TechCrunch
Y Combinator Backed DoorDash Delivers Food Quickly In South Bay, Hopes To Expand Beyond Food
DoorDash, a Y Combinator summer ‘13 company, delivers food from restaurants in Palo Alto and Mountain View in an average time of 45 minutes.
Sound familiar?
It’s a crowded space, but while competitors like Seamless and Grubhub offer users an app to order food from any restaurant that has its own drivers and delivery system setup, DoorDash hires and manages its own drivers, so it can bring you food from restaurants that don’t have their own delivery drivers.
That may not seem like a big difference, but for the suburbs and college campuses, it’s a welcome change from having just pizza and Chinese food places offering delivery.
DoorDash charges $6 per delivery with no minimum order size, and currently delivers lunch (11:45 am-1:30 pm) and dinner (5:30pm – 9:00pm) every day. The company currently delivers to Palo Alto, Stanford, Menlo Park, Los Altos, Los Altos Hills, and Mountain View from 50 restaurants in the area.
Fluc, another startup we recently covered, is doing something fairly similar, but is more expensive–Fluc charges $5.95 per order and inflates menu prices a bit, whereas DoorDash charges $6 per order and doesn’t inflate menu prices. DoorDash partners with the restaurants they deliver from, so they take a cut from the restaurant’s side of things, not from the consumer.
DoorDash was founded by four Stanford students: Evan Charles Moore worked on the founding team of Vevo, Tony Xu was at Square and Red Laser/eBay, and Andy Fang and Stanley Tang spent a summer together at Facebook, Moore and Xu were friends in Stanford’s business school, and Fang and Tang are undergrads. Moore and Tang had worked on a project together in a class in the spring of 2012, and later decided to work together on DoorDash, bringing in the other two.
In February, they built a prototype, Palo Alto Delivery, in one day to gauge demand. Half an hour later, they had their first order and soon they were delivering food everyday around campus. The four of them did the first 200 deliveries by themselves; they say they learned so much as drivers that they have new team members start as a driver.
I used DoorDash (then called Palo Alto Delivery) several times in the spring and really liked it. On campus at Stanford there aren’t a ton of options for delivery, so I was very willing to pay $6 to get better food delivered every once in awhile.
One of the new features I’m most excited for is Group Order, in which you can split the bill with a group of friends through DoorDash but still have all the food come in one order.
“Our ultimate goal is to enable merchants to deliver locally,” Tang says. He notes that restaurants are a good place to start, as the company has been able to grow really quickly (they dobuled total deliveries in the past two weeks), and hopes to grow both geographically and, eventually, beyond just food delivery.
Disclosure: I’m a rising senior at Stanford. Fang and Tang are the same year as me. I’ve meet Fang a couple times, and I haven’t met any of the other co-founders at DoorDash. This doesn’t affect my ability to report on DoorDash.
Someone Please Actually Hack Chipotle's Twitter Account
For whatever reason, this week has felt particularly long. It might be some astrological reason like Mercury in retrograde. Or it might just be the emotions that are a package deal with being a woman at the end of any month.
Or it might be that burrito haven Chipotle fake-hacked its Twitter account on Sunday, and the stunt has left a bad taste in my mouth.
Brands who stage fake hackings as an attempt to #winthemoment, does the world really need more Internet mistrust post-NSA PRISM?
Is fake hacking really something you’d like to have forever associated with your brand? Do you really want Pete Cashmore sopping up pageviews debunking your lame attempt at garnering publicity?
For that matter, is using twelve people to “position” a tweet really the best use of your precious time left on the planet? I mean, doing anything on Twitter nowadays is lauded as being cool and fresh. Even if the content itself is not cool and fresh. We’re on to you, Oreo.
The only reason I’m bringing this up is because the world is in the middle of an economic Cold War: On one side, over a billion people who make less than $1.25 per day; on the other, a class of overprivileged digital natives like myself who get paid to spend their lives on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, thinking up new ways to “go viral.”"What if we faked a hack …?!”
The only way this will end is with my head on a spike. Let them snap chats!
Hit send too soon!—
Chipotle (@ChipotleTweets) July 21, 2013
Mittens13 password leave—
Chipotle (@ChipotleTweets) July 21, 2013
Image: Jillian Fleck
Get Ready For TechCrunch TV's Tour Of The New Hollywood, Starting Next Week
Over the last several years, we’ve seen a new group of digital media companies emerge in Los Angeles, driven by the growth of YouTube as a platform for distribution of video content. What started out as a cottage industry built around YouTube is becoming a pretty massive business, with L.A. at the center of it all.
Companies like Machinima, Maker Studios, and Fullscreen were founded with the idea of helping creators to expand their audiences by improving their production value, collaborating with other YouTubers, and adopting a series of best practices.
That said, not all YouTube networks are created equal: While some focus on providing creators with tools for high-quality production, others have developed technical tools to help them succeed. Some are focused on specific verticals, like gaming or food, while others are built around aggregating channels with massive audiences and growing them through collaborations.
TechCrunch TV spent several days in L.A. meeting with a number of digital media companies, including Machinima, Fullscreen, Tastemade, ZEFR, Big Frame, Maker Studios, and Funny or Die. During those visits we met with executives and creators, toured production facilities, and got to know the people building this whole new ecosystem of video content. We also visited YouTube Space L.A., a huge facility filled with equipment for shooting, editing, and other post-production activities that is free and open to YouTube creators.
On Mondays and Wednesdays over the next four weeks, we’ll be rolling out a series of videos showing off all the best from our meetings at those companies, giving you a better feel for what each has to offer and what creators can expect when they sign up for a multichannel network.
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