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And one more little thing this Thursday, we're going to be running our first bonus episode from the summit. 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. It was not very scalable. I mean, all things that we did were not scalable. I mean, we would take the orders as basically phone operators and then we would do the deliveries ourselves.
And I remember graduating from business school and two days later while my classmates were flying out in other exotic vacations, I was delivering, you know, promise in my Honda. Brom and PR, it's how I built this. The show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists and the stories behind the movements they built. I'm Guy Raaz and I today show the story of how a student named Tony Xu went from delivering Thai food to dorm rooms to building one of the biggest meal delivery services in America.
When I was in college, there was a student who used to roll a giant cooler down the corridors of the dorm. And he would shout out, Chinese food, man, get your Chinese food. In every Tuesday and Thursday night, this very enterprising kid would go to a local Chinese takeout. He'd order a hundred bucks worth of Chao Man and Fried Rice and beef and broccoli and egg rolls. Mark it up by about 20% and sell it to hungry college students at 10 or 11 p.m. that night.
This was kind of a big deal in the 1990s when the only real delivery option was pizza. But of course, at a certain point, the novelty wore off and the Chinese food man got a job somewhere and that was it. The dorm room food delivery wasn't scalable. Except that today, this very concept pulls in an estimated $13 billion in annual revenue. Just imagine the following situation. It's 10 at night, you want Milo for a burrito or some fried chicken or a burger.
You're binge watching some show and well, let's face it, you don't want to get off the couch. You don't want to leave your house. So you grab your phone, you click on Grubhub or Uber Eats or Postmates or DoorDash and boom! 30 minutes later, the food is at your door. Now you might think all of these services got started to solve this exact problem. But actually, when Tony Shoe co-founded DoorDash about five years ago, he wasn't really thinking about us, about the eaters.
He was thinking more about the restaurants, the chefs and the owners who wanted to get more of their food out into the world but didn't have an easy way to do this. So when Tony was still a student in business school, he and some friends built a system that linked local restaurants to hungry customers to the drivers who were available to deliver the food.
They started with a simple webpage, eight restaurants and they Honda Accord. Five years later, DoorDash is valued at over $4 billion and it's done over 100 million deliveries across the country. But getting to that point wasn't so simple. Tony didn't start out with lots of connections or money. In fact, he only started to learn English as a boy.
Tony was actually born in Nanjing, China. And when he was four, his father got into an engineering program at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His mom left behind her career in medicine and started waiting tables. And as a kid, Tony got to work too, trying to fit in at his new American school.
There wasn't a lot of diversity at that time, not in the late 80s and the early 90s. And so I had really two ways to learn English. And I really learned English on my own. One was watching lots of TV. And that's actually how I got my name. Oh, your name is Tony? No, my Chinese name was Xuxing. And when I got to the U.S., none of my classmates, nor my teachers, pronounced my name. I was the only Asian kid in school.
On the registration form, it said Xuxing. It says Xuxing. It did. And as I was learning English watching lots of TV to do it, I saw many episodes of Who's the Boss, starring Tony Danza. And so pretty much at the age of five, I walked with my dad to the immigration office and legally changed my name. Inspired by Tony Danza from Who's the Boss? Absolutely. Did you do any businesses as a kid? Did you say anything?
I did have a couple of businesses. So we didn't necessarily come with a lot of money. And so in order for me to buy Nintendo games or a new basketball, I started working at a pretty young age. I'd washed dishes inside my mom's restaurant. Did youbad one that you worked at? The one that you worked at. If you weren't dishwasher. I was a dishwasher. I'm a very good dishwasher today. I have those days to think but I sideded�dyot Iro II.
And so I realized actually they had a very young age. That wasn't because of you the large three! And I could actually charge money for different shapes along the surface. Hang on. You invested in the enormous size of a lawnmower? in an old lawn mower. And I would just go door to door to door and ask if I can cut people's grass. And I started realizing over time, actually if you cut grass at different heights, you can come up with different shapes and patterns. Like the US flag.
Or like a Mo the US flag into someone's lawn. So I'd first use the mower to make the stripes and I could cut them at different heights. And then what I would do is I'd ask if I can borrow one of their clippers as well as I am blanking. So the trimmer's the trimmer's the their electric. Yeah, the electric trimmer's and effectively make different shapes in the lawn. Wow. It's quite a lot of giant American flag. Many hours.
