben but you know goldman was leading this ipo and they had some hybrid system and like you know everybody's like uh you know traditional ipos you

give up the pop you leave money on the table girly's been crusading against this for years he gets back some well-known odd dpos like oh we got this new system not gonna leave money on the table i don't know about this new system. This, I mean, this is one of the most egregious offenders of leaving money on the table. Like this is probably close to a $3 billion wealth transfer from, you know, employees and investors of this company to the people who bought the IPO last night. The investment banks clients. Yeah.

All right. Here's the thing though. Like I think it's been proven over the last five plus years that people have been talking about this, that you can't beat them. You can't stop this from happening. So I think what we need to do is we need to find a way for the acquired community to get allocations in IPOs. That we got to join. We can't beat them we're gonna join i love that so all our friends at goldman if you're listening

yes we need to get just carve aside a little client yeah we need allocations wow david i honestly i cannot believe this i like if you would have told me a month ago that doordash was going to be a 65 70 billion dollar company up 71 and a half percent ish from a 39 billion dollar market cap say we're talking a 70 billion ish market cap right now somewhere in that neighborhood wow this is gonna be it's kind of a volatile first day too because it's it's you know, if it opened at 182, it's now down to one. Let's see, the high point on the day was 187. The low point so far has been 173. So there's still a good amount of price discovery happening in the public markets right now. Yep. Wow. Man. So, okay. All right. We've got another hour ish to trade here.

So, okay. Over the course of our, the next several sections, all these analysis sections, I think the question that we have to keep in the back of our minds is what is the things you have to believe about their future growth and about their future profitability in order to in some way justify the value of this company right now. Um, and I can't think of any better way to do that than heading into our narrative section, where we, for folks who are new to the show, this section, we try and paint the media narratives over the last few months for the bull case and the bear case of why you should be excited about this company or why you should run from it at all costs. And the market has certainly spoken. But David, what was the sort of biggest bull narrative surrounding the company? So yeah, I mean, the bull narrative, I think we've

told a lot of it along the way here, and I at least mostly subscribe to it, is they have, just like Meituan seems to have done in China, they have accomplished the dream or are in the process of accomplishing the dream and taking a market like this, a highly competitive local network effect market and tipped it in their favor such that there's no viable competition. They have a wide berth to run both to keep growing in the sector that they're in right now with food delivery to add other products and services into it and become the dominant you know meituan as we'll get into now is uh it's not really just food delivery anymore that's a small part of what they do they are a super app just like tencent and WeChat is the super digital app. Meituan in China is the super

physical app. Friend of the show, Rita Yang over at GGV has a really great YouTube walkthrough that we'll link to in our sources of what it's like to use Meituan in China. And like, you want to book a massage, you book a massage. You want to order food, you order food. You want to order flowers, you order flowers. You want to make a restaurant reservation. Great. Like you order food you want to order flowers you order flowers you want to make a restaurant reservation great like you order your food from restaurants you also make restaurant reservations in the app and you're opening it all the time and it's how you interact with your physical world and local businesses around you i think that's probably the bull case to me yeah it's boiled down to they are the last mile near real-time logistics company. They're the local on-demand FedEx to get anything to you. And then you just have to let your mind wander on what are all the things that you could want at your door in a moment's notice.

And really, that starts to shift your mindset to like, oh, so they're actually a competitor of Amazon Prime now, less so a food delivery company. Well, I think what's interesting is, I think it's a yes and on the real bull case. Yes. I mean, at this market cap, it has to be. It has to be a yes and, right? I think it's everything you just said. But it's also this, you know, what Meituan has become in China, which is, and Tony talks about this and they talk about it in the S1, and this is part of what DashPass is. It is your way that you interact with all local businesses

in your area, whether that's bringing stuff to you or you going to them or even other interactions. So, you know, the example of restaurant reservations, well, what if it's, you know, you can make restaurant reservations, but you also get special offers at the restaurant. You can book things, you can book special experiences, and because you're a DashPass member, you might get some discounts on that. Well, and then just like Amazon has made a big business, a big high margin business in advertising on Amazon. Well, right. Once you have that traffic, there's lots of ways to not hard to believe you could have

sponsored listings for food delivery or for other things within the app. And if I, as a consumer, I'm opening this three, four, five, six, 10 times a week to interact with things and I'm getting all this stuff put in front of me. That's pretty interesting. Right? Yeah, smart to name the company door dash and not like door food dash. And it's also smart to introduce dash pass in sort of a, like even pulling the door away from it, you know, because then dash pass you could you could imagine applying that brand to you get special discounts and special relationships with merchants that aren't necessarily being

delivered to your house but you're just transacting through the app yeah and i think so look this is the super bowl case uh lots of questions about whether this can happen when how there is another way to paint the bull case too, which is basically like that this company is an optimization machine and they will run at fully utilized optimization. It's kind of like a factory floor. Like all those machines are really expensive,

so you better run them at the most perfect harmonious capacity so that you can be profitable on that high amount of fixed costs. And the way to think about that in this sense is there's a lot of different ways in which they can optimize. But the biggest one is once you've acquired a customer, can you get the most amount of profitable transactions out of them over time? And obviously, big performance marketing angle to this company, similar to a restaurant. Once you onboard a restaurant, can you keep them for a long time? Can you be

