DoorDash

Stripe

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.

Stripe

Stripe charges a flat 2.9% + $0.30 per transaction. That's it.

No setup fees, no monthly fees, no hidden charges. The simplicity is the product.

When a customer pays on a website using Stripe, Stripe handles everything — fraud detection, currency conversion, bank transfers, tax calculation, compliance. The merchant just sees money arrive in their account.

On top of the core payments, Stripe has built an entire financial infrastructure stack. Billing for subscriptions, Connect for marketplace payments, Atlas for incorporating a company, Issuing for creating virtual cards, Treasury for banking-as-a-service, and Radar for fraud prevention.

They're basically building the financial plumbing for the entire internet.

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.

Stripe

Patrick Collison was 19. His brother John was 17.

They had already built and sold a company — Auctomatic, an eBay auction tool — for $5 million while still teenagers in Limerick, Ireland. Patrick went to MIT, John went to Harvard, and they both dropped out because they had a better idea.

The idea was embarrassingly obvious in hindsight. In 2010, accepting payments on the internet was a nightmare.

You had to get a merchant account, negotiate with a payment processor, deal with a gateway provider, handle PCI compliance, and write thousands of lines of code. It took weeks or months.

The Collisons thought it should take five minutes.

They built a simple API — seven lines of code — that let any developer start accepting credit card payments immediately. No merchant account.

No paperwork. No phone calls with banks.

Just paste seven lines of code and you're in business. They originally called it /dev/payments, then changed it to Stripe in 2011.

Peter Thiel and Elon Musk — the PayPal mafia — were among the first investors. Sequoia and Andreessen Horowitz piled in soon after.

The Collisons had built exactly what every developer on Earth had been wishing for.

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.

Stripe

Stripe grew almost entirely through developer love. They didn't hire a sales team for years.

They didn't run ads. They just built the best developer documentation anyone had ever seen and let word of mouth do the rest.

The developer-first strategy was deliberate. The Collisons realized that in a startup, the developer usually decides which payment provider to use.

If you make the developer happy, you win the company. Stripe's API documentation became legendary — clear, beautiful, with working code examples in every language.

They also grew by growing with their customers. Early Stripe customers included tiny startups that later became giants — Lyft, DoorDash, Instacart, Shopify.

As those companies scaled to billions in revenue, Stripe's processing volume scaled with them. Stripe didn't need to acquire new customers because its existing ones kept getting bigger.

The international expansion was methodical. Instead of launching everywhere at once like Uber, Stripe carefully added country after country, making sure each one worked perfectly with local payment methods, currencies, and regulations.

By 2024 they were processing payments in 195 countries.

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.

Stripe

Valuation whiplash. In 2021, Stripe hit a peak valuation of $95 billion during the fintech boom.

By 2023, they had to mark it down to $50 billion during the tech correction — a 47% drop that made headlines everywhere. Employees who had been paper millionaires suddenly weren't.

The valuation has since recovered to $91 billion after a secondary share sale in 2025, but those two years were rough for morale.

Competition is relentless. Adyen, the Dutch payments company, has been eating into Stripe's enterprise market.

Square (now Block) competes on the small business side. PayPal is everywhere.

New fintech players pop up constantly. The payments business has razor-thin margins and everyone is fighting for the same 2.9%.

Going public is the elephant in the room. Stripe has been expected to IPO for years.

Investors, employees, and the media keep asking when. The Collisons have consistently said they're in no rush, but with $8.7 billion raised and thousands of employees holding stock options, the pressure to provide liquidity is enormous.

As of 2025, they've opted for secondary sales instead of a public offering.

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.

Stripe

Stripe Payments is the core — accept credit cards, debit cards, Apple Pay, Google Pay, and 135+ payment methods in 195 countries. Stripe Connect lets marketplaces and platforms pay out to sellers (Shopify, Lyft, DoorDash all use it).

Stripe Billing handles subscription and recurring billing. Stripe Atlas lets you incorporate a US company from anywhere in the world — fill out a form, get a Delaware C-corp, bank account, and tax ID in days.

Stripe Radar uses machine learning to block fraud in real time. Stripe Treasury lets platforms offer banking services to their customers.

Stripe Tax automatically calculates and collects sales tax in every jurisdiction.

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.

Stripe

Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, General Catalyst, Founders Fund, Tiger Global, GV (Google Ventures), Goldman Sachs, Baillie Gifford