DoorDash started as a website called PaloAltoDelivery.com, built by Stanford students who asked local shops what they needed. The answer was delivery. Outside New York, most restaurants had no way to get food to people's homes. By December 2020, the pandemic had closed dining rooms across the country, and DoorDash was how many restaurants stayed open. Its drivers, called Dashers, had already hit a million deliveries in a single day.

A Website Called PaloAltoDelivery

Tony Xu, Andy Fang, Stanley Tang, and Evan Moore launched the service in Palo Alto in January 2013 and incorporated as DoorDash that June. As students, they had canvassed Bay Area businesses and were surprised how few could deliver. Outside New York City, delivery barely existed. The bet was that a network of local drivers could serve the suburbs. DoorDash expanded to the East Coast in 2014. By 2020 it served all 50 states, plus Canada and Australia.

A Pandemic Debut

DoorDash priced at $102 a share on December 8, 2020, and began trading on the NYSE the next day. It raised $3.37 billion. The stock closed its first day up about 86 percent, near $190. In 2023 DoorDash moved its listing to the Nasdaq. In 2025 it bought Deliveroo, the British delivery company, for about $3.9 billion. DoorDash is still public under the ticker DASH.

Cover: The Doorway, James McNeill Whistler. Art Institute of Chicago, public domain. Chosen for an open doorway.