Tony Xu

Tony Xu co-founded DoorDash in 2013 with Stanley Tang, Andy Fang, and Evan Moore while pursuing an MBA at Stanford. Born in Nanjing, China in 1985, Xu's family immigrated to the United States when he was five. His mother worked multiple jobs — including washing dishes and delivering newspapers — experiences that Xu credits with giving him deep empathy for service workers and a relentless work ethic that defined DoorDash's culture. The founding insight came from a class project studying small business pain points: local restaurants needed delivery capabilities but couldn't afford to build their own logistics. DoorDash started with a simple website called PaloAltoDelivery.com, and Xu personally delivered food orders to understand every friction point in the process. This hands-on approach became legendary — Xu reportedly completed thousands of deliveries himself and still occasionally delivers food. DoorDash's rise to dominance was not inevitable. The company was a distant third behind Grubhub and Uber Eats as recently as 2018. Xu's strategy was to start in suburban and smaller markets that competitors ignored — areas where DoorDash could be the only option and build supply density. This suburban-first strategy, combined with aggressive merchant partnerships and superior logistics technology, allowed DoorDash to reach market leadership by 2020. The pandemic then supercharged food delivery demand, and DoorDash went public in December 2020. Today DoorDash controls approximately 65% of the US food delivery market and is aggressively expanding beyond food: grocery delivery, convenience store orders, retail delivery (DashMart), and international expansion in over 25 countries. The company's DashPass subscription (which offers free delivery for a monthly fee) drives customer retention and order frequency. Xu's current challenge is proving that DoorDash can be sustainably profitable at scale — the company achieved GAAP profitability for the first time in 2024 — and that the local commerce opportunity extends meaningfully beyond restaurant delivery.