The Frontier with Brendan Foody
00:01:01 · Brendan Foody, Andy Fang
[00:01:01] S0: It has been a wild 12 months. Well, I figured the place we can start is with a little bit of your background growing up in the Bay Area, going to Harker, the origin story before DoorDash. Uh, if you can maybe share a little bit more about what all that was like. [00:01:17] S1: Yeah, sure. I mean, you also grew up in the Bay Area. So born and raised in the Bay Area, um, like kind of near Saratoga, Cupertino, West San Jose, kind of shuffled around those areas. Yeah, went to Harker for high school, uh, where I studied computer science. [00:01:32] S0: What was that like? Because I always I feel like Harker has the highest density of high caliber people, like higher than Stanford or Harvard. [00:01:41] S1: Oh, dude, I'm honored. Honored as the Harker Eagle. [00:01:43] S0: And I I'm always wondering what's in the blood. Yeah.
00:01:46 · Andy Fang
[00:01:46] S1: From what I hear now, it's even more kind of competitive, if you will, than it was back then. I didn't actually feel it was that competitive, to be honest. Like people definitely worked hard, but I always felt like it was an environment where you could kind of like learn what you wanted. Fun fact is I actually took a neural networks class at Harker. So this was back when um neural networks were like totally unpopular. And so like the way it was taught in class is like, hey, this is like a technology that like isn't gonna be useful, but like interesting to learn about. And then like who would have ever guessed? Like that was back in what 2009? And then fast forward, oh my gosh, like it's like obviously powering all this crazy stuff. So um, I don't know, it was crazy uh in that sense, like in terms of the rigor, but I don't know. I think it's just like an environment where people felt like you could learn a lot about very technical subjects, and um yeah, also gotta like kind of do stuff outside of just like coding and stuff. I was very personally into like the competitive like math and like computing stuff. That was like kind of my thing, but I also did like student council, I was in the school musical, I don't know. So it's like you kind of do range of things, and I think the the perception from the outside is like it's this massive like pressure cooker, and like you gotta like compete with your colleagues, but I personally didn't feel that, and like a lot of our colleagues are still very close, even to this day. So yeah.
00:03:06 · Brendan Foody, Andy Fang
[00:03:06] S0: Well, the fact that you were learning about neural nets well over a decade ago is pretty wild. So I guess it's a testament to just the proximity to everything happening in Silicon Valley and how unique that is at Harker. And then how old were you when you founded DoorDash? 20. 20. Okay, I was 19. There you go. And I I was telling you I remember the early days of using Palo Alto delivery when I was growing up at the area, which was pretty wild. But what was that like in so far as the scrappiness early on, who owned what, and what the early days were like? [00:03:41] S1: Palo Alto delivery days. I mean, we were still in school. I think you guys dropped out, right? When you started? We did, yes. Yeah. So you made the yeah, you made a good call. I mean, because for us, we were still in school. So it was like technically we started when it was like a class project. So when we started Palo Alto Delivery, we were initially only open five days a week from like five to eight p.m. Cause like we had class during the day, and then like we kind of wanted to go to late night after. Yeah, and this was before YC too. So yeah, I mean, in the early days, we're all just kind of doing deliveries ourselves. Like that was like the bulk of the work we were doing, is like actually just like fulfilling the logistics and like figuring out what how to like get the orders to get filled and all that stuff. [00:04:17] S0: And how long were you guys running it before YC and roughly what scale did it get to?
00:04:17 · Brendan Foody, Andy Fang
[00:04:17] S0: And how long were you guys running it before YC and roughly what scale did it get to? [00:04:21] S1: We did our first delivery, I want to say January 2013. We got into YC April, but we didn't start YC until June. And actually, June is when we relaunched this DoorDash. So it was about six months ago. Uh and rough scale, I want to say like a hundred orders a day type volume. Okay. So reasonable. [00:04:41] S0: Yeah. I mean a little less, maybe. We dropped out when we were at about a million dollars in annual revenue. And so I guess you guys were already like pretty far along by the time you uh did YC. A little bit, yeah. What was the vision very early on? Because I know that the nature of so many of these things is that it evolves over time. Yeah. Talk about that. And and I'm just yeah, so curious. Like, how did your expectations when you were a student just getting started and 20 years old compare to what manifested over the subsequent decade?
00:05:14 · Andy Fang, Brendan Foody
[00:05:14] S1: Not like because we planned it that way, but I feel like our vision was always pretty consistent, actually. Like our vision, and I think Tony's um YC pitch is actually on YouTube, but like the pitch was always we wanted to be like the logistics network for your city, for your neighborhood. We wanted to like we I think Tony said we wanted to be the FedEx for local. And I think that was something where even though we started in restaurants, we were always very keen on kind of generalizing it and scaling it to something much bigger than that. And I think even our mission statement of empower local economies was something that was very consistent from our early days. But it's not like we planned it that way, it just happened to be very consistent. Even before we landed on delivery, we were still toying with things in the local commerce space. We interviewed like hundreds of merchants in the Bay Area just to see, like, as part of our class project, to see like, hey, what are problems that local merchants have? And you know, that's kind of how we stumbled on the delivery issue. [00:06:07] S0: And what was it that drew you to that problem specifically?
00:06:07 · Brendan Foody, Andy Fang
[00:06:07] S0: And what was it that drew you to that problem specifically? [00:06:11] S1: We still remember this. It was an interview we did with a local macaroon shop. And the store manager, she was like, I have this book of delivery orders that I can't fulfill. I have to turn them away. And we thought that was crazy because it's like, you know, for a local restaurant or store, it's like everybody's looking for sales, and like for you to turn away sales was a crazy idea for us. But then when we dug like one level lower, we're like, well, the only way for you to get these fulfilled is either pay 50 bucks for like a local courier or you do it yourself. And so that's kind of how we just stumbled upon the idea. [00:06:41] S0: Roughly 15 years later, almost that now, you guys have transformed DoorDash into a really category-defining company. And I'm curious how that mission continues to play a role in the AI economy that's emerging and how it's transforming commerce and the whole way the economy works and what role you see DoorDash playing in that.