But when you really want an Nintendo and you have no money in the bank, you do what it takes. Did you ever have any inkling as a kid that your parents are struggling? I had a maybe when I went to middle school, had small observations of it. For example, we couldn't afford lessons or sports uniforms. We lived in a fairly small apartment compared to some of my friends who had single family homes. I lived off of the free lunch program for pretty much kindergarten through middle school.
So I think at small assemblances of that, but I think for most of my childhood, I didn't think too much about that. And just to be clear, your mom was a doctor in China, right? She was. She was a doctor and she effectively had to give up her credentials because when she emigrated to the US, no institution in the US would recognize her credentials from China. And so as a result, she kind of had to go backwards. So she worked as a waitress inside of a restaurant. She worked as a babysitter.
She worked at a hospice. And she did that for 12 years before she could save up enough money to open up a medical clinic and basically relive and regain her life in China. And while your mom was doing all that stuff, your dad essentially became an engineer. And I guess his first job was in California. So you guys move out there. How old were you when you moved to California? I was 15. So you guys move out to where? We moved to San Jose.
So you probably, given where you moved to, all of a sudden, we're a school where people, there were people who looked like you, where you felt right? If you were not the only Asian kid for the first time. Almost like going back to China. I'm one of maybe three kids now, right? In Illinois, in my grade, that's Asian. But then I moved to San Jose. I'm like, wow. This is a surprise.
Yeah. And my opening conversation with the principal was one where he and other educators had a set that I was like two years behind everyone. And then it's mainly because I had no idea how competitive the school system is here in the Bay Area. In the Midwest, especially where I grew up, you were recognized for your athletic abilities. Definitely, it wasn't cool to be the smart kid in class. Out here, there were math competitions. There were so many academic lessons after school.
And I worked my tail off. I was miserable. I mean, my first year, it was just day and night. All I did was pretty much, well, first catch up, because I truly was behind. And then secondly, do a lot better. Sure. And I remember looking the teachers in the eye and said, I'm going to graduate as valedictorian of your class. Wow. You said that as a freshman. I said that it was almost an instinctual response. Looking back, it was certainly a bit presumptuous. But four years later, that happened.
You were the valedictorian of your high school? I was. Wow. OK, so you go to college at UC Berkeley. And then eventually, you go to Stanford for business school, right? Yeah. And one of the things that you do in business school is you create a lot of projects, which spoiler alert. This is the beginnings of what eventually would become DoorDash. But tell me about this project that you did for a class. What was it?
Well, the assignment was work on a customer audience that you're passionate about and try a bunch of things. And that was really what my co-founders and I kind of gravitated towards. My co-founders and I, we all met really because of a shared interest for local businesses. Were they in the class with you? But they were. So you all sat around and said, how can we help local businesses? Like scale or just make their operations more efficient? We didn't even know what problem to work on at first.
It was just that audience that we were passionate about. And each person has their own personal connection with a local business. Mine was clearly to my mom's business. I've watched her in the world of local business for 20 plus years, growing up as a kid. So I've always been a fan. And we started by talking to a lot of businesses in the Bay Area, all sorts of businesses. What were you asking them? Asking them about if there was a magic wand and we could take away any problem for you this week.
What would it be? So you would call up a restaurant and say, hey, we go in physically. Yeah, I'm Tony. I'm a student at Stanford. And we're working on a project. And if you had a magic wand, what's a wand problem you could solve? That's what you guys would do. Yeah. Where are they telling you? What's their problem? Well, there were a few. We had heard a few. So we had heard challenges with staffing. We had heard challenges with how do we know where customers find out about us.
And actually the first idea that we had worked on was really an idea towards helping them better understand where their customers were coming from. It was more of a marketing solution where we put a tablet at the checkout and ask very simply when a customer was checking out, or how did you hear about this business? And that was actually the very first idea we've worked on. All right, so where did that idea go? What happened to it?
We realized that while it's a helpful idea, that it wouldn't be the fastest way to help a small business. So maybe we can help and tell you where your customers are coming from. And you can deploy more dollars into those marketing channels. Or maybe we can just gain more customers. And that was when we started shifting our thinking towards and our attention towards how do we do that. So how do you do it?
So while we started hearing about challenges with delivery and from restaurants, florists, some retail stores, and this is very bizarre because delivery has been around forever. Forever. And yet outside in New York City, just about no one does delivery. 85% of restaurants in America don't deliver. So you were hearing from a restaurant saying, delivery, delivery, delivery, and then what? So let me tell you about one customer. So this is a cake store owner. And her store is 500 square feet.
