DoorDash raises $535M, now valued at $1.4B | Hacker News Reader

DoorDash raises $535M, now valued at $1.4B

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107 pointssmaili128 comments

I haven't used DoorDash but my experience with food delivery services has been average. As a bachelor I loved them until I found out these companies use multiple ways to add up charges. Most of the time restaurant cost in-shop vs cost app varies a lot. Then they charge some kind of "packing charges". Including delivery fee some times the delivery price is 25% more than restaurant prices.

When I talked to some of the restaurants, they said these guys can take up to 30% of the food cost. It means DoorDash et al, can take up to 50% of an order.

So, I find it surprising that these guys still struggle to become profitable.

I also think that this whole phenomena might actually end up pushing restaurant prices up to the detriment of consumers.

YMMV but I haven't noticed any change from places that list on delivery services. The local places around here typically just inflate their prices in the app to cover the delivery cut and then push customers to order directly with coupons, or takeout deals.

You could be right and it might not last forever, but independent customer acquisition has a tangible value and I'll be basking in the 35c wings because I'm okay with calling in my order for as long as possible.

Same here. On top of that, the delivery itself can be pretty sub par. I had one delivery person not understand the concept of entering in a code on a keypad to get into an apartment building. Not having difficulties entering the code, mind you, but not knowing what the keypad was even for.

Postmates delivery folks never ever read the delivery instructions, I have to send them all the callbox code via the app when they are close, and 25% of them still call and have no idea what to do. DoorDash folks at least read the instructions..

every time I order from food dash I overpay and the food is cold. won't order from them ever again.

In China where delivery of all kinds is omnipresent (the other day we even ordered someone to go shop for us and had the makings for breakfast arrive within half an hour!) it feels to me that people are beginning to see the limitations of prepared food delivery.

While it's always great to get some food when you're hungry, the waiting involved in a typical order is 45min+ and the experience never matches eat-in or self-made due to factors like post-cook cool-down while in transit, corresponding ingredient visual and textural degradation, timing unpredictability (what if I need to bury myself in work or have a conference call? I don't want someone at the doorbell suddenly interrupting), etc. Limited hours of availability also suck, as do random phone calls about parking/access/are-you-around/etc.

Some of these problems are impossible to completely solve as orders tend to be heavily grouped at peak periods, and driver and vehicle fleet size cannot be realistically optimized for short term burst demand patterns without substantially increasing costs.

Except unlike here in NA, the cost of a delivered meal in China is often times less than their in-restaurant equivalent. The delivery platforms there are still offering large discounts, and it's not only for new users.

For example is common to see restaurants offering, 15 rmb off for orders over 50 rmb.

The cost is less because:

(1) the restaurant has limited sit down space and chef time during peak periods;

(2) eating times in China are highly regimented (office lunch hour dominates);

(3) delivery customers by default can tolerate higher volatility in meal completion schedule;

(4) the actual cost to the restaurant for a 50RMB meal outside of the the limited sit down space represented by high rental costs and the chef's salary (already paid by peak hour sit-down customers) is negligible, often under 10RMB including ingredients, cooking energy and packaging;

(5) delivery platforms are battling for market share.

In short, the primary issue running a conventional restaurant is limited temporal and spatial bandwidth to serve customers. Delivery takes advantage of resources already spent toward the primary issues, so can be substantially discounted without loss.

One of the big players should launch a giant warehouse - serving as a giant kitchen. Capable of cooking all kinds of different varieties of cuisine and tons of automation. And a huge staff of well-trained chefs cooking, and delivering to a ~50 mile radius.

I'd imagine they'd open this in - say Fremont - and deliver to the entire bay area.

It would be great, because I could order Mexican food for me, Indian food for the wife, and the kids could have a couple hamburgers.

Seems like something Amazon would be good at.

Honestly? Sounds awful. Industrialized, lowest common denominator fast food. Plus pretty much any time I've eaten at a big restaurant offering options from a bunch of different cuisines, the experience has been somewhere between mediocre and awful.

ADDED: As others have pointed out, you can put together something that's effectively managed like a high-end food court. But it seems as if the economics are tough.

