The founders of DoorDash learned valuable insights by personally delivering food, which helped them understand the challenges of the business.

DoorDash founders initially handled all deliveries themselves to ensure customer satisfaction and build relationships with users and restaurants.

During the early days, we ran experiments to confirm that consumers would pay for DoorDash's service, which gave us confidence in our business model despite initial doubts from investors.

The first demo day for DoorDash was not successful, and we struggled to raise funds, putting the company at risk of going out of business.

Investors were hesitant to back DoorDash because, although we had strong numbers, it wasn't clear that we would emerge as the largest player in the market.

DoorDash's initial product was created in one day using manual methods to test whether people wanted the service, demonstrating the importance of validating ideas before scaling.

Launching to strangers can provide valuable feedback; for example, DoorDash founders learned about delivery issues by talking to small business owners.

By controlling the entire delivery experience, DoorDash offers the best performance in food delivery. When an order is made in our system, it gets placed immediately at an iPad installed at the restaurant.

All you need is one investor to say yes; in 2018, when we raised our Series D, it became clear internally what was going to happen next for DoorDash.