profitable on them? It's all about getting to not only the scale, but the internal data that the company has so they know exactly how to price every component, what customer is worth going after, what restaurant's worth going after, what restaurant's worth going after, what product at what time. In a lot of ways, it's basically a bet on data and data science being able to be the way that you can do this thing profitably. Yep. Not to mention even just the fixed costs, so to speak, although they're variable costs, but it's a fixed set of variable costs right of having the dashers operating right like you have capital in the system all day every

day with the dashers that are operating on the platform right and so like how do you leverage the fact that they're getting paid to be doing the fulfillment on the platform, how do you get more leverage out of that? Meaning make them do more deliveries more efficiently during the time that they're working for you. It's almost like the gig economy. It's a third way to think about costs. It's, it's not, it's, it's variable, but it's not totally variable costs. It's a fixed, very, it's a fixed set of variable costs in the network. Uh, and how much leverage can you get out of that? Yeah. Okay, so then that goes to the bear case, which is actually one of them is pandemic related, which is the most simple way to look at the pandemic related bear cases, this is the best

it's ever going to be for this business. And after this, there's going to be way less demand than there previously was. The other I think a little bit more nuanced way to look at it is the data that they're getting right now may not inform consumer behavior in the future. And so it will be hard to trust the guardrails for this cohort. Yeah, of course, all their most recent cohorts are looking great right now because of the pandemic. Right. You know, I personally think the way it

will play out is that all the new customers they did acquire have pseudo permanently changed their behavior. Like I think once you make a behavior shift, and I just know this from, you know, myself, like DoorDash has sort of won me over as a customer. And I don't think I will sort of change behavior after this, but they're certainly not going to acquire customers with the ease that they did during the pandemic. So that's sort of my like metered bear case on the pandemic. I would say also too, even on that,

one thing, we don't get delivery often. I've done it the last couple of nights in research for this episode. But what we do do often is take out. And I think this is one of the things that's really smart that DoorDash has invested in is making that a feature on the platform too. Like, yeah, it's way more, I vastly prefer, and probably the restaurant vastly prefers me to place my takeout order to walk over and pick up from my local Thai place via an app rather

than calling them and tying up the phone lines. And DoorDash has found a way to enable that and get paid for it. Yep. Yep. I think that pretty well. Anyway, the biggest bear case I think you can make is that they're not going to be able to make the leap out of this restaurant category. And this is going to continue to be a razor thin, highly competitive business. And they're just never going to be able to sort of take all the investment that they've made and actually get to benefit from an immensely cashflow positive output on the other side. Yep. That makes sense to me. I guess maybe, maybe there is one more legitimate argument you could make on the bear case, especially at this valuation which is this tam is maybe not as big as you think

and like obviously it's big but how big is it now in the s1 they talk about what is it i want to say something like 600 billion ish of off-premise restaurant food annually oh yes yeah that sounds right okay uh now what percentage of that is actually addressable by doordash so last year they did eight billion uh in gmv out of that 600 but like you know a bunch of that is dominoes a bunch of that is catering businesses which obviously doordash is getting into that but like they're not going to be able to address all of that by the way it's only 300 billion the off 300 spend 2019's off-premise spend at restaurants and other food service in the united states 300 billion okay yeah so now you're like wait a minute so say even you get the whole market 300 billion dollars in gross order

value you said we said we have a 2.5% contribution margin, let's say 10% revenue. Let's just even use revenue, a 10% revenue margin. So now you're talking about a $30 billion net revenue company. Um, yeah, that's great. That's super impressive, but like, that's not Amazon. Right. And that's if you address 100 of it and yeah like even amazon only addresses uh what is it 50 of e-com but um e-com is only 20 ish percent of commerce so yeah the way they define their market just make sure i actually understand this well is they say americans spend one and a half trillion dollars a year on food 600 billion of that has been on restaurants and then 300 billion is off premise ah that's what i was thinking the 600 but 600 is also dining in right right so that you could imagine i don't know i don't know how

the dining is addressable for them man so okay at this, not only do you have to not believe the bear case, you have to believe the bull case that they are going to expand outside of just the off-premise food delivery market. Yep, absolutely. is a really actually we decided to do power on this episode as well in a section where we normally trade it off with narratives but i think it's actually very appropriate to do both of them so this comes from friend of the show hamilton helmer's book seven powers and power is defined as what enables the business to achieve persistent differential returns or put another way uh how do you be profitable and more profitable than your closest competitor and do so sustainably over a long period of time? And the options for this are counter-positioning, scale economies, switching costs, network economies, process power,

branding, and cornered resource. And David, I'm curious where you come down on what power do they actually have here? Well, it's interesting before we get to us. It seems pretty clear to me that Tony and the team at DoorDash are probably also Hamilton Helmer fans. Because if you read the S1, they have this handy little flywheel diagram, three noted flywheel. And then they also talk about what they view as their defensibility. And they list local network effects, economies of scale, and increasing brand affinity. So three of the seven. Got to imagine that Hamilton, as he has so many, as his work has influenced so many people here in Silicon Valley, has also influenced them.

