Well, first of all, is there like, some rule that the graphics that you put in your S1 have to be just like, painfully low resolution?
Welcome to season seven, episode seven of Acquired, the podcast about great technology companies and the stories and playbooks behind them.
I'm Ben Gilbert and I'm the co founder of Pioneer Square Labs, a startup studio and venture capital firm in Seattle.
And I'm David Rosenthal and I am an angel investor and advisor to startups based in San Francisco.
And we are your hosts.
The year was 2013.
Everyone had just finished cracking their jokes about how every startup is just another photo sharing app.
But the wave of yet another food delivery app was just getting started.
Tony Hsu and his co founders were launching Palo Alto Delivery.com, which we all know today as DoorDash.
On this episode, we'll dive into how these Stanford students became one of the very few winners in the cutthroat food delivery category.
How they raised $2.5 billion from VCs, the SoftBank Vision Fund, and even sovereign wealth funds around the world.
How they went up against incumbents like GrubHub and Seamless.
And the even more well funded startup on a warpath for world domination, Uber.
This is the story of insanely fast growth.
A company currently tripling year over year.
And that's the December 2019 number before the global pandemic created the ultimate tailwind at their back to IPO at the greatest possible time in the business's history.
Yeah, they kind of nailed the timing on this one, didn't they?
They did, David.
Today we will dive into the question that we're all wondering.
Is it even possible to build a sustainable business with positive unit economics in this category?