Maybe the size of your studio. And she would say things about turning down 10 to 15 orders a week. This is material. This is very, very expensive. She's when you're making cakes. Especially when you're making expensive. They're expensive. And as I remember how many orders my mom would used to do in her restaurant in Illinois. I'm like 10 to 15 orders is a lot. She was turning them down why? Because she had no way to deliver them. She didn't want to do it herself.
She was a one person show many of the days. So she could not afford a hire. So she could not afford a hire. And when she did try to hire, she had this challenge of, well, only sometimes with a driver's busy. Because when there was a spike in demand, then maybe the driver's very busy. But on most days, the driver was doing nothing. But she had to pay the driver, obviously, for both the uptime and the downtime.
And she literally had copies of customers, payment information, and details that she could not fulfill. And so this is just crazy. This is so un-American to turn down all these credit cards. And so that was really what turned our eye towards. Is there an opportunity and delivery, if so, what is it? So at that point, you guys started to do some research to find out. We did one. We did research to figure out why is delivery not a thing outside in New York City?
And the second thing we did was can we run a small pilot here at Stanford Campus to test out our ideas? So on the first piece, we would do deliveries for services like Domino's or FedEx. And we would learn, how does deliveries actually work? What do you mean you would do deliver? You would go and- We would just be a driver's. You mean you applied to Domino's? Yeah, we would just be a driver. You actually went to go work for Domino's?
Yeah. So you guys were, you were students at Stanford Graduate School of Business, but you also had these like part-time gigs working as drivers for FedEx and Domino's just really to learn about how this works. We were just trying to figure out how delivery works. Because none of us necessarily had a background in logistics. And so we learned a couple of pretty interesting observations. The first to us was it is so hard as a single store to know how many drivers to put in the store.
If there's, for example, a football game at Stanford, way times would skyrocket. Sure. We wouldn't know what to do. We wouldn't know how to flex up the number of drivers. This would happen to add a florist too, if there's Valentine's Day good luck. The store owners are literally calling all of their families and relatives and friends. To deliver flowers. To deliver flowers. Right, because you can't, you can't flex up. OK, but then think about, you know, a normal day of the week.
Where literally we're folding pizza boxes, the drivers, because there isn't the volume. And so you have this very difficult and inefficient use of expensive labor. And so as consumption is becoming more last minute, isn't it strange that the way these goods are brought to us required advanced planning? And it was just this weird juxtaposition to us that says, well, maybe there's something here. And so we said, well, let's just run a test.
Let's just do something on Stanford campus, something simple. Let's pick one thing to deliver. Instead of trying to deliver everything, we chose restaurants because people eat 20 to 25 times a week. And we had research that 85% of them did not do their own deliveries. In fact, all of the restaurants we had spoken to in the Bayer had zero delivery. And so when we saw that, we said, well, OK, is that because nobody wants the deliveries? Or is that because of something else?
And so that was really the crux of what we wanted to test when we were at Stanford. All right, so you decided to test this theory out. Yes. And what did you do? What were you offering? And how did you do it? So on a Saturday, we built a website called Palo Alto Delivery.com. You guys all knew how to do this. We did. Well, building a website fairly straightforward. And what we did was we put 8 PDF menus on Palo Alto Delivery.com. And from local restaurants. From local restaurants.
OK. There was a Google voice number that I had signed up for. That would ring the cell phones of all of my classmates and now founders and me. And that was it. And did you partner with these restaurants? You call them and say, hey, we're going to do that. Did you guys start permission? We did not. You did not ask that. In the beginning. And what did you just pick, they restaurants? We picked eight restaurants that we liked. And what were they?
Oh. There was Bangkok, cuisine, which is a Thai restaurant. There was Orn's Hamas, which was a hamas store. Middle Eastern Hamas food. There was a Chinese restaurant. There was an Indian restaurant. There was a salad bar. And people could call the number and just order off the menu and then. And so how are you going to make money if the restaurants didn't? No. Who was you were just going to hope that they tipped you? Like how was that going? We were not necessarily making money.
So we would take the orders as basically phone operators. And then we would do the deliveries ourselves. There was no app. There was no app. It was just a website. It was a janky webpage. And you called the number. And you would say, hello. It's Tony from Palo Alto Delivery. May help you. Yes. And they would say, sure, I want a big bucket of Hamas and some PETA and some Boba Ghanouj. And you would say, great. And then how would you know how long that was going to take?
