Uncapped #55 | Tony Xu from DoorDash
Shownotes
Tony Xu is the co-founder and CEO of DoorDash, the leading local commerce platform in the United States. Since co-founding DoorDash in 2013, Tony has built the company into a publicly traded business operating across 40 countries, spanning restaurants, grocery, convenience, retail, and advertising.
We discussed how Tony thinks about AI spend and what it means to be an "atoms company" in a world racing to consume tokens. Tony shared his framework for directing AI toward customer outcomes rather than pure exploration, and why DoorDash's physical world infrastructure becomes more valuable as AI agents mature. We also got into the 70-year consumer trend behind DoorDash's growth, how the company built the fastest $1B ads business in history while protecting the consumer experience, why every DoorDash employee still does deliveries to this day, and what Tony means when he says DoorDash is still only single digit percentages of its core market.
Timestamps
(0:00) Intro
(0:44) AI spend and token consumption
(2:59) Directing AI toward customer outcomes
(5:08) How DoorDash uses AI today
(8:18) Atoms vs. bits
(12:47) What LLMs can do for the DoorDash app
(17:09) Was the $35 burrito obvious in 2013?
(20:39) The 70-year food consumption trend
(22:20) Consumer trends beyond food
(26:41) Sequencing: seven years on restaurants before groceries
(29:37) Building the ads business
(33:13) 1% better every day
(34:23) Math and humanity
(38:37) Growth levers at scale
(41:09) Speed, drones, and autonomous delivery
(43:39) Why everyone at DoorDash still does deliveries
(44:16) What Tony is most excited about
(46:14) Keeping startup intensity at year 13
Links:
https://uncappedpod.com/