Chris Tottman’s Post

The critical part of what Tony is saying is to build something fantastic for a specific type of customer before you worry about moats. Building something too rigid from day one puts hurdles in the way of adaptation, delivery and decision making. When you strike it big and the parts start working in cohesion around a Persona or Industry then moats become more critical. However, in the early days it is critical that you figure that out and deliver value before you pin yourself to something so specific. Chris Tottman #VenchaVideosforFoudners

DoorDash Capital Raises: 2013 Seed: $120,000 2014 Series A: $17.3 MILLION 2015 Series B: $40 MILLION 2016 Series C: $127 MILLION 2018 Series D: $250 MILLION Revenue $291 MM Net Loss of $204MM 2019 Series E & G: 400 MM + 100 MM 2020 Series G: $400 MM Total Raised in 7 years: $2.5 Billion Before you take advice from anyone, be sure their reality matches yours. Definitely spend 15 minutes on the internet to see how much you can take away from their advice. DoorDash started with first mover advantage. In the early days, they could have easily signed exclusive deals with the restaurants in the limited geography they served. They had limited competition, so restaurants wouldn’t have given up anything, and DoorDash would have avoided the massive burn on resources because they decided to not plan for success. Can you afford to not take 60 minutes in the early days to plan for success? Are you creating a new market? Can you bank on raising >$18MM before your two year anniversary? Are you running a business where investors will subsidize your massive customer acquisition costs? Are you comfortable operating with no hopes of being profitable on an annual basis EVER? If not, maybe you are not the right audience for this advice. #innovationmanagement

You're a lunatic founder and you desperately want to hit your 2024 plan. Unfortunately, nothing's working, everything's a mess, and you're off by miles. Typically the issue isn't one of talent or execution, but one of organization. That early startup plans are often simply the sum total of a founder's direct, sometimes-incongruent marching orders to each of their siloed VPs, rather than a blueprint for how to organize, problem solve, execute, and ultimately succeed, together. The solution - at least at DoorDash - was the idea of ops-led 'pods'; single cross-functional units, with a single DRI, and a single business objective. These structures ensured there was clarity on who was accountable for a plan's success, who had final decision making authority on resource allocation, how each function was expected to contribute to hitting goal, and how the team was expected to collaborate, to maximize its odds of success. So, here we go with part 3 of a very-likely 3-part series on the DoorDash Operating System: "Pods". Link in comments!

Stanley Tang shares three lessons from the founding story of DoorDash Stanley Tang, Tony Xu, and Andy Fang founded DoorDash while they were students at Stanford. In today’s clip, Stanley tells the founding story of DoorDash and the three startup lessons he learned from this time. 1. Test your hypothesis During his junior year at Stanford, Stanley wanted to build technology for small business owners so he sat down with the owner of a macaroon store in Palo Alto to learn about her problems. The owner took out a large booklet with pages of delivery orders that she had to turn down because she couldn’t fulfill them. This seemed like an interesting problem to the DoorDash founders so they spent the next few weeks talking to another 150-200 small businesses who also didn’t have a good solution for delivery. This led the founders to wonder: “Delivery is such an obvious thing. Why hasn’t anyone solved this before? We must be missing something. Maybe people have tried this in the past but failed because there wasn’t consumer demand. So we thought, okay, how can we test this hypothesis?” They decided to create a simple experiment and spent an afternoon putting together a quick landing page with some PDF menus of local restaurants in Palo Alto with their personal cell phone number at the bottom. They called the company Palo Alto Delivery and weren’t expecting much: “We weren’t really expecting anything. We just launched it, and all we wanted to see was would we get phone calls from this? If we got enough phone calls then maybe this delivery idea was something worth pursuing.” Later that day, the founders received a call from their first customer. They picked up the Thai food order and delivered it themselves. The next day they got two phone calls. Then five the day after that. Then seven. Then ten. “Soon we started gaining traction on campus with Palo Alto Delivery, which was pretty crazy because it was just a landing page, you had to look up PDF menus to place your order, and then you had to call in… That’s kind of when we knew we were onto something.” 2. Launch fast As Stanley explains: “I think another key point to remember is that we launched this in about an hour. We didn’t have any drivers. We didn’t have any algorithms. We didn’t spend six months building a fancy dispatch system… At the beginning, it’s all about testing your idea, trying to get this thing off the ground, and figuring out whether this was something people even wanted.” 3. Do things that don’t scale “At YC there’s this mantra we like to talk about: ‘Doing things that don’t scale.’ At the beginning, we were the delivery drivers. We were customer support… We used Square to charge our customers. We used Google Docs to keep track of our orders. . . You can read the whole newsletter here: https://lnkd.in/gU52Z-6y Video Source: Y Combinator

