According to Fortune, DoorDash CEO Tony Xu built the company from a near-bankrupt 2013 startup with less than $30,000 left into a powerhouse on track for over $13 billion in revenue this year. The Fortune feature, based on a ride-along with Xu, details how he outmaneuvered rivals like Grubhub and UberEats by using gig workers to order and pick up food from any restaurant, not just those with delivery drivers. Key moves included a spending blitz in the late 2010s while Uber was distracted, expanding into 6,000 locations from 1,500, and a focus on suburbs that paid off massively during the 2020 COVID pandemic, tripling the business. Now, the company faces new threats from AI-native competitors as it moves into grocery delivery.
Dashers, Details, and Dollars
Here’s the thing about DoorDash’s strategy: it was fundamentally about solving a different problem. While early rivals just connected you to pizza places that already had drivers, DoorDash said, “What if you could get *anything* delivered?” That meant building a logistics army—the Dashers—from scratch. But Xu’s real obsession seems to be the tiny, frustrating details of delivery. Highlighting desserts because they’re most forgotten? Telling Dashers where to park? That’s not glamorous tech innovation. It’s just grinding away at the stuff that makes customers not hate the service. And making every corporate employee do four delivery shifts a year is a genius, if obvious, way to keep that focus. You can’t bullshit about the user experience if you’re the one struggling to find apartment building “B” for $4.75.
The Suburban Gamble That Paid Off
Timing and luck are everything. DoorDash’s push into mid-tier cities and suburbs looked risky when the big money was in dense urban cores. But then COVID hit. And suddenly, everyone was in the suburbs wanting restaurant food delivered. DoorDash was already there. They basically won the lottery, but only because they had bought the ticket years earlier when no one else wanted it. The parallel move was poaching UberEats execs and spending aggressively while Uber was in crisis mode, trying to become profitable. That’s not just good strategy; it’s predatory. It’s striking when there’s blood in the water. Now, the question is whether that same playbook works in groceries and other deliveries, where the margins are even thinner and the competition is just as vicious.
business-briefs”>The Other Business Briefs
Beyond the delivery wars, Fortune’s roundup paints a picture of a cautious, anxious economy. Gen Z is planning to slash holiday spending by 34%? That’s a massive pullback. And consulting firms freezing salaries for the third year straight because AI makes juniors more productive… that’s the canary in the coal mine for white-collar jobs. The MIT study saying 12% of the workforce could *already* be replaced by AI is staggering. We’re not talking about the future; that’s *now*. It’s happening in finance and healthcare, not just tech. And the “Great Wealth Transfer” won’t be a sudden windfall for millennials and Gen Z? That’s going to disappoint a lot of people banking on an inheritance to solve their financial stress. Basically, the mood is one of battening down the hatches, from teenagers to CEOs.
Winning the War, But Not the Peace
So DoorDash is on top. For now. But as the Fortune piece cautions, an AI-native competitor that doesn’t exist yet could displace them. That’s the terrifying reality of tech. You can out-execute everyone on logistics and customer service, and still get blindsided by a completely new model. Uber isn’t going away either. Xu’s hands-on, gritty approach built an empire, but empires get complacent. The mandate for four delivery shifts a year is a brilliant guard against that. Can they keep that scrappy, detail-obsessed culture at a $13 billion scale while fighting new battles on a dozen fronts? That’s the real test. The food delivery war might be over, but the war for everything else at your doorstep is just heating up.