Yep, sounds like one step above Soylent.

My experience has been that the more things on the menu the worse the lower quality the food is, however it can be executed successfully. Wegmans, one of the grocers in the area has a huge variety of prepared food options. Despite the number of dishes, the quality is consistently high. They put a substantial effort into developing an entre before it goes into stores, and also own a few restaurants that probably help with this. Just one example of how it can be executed successfully.

Isn't this basically what Munchery does (although their meals are delivered cold)?

I noticed that Whole Foods is essentially starting to move in that direction, with these options:

* Eat in the store (self-serve "hot bar") * Take home already cooked, heat and eat * Take home meal kit, cook at home

https://www.wholefoodsmarket.com/department/prepared-foods

Add in Amazon Fresh for home delivery of most of the above, and they seem to have a covered most of the options.

https://www.amazon.com/AmazonFresh/

> starting to move in that direction

Just want to point out that these things are not new at whole foods. I can recall eating at the hot bar 3+ years ago, and they've always had take home already cooked items as well.

>One of the big players should launch a giant warehouse - serving as a giant kitchen. Capable of cooking all kinds of different varieties of cuisine and tons of automation. And a huge staff of well-trained chefs cooking, and delivering to a ~50 mile radius.

They did, it was called SpoonRocket. I loved it, you could get a decent meal delivered in under 5 minutes. But they failed horribly because the economics just don't work out [0].

https://techcrunch.com/2016/03/15/spoonrocket-shuts-down/ [0]

I miss SpoonRocket. It was super convenient and they had some really good food.

Agreed. Their breakfast options were the best. I could wake up in the morning for work, put in an order, and have a full hot breakfast show up at my door by the time I get out of the shower.

What I really miss is the pulled pork mac 'n cheese. I don't want to know how many calories were in that thing, but it was delicious.

>SpoonRocket had reached a positive contribution margin — it was selling meals for more than it cost to cook, package, and deliver them. But due to other costs and the frosty fundraising climate, it wasn’t able to get the money it needed to continue operating.

I wouldn't describe that as "failing horribly". They just couldn't raise money. I was under the impression that they were turning a profit. Maybe this article isn't accurate, do you have other information? I'm actually quite interested in this story, seems like a cool idea but I imagine the financial side of this needs to be really well managed. So many possible places that costs could get away from you.

Others in this space: Sprig (failed) and Munchery (still around) come to mind.

DC has Galley, which cooks and delivers meals that you finish/reheat in your own oven. The food is good and the prices are fair and the delivery is fast (though now you need to pick a "Delivery Window" and sometimes they sell out). I think it's founded by former LivingSocial folks.

INAL, but I'm fairly certain there are a lot of food safety regulations that would prevent that or make it a hell of a hassle.

Based on other companies which tried and failed (e.g. Spoonrocket, Sprig) this seems like a risky model to follow. It's possible that the costs of managing such a kitchen plus delivery service is at this point more expensive than brick and mortar, or the margin earned on these deliveries is much less than sit down customers.

Maybe once kitchen automation technology gets there this can be a workable model.

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2017/05/26/on-demand-food-startup-spr... [2] https://techcrunch.com/2016/03/15/spoonrocket-shuts-down/

ClusterTruck (https://clustertruck.com/) does this in Indianapolis and I'm a huge fan of it. There strategy is to license recipes from local food trucks then cook them in a kitchen downtown. I A bit pricy but I think the business model is brilliant and the food is always good and delivery is fast and consistent.

I'm surprised they haven't grown or expanded more. I think it's such a great model, but then again who knows what the logistics is like especially in a larger city.

Deliveroo, the biggest player in the UK does this https://www.theguardian.com/business/2017/oct/28/deliveroo-d...

This may have been a byproduct of their acquisition of Maple.

We actually just did something like this, but on a much smaller scale than "a giant warehouse".

