DoorDash

Dandy

DoorDash

DoorDash operates a three-sided marketplace connecting restaurants, delivery drivers (Dashers), and consumers. Revenue comes from three streams: commissions charged to restaurants (typically 15-30% of the order value), delivery fees and service fees charged to consumers, and DashPass subscription revenue ($9.99/month for free delivery and reduced fees).

The DashPass subscription is the retention engine. Over 18 million subscribers pay monthly whether they order or not, creating predictable recurring revenue.

Subscribers order more frequently (about 4x more than non-subscribers), increasing order volume.

Advertising is the emerging high-margin business. Restaurants pay for promoted listings and sponsored placements in the app.

This is essentially a search advertising business built on top of a logistics network. Ad revenue has grown to over $1 billion annually — and it's nearly pure profit because it costs almost nothing to display an ad.

Dandy

Vertical SaaS plus manufacturing. Dandy provides dental practices with intraoral scanners (often subsidized or free to eliminate the switching cost), cloud-based software for managing cases, and its own network of digital dental labs that manufacture the final restorations.

Dentists pay per case — each crown, bridge, veneer, or implant restoration is priced individually. The margin comes from manufacturing efficiency: digital workflows are faster, more precise, and require less manual labor than traditional hand-sculpted methods.

As volume grows, Dandy's labs get more efficient and per-unit costs drop. It's the classic razor-and-blades model — give away the scanner, make money on every restoration.

DoorDash

Tony Xu grew up watching his mother work multiple restaurant jobs after the family immigrated from Nanjing, China to Illinois. She washed dishes, waited tables, and cooked — sometimes all in the same week at different restaurants.

That experience gave Xu an unusual understanding of how brutally hard the restaurant business is.

At Stanford in 2012, Xu and classmates Stanley Tang, Andy Fang, and Evan Moore were in a startup class looking for a business idea. They interviewed over 200 small business owners and kept hearing the same problem: restaurants wanted to offer delivery but couldn't afford to hire drivers.

Domino's and Pizza Hut had fleets. Your local Thai place didn't.

Their solution was comically low-tech. They built a one-page website called PaloAltoDelivery.com, listed menus from local restaurants (without asking permission), and put their personal phone numbers on the site.

When orders came in, they drove the food themselves. The first order was pad thai from a restaurant in Palo Alto.

Within months, they were drowning in orders and realized this was a massive business. They incorporated as DoorDash in January 2013 and got into Y Combinator that summer.

Dandy

Henry Stott was a repeat entrepreneur who had previously co-founded a tech company in the UK. When he looked at the dental industry, he saw a $15 billion lab market that was shockingly analog.

Here's how it worked: a dentist jams a tray of gooey putty into your mouth, waits for it to harden, mails the physical mold to a dental lab, where a technician hand-sculpts your crown out of ceramic. Turnaround: 2 to 3 weeks.

Error rate: high. Patient experience: miserable.

The technology to do this digitally had existed for years — 3D intraoral scanners, CAD/CAM software, CNC milling machines — but nobody had stitched it into a seamless end-to-end platform for the average dental practice. Stott started Dandy in 2020 to be that platform.

Provide the scanner, build the software, run the lab — and make it so easy that any dentist can switch from analog to digital without changing how they practice.

DoorDash

DoorDash won the US market through obsessive focus on suburban and mid-market restaurants — the segments Uber Eats and Grubhub ignored. While competitors fought over Manhattan and San Francisco, DoorDash was onboarding every Chinese restaurant and pizza shop in Tucson and Des Moines.

By the time competitors noticed, DoorDash had locked up the majority of US restaurants.

The "last-mile logistics" expansion is the long game. DoorDash now delivers groceries (partnerships with Albertsons, Rite Aid), convenience items (DashMart dark stores), alcohol, pet supplies, and retail products.

The thesis is that once you have a network of drivers and a consumer habit of ordering through an app, you can deliver anything — not just food.

The Wolt acquisition for $8.1 billion in 2022 was the international play. Instead of grinding through country-by-country expansion, DoorDash bought the leading delivery platform in 23 countries across Europe and Asia.