So that's what they they think network effects economies of scale scale economies and brand and we can talk about how they think about them to me the biggest one right now is is economies of scale 100 i i think it's actually the only legitimate one because i i i think it's pretty easy to hop for any network any participant in the ecosystem it's very easy to multi-home and it's very easy to choose the next best competitor like it's easy to order food it's easy to deliver food and it's easy to as a restaurant also list on uber eats no problem at all so i think that i think any defensibility that comes from a network effect is not really real. Yeah, no, I was going to say that it's related to order times and density, but that's scale economies. So yeah, I think scale economies is the big one.

And there's something to brand, but it's always hard to actually know how much to sort of chalk up to brand. I mean, one thing is really true and rings really, really true to me, which is like the whole end game is aggregating the consumer attention. And this is the Ben Thompson aggregation theory concept applied to food, where if you're the way that people think to order food, like you're the destination site, they're the front door to someone's purchase, you're going to get superior economics on that transaction. And I think like, as you think about the far future... Especially if you start introducing an advertising business model into this too. Absolutely. And I think about, as you think about the far future of like, how does the world of restaurants reorganize given you now have this participant in the system or the set of participants in the system that are

you know uh gobbling up all the consumer attention and the default way to order food as the default shifts from that real world to online whether it's door dash or you're using prime now to have stuff delivered they're going to start eating or they already are eating the profit of that local business or store. And for the vast majority of local businesses without a differentiated offering other than store location, which is how most businesses used to differentiate,

DoorDash will totally eat them. And they'll actually eat their backend too in the same way that Prime now has a warehouse like DoorDash will eventually have warehouses for the most commonly purchased things and be able to capture some more of that margin so then only the restaurants who deliver unique product or a unique experience will actually be in a good position as the world continues to to reorganize like it's the same thing amazon did to e-commerce is going to happen in food. Yep. I agree with all that. I don't think

this is brand power in the Hamilton sense. Like I don't think this, this is, that is a consequence of economies of scale and then growing into network economies, which I think they, you know, they maybe have a little bit of now, but i do think as what you're saying happens that'll grow more that more of a network effect as they have all the consumers and all the restaurants for now but let's say suppliers writ large local businesses on the other end brand though to me brand like for brand to be a power it has to be like tiffany's you know that's the canonical thing where like i'm willing to pay more for this exact same commoditized thing simply because of the brand name on it and there's no way that that applies to doordash like no way if eats gave it to be cheaper or for

the same price like yep yeah you're absolutely right on that yep so that's that's pretty aspirational nice one tony we appreciate that good try but well uh listeners for what would have happened otherwise, our sort of section where we, in a traditional Acquired episode, would talk about what would happen if this transaction didn't happen. We thought it'd be fun on this episode to dive into what would have happened if Uber hadn't imploded during their 27 and 2018. Would we be here today? And I think that gave, in the ride sharing market lift

a new breath where they were basically dead until uber you know imploded um and are now quite formidable competitor well 20 i don't know if i can call them formidable when like no one's ride sharing they exist and there's not like uh it doesn't seem like they're about like in 2017 it seemed like they were about to die. And indeed, as we've talked about on the Lyft and Uber episodes, they were about to die. Uber was going to win and then they haven't. And now it's stabilized into more of a duopoly type structure. Yep.

So what would have happened to DoorDash if Uber hadn't gone through their 2017 and 18? And as we know, like 2016 wasn't looking so good for DoorDash if Uber hadn't gone through their 2017 and 18. And as we know, like 2016 wasn't looking so good for DoorDash. Early 2017, they could have died. So how much of Uber fumbling had to do with DoorDash having a breath? Well, this is, I think this is really one of the most interesting questions on this episode episode because part of the narrative around this whole space and uber's role in it particularly that we haven't yet talked about on this episode is what uber would say which is we have a structural advantage in both of the main core products that we markets that we operate in ride share and food delivery because we can use our supply of drivers across both of these products lyft is a pure play ride sharing they can't use

their supply for food delivery doordash is pure play food delivery they don't do ride sharing thus we should you know the thesis the the narrative that um they and lots of other people have believed over time is we should be able to win both markets because we will be you know we'll have better essentially 2x the scale economy that any pure play player could have yep that has not played out interesting question is i do want to say like that that actually according to tony is not true like that well right yeah dashers are actually different than rideshare drivers so like that all sounds great and until i was doing the research i was like how did uber not win here they already had all the drivers like all they had to do was tell

them to deliver food instead of people but like according to tony at least the average dasher is in their mid-20s and the average rideshare driver is in their early 40s and women are willing to be dashers there's 40 40 percent of dashes are female whereas only 15 percent of ride share drivers are women i mean largely because of the safety concern so this has been this like you know common observation this common belief well i think there's an even more important so i totally agree um i think on the what would have happened otherwise i think it would have been interesting so i think uber got lazy and relied on this idea and i think it would have been interesting if they weren't going through everything that they went through to see like would they have how would well would they have done with maybe being less having their eye taken off the ball here because

i totally agree with tony on this one that the nature of the supply for food delivery is quite different across many dimensions versus ride share um and in particular so there's all the demographics that you mentioned um i think perhaps especially in cities the more important one is vehicle type uh so if you're going to do ride share in a city, you need to have a nice late model car or access to one. That immediately segments out a huge portion of your addressable gig labor economy, your gig labor force there.

There are a whole lot more people who either don't have a car at all or have a car that doesn't meet the standards of Uber and Lyft. And DoorDash came along and said, this is why I think bicycles were so brilliant in the early days in Boston. And then that grew into e-bikes, then that grew into scooters of all different types, both the powered motorcycle-like scooters and bird-like scooters. And I think that opened up a lot more addressable supply for them that Uber was never going to be able to multi-home across their two products. It's a really great point.