We've (https://myaccio.com/) been running as a premium delivery service in Victoria, BC for a few years. Instead of taking a 25-30% discount from restaurants we were marking items up by 20%. We deliver mostly from the "good" restaurants who can't afford to take a 25-30% hit just to provide delivery. While this was turning into a good lifestyle business, delivering food when you don't control all the variables is extremely hard (and not exactly profitable at a small scale).

What we ended up making was "The Kitchen by Accio". It's high end delivery food made by extremely talented chefs. There are four concepts to choose from each with its own head chef. We launched just over 3 weeks ago and things are going pretty well so far. We still deliver from other restaurants but we've noticed that a growing population of our "regulars" are starting to just order from The Kitchen.

That's really cool. I hadn't considered that model before. Seems other's have, my gut tells me there's a successful business to be had just have to keep the financials inline.

There are probably a lot of businesses that work as premium small-scale businesses that explicitly are about convenience for people who don’t mind spending money on them. The problem with almost all of these VC-funded startups is they have to grow, grow, grow which means that they have to also appeal to people who count their pennies or at least dollars. And it’s hard to sell a luxury service without a surcharge.

SpoonRocket (as noted) and Sprig were doing this and neither survived. Great concept, but extremely difficult to pull off.

My guess is they're raising to follow the path of deliveroo: https://techcrunch.com/2017/09/24/deliveroo-raises-385m/ which is opening kitchens to allow restaurants to increase production (and, who knows, maybe create a few brands of their own).

Ah, middlemen. There's always a peril in letting someone else own your customer.

Doordash is a tire fire. 10x worse than Uber Eats for basic service. My experience is less than 50% success at delivering what I ordered. Missing items, wrong items, wrong totals, completely failed deliveries, and non-equitable compensation. Then, shit follow up when they fail. I’ll savor in more than a little Shadenfreud when they fold.

Downvote at will. But be brave enough to offer some counterpoint. They truly suck at delivering on their promise. That includes direct comparison to their competitors.

I have ordered with Doordash 10-15 times. It failed me only once when the "dasher" delivered my food to a random neighbor (who actually ate all of it)

Guess it's a regional issue then. Upvoted. Dfw is honestly terrible. Less than 50/50. I'd be embarrassed.

Anecdotal but I've only had one issue (not delivered) on 50+ orders here in Chicago.

Their customer service was quick and made sure the delivery was expedited, only received it 40 minutes late.

They are also one of the only on-demand providers to serve a lot of common fast food in my area, which is handy when I'm feeling non-healthy food.

Interesting, upvoted. So maybe I'm seeing a regional problem. It's honestly terrible. DFW area Dasher, if you're listening.

That's been my experience with DoorDash as well - mainly in San Diego and Redwood City.

Wow that's a lot of dilution for a late stage round. I feel bad for the employees that suddenly have their equity cut by 60%. If I'm doing my math right, ($865 MM pre-money) then it means even with the higher valuation preferred price goes down

Do you mind sharing the math? Isn't impossible to know how much the equity is cut by because we don't know how much dilution there was (vs. liquidation)?

Most likely earlier share holders sold their stakes, so not much dilution. Perhaps founders took money off the table too. In these cases, there is not much dilution because new shares are not issued (but not much capitalization either).

It's hard to infer much from this article since it lacks all relevant detail. If the earlier share holders are selling common stock, it's not clear how that affects the preferred price.

That's right, but it is usually minimal. This is a very dilutive round. But they need the cash, as the general MO is to try and drive competition out of business by pushing prices down. So not much of a choice here.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but couldn't the preferred price stay flat, even with dilution? The company issues new shares and sells them at e.g. the current preferred price. Now there are more outstanding shares, and a higher post-money valuation, but a close to flat pre-money valuation. In this case the preferred price in real percentage of the company terms is higher since there are now more shares outstanding, but the price per share is flat.

I imagine the 409a (common stock price went down), but I don't think you can infer from this that the preferred price went down. The missing figure is how many shares were issued.

Is there like a good blog post out there that can explain the difference between preferred and common stock, dilution, and all the other nuanced things about equity?

yeah but all the employees probably have common stock not preferred so they are in fact getting screwed.

Some reports put the post-money valuation after the Series C at $700M. For this round, the pre-money is reported to be $865M and post-money is $1.4B.

