Tony Xu co-founded DoorDash and turned it into the largest food delivery platform in the United States. If you've ordered food delivery in the last few years, there's a decent chance DoorDash was involved.
Xu was born in Nanjing, China, and immigrated to the US with his parents when he was four. His mom worked in a restaurant, which is where he first saw how hard the food service industry is and how thin the margins are. He went to UC Berkeley for undergrad and then Stanford for his MBA.
The DoorDash idea came out of a Stanford class project in 2013. Xu and his co-founders Andy Fang and Stanley Tang started by literally delivering food themselves to test the concept. They'd take orders, drive to restaurants, pick up the food, and bring it to people. That scrappy beginning turned into one of the biggest tech companies to come out of Stanford in the 2010s.
DoorDash went public in December 2020 and the IPO valued the company at nearly $40 billion. That's a long way from personally delivering pad thai in a Honda Civic.
On Shark Tank as a guest shark, Xu brings a tech founder perspective that's grounded in logistics, marketplace dynamics, and scaling a two-sided platform. He understands the gig economy, food service, and what it takes to build something massive from a class project. He was included in Fortune's "40 Under 40" in 2020.
Key milestones:
- Co-founded DoorDash in 2013, now the largest food delivery platform in the US
- Took DoorDash public in 2020 at a nearly $40 billion valuation
- Immigrated to the US from China at age four
- Fortune "40 Under 40" (2020)