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Comment by ryporter | Hacker News Reader

It's a straightforward and logical business model. Restaurants want a way to deliver food to their customers. They provide this service, and are compensated for it.

They ensure that the food is edible by working with restaurants that customers already dine-in at. Sure, they can't guarantee that the food is edible, but no delivery service can guarantee anything about the product that they are delivering. They have to rely on the reputation of the sender.

The problem is instead that this is too common of a business model. There doesn't appear to be anything particularly innovative about what DoorDash is doing, and they don't appear to be executing very well. It's not a fundamentally flawed business; it's just a uninspiring one that was probably overvalued.

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Deliveroo, Hungry House, Deliverance, Just Eat. That's the (well entrenched) competitive landscape in London alone. And I doubt those are sucking in numbers like 127m of funding (at god knows what valuation). These guys at doordash must have one helluva good pitch.

Deliverance long pre-dates the others; I'll wager it'll still be standing when the dust settles.

Deliveroo raised $100M (~£66M) back in November '15, that's $27m short but still. source: http://uk.businessinsider.com/london-startup-deliveroo-has-r...

Fair enough, at valuation of more than 1billion GBP so double that of doordash.

Doordash and Deliveroo's business model is different from hungry house or just eat. And to echo what laurentb said, Dilveroo is not only recently funded but also only just expanding into other big UK cities.

Like deliveroo recently went live in Nottingham (May 2015) and they have only fairly good restaurants who did not previously do delivery on their books.

Just Eat and HH added a centralised online booking service to existing takeaways. Dilveroo and Doordash aim to deliver restaurant quality food, it's a new market segment.

It would be innovative if they had some super fast on-line optimization of delivery routes. Optimized routes would allow them to chain several pickups from restaurants with a chain of deliveries.

Given the fact that the optimization is global they would have the advantage of doing global optimization over each restaurant doing it locally. Therefore they could charge less for deliveries while paying their workers the same.

Unfortunately, a google search of the founders tells us they haven't got the slightest clue how to do that. What the investors can hope is that this money will allow them to find people that can make the extra effort to rise the business above all of the similar ones.

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