If I had a 1% stake in DoorDash after the Series C, it was worth $7M ($700M * 1%). Assuming all the Series D round was new shares issued (we don't know the details), my stake in DoorDash would be diluted from 1% to 0.62% after the Series D (1% * $865M/$1.4B). However, the value of my stake would have grown from $7M to $8.68M (0.62% * $1.4B) because the valuation went up.

This obviously ignores things like value of preferred vs common stock. But, it is not straightforward to say everyone's stakes were diluted by 60% and it's bad. They were diluted, but the value of their holdings theoretically went up.

This is something a lot of the "all dilution is bad" commenters don't seem to understand. Dilution isn't automatically bad. What matters is the total dollar value of your stake in the company. Did it go up or down? What percentage of the pie you hold isn't really relevant.

The main takeaway imo is that door dash did not have the metrics to command a favorable valuation. The funding terms inform us of the immediate prospects of the company.

I really want to like all of these services. I've used Grubhub, Uber Eats and DoorDash. My problem with them is that it costs way more than eating at the restaurant. It's usually 30% - 40% of the cost of the food for delivery, service fees and tip.

I've always wondered why it wasn't cheaper to do take out than eat at a restaurant. I'm not taking up a parking space, table, using facilities, or taking up as much of the employees time but I still incur that overhead.

Food is priced to existing overhead; delivery is added to that. Whether or not you walk in the door doesn’t shift their fixed costs, and the marginal cost of the busboy cleaning one more table is trivial.

  I've always wondered why it wasn't cheaper to do take out
  than eat at a restaurant. I'm not taking up a parking 
  space, table, using facilities, or taking up as much of the 
  employees time but I still incur that overhead.

You're also not buying high-margin drinks or being swayed to buy the specials (which are often used to balance inventory).

The impact of drinks really can't be overstated. As a booze-loving city, Portland restaurant's economy is especially interesting. At least half of the meals I eat out are at bars and you can get a quality meal for $8-12. But this all hinges on drinks subsidizing the rest of the meal.

IIRC, it is common in the UK to charge different prices for dine-in vs take-out. Can anyone confirm?

It does happen, but its not very common. (some exceptions for cold food, where the tax is different).

In January I caught the flu and was down for 2 weeks. Amazon Prime Now and food delivery services like Uber Eats were a blessing.

The reason why takeout isn't cheaper is they want to encourage you to sit in the restaurant. You're more likely to order drinks, desserts, and have a more controlled/positive emotional response to the eating experience.

Here in S.Korea you can order from a restaurant and they deliver it to your apt door. The food arrives on porcelain plates and bowls with utensils and trays just like you would get it from their restaurants. After an hour the delivery guy returns to your door to pickup the plates and utensils.

The price is the same as you would pay when you go inside their restaurants and you don't have to pay tip. They don't accept tips.

Many of these services take a cut of the order price [0], so it's not surprising if restaurants chose to up their price to try and make up the difference.

[0] - https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-business-model-of-Uber-eat...

How can DoorDash compete with Uber Eats?

Yeah, it's pretty insane. Makes me miss my hometown back in Turkey, where most restaurants deliver to the same neighborhood for free, and there is no mandatory tipping culture (although most people still tip if the delivery is quick).

"Xu said the company became “contribution margin positive” in the last year, which means that it’s profitable on a per-order basis. In fact, DoorDash has become profitable in its earliest markets."

Its funny this is a milestone for a company at this stage. Congrats you aren't losing money on every order!

Creative accounting at its finest.

Company is either GAAP profitable, pro-forma profitable, EBITDA profitable, cashflow profitable, cashflow neutral or money losing. All other metrics are creative accounting that put lipstick on a pig masking money losing status.

DoorDash is money losing.

Which is amusing given they don't have to pay the actual labor to deliver goods or make food. Are they set up in the valley paying mega wages perhaps?

Not sure why you think they don't pay their drivers. The exact amount is unclear, but according to this FAQ [0], it is "at least $1" per order, and at least a variable "guaranteed amount" that door dash will pay up to, regardless of customer tips.

