DoorDash: Tony Xu

How I Built This with Guy Raz

Guy Raz | Wondery

Business

4.8 • 31.1K Ratings

🗓️ 12 November 2018

⏱️ 52 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

In 2013, Tony Xu was brainstorming ideas for a business school project when he identified a problem he wanted to solve: food delivery. For most restaurants, it was too costly and inefficient, leaving most of the market to pizza and Chinese. Tony and his partners believed they could use technology to connect customers to drivers, who would deliver meals in every imaginable cuisine. That idea grew into DoorDash, a company that's now delivered over 100 million orders from over 200,000 restaurants across the country. PLUS in our postscript "How You Built That," we hear from the winner of our 2018 HIBT Summit Pitch Competition: Ashlin Cook. She combined her love for dogs with an entrepreneurial itch to create Winnie Lou: a Colorado business that sells healthy dog treats in independent pet stores and from a food truck. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Hey, Prime Members, you can listen to how I built this early and ad-free on Amazon Music.
0:07.0	Download the app today.
0:09.0	New Year's is here, and with it brings the possibility of change.
0:13.0	As one behavioral scientist put it, first starts are really powerful.
0:17.0	So as you head into 2023, LifeKit is a great resource to help you plan your life and tackle changes, both big and small.
0:24.0	Listen to the LifeKit podcast from NPR.
0:27.0	Hey, it's Guy here. Just want to let you know that on November 13th, I'll be doing a live webinar with Gary Erickson of Cliffbar.
0:34.0	He'll be talking about how to build a business and a business culture that reflects your personal values.
0:40.0	The webinar is free, it's supported by GoToMeeting, and it's just one of the projects that grew out of our first how I built this summit in San Francisco.
0:48.0	If you want to check it out, go to summit.npr.org slash webinar. That's summit.npr.org slash webinar.
0:58.0	And one more little thing. This Thursday, we're going to be running our first bonus episode from the summit.
1:04.0	It's my live conversation with Jennifer Hyman of Rent the Runway. So be on the lookout for that in your podcast queue, and now here's the show.
1:13.0	It was not very scalable. I mean, all things that we did were not scalable.
1:22.0	I mean, we would take the orders as basically phone operators, and then we would do the deliveries ourselves.
1:28.0	And I remember graduating from business school, and two days later, while my classmates were flying out on their exotic vacations, I was delivering, you know, promise in my Honda.
1:40.0	Raman PR, it's how I built this. A show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movements they built.
1:56.0	I'm Guy Raaz, and on today's show, the story of how a student named Tony Shoe went from delivering Thai food to dorm rooms to building one of the biggest meal delivery services.
2:09.0	In America.
2:14.0	When I was in college, there was a student who used to roll a giant cooler down the corridors of the dorm.
2:20.0	And he would shout out, Chinese food, man, get your Chinese food.
2:25.0	And every Tuesday and Thursday night, this very enterprising kid would go to a local Chinese takeout.
2:32.0	He'd order a hundred bucks worth of chow mein, and fried rice, and beef, and broccoli, and egg rolls.
	...

Transcript will be available on the free plan in -2328 days. Upgrade to see the full transcript now.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Guy Raz | Wondery, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Guy Raz | Wondery and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.