Yeah, it's a larger potential supply base than Uber has. And the way Uber solves that problem is like, oh, well, that person can lease a car from us. If you're a person who, or lease a car from one of our partners, I actually think this gets to the fact that the way that people plug into DoorDash is pretty different than the way that people plug into ride sharing. I think Uber would like to continue the narrative that it's largely the sharing economy, but I think the professionalization of supply is pretty clear at this point. The majority of Uber drivers, their full-time job is to drive Uber. I actually don't know if that's true with DoorDash. I think it is much more like a younger crowd with a different job that is using this to make a little bit of money on the side in order to do something else. And like, it feels to me much more like a, an actual realization of the sharing economy as opposed to what Uber turned into.

Yeah, I would agree with that. So yeah, I actually don't know what would have happened. Otherwise it's not clear. It's not like we can crystal clear say like, Oh yeah, Uber shot themselves in the foot.

They would have won here. Things would have been different. Well, certainly it became possible for DoorDash to raise money in a climate that would have been too hostile had uber continued to be a juggernaut yep and raise money from uber's largest shareholder still so crazy to me that that happened indeed all right playbook playbook Let's do it. Oh, man. So many things we've already talked about, but the headline of this needs to be, winner-take-all markets do indeed have a pot of gold at the end. But so far, we have just seen

cash flooding in to try and take it all, but that pot of gold has totally not materialized. In 2018, they lost $200 million. And then just like their growth, they tripled it to over $660 million loss in 2019. And of course, the losses are shrinking in the pandemic. They've only lost $150 million so far this year. But I mean, this is the classic modern embodiment of a venture capital business where capital floods in because the perception is that when you're at the biggest scale, then even if you stay small margin, all those little margins across all those little purchases add up. And maybe people can take that next leap and believe that you have pricing power. So then actually you can make more money per order over time when you're a monopoly.

But I think this is the bear case on this whole ecosystem that we're in right now. The winner-take-all effects may not be as strong as people thought, and the lock-in and moat may not be as deep or wide or whatever you want to say as people thought. And it continues to take longer and longer and longer to be able to realize that end state where you actually can realize all the fruits of your labor or not really labor but actually capital that has gone in yep so to me that's like that's the biggest playbook theme here is there they're running the playbook that is the winner take all capture a winner take all market but we're we're in the middle of the story we're not at the end of it yet yep yep i think that's i think that's true although i think

coronavirus um was a huge accelerant to them vastly improved their chances and also stepping on the gas and continue to run this playbook while their competitors pulled back vastly improved their chances. So, you know, whereas the narrative has shifted on this, where in 2013, 2014, it was run this playbook, there is the pot of gold. In 2016, 17, 18, it was there's no pot of gold at all. This is a mirage now the question is well there may be a pot of gold right i think it's a good way i think a related corollary playbook theme to that for me that we've seen across this season that acquired and some of the other episodes we've done recently focusing on more bootstrap businesses and just businesses with different histories. I mean, even I would put Epic Games in this category too. Different markets are different, right? And if you're going to go after a market like this, you stand no shot unless you raise a lot of money.

You're going to get torched. But that's not the case in other markets. Sort of. It depends if you want to compete nationally or globally or not like i don't know doordash is probably going to win if you're trying to operate just in one city and then they come in and compete against you in that city but i actually don't think there are any meaningful cross-geography network effects other than the national chains which doordash has done better at than uber but like if you're uber eats like really what are the cross-geography network effects between your uber eats business basically nothing like you get to reuse the same technology on the back end great customers know of your brand great

but like compared to airbnb which has an unbelievable cross-geography network effect probably the best ever right like I only live in one place. And if word gets around pretty quick that all the restaurants are on one app. So it's, yeah, I don't think, I don't think you need a national brand or an international brand in order to, to win. I think that's fair. But I think your, your upside is capped. Like you're never going to build an Epic Games type size company if you don't take the go

big approach in a capital intensive market like this yes great point great point i guess it really comes down to capital intensity like if you're operating in a capital intensive market good luck if you don't have capital but as we've seen on this on this season there are lots of other markets that are not capital intensive yep okay. Okay, great. That's one for me. The other one I want to highlight again, because I think it's very Amazonian. It's very apt and to me just sums up DoorDash exquisitely well, is their value of operating at the lowest level of detail. And I think it's, it's one of those things that like people say, it's like, oh yeah,

like, you know, like people talk about the Amazon, um, leadership principles, the leadership principles. Yeah, exactly. But I think understanding what that really means, Tony talks a lot about this in interviews and he uses the example of the cheesecake factory in San Francisco, which is in union square. And the cheesecake factory is on the sixth floor of a is in Union Square. And the Cheesecake Factory is on the sixth floor of a mall in Union Square. There's no dedicated parking out front. You need to take an elevator to get up there. And they have a bunch of different serving stations. And you've got customers even in San Francisco who like to order from Cheesecake Factory and they live, you know, a 20 minute car ride away in the city. So how are you gonna get them the, get them their cheesecake in a high quality,

