HOW DOORDASH WON THE DELIVERY WARS

INSIDE TONY XU'S BATTLE TO “MASTER THE LAST 100 FEET.”

- BY JASON DEL REY

THE DELIVERY GUY'S legs were propelling him toward the parked car I was in at a pace that registered somewhere between “I'm training for my neighborhood 5K” and “Grab the keys, start the ignition, let's bail!”The scene might have posed some cause for concern if not for the identity of the man barreling toward me: It was Tony Xu, cofounder and CEO of DoorDash, the $85 billion delivery company that has experienced a meteoric rise over the past five years.

But on this mild fall day in downtown San Francisco, Xu was not playing the role of Fortune 500 CEO. Instead he was spending the afternoon as a “Dasher” for DoorDash—zooming around San Francisco in a staffer’s white Audi SUV (his own car was cluttered with his kids’ car seats, he told me) to deliver fried chicken salads and Mediterranean bowls. It wasn't his first time; as a cofounder of the company, he was one of the company’s first Dashers—and all U.S. salaried employees must do four delivery shifts a year. (At one point he pulled a mid-street U-turn that impressed even this New York City native.)

A short while earlier, Xu had accepted four orders from the same ghost kitchen (industry vernacular for a takeout-only restaurant). “This is what I call playing the game on extra hard mode,” Xu said. “I’ve never done a quadruple batch.”

Now, Xu wanted to demonstrate a feature on the DoorDash app’s interface for Dashers. “The order's not ready yet but look, I want to show you something cool,” Xu told me as he neared the Audi, which he had parked in a questionably legal spot on a narrow two-way side street in San Francisco's SoMa neighborhood. “You see that? It just popped up like 10 seconds ago.”

Xu thrust his iPhone toward my face to read the alert: “Would you like to unassign from the order?” I was a bit stumped.