[0] https://dasherhelp.doordash.com/new-dasher-pay-model-faq

>> became “contribution margin positive” in the last year, which means that it’s profitable on a per-order basis.

>Congrats you aren't losing money on every order!

Seems like an overstatement as fixed costs are still not covered when they are "contribution marigin positve".

Definitely. At least, though, it means there's a path to profitability just by increasing volume, right? Like, if every new order brings it more than it marginally costs, with enough eventually you'd cover your fixed costs, so it seems like at least a rough validation of the business model (assuming their total addressable market is as big as they think it is). Vs, say, Uber, which is as far as I know still losing money on every ride and has no path out aside from not at all certain, majorly disruptive technical innovation.

> Congrats you aren't losing money on every order!

I think this misunderstands how marketplaces are built. Traditional economics would agree with you and say that selling $1 at $0.90 is insanity. Traditional economics have been slow to catch up with marketplace economics although there have been some recent papers that start explaining a better framework.

If you know that a marketplace has strong network efforts and improved performance at scale. The right strategy is to understand the trade-off between time and $ required to get to scale in your marketplace.

The optimal strategy often means subsidizing a market at a price below your actual cost for early markets. The fact that Door Dash talks about their business in terms of early vs. late markets with different economics means that they are using this playbook.

There are of course many companies that think they are building a marketplace with a network effect when they are actually just losing money. I don't know DoorDash specifically.

Yeah that's the problem here its really hard to tell the difference between the two. Sometimes it feels like a "new economy" excuse.

Question, what is a good example of a market place that is now highly profitable where the unit economics/contribution margin were negative for a very long time.

Amazon is not an example, I guarantee they were making contribution margin on every book sold fairly early on.

Investors found that particular religion with Google. Losing money hand over fist till they put in adwords. They had to fight investors to put in one of the most profitable models on the planet. Ever since then, the game has changed. Investors now believe fervently, and founders realized investors may not know everything. Everyone else who came after drafted in Google's wake (I'm looking at you Zuck)

Yeah but thats different. Theres a difference between charging zero to get a network and losing money as a business vs selling a product and losing money on every single unit of that product being sold.

Possible to share link to said papers? I'd love to get up to speed on the first principles behind the frameworks

Basically, it's like Indy Jones with the leap of faith - there's a an inordinate amount of hope in the future.

https://thumbs.gfycat.com/PoorImperfectAdouri-size_restricte...

Thankfully, the world is afloat with cash looking for a home, and so we can continue with this game for a while. At least, I think the portal will stay open till the round closes. Which is enough mostly.

BTW, traditional economics can well model this using advanced options equations, but the answers won't come close to justifying the valuation they got.

I'm not sure I even understand what the network effects are here. I guess there are some potential efficiencies with having a single delivery company that handles deliveries rather than individual restaurants but it seems like a stretch. People I know who live in cities tend to just have a stack of take-out pizza/Chinese food/etc. menus for places that deliver (or not). Maybe I'm missing something but it doesn't really seem like an area that's crying out for "disruption."

Restaurant delivery people will be utilized 50% (trip there and back). If the network effect can do better than that, then there's a business.

Maybe its where you live? I live in Las Vegas, and with the 24 lifestyle that often includes drinking, these services have absolutely blown up out here. Granted its a pretty special case in terms of city density coupled with a larger than normal group of restaurants that are open late or 24 hours. That and the 215 beltway makes it so even if someone wants something from across town its not much of a hassle (lest its during rush hours obviously). I always wondered if it was the same in other cities, I just don't see it as sustainable without the 24 hour life style and the city density.

It's fair that there's been an increased expectation of near-immediate gratification. As a result, although a fair number of restaurants in cities have long offered delivery, it's not clear that ad hoc delivery on a restaurant-by-restaurant basis necessarily scales to this new world.

It will probably vary by location though. I live about 40 miles out of Boston and adjacent to a couple smaller cities. I have basically no food delivery options.