Wolt brought strong unit economics and a beloved brand, especially in the Nordics.

Dandy

Land-and-expand with dental practices. Dandy gives practices the scanner for free or at heavy discount, which eliminates the biggest barrier to switching from analog.

Once a practice starts submitting digital scans, they become recurring revenue — every patient who needs a crown is a Dandy order. Sales team targets mid-size practices (3 to 10 dentists) that are high-volume but haven't invested in digital yet.

Referral programs where existing dentists recommend Dandy to colleagues. Geographic density strategy — build lab capacity in a region, then saturate practices nearby to optimize logistics and turnaround times.

Content marketing educating dentists on why digital is better, faster, and more profitable than analog workflows.

DoorDash

Profitability has been the constant question. DoorDash lost money every year through its IPO and beyond, finally turning consistently profitable in 2023.

The food delivery business has razor-thin margins — restaurants want lower commissions, drivers want higher pay, and consumers want lower prices. Squeezing profit from that three-way tension is incredibly hard.

Regulatory risk is real and growing. Cities and states have capped delivery commissions (New York City caps at 15% for delivery, 5% for marketing).

Worker classification lawsuits keep coming — are Dashers employees or independent contractors? California's Prop 22 temporarily settled this for California, but the debate rages everywhere else.

Each new regulation shaves margin.

Uber Eats is the forever competitor. Uber's massive ride-sharing network gives them built-in driver supply and brand recognition.

They're willing to lose money on Eats to keep their broader ecosystem sticky. DoorDash and Uber Eats together control about 90% of US delivery, and neither can afford to cede ground.

Dandy

Dental practices are notoriously resistant to change — many dentists have used the same lab for 20 years and switching feels risky. The scanner hardware is expensive to subsidize at scale, creating a capital-intensive land grab.

Quality control across distributed manufacturing is hard — a crown that doesn't fit means a remake, an unhappy patient, and a dentist who might switch back to their old lab. Competition from established digital players like Align Technology and legacy lab companies investing in their own digital capabilities.

The dental industry is fragmented — 200,000+ practices in the US, mostly small businesses, which means enterprise-style sales don't work. Each practice is its own decision maker with its own habits.

DoorDash

DoorDash Marketplace — the core food delivery platform connecting consumers to 390,000+ restaurant partners across the US, Canada, Australia, Japan, and Germany. DashPass — a subscription program offering $0 delivery fees and reduced service fees for $9.99/month.

The loyalty engine of the entire business. DoorDash Drive — a white-label delivery service that lets any business (not just restaurants) use DoorDash's driver network to fulfill their own orders.

Basically DoorDash as a logistics API. DoorDash for Business — a corporate platform for team meals, employee benefits, and office food programs.

Wolt — the European food delivery platform DoorDash acquired for $8.1 billion in 2022, now the company's international expansion vehicle.

Dandy

Dandy Scanner — provided to dental practices, captures a full 3D digital impression of the patient's mouth in minutes. No more putty molds.

Cloud-based case management platform where dentists submit scans, approve designs, and track orders. AI-powered restoration design that generates crown and veneer designs automatically from 3D scans, reducing turnaround from weeks to days.

Digital dental lab network with automated CNC milling and 3D printing for manufacturing restorations. Shade matching technology using AI to color-match restorations to surrounding teeth.

Integration with practice management software so cases flow seamlessly from scan to delivery.

DoorDash

Sequoia Capital has been the most consequential investor, leading multiple rounds and backing Tony Xu from Y Combinator onward. Khosla Ventures, Kleiner Perkins, and SoftBank Vision Fund participated in growth rounds.

Y Combinator was the starting point (Summer 2013 batch). The December 2020 IPO raised $3.4 billion at a $39 billion valuation, making it one of the biggest tech IPOs of that year.

Dandy

Investors include Bessemer Venture Partners, IVP, DST Global, and IA Ventures. Series C in 2023 valued the company at approximately $1.8 billion.