DoorDash ($DASH)

DoorDash is a food-delivery marketplace. The wiki references it as a marketplace case study rather than as a researched company page.

• Ghost kitchens. DoorDash is Quietly Expanding Its… (tweet) (matt newberg, February 2021) says DoorDash was leasing vacant kitchen space on both coasts, a departure from the Redwood City facility it built in 2019. Unlike CloudKitchens, the aim is customer acquisition rather than better logistics; DoorDash signs the leases and takes a revenue share from each brand in exchange for exclusivity, testing 1–4 kitchens per facility in LA, Denver, SF and NYC. The author, who signed up as a driver, reports a 30% increase in hourly earnings when picking up two orders from CloudKitchens versus point-to-point deliveries.
• Marketplace lessons. Marketplaces quotes Micah Moreau, DoorDash’s VP of Growth: every time the team looked for a reason they weren’t growing, “it always came back to the basics –– selection, delivery quality, pricing.” The Hierarchy of Marketplaces — Introduction and Level 1 (Sarah Tavel) poses the question of why DoorDash beat Postmates. Building a Money Moat contrasts DoorDash’s effectiveness at fundraising with Postmates’, and uses it alongside Uber as an example of spending on awareness that is not a sustainable moat on its own.
• Related. Chowbus is described as a food-delivery marketplace operating in a model similar to DoorDash, focused on Asian cuisine.

Where this appears

Concepts

• Marketplaces
• Building a Money Moat

Long reads

• The Hierarchy of Marketplaces — Introduction and Level 1 (Sarah Tavel)

Companies

• Chowbus

Tweets

• DoorDash is Quietly Expanding Its… (tweet)