According to Fortune, DoorDash has won the U.S. food delivery wars, now holding about 60% market share—more than double its nearest competitor, Uber Eats—and is on track to generate over $13 billion in revenue in 2025. The company, founded in 2012 by Tony Xu and three other Stanford students, survived a near-death experience in 2013 when refunding late orders from a Stanford football game nearly bankrupted them. Xu, who still does four delivery shifts a year like all salaried employees, obsesses over tiny operational details, like an algorithm that unassigns Dashers from late orders to protect their ratings or highlighting desserts that are often forgotten. His stated goal is to use data to “master the last 100 feet” of delivery, building a unique catalog for the physical world. The company aggressively expanded by using a gig-worker model to deliver from any restaurant, even those not officially partnered, and outlasted rivals like Postmates, Caviar, and a host of now-defunct meal-prep services.
Winning the War of Inches
Here’s the thing about DoorDash’s strategy: it’s brutally mundane. While other startups were pitching revolutionary ideas or trying to own the entire food chain, Xu’s team focused on shaving seconds off a delivery run. Better parking instructions. Smarter batch assignments. An app that protects its couriers from one bad order. It sounds small, but in a low-margin, hyper-competitive game where you’re literally racing against the clock, those seconds add up. It’s a grind-it-out philosophy that Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, who has Xu on his board, praised as “realistic” compared to the big, abstract ideas common in Silicon Valley. Basically, DoorDash won by treating delivery not as a tech moonshot, but as a complex logistics puzzle where every variable matters.
The Risky Road to 60 Percent
But let’s be clear: this dominance was never guaranteed. DoorDash was the underdog for years. Remember when Uber Eats launched in 2015 and seemed unstoppable? It leveraged Uber’s massive war chest and global reach to grab a third of the U.S. market while DoorDash was burning cash and morale was in the toilet. Xu himself showed employees the graph of their dwindling bank account and told them he wouldn’t blame them for leaving. So how did they turn it around? They out-hustled and out-spent everyone in local markets, signing up merchants and couriers aggressively. And they benefited from a key competitor’s mistake: Grubhub stuck to being a simple order platform for restaurants with their own delivery staff, completely missing the gig-economy wave that allowed delivery to expand everywhere. That strategic rigidity left them in the dust with less than 10% share now.
What Comes After Food?
Now, the big question is, what does a delivery company do after it wins delivery? DoorDash’s lead isn’t safe. An economic downturn could make those fees and markups the first thing budget-conscious customers cut. A new, AI-native competitor could emerge. So DoorDash is expanding—into grocery, retail, and new geographies. Xu’s vision is to be the “first phone call” for any local business issue, not just delivery. It’s a massive ambition. But is it a prescient diversification or a disastrous distraction? The company’s entire identity is built on mastering the intense, fast-paced logistics of hot food. Moving parcels or cold groceries is a different beast. Can the “last 100 feet” philosophy translate? They’re betting the company on it.
The Core Obsession That Built a Behemoth
Looking back, that early Stanford football disaster set the tone. Refunding orders that wiped out 40% of their cash, then baking apology cookies all night? That’s a level of customer obsession that borders on insanity for a startup on the brink. But it established a core value. They realized their product wasn’t just an app—it was the entire, fragile experience of getting a meal from a restaurant kitchen to your door without frustration. Every other competitor that failed, like Munchery or Sprig, tried to change the food itself. DoorDash just focused on moving it better than anyone else. In a world where reliable physical logistics are becoming a rare and valuable commodity, that focus might be their most durable asset. The trick is seeing if that maniacal attention to detail can scale beyond the dinner rush.
