DoorDash
Est. 2013Tony Xu and three Stanford classmates were the entire delivery fleet — a $6-a-drop page, and them behind the wheel.
▶ DOORDASH · 2013
DOORDASH · 2026 ◀Drag the handle — DoorDash, 2013 → 2026.
“At the time, everyone at the company, we're the only ones doing deliveries.”— Tony Xu, co-founder of DoorDash
The ugly part. PaloAltoDelivery.com was a one-page site offering $6 delivery from local restaurants that didn't deliver — no minimum, pay on the doorstep. Behind it was no operation at all: orders pinged the founders' phones, and Tony Xu, Stanley Tang, Andy Fang and Evan Moore drove them around Palo Alto themselves.
What they did that didn't scale. Students by day, couriers by night. They took the orders, called the restaurants, picked up the food, and delivered it — learning the logistics by living them, weeks before they had a name, a fleet, or the YC check that turned it into DoorDash.
Now. The largest food-delivery platform in the US, a public company moving billions of orders a year — still the thing those four were hand-delivering one bag at a time.