We would make an estimate in the beginning. We would guess. And we would say. It's a 45 to an hour. We would say 45 minutes. And then we would drive to the store. There was a lot. Because you would call Orons Who Moose first. We would call on the way. We would call on the way. And we would place the order, pick it up on behalf of the customer, show up at the customer, and use. So I used to work at Square as well. So I would take a Square card reader and use that.
Like a summer internship at Square? I did a summer internship at Square. And so I had many square card readers with me. So I would plug them into my phone and use that to receive the payment. Essentially meaning you were just being reimbursed for buying their food at the Hamas bar. Yes. We weren't losing money. We just weren't making any money. And how quickly, from the time you put it out there, until the time your phone's rang, did you start getting orders?
We got our first order, 45 minutes actually after launching. Wow. And that was a very pleasant surprise. The only way this customer could have found us was by typing in Palol to deliver into the browser, hitting enter and finding us. Yeah. And this customer places an order at a tire restaurant who delivered it, a micro-founder in me. And then when you showed up at this place, did you say, thank you so much for grad students to stand for business school doing this research?
Or did you just say, here's your food? We actually did the former. We actually taped the whole thing. We actually asked for permission and videoed it. We've with my phone and asked them how you found out about us. And a few other questions. He was like, OK, thanks for the food or what? He was really friendly. He was actually a visiting author. And he was a bit of entrepreneurial spirit himself. And he was very supportive of what we were doing. So you decide that you're going to keep this going?
Yes. So how are you? If your Google voice phone was going to ring, presumably 20 far as a day. And you and your co-founders had to do all the deliveries. How did that work? Well, it was a bit of a limited service. So we only offered service when we were not in class. I see. So it was really great technology there. Yeah, great. It's a killer app. I know. We're available from 9 to noon. We're available from 5 to 8 p.m. That was actually what we were available.
And so this was certainly not a venture. But those were the early days. So how long did you guys do this for? We did this for five months. And what were you for five months? I mean, every time you were doing a delivery, were you recording how long it took you? Did you have a book or a spreadsheet that you were putting numbers in? Yeah, there were a few things. So the three major questions on our minds at the time, number one was, do people want delivery?
And how much are people willing to pay for it? Number two, our restaurants interested in working with us. So as we started getting orders, we would talk to the restaurants and ask, is this something that you find valuable? Is it, would you pay for the service? In other words, instead of the customer paying a premium, would the restaurant pay you guys? Yes. OK. And then the final question was, well, as you mentioned, we were in class at the time.
And so sometimes it was difficult being in class and on a delivery at the same time. And so we started trying to recruit drivers at Stanford. And so we're trying to figure out, well, can we do that? People be willing to use their own vehicles, would people be willing to, how much do they need to be paid, things like this? Those are the three areas that we were really interested in. And at what point did you and your co-founder say, this is our business?
We're going to, like, what information did you get? Did you gather that convinced you this was going to be the thing we're going to try to do? Yeah, there wasn't that moment. We were doing such little volume. We were delivering maybe five to 10 orders a day, half of whom from our friends. And so certainly from the data, it would have been too far a jump to say there's a business here. But I think two things kept us going. One was just enjoying working with one another.
And then second was we kept getting positive answers to the questions we were asking. Is this something that consumers wanted? Is this something that restaurants were willing to pay for? Is this something that drivers were willing to partner with? And so it was more incremental. And there wasn't these step function jumps per se. We were a very small service still at the time. Did you strike it the old, any of these restaurants in that time to pay you? You did.
So some of them were like, sure, we'll give you a percentage of the sale. Yeah, all of them, actually. Oh, well. But it's not like you were bringing them a whole lot of business. No, the first check I remember cutting to a very popular store today was for $21 and some change. So at this point, this thing is not scalable. It was not very scalable. I mean, all things that we did were not scalable. I mean, I remember graduating from business school.
And two days later, while my classmates were flying out in other exotic vacations, I was delivering, you know, promise in my Honda. When we come back in just a moment, how Tony Shoe went from delivering a hummus in his Honda in Palo Alto to delivering just about every food you could imagine all across the country. Stay with us, I'm Guy Raaz, and you're listening to How I Built This from NPR. MUSIC Picture that thing you've always wanted to learn.
