On December 9, 2020, DoorDash was listed on the New York Stock Exchange. As the company with the largest market share in the U.S. food delivery field, DoorDash has since been at the forefront of the competitive landscape of on-demand delivery.
As the founder and CEO of DoorDash, Xu Xun has many "sacred and inviolable" habits and principles, and one of the most important of these principles is to "do a good job in the last mile of service", whether it is a public or private matter, whether it is a big thing or a small thing. Personally answering the merchant's phone and personally delivering the goods are one of Xu Xun's habits. Because he believes that part of the reason for DoorDash's success is that he will continue to be exposed to all aspects of the business. "We have a saying like this: 'Go find the icing on the cake, not the optional solution,'" Xu Xun said, "these daily habits allow me to constantly find 'icing on the cake' in work and life." ”
How to solve the "last mile" of consumer goods from retail shelves to customers' doorsteps is a very popular problem in Silicon Valley. Before Xu Xun and Stanford alumni Andy Fang, Stanley Tang, and Evan Moore created Palo Alto Delivery, the predecessor of DoorDash, in 2013, the on-demand delivery space was already crowded with players like Seamless, GrubHub, and Postmates. It was then that the space began to explode — Uber Eats, Instacart, Gopuff, Delivery.com, Gorillas and others all started joining the track, offering similar but slightly different fees.
The influx of these companies has raised customer expectations for delivery timeliness and quality of service – from days to days, from self-pickup to home delivery, from high prices to affordable... There's never an end to customer expectations for service improvements, and DoorDash happens to see that. Before the advent of DoorDash, only residents of big cities could order delivery services other than Chinese food and pizza, and brand options were limited; but after the advent of DoorDash, residents of more than 7,000 cities around the world could use DoorDash to order anything, from French toast to burritos and, more recently, wine and home Labrador sweaters.
Globally, the online food delivery market is expected to reach nearly $200 billion by 2025, an increase of about 50% over 2021. For some businesses, DoorDash has not only driven their delivery services, but has even become a large part of their business growth.
However, DoorDash's business model is still being optimized, such as how to deploy complex distribution problems, which is a challenge that Xu Xun and his team have been facing. From the beginning, DoorDash has been committed to solving every logistics problem by establishing its own technical solutions, and over the years, it has accumulated a considerable amount of operational data, so that DoorDash's delivery staff can consider the preparation time of specific items, and combine weather forecasts, local traffic patterns, whether there is parking space, personal efficiency and countless other key indicators to meet various distribution challenges.
However, in 2013, when Xu Xun and his co-founders introduced DoorDash to many investors, they did not get much recognition because DoorDash had almost no business outside the location of its establishment.
Xu Xun is very convinced of one point: "We must look at the overall situation when looking at things, but we must be down-to-earth in our work." ”
At that time, at least in the short term, no one felt that there was a market for what Xu Xun had to do. But in the next year, Xu Xun and his co-founders decomposed food delivery into dozens of business pain points, and personally became a delivery man to experience the real feelings of catering companies, drivers and customers. Xu Xun re-analyzed the "last mile" problem in a way that everyone had never heard of. In Xu Xun's view, the key is to establish his own team of delivery personnel. This was very unique at the time.
Not long after, Sequoia cast DoorDash. Since the 2014 Series A financing, Sequoia has been one of the earliest institutional investors in DoorDash, and has not missed any subsequent rounds, until the IPO stage also chose to continue to support.
The reason why we adhere to the principle of "looking at things to look at the overall situation and doing things in a down-to-earth manner" is inseparable from Xu Xun's growth experience. The first ten years of Xu Xun's family's arrival in the United States were very difficult, and it was the small businesses that hired his parents to help their family through this difficult time. So after finishing his undergraduate studies at Berkeley, Xu Xun gave up his biology major and chose to enter the Stanford Graduate School of Business. And although he didn't think clearly about what company he wanted to start at first, he knew very well that the people he wanted to serve were small business owners.
Xu Xun's life is shaped by these small businesses— their bosses, employees, and customers. In many ways, they just let Xu Xun have a sense of belonging, and feel that he is also a member of this cultural ecology.
After the outbreak of the new crown epidemic, it also brought life-and-death uncertainties to DoorDash. In the early stages of the outbreak, in response to this uncertainty, Xu Xun made adjustments to the company, announcing that it would provide free personal protective equipment for delivery workers and provide financial support for those affected by the epidemic, as well as other key services such as telemedicine.
When it became clear that U.S. restaurants still needed companies like DoorDash, Xu quickly shifted his approach and shifted his company's goal to promote the development of "last mile" delivery services — the first thing was to launch the #OpenForDelivery campaign to remind people that restaurants are not only open, but also need delivery services more than ever.
Ultimately, the campaign was a success, but more importantly, #OpenForDelivery反映了一个更深层次的理念 — a philosophy that had been established long before Xu Xun and the other founders decided to launch Palo Alto Delivery in 2013 — a lifelong desire to invest in and promote small and local businesses that delivered services from the kitchen to the doorsteps of customers.
"There are so many more things that bring people together than there are things that separate people," Xu Xun said, "based on this growth background, the choices I make, and the choices our company makes, are to ensure that all of our customers are successful, individually and collectively." ”