Who they are
Co-founder and CEO of DoorDash, which he started in 2013 at Stanford as a class project delivering food for local Palo Alto restaurants. Xu, who grew up working in his mother's restaurant, built DoorDash into the US market leader in food delivery and took it public in 2020. Known for an operator mindset — running the business from the ground up, riding along with drivers, obsessing over unit economics — and for outlasting better-funded competitors through execution discipline.
Core Ideas
- Operator Mindset — CEOs should stay close to the work
- Local Market Economics — marketplaces are won city by city
- Execution as Moat — beating incumbents through relentless iteration
Related
- DoorDash — the company
- Y Combinator — DoorDash's early accelerator