timely manner? Well, the only way you can do that is by doing things like he talks about like, well, okay, we went to the mall and we were like, can we get a dedicated elevator shaft for us? Great. We went to the restaurant and we were like, can you give us a dedicated serving station? Great. They went to the parking garage there and they're like, can we get dedicated Dasher parking spots? Great. You know,

that only happens when you can't do that when you're sitting in a, when you're sitting in an office writing code. Right. And only paying attention to averages. I think another great embodiment of this is I think it's Michael Block is how you pronounce his name, on Twitter, talked about how, and he's an early employee, in food delivery, you can compete on four things, price or speed because they didn't have the density yet that was in cities. They didn't have the broadest selection yet. They did have high quality restaurants. And one of the very interesting things that they zeroed in on is speed. They're like, well, how fast do we need to be? And he says, our analysis showed that there was a limited marginal benefit to customer conversion or retention rates under 42 minute ETAs. As long

as deliveries were sub 42 minute, customers didn't really care how long they took. And it's just this like amazing light bulb that by diving into it, this flies in the face of what I said a moment ago, because this is an average number and not a sort of like per customer per location per type of food tail number. But the idea that like they can learn that 42 minutes is their food delivery equivalent of that sort of magic five minute mark for uber where like i don't care if an uber is two minutes away or five minutes away it's the same thing i do care if it's five minutes away versus 15 minutes away that's those are very different things um and i think his point in

his twitter thread which again we'll link in the show notes, is that when they were competing against Uber, Uber was in a constant optimization race to get the food to you faster. And DoorDash was kind of realizing, actually, that might be a waste of resources. Hmm. Yeah. Yeah. So anyway, it's the Amazon leadership principle, dive deep, like being deeply analytical, which they need to be to be able to operate at the margins that they're operating at. All right. Last section before grading is value creation and value capture.

And this is a section that we started doing based on actually a lot of listener demand that has two parts. The first part is how does the value that they are capturing compare to the value that the company creates? So is it like Wikipedia, where they capture a tiny little percentage and could be capturing way more? Or are they capturing plenty, like Google, who makes a ton of money from the value that they create in the world? So there's that component. And the second is, how does the value created for the world, not just for shareholders, compare to any value destruction that they've done in the world? And I think let's address these in order. So on that first one, they seem to be capturing basically the maximum amount that

they possibly could. Any more and consumers probably wouldn't buy. I mean, it's effectively a 40% markup on your food in order to pay DoorDash and then to pay the Dasher. And like the market actually feels relatively constrained to me of people who are willing to pay 40% more for their food to have that sort of convenience. So like, I don't think they could be extracting any more. So that's any more from consumers,

any more on the restaurant side. And the restaurants probably couldn't keep their doors open. Like I think DoorDash does a lot of research on figuring out like how much of the drip do we need to give to restaurants so they'll continue to be our suppliers and not, you know, turn off the platform either because they don't like us or because they just can't operate at all. So I think they're, they, they're doing a reasonably good job of maximizing the value that they possibly can take. Well, then there's the dasher side too, of are they earning enough on the platform?

Right. And the knock on this whole freaking business is like this business model is, is there actually enough dollars to go around as you start to get to more and more customers versus a smaller set of customers who are willing to pay a larger markup in order to

have more, you know, actual dollars to go to go around here. So that's sort of how I would describe I think companies doing a bang up job of capturing value. How does the value created for the world compare to value destroyed for the world? I mean, i think there's a strong case to be made around uh exploitation of gig workers not nearly as strong as like uh ride sharing um i actually think that they're uh this seems to be a much friendlier company to dashers than um ride sharing tends to be to to drivers but i agree and i And I think that the biggest reason for that, I think, is structural. We were talking about a minute ago

in terms of vehicle types. The depreciation on ride sharing on the vehicles is a huge hidden cost that the laborers bear. And of course, depending on what vehicle you're driving with for DoorDash, you're probably also incurring depreciation, but potentially way less. Right. And a lot of them are leases. So it's sort of like built into the cost of the lease.

But yeah, I think the bigger case to make that, you know, it's there's value destruction happening for the world is on the restaurant side. As much as DoorDash wants to sell a story around, we empower local businesses. And, you know And I would hate to live in a world where those businesses didn't thrive and people only bought stuff through us. And we're not the merchant. Our merchants are the merchant and we're just the platform. I just don't think that's where this business is really going. I think that's a wolf in sheep's clothing or fox in the hen house or whatever you want to say, especially now that they have the market cap that they do and they're publicly traded

and they have the shareholders that they do. Like I just don't see a world where what they're actually doing 10 years from now is empowering local businesses. Yeah, it's interesting. It's funny. I think I would maybe push back on that a little bit in the now, in the short term,

in that like, yes, there's a lot of a lot of sentiment among restauranters and often justifiably so that doordash and other platforms take way too much of the order it's eating into their cost their cost the restaurant's cost structures are not sustainable uh profit margins with when selling on these platforms, they can't make things work. I think there probably is some truth to that. On the other hand, I think there are also plenty of businesses and restaurants that have figured out how to make it work. And it's like incredibly additive to them being able to have this new delivery channel that honestly, they just they can't operate this network themselves, as we've talked about in

the whole episode. So I think that's today. I do think though in the future, you're probably, the point you made is going to become more salient as cloud kitchens, ghost kitchens, other food related businesses get built that are gonna be more of scale businesses as opposed to local restaurants.

