That said, I searched the entire article for the words "luck" and "lucky" and see none. No doubt the pandemic and WFH life helped them, and that's something even YC couldn't have predicted.
It's also a great example of a company that was not popular on Demo Day. This kind of success is so hard to predict.
has it succeeded?
What happens if their cost of capital goes positive?
What happens if people start going to restaurants again?
This comment really comes across as out of touch... The company just went public and based on their S-1 has been massively growing even pre-pandemic! (both huge measures of success)
If we define success as cashing out, sure, success. It feels like the delta in journey between building a sustainable, profitable business that handsomely rewards you at your exit and "congrats on your lottery ticket" is growing by the day. Let's not kid ourselves, investor dollars chasing after your equity when you go public and with no evidence profitability is possible is a rare lottery ticket that has paid out (or maybe not so rare! See: Adam Neumann/WeWork).
EDIT: I want to really stress that this isn't "sour grapes" but more echo chamber fatigue. If you are founders at a startup, who grow it into a unicorn, are delivering value, your employees and customers are happy and delighted, and you're profitable, those are the folks who deserve to be congratulated when they IPO and become billionaires and are who you can learn the most from on your own startup journey.
That's the only definition of success that matters to VCs.
Even if the company is not around in a year, if they were able to dump their stock to investors^Wspeculators^Wsuckers before the meltdown then it's bagged as a win.
F-4 they are clearly on a path to profitability...
It seems silly to even focus on profitability at IPO when credit is so cheap. Growth trajectory is rewarded and based on the S-1 they are growing in a healthy enough fashion. This is VERY different than WeWork which had massive amounts of debt on their books and didn't have a plan out.
Again, if you keep getting hung up on profitability you aren't really realizing what stage Doordash is at or the maturity level by which companies are expected to be profitable
Well, anyone can massively grow (pandemic or not) when you're selling dimes at the price of a nickel.
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-05-18/the-un...
You must not be aware of what happened around the year 2000.
You had me up until here. This is WIDELY debatable.
Widely debatable is now up to the common investor to determine.
By the way, with such faith, I assume you will short the stock.
Certainly the pandemic helped with mass adoption but they've also just built a more competitive product.