DoorDash Co-Founder Stanley Tang on founding story, lessons + First-time fund manager panel | E1759

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
On today's episode, we have two amazing talks from Jason's Angel Summit, which he hosted earlier this week in Napa Valley. First up, DoorDash co-founder Stanley Tang sits down with Jason for a fireside chat.
He tells DoorDash's amazing founding story, explains how they mostly avoided Zerp distractions and more. Then Jason hosts a panel focused on first-time fund managers with Sophia Amoruso of Trust Fund, Paige Finn Doherty of Behind Genius Ventures and Kelli Fontaine of Cendana Capital. Stick with us.
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**Jason Calacanis** (1:23)
Next up, a real treat. We have the co-founder and chief product officer of DoorDash. How many people have DoorDashed this month? Raise your hand. Jesus, whole audience.
How many people have, be honest now, have DoubleDashed? Have you ever DoubleDashed?
Sickos.
Double dashing. It's enough. You get one restaurant, it's enough. You don't need to pick from two. You're going to be doing a TripleDash soon. It's ridiculous. My daughters want a TripleDash for dessert. I have three of them. One wants boba, one wants ice cream, other one wants cookies. It's enough. It's enough, Stanley.
At this point, I don't know if I've, I've won more money from you in poker or you've won more money from me in DoorDash views. It's probably about right. Probably.

**Stanley Tang** (2:12)
I mean, I'm just giving what people want.

**Jason Calacanis** (2:14)
Exactly.
Stanley and I became friends because he has a passion for poker as well. You may have seen him on some of the online poker games, but I wanted to specifically have an entrepreneur here at the end to talk a little bit about the three cycles that you've operated DoorDash under. You started in 2013

**Stanley Tang** (2:35)
Yeah, 2013

**Jason Calacanis** (2:37)
2013 as a landing page for one Indian restaurant, I believe it was.

**Stanley Tang** (2:42)
Yeah, something like that. We had like eight restaurants on a landing page.
It was called paulaltodelivery.com.

**Jason Calacanis** (2:50)
So it was really a big vision at that point.

**Stanley Tang** (2:54)
Yeah, I mean, I can go into the story. Yeah, please. So we started 2013, and I'll get to the Paul to delivery bit later, but I mean, it's funny because we really weren't trying to do a startup. It was literally one of those typical Stanford dorm room class projects. We weren't trying to do a startup or even a food company or delivery company. I think me and I met my co-founders, Andy and Tony, through, Andy was in my freshman year dorm, and then Tony, we met through one of those project-based classes at Stanford, and the idea we were working on for this class was software for small business. I remember at the time, the hot startup or the hot thing everyone was doing back then was social apps, Snapchat, things like that. Everyone was very focused on the digital world, but no one was really focused on the physical world. What about the mom and pop shops, the local businesses? None of these people were using software. Tony, he just wrapped up an internship at Square, so this idea of software for small business was very fresh on his mind.
When I was in high school, I used to build a lot of websites for small business owners for fun.
This was an area we were just talking about.
Maybe we can work on something here, but of course, we're all college students. None of us have worked at a small business before or ran a small business before. The way we approached this was, why don't we just start talking to a lot of these business owners? Why don't we just go after class? We'll just go down to Palo Alto, go down University Avenue, and literally, we'll just go door to door. We'll just walk in and say, hey, we're a couple Stanford students working on a class project. We'd love to just sit down and interview you and try to understand what your day-to-day life is like, what are some of the challenges you are facing, and see if there are any unique insights we could get out of that.