And my question is, how do they just not end up combining? And how does DoorDash not build this themselves? I think they are. I think they're working on it internally. I think there are also a bunch of other startups out there, several that have come out of Uber. One that my brother-in-law works for, a virtual kitchen company. So I think those businesses are going to be more scale businesses. And some of them are going to partner with local restaurants, like virtual virtual kitchen company partners with local brands, and helps them and includes them in the economics. And I think others are going to just be like, no, we're doing this ourselves, we're vertically integrated,

and you're going to move more and more towards an Amazon type marketplace where you have big players that are large consolidated manufacturers and brands operating in the Amazon marketplace and the small guys get pushed out. Yep. It's going to be more important than ever for restaurants to create customer love. Yeah. And, and not in a begging way, not in a like, please support us versus these bad guys and shop local, but more in like a delight way. Like I think if I was running a local restaurant right now, what I would try and do is like, and I should caveat all this with like, oh my gosh, I can only imagine how hard it must be to be a small, small business entrepreneur running a restaurant right now. But I think the most successful path forward for the future is

look at something like DoorDash and be like okay great we're going to use them for the delivery network awesome let's not list on door dash the marketplace try and aggressively start building my direct email list figure out how to do all sorts of segmentation on like you know who loves me the most figure out referral programs figure out basically how do you run your restaurant like a bootstrap web business where you have like really rich CRM information about your customers, and then try and be creative in ways where you're not just a food experience. Like you have an online component or you, I mean, a lot of this is like pages from Canlis' book. And Kokonis and Tok too.

Totally. What they've done at Alinea and with next like you know they've executed this playbook to a t how do you do this stuff creatively cleverly digitally cheaply um you know without being a fine dining experience and then use use doordash for its component parts because it's great that it's built out but you don't want your customers coming from there and then you don't want that traffic at the whim of of someone who's trying to commoditize you. So anyway, I think the restaurants that do have the most differentiated offerings will be able to thrive independently. And otherwise, I think it's going to be, it actually looks a lot like the travel market where like once OTAs came into the picture, it was really hard for any

airline to differentiate. And then they all ended up being a commodity, racing to the bottom, dropping their prices, seeing massive consolidation. consolidation yeah it feels like that's a playbook that's being run in restaurants right now yep totally which i think you know then the question is for value creation value capture here for doordash question is was that going to happen anyway like is doordash causing this or are they you know participating in it they're also arming the rebels like it's complicated merely an inevitability yeah like in the same way that like was facebook an inevitability yeah for for the publishing world yeah because again tony doordash the team these are amazing they persevered they had really great

insights that very few other people had at the moment they persevered they had really great insights that very few other people had at the moment they persevered through incredibly hard times and they have against all odds built seemingly built actually like they're on the path to doing it they built a good sustainable business at the same time like this was going to happen because this is happening in china like this moment was if it wasn't them, would have been somebody else. Again, not to take away from anything that they've done, but like the timing was right. That why now of like mobile enabling this for all three sides of the marketplace,

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of free credit. Vanta.com slash acquired. Grading. So for the new influx of folks joining for the show, when a company buys another company, what we do is we grade how good of a use of the capital of the acquirer's company was for the inquiry to basically for Facebook to buy Instagram, you know, in hindsight, how good of a use of capital capital of the acquirer's company was for the acquirer, basically for Facebook to buy Instagram. In hindsight, how good of a use of capital was that? On this episode, the way that we're going to do that is collectively, how good of a use of capital was it for the company,

like all these people's human capital, and for the investors in the monetary capital to go after this business opportunity in this way over the last five years. And everyone bought in at a different share price. So I think it's a little bit of a, it's very different to say how good of a use of it was it to buy a share today versus if you're Sequoia. But I think actually what we should do is, in some ways that's true, in other ways, everyone's all on the same boat now. And it's unlikely that there's any path other than really big success long-term or kind of going out of business or doing some kind of merger combination. Because at some point, the market cap is going to reflect the actual long-term cash flows of the business. And that

might be a long time from now. So I don't want to talk about like, gosh, if you had gotten in early, what your shares would be worth today. Like, it's just not actually interesting to think about the sort of market value of the shares right now. What I think is interesting is to say, should all of these people and all of this capital have raced after this opportunity? And will that eventually yield a very profitable business yeah such a good way to frame it um so glad you had this idea to do it this way on this episode um yeah i think my answer is uh it was a not in the very beginning not in the very beginning, not in the seed A or B, but in that period after the B, it was a very contrarian move to keep doing this. The end is not yet written. So we can't like say

for sure because, uh, the, you know, they've had a couple, uh, contribution, positive contribution, margin, positive quarters during the greatest tailwind to their business that they could ever experience but uh given that and given now this uh the reward along the way in this ipo and the 70 billion dollar market cap journey outcome temporary outcome here gosh i gotta think it's an an a to make this decision like it's so high stakes, though. It reminds me, I had in the notes and didn't say, but it reminds me of, in a very different way, of Santi at Emergence and the Zoom investment. This was, for a lot of people,

and specifically for Sequoia, and I have to imagine Alfred at Sequoia, this was a bet your career moment for a lot of these of these people, and you know, it took a lot of conviction to do to stick with the company like they did. And and I think it's it's paid off so far. So I give it a day. Again, I see what you're saying. But I guess what I'm saying is, we should totally abstract any notion of so far. Like like let's take out the notion of like, have your shares appreciated in value. Cause like a freaking course,