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And when you're ready to launch, use offer code built to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. P.O.K.E. P.O.K.E. P.O.K.E. P.O.K.E. P.O.K.E. P.O.K.E. P.O.K.E. P.O.K.E. P.O.K.E. P.O.K.E. Hey, welcome back to How I Built This from NPR. So it's 2013 and Tony Shoes Company Palo Alto Delivery isn't really growing a whole lot. And it's clear he and his partners need more money to make this food delivery service thing grow.
So they decide to apply to the Y Combinator Accelerator Program. And, well, they get in. So that's like, it's kind of the golden ticket, right? I don't know if we viewed it as a golden ticket as much as just the next step on the way of our project, because we're still very small at the time. We were high five in each other when we did 20 orders a day, right? This is not a very large service. So it was certainly not obvious that there would be a business here. So what does Y Combinator get you?
Does it, do they give you, because they don't give you a whole lot of cash, right? Now they give us $20,000 at the time. And then they get a small piece of ownership. Yes. And but you're in this thing, which is very prestigious. And of course all these VCs are like, vultures circling around, why Combinator looking for the next big thing. But then what, with $20,000, I mean, was it still a webpage with PDFs of menus? It was still a webpage. It got a little bit more sophisticated.
We evolved from the PDFs and to actual store menu pages where a customer can order. It wasn't, it was still all web, though. Nothing on your phone. So at the end of Y Combinator, it culminates into what's called demo day. Where you pitch. Yes, where you pitch and we had there about 40 companies in our group and all 40 companies pitch on stage to a group of investors. So let's say I'm an investor there. I'm gonna listen to this and I'm gonna say, Tony, you're really smart and impressive guy.
You present really well. I just don't understand what's a big deal. Like how is this gonna be different than, you know, there's grub hub and there's this and there's that. I don't get it. What are you offering? What did you say? I said that we're building a logistics business, not a food delivery company. And, you know, our goal is to not just do food, but we need to start somewhere and we need to show value from day one and this is the best way to serve businesses.
So how much money did you guys were you able to raise out of those pitches? Or so we raised $2 million, a 2.2 million dollars in our seed round. In the seed round. In the seed round. You said it was hard to raise money, but that's pretty amazing. It was, it was a bit of a harrowing experience because our bank account was doing the link quickly to tens, you know, between 10 and $20,000. I had debt from grad school as did my co-founders.
I had a wedding also, upcoming my own wedding that I was struggling to pay for. So I had to take a loan. You should have loved it. You should have loved that's true. So, all right. So what was that $2 million going to get you guys? What, I mean, what did you need to do with that money? Well, we needed to prove that the service was viable in a market. Right. In one area. And so we chose San Jose. But you couldn't do that with a webpage. You had to, at this point, I'm assuming build an app.
Yeah, so, so after graduating Y Combinator, we'd launch our app in September. So the month after. And what, what are you called Palo Alto delivery at that point or DoorDash? In Y Combinator, we launched as DoorDash. How did you come up with that name? So it was a bit of a nerdy experience. But we, my co-founders and I, with a few very simple criteria, we wanted to name those easy to spell. A name that was two syllables or less, whose domain name was available. And those are the three criteria.
And we ran a script across the internet to crawl, you know, many third party services that list websites, the go-dates of the world and found DoorDash. And, and, nobody owned it? Nobody owned it. So for $9.95, we were able to purchase DoorDash. Wow. And who were your drivers? They're mainly ourselves. It was my co-founders and me and the early employees at DoorDash. We did all of the deliveries for the first, almost the first year. So you run the business and you were delivering?
Yes. So it was a, it wasn't exactly 24-7, but it was very close. And what was it that you were in that year trying to figure out, trying, what information were you trying to gather? Well, we were realizing that the most difficult part of what we do with consumers, merchants and drivers, you have three parties now, not just two, is that you have to build a lot of products that consumers don't see. How do you get the order to the restaurant? How do you reconcile orders if they go wrong?
What about payments? How do you actually tie to the accounting that restaurants are already doing? How do you know which door you should be entering if you're a driver delivering food? Because all these things save precious minutes, which also saves money for consumers. Because if we can save costs out of the system, we can lower fees to consumers. So who was doing all of the coding and the data analysis and sucking all that stuff in an organizing? So my co-founders led the engineering team.
And a lot of our early recruits, we had an unfair advantage of friendship. We would hire a lot of friends. Most of that initial early engineering team were actually still at DoorDash today. But that was really the early crew that built the product. How did you get the word out about it? And yeah, how did you even start? Well, we employed a tactic that worked for us pretty well at Stanford Campus, which was at the time we would print out flyers and would stuff take out bags at restaurants.