Using DoorDash or UberEats as your delivery service instead of building your delivery staff in-house is like using AWS or DO instead of building your own in-house ops team. Since most delivery workflows are pretty much identical (go to restaurant, pick up food, deliver food), it seems like any restaurant other than a "typical delivery" place would benefit from using someone else's infrastructure.

Except that "building your delivery staff in-house" more or less consists of hiring some teenagers to work for tips. It's not exactly architecting a datacenter. Furthermore, delivery is going to inherently be a local business even if you're a nationwide company.

I actually do think that there's something to be said for having a standardized service that a restaurant already offering take out can just sign up for. Maybe delivery is something they just never got around to offering. It just seems like a service that's hard to do well at a price people are willing to pay.

I'll see your anecdote and call with mine: I live in Atlanta and I can't think of a single person that doesn't use some app to order delivery anymore. Do you live in a city or just know people who live in cities.

I won't use them after I tried one of their 'free delivery' codes and then the next time I went to place the same order it came out to the exact same price with delivery included, they seemed to have increased the price of the food to cover it the previous time.

The problem I have with doordash is that though they say the delivery fee is $x, there are a lot of hidden charges. You are actually paying a lot more than that, a markup on food items + a delivery fee + 8% service fee + taxes + 15% tip (optional but selected by default) + a small order fee (if your order is less than a predefined min order value)

For instance, there's a a particular dish served at a local restaurant that I like, and I recently noticed that it is $11.99 at the restaurant but in doordash it's priced $13.99, delivery fee of $4.99, service fees of $1.88 and optional but pre-selected tip of $3.81. And, of course taxes in addition to this. At this point in some cases, its perhaps more economical to take an uber/lyft to the restaurant and back.

Agreed, their fees are annoying. The website also always glitches for me the first time I press the final order button. It looks nice but it's making me look at other similar companies more these days. I enjoyed the early days with no fees and no glitches.

DoorDash doesn't mark up menu prices any more, at least in my market. Supposedly restaurants didnt like the hidden markup, so they moved all of their fees into the delivery fee and the service fee.

Its not terribly fair to consider taxes and tip as "hidden charges", IMO. The taxes you pay even if you go to the restaurant yourself, and the tip is the majority of what the drivers get paid -- they dont work for free. I'd prefer a flat driver's fee, though, its not twice as much work for someone to deliver $50 of food vs $25, so I generally don't make large orders on DoorDash.

Menu prices on DoorDash are definitely still higher here than at the restaurant.

I agree taxes are not hidden charges, but it does sound a little deceitful to me that doordash bundles taxes with their service fee as one line item on their checkout page.

And, I don't share the same sympathy for the doordash drivers. I was already charged a delivery fee and a service fee separately, why is it still my responsibility to make sure the drivers get paid enough and not doordash's. Besides, the idea of tip for me is that I pay extra if I am happy with the service, and now I am expected to mindlessly pre-pay a tip before knowing if the service is going to be good or not. A reason why I prefer ubereatz, its a rating system but after the delivery.

The crazy thing is with all those fees, service charges, and markups they are still just barely contribution margin profitable.

Amazon Prime Now / Restaurants guarantees a delivery driver a certain wage (say $XX/hr, depends on market). However what that really means is while your tip is technically going to the driver, until they exceed $XX/hr, you're just saving Amazon from having to pay them instead. I still tip, but my generosity went down when I realized that most of my tip is really just a handout to Amazon.

Guess that explains why my amazon drivers said they always preferred cash...

I think NY state forced them to hand over tips to drivers (at least they did for GrubHub/Seamless), but I don't know if that has changed in other markets.

What's the difference between the 'delivery' and 'service' fee? Isn't the service literally the delivery with DoorDash?

I really hope they use some of this money to better screen dashers and improve customer support.

We used to order lunch on Doordash once a week till things got so bad that we decided never to use Doordash again. Orders would regularly have missing or incorrect items. Some dashers would leave the food in the lobby, text me, and leave. Delivery was hardly ever on time and there was no way to get in touch with a human on customer care except through some unlisted numbers. We've switched to Caviar(https://www.trycaviar.com) since and have no complaints.