like there's a hype train, you know, that's like, have you seen Snowpiercer? I imagine the hype train for this is like the train from Snowpiercer. Go through. Oh no. And so like the,

the way that I've been thinking about this is basically like, what is the likelihood that they'll actually be able to be very profitable on each customer or get a whole bunch of customers that are contribution margin positive and they can sort of ramp down marketing spend and ramp down R&D relative to their overall revenue in the future. And like, I think the thesis a few years ago of we're going to be your local real-time FedEx, I think it sounds better than it has been true in practice based on the way the market has evolved. Like remember when Uber said they were going to be Uber for everything and everyone was like, oh my God, this is going to be the most valuable company on earth. I think it sounds better because it sounds better than it is because once you start actually getting into it

you're like okay what are they going to deliver besides food and you're like oh groceries but that market like that adjacency kind of went away like instacart kind of like that that lane is no longer open for them like for uber the adjacency of food was interesting and there's like other adjacencies that are interesting i don't think doordash has as rich of the adjacency of food was interesting and there's like other adjacencies that are interesting. I don't think DoorDash has as rich of an adjacency landscape available to it. Because when pressed, they're like, oh, you know, flower delivery. You're like, that's what you're going to list

in like the first two or three. Yeah, that's not a big market. Stuff from like drugstores, like we're already listing stuff from CBS. And you're like, so you're going to compete head-to-head with Amazon on Prime Now okay huh yeah and i i think like i think the market that they're actually in here is food delivery and i think based on their cohort data and their return on marketing spend and their cacti ltv ratio like this is going to be a really good food delivery

business when they can finally ramp down the marketing spend but i don't think it's bigger than that so for me it's like a b opportunity for everyone to have chased after this just because i think it's like a big market but not an amazon market i totally hear you i think well, well, I don't know. I think I'm probably maybe a little caught up in the story and the hype trade, the Snowpiercer hype trade. But I do think I come back to, like, as I was thinking this morning in the couple hours before we started recording,

I went back to Meituan and looking at what that business is, I do think there's an opportunity to be more and be more in a way well tomorrow on the airbnb episode we're going to talk about uh trips and the uh honestly kind of zany 2016 i think it was airbnb open with. Airbnb trips, the products that, uh, none of us ever used. Yeah, exactly. Experiences, places,

reservations, all this stuff. I think that could be that like, that's just like, nobody wants that. Uh, it's just a bad product idea. One,

um, more likely though, when I look at Meituan and I'm like, Oh wow, that, that all lives on Meituan now. Uh, I think the issue was with Airbnb. Like, you didn't interact with Airbnb every day.

You interacted with Airbnb very infrequently for a travel use case. With DoorDash, if you're opening it multiple times a week and interacting with it, I don't know. It is still a stretch. It's not what they're doing today, but, uh, I think there's a good chance that they can add more just in the same way that Amazon was the book company when they started. Very fair. Well, this'll, this'll certainly be a fun one to, uh, to watch evolve. Indeed. Um, I know we've gone longer than any other acquired episode in history but i do think we should do carve outs i think uh we haven't done them in a while and they're fine

i'm curious uh david what do you got on the docket oh and if you're new to the show carve outs uh are basically where we throw and like things we're watching things we're paying attention to things we're reading um that have nothing to do with the show, but we think are interesting to put on y'all's radar. Yep. I'm so excited. We're doing this too. It's been a long time. Uh, so I've got a, uh, I thought about all the like, you know, important area date stuff I could put in here. I was like, you know what? It's mid December. We're heading into the holidays. It's been a rough year. My carve out that I've been getting a lot of fun and joy out of is the game Hades on the Switch. I think it's on PC, Switch, might be on PlayStation

and Xbox too. It's made by the guys who made Bastion and Transistor, if you ever played those games. So like indie game developer, but just like super high quality really well done and uh this game is so much fun you play you're the son of hades the god of the underworld and you're trying to escape uh hades and like all the other olympia olympian gods like help you escape and and then so you try and like do these escape runs and then you die like you never make it and so you go through like over and over but it's so well done. So fun. Great times suck, but you feel like you're progressing.

You get that sense of accomplishment. I didn't just throw hours down the drain. I actually built my skill. It's kind of like what Rahul was talking about in game design. You're building towards a sense of mastery. You have this kind of, you're getting,

whatever it is, it's got that magic that I just feel like it's a worthwhile investment. Sweet. Love good game design. All right. I have to get a switch and then I have to get that game and check it out. Um, I have three because I was making my list and I was like, you know what? Like I, I'm just going to put all three on here here they're all three things you can watch uh while you're looking for some things to stream while you're staying safe this holiday season uh the first two i think are the best written acted directed uh tv shows that i've i've streamed this year and like i have a lot of like kind of like trashier tv i like to watch always sunny the league like a lot of that stuff uh but like it is always jarring when you watch something that is just tremendous it's art and um there's two great pieces of art that i want to talk about and then a movie

so uh if you haven't seen watchmen on hbo the series whether or not you were a big fan of the graphic novel or the movie, it is exceptional. And I think it grapples with social justice issues in a really unique and interesting way that was a little ahead of its time since it was sort of before this summer. But it's fun sci-fi, fun social justice, amazingly well produced and written. So I highly recommend it. The the other i'm sure many people who listen to this show uh have watched is succession and david i don't know if you've been a fan i have not i have not watched it but heard many people told me about it before uh i

got a chance to watch it's basically it's a it's a fictionalization of the effectively the murdoch family and news corp um different names, different characters, all that, but just unbelievably well-written and acted. And it's so easy to get super sucked in and you can't stop thinking about it. So highly recommend both of those. Then for a movie on Hulu, you should go watch Palm Springs.

