TONY XU

Born in 1985 in Nanjing, China. His family moved to Champaign, Illinois, when he was five.

His mother ran a Chinese restaurant. Xu spent his childhood washing dishes and watching her struggle with the business side of food service.

That experience stuck.

Went to UC Berkeley for industrial engineering, then got an MBA at Stanford. At Stanford, he and three classmates — Stanley Tang, Andy Fang, and Evan Moore — noticed that local restaurants had no way to deliver food.

They built a simple website called PaloAltoDelivery.com in 2013. That became DoorDash.

The early days were brutal. Xu personally made deliveries.

The company nearly died multiple times — in 2015, they almost ran out of money. GrubHub and Uber Eats were bigger.

Postmates had more buzz. But Xu made a counterintuitive bet: focus on suburbs, not cities.

Everyone else was fighting over Manhattan and San Francisco. DoorDash went to the places nobody cared about.

It worked. DoorDash became the #1 delivery app in the US by late 2019.

The pandemic supercharged everything. DoorDash went public in December 2020 at $102 per share.

The stock hit $257 on its first day. By 2024, DoorDash had 67% US market share.

DoorDash is the whole story. It's America's largest food delivery platform — 67% market share, millions of merchants, and operations across the US, Canada, Australia, Japan, and Germany.

Before DoorDash, Xu interned at McKinsey, eBay, and Square. He met Tony Fadell at Square and learned about building hardware/software products.

But restaurants were always his thing — growing up in his mom's restaurant gave him a visceral understanding of the problem.

Xu thinks like an operator, not a financial engineer. He's obsessed with logistics and execution.

His philosophy: pick an underserved market, out-execute everyone on the ground, and build the infrastructure that makes switching impossible. He doesn't care about being first or flashiest.

He cares about being the most reliable. That's how DoorDash won — not by having the best app, but by being the service that actually showed up.

DoorDash's IPO. The company went public in December 2020 at a $72 billion valuation.

The stock more than doubled on its first day of trading. Xu's stake was worth over $5 billion at the peak.

More importantly, DoorDash had dethroned GrubHub and Uber Eats as the #1 delivery platform in America. The suburb strategy — which everyone mocked — turned out to be the winning move.

The gig economy backlash. DoorDash spent $50 million supporting California's Proposition 22 in 2020, which classified drivers as independent contractors rather than employees.

It passed, but the fight was ugly and DoorDash became a symbol of gig economy exploitation. The company also faced a scandal in 2019 when the New York Times revealed that DoorDash was using customer tips to subsidize driver base pay.

Xu apologized and changed the policy, but the reputational hit was real.

Focus on the underserved. Xu talks constantly about building for the "long tail" — the millions of small restaurants in suburbs and small towns that the big players ignored.

He believes the biggest opportunities are in markets that look boring to everyone else. Don't compete where everyone is competing.

Go where nobody is looking. Also: logistics is a moat.

If you can deliver faster and more reliably than anyone else, you win.

Xu keeps his personal life very private. He's married and has children.

His mother still works in the restaurant industry. He's spoken about the immigrant experience as a core motivation — watching his parents sacrifice everything to build a life in America.

Grew up in Champaign, Illinois. Bachelor's in industrial engineering from UC Berkeley.

MBA from Stanford Graduate School of Business. He started DoorDash during his Stanford MBA with three classmates.

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