Here's the challenge. The printing is not free. And that's summer. And when we were just testing this project out, we'd printed out 100,000 plus copies of flyers. Wow. I broke every single color printer on campus. And some mystery, right? School's out. No students are supposed to be on campus. But yet, all the color printers and the toners need to be replaced every day. And so when we launched San Jose, we did something very similar. We printed out flyers.
And we distributed them to the different restaurants. And the restaurants got the word out on our behalf. So were you on the phone all the time to find out what restaurants were trying to explain what you did, trying to get them to sign up with you or to partner with you? Absolutely. I went door to door to door to sign up our first 50 restaurants. And later on, we evolved into phone calls and other ways of reaching the restaurants.
After that first year in San Jose, when did you decide, OK, this is going to work. Let's go to the next city. Yeah. So San Jose, over a three-form-on period of time, is very, very, very, very fast. And once we discovered that, that's when we decided to raise our next round of financing to see if we can take this beyond the barrier. And you needed that money to create new technology? To create new technology by hiring people, to hire sales people.
When we launch into a city, we have to make sure drivers are on the road. And so we have to pay dashers on the road. We have to spend on marketing. It was really to operate the business we needed the capital. So let's just talk about this for a minute, because my understanding of DoorDash is there's an app for the user, like I have DoorDash on my phone. And then the restaurant has a different app. And the driver has a different app. That's really expensive to do all that back in technology.
It's even more complicated than that. We have to then build lots of systems to figure out how long is it going to take for this delivery? What's it going to be for deep dish pizza versus a salad? What if they come in in the same order? How do you even start to figure that out? Well, you get into the lowest level of details.
So this is why one of the best things that could have happened to our company was that every single person did deliveries and customer support every single day for the first year. And actually, we still do this today. We do this once a month instead of every day. Every single person in the company. And so as a result, you become an expert. You learn about different systems.
You learn about the nuances of how difficult is parking versus if the food is in a different aisle from the drinks from a different aisle from the desserts, you learn how to collate those orders. You learn how to build that into the software. So then you can scale this across the country. So it's a little bit like StitchFix, which is, yeah, they sell fashion, but ultimately, you're really a data company. Yes. Many ways we're an applied math company. We are collecting lots of information.
We're trying to digitize the physical world. We're trying to understand where is every parking lot? We're trying to understand where is every construction zone? Where is every alley? Where is every elevator inside of a mall? And how does it work? Because the delivery fee is how much? The delivery fee is arranged from $1.99 to $5.99. So there's two ways that Dora Ash makes money. Dora Ash makes money from the consumer. So a delivery fee, then Dora Ash makes money from the restaurant.
Percentage of the order. And so it's really the combination that makes the model work. I'm curious, like when you think about this disaggregated world we live in, right, can this industry, the logistics industry, support, Dora Dash, GrubHub, Uber Eats, Postmates, on and on and on? Do you think they can all coexist in that world? Or do you think there's ultimately going to have to be one or two winners? So it is a very giant space, as you mentioned.
There are, when we were doing our research starting the company five years ago there were 800 plus companies just in third party logistics. I know we know about the FedEx as and the UPS as of course in the Pulse Service. But there are 800 plus companies just delivering parcel that we've researched and I'm sure around the country. Around the country. The offline world is just so much bigger and disaggregated to your point.
The second thing I would say is when you look at the our current industry, the restaurant industry, it is not yet even online. 95% of orders still happen through a phone call or an in-person visit. Only 5% occurs through an internet connection. I know we talk about a lot of these other services, but the fact of the matter is that we are in the very earliest endings of the day of a gigantic industry. We really remember this all started because of a want and desire to help local businesses.
It is also given DoorDash the clarity to go and get all the details right. Even the ones that don't seem scalable. There is, for example, a cheesecake factory that we deliver from in San Francisco. It is on the sixth floor of a mall of Macy's. To make downtown. In the Union Square. In the shopping district. It is a nightmare to drive in. It is very hard to make those deliveries.
To make that one delivery from that one store happen, we have to find dedicated parking that we negotiate with the mall. We have to find dedicated access to a mall elevator. That only mall employees and dashers receive that we have to figure out how to get orders from different stations because that store is so large. To make that one store happen. I am losing sleep just thinking about trying to figure that out. That is just one problem.