The birth of a $63B dollar idea. This is how DoorDash did their first public pitch ⤵ 1/ The Humble Beginnings ➠ A $63B Idea Started Small ➝ Tony Xu pitched DoorDash at YC demo day, August 2013. ➝ Back then, it wasn’t DoorDash; it was Palo Alto Delivery. ➝ Founders were the only Dashers. ↳ Office? School housing. ↳ Marketing? Dorm room flyers. 2/ The Leap Forward ➠ From Dorms to Domination ➝ Be ready to iterate. ➝ Listen to your customer. ➝ Be ready to pivot. ➝ Scrappy solutions can lead to scalable empires. ➝ Staying in the trenches sharpens your problem-solving skills. ➝ Investors care less about polish, more about potential. ↳ Even giants start scrappy. ↳ Relentless focus beats resources. 3/ Lessons for Fellow Founders ➠ Persistence Pays ➝ Stick with the grind—momentum compounds. ➝ Humble starts don’t limit massive outcomes. ➝ Small moves, smartly made, snowball into big wins. ↳ The only way out is through. What’s stopping you from launching that idea today? ▶ How much do beginnings really matter? ▶ Are we undervaluing grit over glamour? ▶ Could your “scrappy idea” be tomorrow’s billion-dollar breakthrough? // Repost this ⇄ // Source: via Kevin Jurovich 🙏 Follow me for daily posts on emerging tech and growth: https://lnkd.in/gqzS_9Tf

Lessons for success here? 1️⃣ Make the right bet. You have to believe you've found an area where you can be advantaged. Understand the market and back yourself. 2️⃣ There probably isn't any low-hanging fruit any more. You can't compete with the incumbent on their territory (i.e. don't build 'me-too' businesses). It's the innovator's dilemma. You might have to go for lower margin to get scale. 3️⃣ Know where the market is, know it well, and know why it might be difficult for a competitor to serve it. Know the solution to that. 4️⃣ Focus (the verb). You only have one product to focus on. You're so advantaged over larger companies. Capital allocation should be super-easy. 5️⃣ Be super-fast. Whether it's outpacing the competition, whether it's land-grab, grab the territory. You can't claim you're 'the only' if you're not 'the only'. I am not commenting on DoorDash as a specific business here. I don't know them well enough. What do you think to the principles? #AngelThink #angelinvesting #angelinvestors #startups #entrepreneurs

Want to compete with the big dogs? 🐕 Tony Xu, DoorDash founder, drops some 💎: 1. Don't fight on their turf You'll lose. Period. 2. Find your niche • Something they're not incentivized to do • Lower margin areas they avoid • Innovator's dilemma in action 3. Identify your advantage DoorDash's edge? Delivering outside city centers Why? That's where most people actually live 🏘️ 4. Make a calculated bet • Know your market • Understand structural differences • Predict where the market's heading 5. Move fast. Like, really fast ⚡ • As a startup, focus is your superpower • You've got one product. Period. • No complex "capital allocation" decisions 6. Embrace your startup simplicity Forget what business schools teach about CEO jobs Your mission? Build. That. One. Product. Remember: Being correct on your bet is crucial. DoorDash's suburban focus? It paid off big time. But here's the kicker: They didn't know for sure. They just moved fast and stayed focused. What's your startup's unique angle? How are you outmaneuvering the incumbents? — #VenchaVideosforFounders | Video #29 Find us at Vencha 💛 And check out my Book "The Go To Market Handbook for SaaS Leaders" 🌟

As a former competitor I can vouch for the relentless execution. Doordash's rapid market share gain can be attributed to a clever strategy of targeting untapped suburban markets. But the real story lies in the team's relentless execution and attention to detail. By continuously improving delivery speed and reliability, scrutinizing restaurant and dasher quality, and optimizing cost, Doordash provided better selection and faster, cheaper, and more reliable delivery. This dedication to excellence is the key to success for most startups. So, if you want to make it big, show up every day with grit and attention to detail. #startupsuccess #entrepreneurmindset #attentiontodetail

WATCH: Your #logistics news wrap of the week in 90 seconds. 𝗛𝗲𝗿𝗲'𝘀 𝗮 𝗿𝗲𝗰𝗮𝗽: ➡️ Australian startup Ofload has a carbon analytics platform, but what's the purpose? ➡️ Amazon partners with Grubhub, what does this mean for other food delivery companies? ➡️ Yodel partners with The Cornish Company, focusing on supporting local artisans. Link to articles in comments. 🔗👇 #LogisticsNews #amazon #Logistics #Locate2uNewsWrap #yodel #grubhub