Special thanks to Nancy Luna of Insider for quoting me in this article.
Those who frequently read my posts know that I am a fan of DoorDash. In my opinion, DoorDash has one of the best CEOs in business, Tony Xu, and arguably the most capable executive team in the food delivery and retail industries.
What I like most about DoorDash is that they’re aggressive and they have no fear of going after business. For example, Instacart had a massive head start fulfilling and delivering groceries over their competitors. Within 2.5 years, DoorDash has become Instacart’s biggest competitor.
With a market cap of $32B, it’s possible that DoorDash will acquire Instacart. However, I anticipate that DoorDash will simply outperform Instacart and slowly siphon away their customers. The brutal truth is that Instacart is a very limited company that can’t compete against DoorDash.
With 500,000 merchants active on the DoorDash app, connecting 32M monthly active consumers across 25 countries, and providing 2M monthly active Dashers with opportunities for earning supplemental income, DoorDash is positioned for growth. I anticipate that DoorDash will continue investing in multiple categories to accelerate their growth as a leading local commerce platform globally.
DoorDash understands the importance of “winning the porch and the home” as it increases revenue opportunities. For example, when a homeowner needs a plumber, DoorDash will want to handle it. The biggest opportunity for DoorDash is consolidating package deliveries from Amazon, FedEx, UPS, and the United States Postal Service, into a single delivery to a customer’s home. Winning the porch and home makes DoorDash sticky and increasingly relevant.
I also anticipate that DoorDash is watching very closely what TikTok, SHEIN, and Temu are able to accomplish in e-commerce and fast fashion to see if it makes sense to form a partnership or apply any lessons learned to their strategy.
Today, DoorDash is content with enabling commerce. What about three years from now? Should DoorDash only deliver food or should DoorDash acquire a restaurant? Domino’s, for example.
Are we to believe that Tony Xu’s idea of thinking BIG is focusing on low-margin categories like food and grocery delivery? I’m skeptical.
Elon Musk has been open about his desire to create an everything app he calls ‘X.’ I don’t think he’s the only one working on such a project.
I believe we will soon find out that DoorDash has much bigger plans than enabling retailers and restaurants. Instead, DoorDash will launch a new form of commerce and fast fashion empowered and managed via their platform. DoorDash will expand their app to include e-commerce, social commerce, social media, AI, payments, banking, finance, money transfer, and currency (fiat and crypto).
DoorDash will become X, the everything app, not Twitter.