That is one of 242 cheesecake factories, one of 200,000 businesses. Tony, I am really interested in just the pressure. I want to try to get into the movie in your head. You are the internal dialogue. You guys have raised enough money now from different major investors where your evaluation is 1.4 billion dollars. If I am you, I am like, I am nervous. Of course, you have to project confidence and you have to believe in this thing. That is a lot of pressure. Does that feel like a lot of pressure?
It is a lot of responsibility, but it is one that I feel very, very lucky to have. I mean, if you think about it. I just wired to think it that way. Are you just kind of an even-killed guy? So I don't necessarily focus on some of those metrics. We started this company again to help the businesses on the streets. Why are we doing that? We are doing that because the businesses on the streets, even in Silicon Valley, produce 60% of the jobs inside every city. We need to help them.
We need to help more of their stores. We need to give them technology. We need to offer them logistics. I guess when my brain thinks about that, it thinks a bit less, maybe about the company evaluation or how much pressure necessarily we are under. I think more instead about the future. I think about how do we actually service that opportunity? How do we make the job easier for the dashers? How do we think about serving other types of businesses? That's where my brain goes.
Where do you see this in 10 years? If you are building your dream house vision, you've got your magic wand. You ask these businesses early on, hey, you got a magic wand, what's the problem? You want to solve it. You've got the magic wand. Door dash is what? In 10 years, is it the Netflix of delivery? Is it the Amazon or what is it? Door dash is the biggest infrastructure for a city that connects consumers and merchants. We would be your first phone call if you wanted to start a company.
We can help you start that business. We can introduce you to customers on that business. We would want to introduce all of the customers to all of your use cases, delivery being one of them. But certainly, I still envision even in 10 years, people going into stores, we're still social creatures. We're still going to go hang out with our friends or our coworkers or our spouses and partners. And we're going to do that in the physical world.
Door dash will help you figure out which businesses to do that with and will be the best way to grow local businesses. When do you, I mean, there's different sort of different measurements, but from what I understand, you don't have the biggest market share, right? You don't have the biggest chunk of market share yet, but I have to assume that's a goal, right, to capture the greatest share of the market. Do you feel like you're heading in that direction?
We've been the fastest growing service in the space for the past year and we're actually the biggest service in about 60% of the population in the US. So we have ground to cover as we were not the first service, but we feel very, very good about the trajectory. And we feel very, very good about the fact that the ideas that we had come up with a few years ago around servicing merchants in the best way have really proven out well.
Yeah. Can you even imagine what you would do afterwards once this company goes public or is sold, whatever happens, you know, once everybody caches out, what do you think? I haven't given that a lot of thought. Most of my days are pretty obsessed over the people that we have and the plans for the future. I am in the business. We haven't given much thought about, you know, so again, I go back to my life decision framework of, where am I going to have the most fun in the least regret?
And that's what I'm enjoying today. How much of your success do you attribute to skill and hard work and intelligence and how much of what is happening is do you think is because of luck? There is a lot of luck involved in shaping a lot of the circumstances for me. It's absolutely a combination that's a short answer. But when I think back in my life, I've come a long way on the shoulders of a lot of great people who I was going to meet in school.
To things I studied in the past that somehow have magically made its way back into my life today, to people in Silicon Valley who, you know, before even having a, you know, a business partnership with me or the company who have more than volunteered the time to help me. There's been a lot of fortunate circumstances for me. On the flip side, of course, there's a lot of hard work. And I think, you know, the hard work and skill is really not a one person.
And I think that's the thing that sometimes people forget. I think we live in a world where it's easy to idolize the stars. To me, the real heroes are my teammates. And the people whose collective hours, skills, hard work and drive are what has allowed me to be successful today. Tony Shoe, co-founder of DoorDash. DoorDash has now delivered more than 100 million orders in cities across the United States.
And if you happen to live in the San Jose area and use DoorDash on the right day of the month, you might get to know me. You get your noodles or breakfast or hummus delivered by Tony himself in his Honda Accord. It is the same Honda. What kind of Honda is it? It's a 2001 Honda Accord. It's a sweet Honda Accord. It's an amazing Honda Accord. It's a great delivery vehicle. How many miles do you have on your Honda Accord? Nearing 200,000. I love it.