I'm surprised I've never heard of them before. Are they doing the same thing as Uber Eats, Postmates, Eat24, GrubHub, Amazon Restaurants, etc? That seems like a really tough market to succeed in. How is so much money being funneled into it?

DoorDash is literally a Postmates clone.

Food delivery has officially become a very frothy market. Is GrubHub/Seamless actually vulnerable? They seemed to be the 800 lb gorilla of the market. And based on my observation, the competition seems to be private labelled delivery service.

They're all pretty much mediocre. GrubHub especially I avoid after having several orders simply disappear without warning. Waiting an hour only to check by calling up the place and finding out they never got the order is frustrating. Twice and I was done, I just call now for delivery.

Just my personal experience but Grubhub has kind of declined a bit while DoorDash has become more useful. The most popular restaurant in my town has appeared to partner with DoorDash -- I can no longer order from them through doordash but if I do it through their restaurant website I get a delivery with a receipt from DoorDash. I can't order it anywhere else. So maybe you're right about the private delivery service.

I don't understand the appeal of DoorDash, I had an ad pop up for free delivery for a first time user and I happened to not have my car that day so I thought I would give it a go. "free" delivery only got rid of 1 of 3 service charges which had me spending $6 on top of a $9 dollar meal (not including tip). And that was "free" delivery for the first time I ever used the service.

This is purely anecdotal, but I've never had a good experience with this service. But I have some friends that are so lazy they don't care if it takes 2 hours for the food to arrive, so that works in their favor.

DoorDash seems to cater to the 1%. Even when we had free lunches at work ($10^7 funding), we avoided using DoorDash. For two people, we would end up paying the equivalent cost of three people.

I enjoyed DoorDash's interface and checkout experience, but +50% is a high premium for delivery, especially if you're close to food. If I live in the middle of a city and I'm only getting food for a few people, I usually just walk. I wonder if DoorDash would be more useful for very large parties (N > 10).

I swore not to use doordash anymore after a few bad experiences even if after placing a complain for each occurence I got $10 off the next order (resetting the fee and the tip.) Beside some of their fees are high. Mind you, I would still use them if the service was great. From incomplete orders to bad CS to cold food on arrival to even missing the basics of delivering location, I can't believe this is getting popular.

This is a business that should be run by a company that can afford to lose money while subsidizing it by connecting the userbase to their other businesses, for example Amazon.

Basically they're sandwiched between both the vendors and the users who both want cheap price--users want cheap delivery, vendors don't want to pay a lot for delivery service.

Just look at the dilution based on this single raise, I'm guessing the founders are so diluted out at this point that there's not enough motivation to go on further unless there's a black swan type success to their business. I'm guessing the only reason they're raising this much is so they can work the same strategy of growing userbase with no viable plan and then selling to a larger company like Amazon or Google, or try to merge with companies like GrubHub.

Personally, I've only used doordash for their "free delivery" options, but stopped using them when I realized their "free" is not actually free, and they have hidden their cost into other parts of the price, which actually makes it much more expensive, not to mention it's unethical.

I had bad experiences with doordash. I ordered a pizza. It showed up 40 minutes after the estimate. It was cold. It was all messed up. Driver apologized and said she dropped it and took off.

Being an Uber eats user I wasn’t worried as I went into the app and said what happened. App did nothing immediately. In a few minutes got a template email saying “sorry, we’ll give you your $5.99 delivery fee back” Didn’t happen. Emailed support saying what happened, no response.

Uber Eats is on top of food orders. Any errors result in new deliveries to replace or refunds on food.

I assume that a company with bad customer service agorithms has other problems. I tried again and it was ok. But don’t use them as alternatives are way better.

I deeply despite those third-party food delivery services. The people delivering the food are often working for less than minimum wage and are mostly using their private equipment (smartphone, bicycle, car) for delivering.

One might argue that people then should not work for those services but on the contrary why don't the services pay a fair wage and provide vehicles and devices necessary for the job? If the price gets too high, then maybe there is no market.

All of this ignoring that SV venture capital is subsidizing the erosion of other comparable jobs at small businesses that try to pay their delivery drivers a fair wage.

