Stanley Tang (DoorDash) - Scaling the Unscalable

**SPEAKER_1** (0:14)
Welcome to the Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders Seminar, the Stanford Seminar for Aspiring Entrepreneurs, or ETL. ETL is brought to you by STVP, the Stanford Engineering Entrepreneurship Center, and BASIS, the Business Association of Stanford Entrepreneurial Students. I am Ravi Balani, a lecturer in the Management Science and Engineering Department, and the Director of Alchemist and Accelerator for Enterprise Startups. And I am so excited today to kick off ETL for the spring with one of our own, Stanley Tang. Stanley is the co-founder, chief product officer, and head of labs for DoorDash. How many people have used DoorDash? Okay, so it really needs no introduction, but for those who don't know, DoorDash is now, I think, an 80 billion dollar company focused on really revolutionizing last mile delivery, and it's really a phenomenal logistics company that has really transformed how the world thinks about logistics. But what's especially great for me about Stanley is that he's not only becoming an icon of entrepreneurship, but he's also really in his heart also a student of entrepreneurship. Quite literally, he was in your seat a decade ago in this same class, attending ETL when he was a Stanford undergrad studying computer science. He started DoorDash after Stanford, after he majored in computer science. But even more impressive is before that, when he was a high school student growing up in Hong Kong, he actually authored an anthology of interviews of Internet entrepreneurs when he was in high school. So this is a real full circle moment where the student has become the teacher. And Stanley today is going to share with us some pearls of wisdom and insight from his own entrepreneurial journey. So without further ado, please join me in welcoming Stanley Tang to ETL.

**SPEAKER_2** (2:05)
Well, thank you all. I'm super excited to be back here at Stanford. I'm gonna start off with a quick story. It's September 2013 It's the first home football game here at Stanford. I'm running a tiny, scrappy food delivery service with a couple of my classmates here. It's only been around for a couple months. The entire thing was run out of a two bedroom house in Palo Alto, held together by duct tape. All of a sudden, it starts pouring rain. And soon after, our phones start exploding. Orders were flooding, were coming in, flooding in nonstop. Everyone wanted to order delivery for game night. We thought, this is it. This is our big moment that we've been waiting for. It's the, it's our breakthrough. Finally, people are starting to hear about our food delivery service. You know, this is, this is what product market fit feels like, right? Except it isn't. It was a complete disaster. We were, we are completely overwhelmed with orders. We didn't have enough drivers. And the worst part of it all is that we didn't actually have the ability to shut down the website. We haven't built the, we haven't built the kill switch feature yet. So orders kept flooding in. All of us went out and did deliveries, whether you were the founder, the engineer, the salesperson, everyone was out doing deliveries. No one was back at the office. But despite that, even with all our heroic efforts, there's nothing we could have done, we could do. Every single order was late, some by an hour, some by two hours. And it was just utter chaos. And by the end of the night, we were just staring at a complete meltdown. And by the way, did I mention we're three weeks away from running out of cash. So in that moment, staring at this disaster, we asked ourselves the question, what do we do? And that question, what do we do, is really the topic I want to address today. Because it's really in those moments where everything is on the line, your back is against the wall. These are the moments you're going to find yourself facing over and over again during your journey as an entrepreneur. And I feel like it's an especially relevant topic to talk to you all today. Because like Robbie said, it wasn't that long ago when I was literally in your shoes, in those very seats, in this very auditorium, in video auditorium where I was taking this class, Stanford ETL. And whenever I came to these classes and these talks, where I would hear from these amazing speakers and founders and entrepreneurs, it always felt like they had everything figured out. Everything about them seemed so purposeful, so resilient, so certain. And what I've come to realize from a decade in, having gone through the journey as an entrepreneur myself, is that, you know, most people didn't start out that way, right? Like, that certainty comes much later. You know, for most people, resilience is not something you're born with. You know, certainly, I was not born with that. It's something, resilience is something that's forged in the fire through these pivotal moments. It's built through adversity, it's built through hardship, it's built by staring failure in the face and asking yourself the question, what am I going to do? And it's that decision point, that moment, that's when resilience is born. And today, I want to share some of these pivotal moments from my journey through DoorDash and how it shaped our company, but most importantly, who I am as a founder. So I want to take you back to the fall of 2012 It's my junior year at Stanford. I got together with a few of my classmates, Andy and Tony, because we wanted to work on a class project together. We had no intention of starting a company, and the project, the idea we were working on actually had nothing to do with food or delivery. It was actually because we wanted to figure out and build technology solutions for local businesses. And we did it as part of a class here at Stanford. So as part of that exercise, since we were three college students, we knew nothing about local businesses.