Today you're the CEO of a $4 billion valuation company. And you got a 2001 Honda Accord. It's a great car. Great. You should be driving that. For as long as it lasts. And please do stick around because in just a moment, we're going to hear from you about the things you're building. With everyone fighting for attention, how can your business stand out? Easy. Get constant contact. Constant contact has helped millions of small businesses stand out and see big results fast.
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That's netsuite.com slash built to get your own KPI checklist. NetSuite.com slash built. Hey, thanks so much for sticking around because it's time now for how you built that. But today's story begins a few years ago in Miami with Ashlyn Cook and her dog. So my dog's name is Winston, and he is a German short-haired pointer. He is liver colored. Anyway, Ashlyn was working in Miami in the fashion business, and Schmittekai named Dean, who also had a pointer.
We started hanging out and running with our dogs, taking the dogs to the beach, and eventually it turned into more. Ashlyn and Dean and the dogs Winston and Louis bonded, and eventually the humans in the story started dating. Now thanks for going great, but then earlier this year, Dean got a job offer in Boulder, Colorado. So Ashlyn decided that might be a sign to get out of Miami and head to the mountains.
So the four of them, two humans, two dogs relocated, and Ashlyn had to figure out what to do next. I really wanted to do something on my own. I had had the entrepreneurial bug for over a year at that point, and I knew I wanted to do something with dogs, but with a little twist. So we had bounced ideas off of each other for dog food, and honestly, I just thought of a food truck for dogs just came out of my mouth, and we looked at each other like, is that a thing?
Well, it turns out food trucks for dogs were sort of a thing. There were a few scattered across the country, but nothing in Colorado. So Ashlyn and Dean pulled together their savings. They got a loan from Ashlyn's dad, and they bought a custom-built trailer that looks like one of those vintage models from the 1950s. They have that iconic paint job where half of the bottom is a different color, and it has that can-tam shape with the rounded edges.
And after she ordered the trailer, Ashlyn got together with a local chef to come up with a bunch of recipes for healthy dog treats, with no salt, no sugar, no fillers. And Winston, Ashlyn's pointer. He was a good taste tester for us because he is a picky dog of finding out like, okay, he really liked this one, he didn't like this one. I remember I tried to make a dried banana treat, but he would put in his mouth and spit it out. So I realized, okay, Winston does not like bananas.
But Winston did like some of the other treats Ashlyn came up with, pumpkin apples, spice cookies, zucchini squash biscuits, and one of his favorites, bison burger jerky. It is made with just three ingredients, ground bison, which we do source from a local bison ranch, cranberries, and organic flax seeds. And I know this stuff sounds like food you might order at one of those farm-to-table restaurants, right? But of course, Ashlyn's target demographic was just dogs.
And the dog-centric nature of her business actually proved to be a problem when she started to apply for the permits she needed to launch the truck. The most challenging part was defining ourselves as a new category. A lot of the cities would say, well, we only allow food trucks for humans. Other cities would say, well, no one's ever come to us with that type of business before. We have no idea how to define you guys.
So we ended up going the route of just full on getting all the permits of a human food truck. So finally, this past June, Ashlyn started parking the truck at breweries, dog parks, and farmers markets all around Boulder. And since then, things have been going pretty well. The treats are popular and a major sign of customer buy-in. A lot of the dogs are starting to recognize the truck. Oh, absolutely. They will literally jump up to the counter with their two front legs and stand up at the counter.
It is hysterical. The company is called Winnie Lou. It's named for Ashlyn's dog Winston and Dean's dog Louis. And in addition to that one food truck, Winnie Lou now sells treats online and its six independent pet stores in Colorado. So there are thousands of pet stores in the United States. And we would love to be in all of the independently owned smaller pet stores that we can. To find out more about Winnie Lou or to hear previous episodes, head to our podcast page.
How I built this, dot NPR, dot org. And of course, if you want to tell us your story, go to build dot NPR, dot org. And thanks so much for listening to the show this week. You can subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. You can also write to us at hibt at npr.org. And if you want to send a tweet, it's at How I Built This. Our show was produced this week by James Dela Hussi with music composed by Rump Teen Arrow Bluey.
Thanks also to JC Howard, Nora Kutsi, Nipa Grant, Sanas Mechkan Thorpe, and Jeff Rogers. Our intern is me event cat. I'm Guy Ross and you've been listening to How I Built This from NPR. We all have moments where our limits are tested. What I want to talk about is how we define those limits and what it means to exceed them. I'm Jay Williams. Check out my show The Limits where I talk to people who have overcome theirs and achieved great things in business, sports, and culture.
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