It is an absolute delight. It's an Andy Samberg film. I heard this is hilarious. It's so funny. It's so lighthearted. It's so unexpected. It's in some ways, it's actually a thinker movie while being lighthearted. It's like a, it's like a modern groundhog day, right? It's got elements of that. Yeah. Um, but I, it'll leave you thinking in a different way than the other two, but it's, it's also worth your time. So, um, you know, if you're like me and you're looking for a great stuff to, to get into on these streaming services, all, all three of those are awesome. Well, you know, before we wrap here,

um, David, I know you've got a little tribute that you want to, you want to do. Yeah. One other thing we wanted to, um, say, you know, we didn't want to make a huge deal cause we didn't know him and, uh, uh, you know, we're more arm's's length. But Tony Hsieh passed away last week and we just want to take a moment and just reflect on how tragic that was, but also say just thank you to everything. the companies that we're covering, you know, today and in DoorDash and directly through Alfred Lynn, who was the COO of Zappos, Airbnb tomorrow, Tony had a huge impact on just the whole ecosystem and, you know, tragic he passed away so young, but thank you to everything he did do during his life to really push the Valley forward. And other communities too. I mean, I remember when I was really involved in the startup weekend community, Tony hosted a bunch of us at the downtown project in downtown LA and like what he was doing to revitalize that area north of the

strip. Like it was just really cool staying at the container park and just seeing sort of that vision come to life. I know the city is much better for it. Yeah. That's a good point. Not just the valley, but our whole industry and other things graduate of uh same high school as my wife jenny pranson in uh in marin well now i know a security question of yours well uh for folks who don't know as we wind down the show here uh we have started codifying codifying i think it's codifying the playbook from each episode. So pulling out all of the,

not only in the actual playbook section that we talk about, but sort of key themes from earlier on. If you wanted to run the DoorDash playbook, how would you go about doing it? And we've been pulling those from each episode in some written bullet points.

And we started emailing those to folks after we post each episode. So if you want sort of a digestible, consumable way to share or help you sort of understand the points we're making in each episode, you can sign up to receive those playbooks at acquired.fm. Anywhere that it allows you to type in your email,

we only have one email we send, so you'll get that one. And if you join the Acquired community Slack at acquired.fm slash slack, you'll be automatically signed up for that as well. We're going to do those on an ongoing basis. It's totally open to any of you if you want to tackle that for a previous episode, because we think it'd be cool to host more of those on our website too. We've had some great ones that community members have done. Yep. Thanks to the folks that have already done that. If you want to just shoot us a note,

acquiredfm at gmail.com or in the Slack if you want to do those. We've talked about the LP show a bunch, but I did want to highlight our most recent one. We just did with uh two of david and my lps from our current and past funds uh from uh from foundry group um actual lps like actual yes it was the first time having lps on the lp show and investors in venture funds and it was like amazing to get to kind of like talk about all the things that we talk about more in private with them, the ways that they sort of help guide, especially for me at PSL Ventures, like how to think about our portfolio construction and the ways that we work with the portfolio and how do you manage your time across all those. And when you're sizing the types of investments you want to make, how much do you save for reserves? How much do you do up front? So just really good to dive into a lot of nitty gritty in a super structured way in a way

that we can share more than just the private conversations we have. So that was part four in our VC fundamentals series, more, more good stuff like that to come. But if you want to be an LP seven day free trial, acquire.fm slash LP, feel free. Yeah. And also two things for the holidays that are important on that front. One LP subscriptions make great gifts for the acquired fans in your life. Woo. And two, on an even more important note, we've said before, but it's been a while. Um, we never want financial hardship of any type to be a barrier to someone accessing more acquired content and engaging more deeply with us and getting access to all the stuff we do on the LP show. So if that is the case for you, for whatever reason, just shoot us an email,

hit us up on Slack, uh, acquiredfm at gmail.com or join the Slack and DM one of us. Um, and we will make sure that we take care of you and you get access to an LP subscription even if you can't afford it. Yep. Similarly for gifts, it's a little complicated to go through the machinations of making sure to use someone else's email address. So if you want to give the LP show as a gift, just shoot us a note

and we will send over instructions. And with that, if you are not already subscribed and you like what you hear, you totally should subscribe. And if you like this episode and you have a friend that you think would like it too, you can share it from your favorite social media hilltop or with them one-on-one directly. We always, I think that's probably the best way

is for any one person to tell a friend personally, like, this was great. You should listen to it too. I think you'll like it for X reason. You know, I just love the like one-to-one-to-one-to-one spread that we've had so far. So feel free to share it. Feel free to sign up for playbooks. And, uh, yeah, with that, everyone, we'll see you next time. Actually tomorrow. Yeah. That's good to say. Usually we say, we'll see you next time today. We'll say, we'll see you tomorrow. See you tomorrow.