I could probably develop a network of 5 driving-age teens in my neighborhood, call in an order at a restaurant, and then send out a "who wants to make 10$ cash picking this up for me?" group SMS. I'm sure the service would be better and I'm sure they would make more money than through DoorDash.

Wow, seems like everyone is taking 40% dilution on this deal and SoftBank probably has huge liquidity preference. I believe DoorDash's last round was also done with a multiplier on the liquidity preference. Crazy.

Unfortunately I no longer use DoorDash. The concept was amazing, but I’ve had one too many questionable people deliver my food that the last time it happened I didn’t even eat it.

I’m a huge fan of the “1 million jobs” type of companies like this, but there’s a level of trust that comes with allowing someone to handle the food you eat. I’m not even a judgemental individual, and I hate people that are, but I shouldn’t feel uncomfortable about my food delivery. I now go get my own food. Oh well.

When one hires everyone under the sun as a contractor, it's bound to attract society's ne'er-do-wells.

My mom never used to let us order pizza delivery because she didn’t want a pizza delivery guy to know who we were and where we lived. Remember going out to the pizza shop in 5 degree F weather with my dad.

I'm well into my 40s with numerous kids and I still drive to the pizza place to pickup whenever I order. I never understood delivery unless there is some urgent need to stay home.

It's Sunday. You're extremely hungover. Chinese food sounds great. What's not to understand about ordering delivery? Ultimately it boils down to convenience.

I don't have any of this available where I live. But there are definitely times when I'd be willing to pay for something to be delivered rather than having to hop in my car and drive 10 minutes or whatever to pick something up.

What exactly have they done to your food? and what incentive do they have to mess with your food? They get rated after each delivery you know..

You said "I’m not even a judgemental individual", but the sentence before reveals you judge the people who delivered your food (apparently based on appearances?) so much in that you wouldn't even eat the food they delivered. That's being very judgemental.

Doordash has frequent system-wide outages.

https://twitter.com/DoorDash_Help

During their outages your items will never arrive, your order may still appear as active and customer support may handle your case in 48 hours. Plus, their outage messages are misleading.

On the other hand, Amazon almost never has outages, you can live chat with support at any moment, and if they're slightly late they will even give you money.

>On the other hand, Amazon

Amazon does restaurant delivery?

as a part of Amazon prime now

DoorDash in particular is exorbitantly expensive. Absolutely terrible markup and horrible experiences ordering through them. They're on my list of personal trade embargoed companies along with Dell and Domino's. Hmm. All three are "D" companies (and also their names start with the letter "D").

Why would you sell a third of your company? Do you need 0.5b to run ops? Who would invest so much when the "value" is 1.5b? Unless they already think it's worth multiple times more? But then the opposite party doesn't think so? Can somebody explain please?

Since moving just outside of Portland, none of these delivery companies cover my area with the exception of uber eats. It's insane considering how many large corps are all around (intel, nike, etc).

Edit: Apparently grubhub decided my address was in their area, nice!

The availability of most of these delivery services seems to be very dependent on density and demographics. You get out of the core metro areas of relatively large cities and the options for these types of services tends to decrease dramatically.

I think in my case its more of my address being brand new. Hell, the zipcode fails validation on a lot of sites even since they just recently split it apart.

If you are "Per order profitable", why do you need 535M USD? I dont get valley valuations/Metrics..

Because you need money to cover fixed costs.

But if you need 535M USD to effectively deliver pizzas... I think you are doing it wrong. Specially if you make money on every order.

"Per order profitable" is a made up term by DoorDash to lure unknowing investors. They are still not profitable.

This could be early investors/founders/employees taking the opportunity to sell equity. Its possible that DoorDash itself is getting little or nothing from this deal.

That would be a hardsell for an investor. I put in 535M USD, and nothing goes towards making the company grow, everything goes towards payouts?

It could be Softbank forcing it -- they're known to overfund a round as a take-it-or-we'll-go-to-your-competitor tactic.

Just put $1 billion into a bank account for your lemonade stand and claim you started the newest Unicorn! ...

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