The 9x boy became a billionaire thanks to a food delivery app

When it comes to a stereotypical Silicon Valley tech entrepreneur, Andy Fang, CTO of fast food delivery app DoorDash, is a prime example. The Chinese-American boy born in 1992 has all the elements: talent – hard work – dare to take risks. But that’s not all the features that make people reminiscent of Fang.

“Andy Fang is the type of student that any teacher would love. He gives his best even with the smallest assignments,” commented Eric Nelson, chair of the computer science department at Stanford University. in the 2018 winter issue of The Harker.

When talking about his time at school, the 30-year-old billionaire did not talk about his major, but passionately talked about a musical. “Participating in that musical was out of my comfort zone. I yelled on stage things like Music Man and Les Misérables…”, Fang said.

Before becoming CTO of one of Silicon Valley’s most valuable startups, Fang had a stellar academic record. He served as student body president and was one of the first members of an advanced course on neural networks before it became an official school subject a few years later.

The opportunity came to Fang when he was a sophomore. He and three other students, Evan Moore, Stanley Tang and Tony Xu shared an assignment in class. After speaking with eight local restaurant owners, they found that web pickup and delivery was always confusing and inconvenient. The whole team programmed the site PaloAltoDelivery, allows users to place orders quickly from mobile phones. Initially, the order was just a menu in PDF format, but immediately gained the support of users and store owners because of the smooth ordering and delivery on the web.

To proactively find customers, the team emailed students in the school and dormitory. “We delivered the first hundreds of orders ourselves, even in the middle of the night, or took advantage of it during class time,” Tony Xu, co-founder of the project, told. Los Angeles Times.

By 2013, PaloAltoDelivery received $120,000 from the Y Combinator startup support program. Fang and his team renamed the project DoorDash. Before starting to recruit the first delivery drivers, called Dasher, the four founders still worked hard to deliver from 6am to 6pm every day. In 2014, before Fang graduated, the company received $20 million from a venture capital fund. DoorDash became a food delivery unit for more than 1,000 restaurants in the Bay Area and Los Angeles before expanding across the United States.

Two years later, Andy Fang and Stanley Tang were honored in the Forbes Under 30, consumer technology category. But this is also a dangerous period for DoorDash. Investors are starting to question whether the app is profitable when the industry doesn’t have new companies to compete with. Investments in DoorDash gradually decreased, founders had to tighten spending, reallocating capital to maintain operations. By the end of 2019, the company had raised more than $2.5 billion from major investors such as SoftBank, Sequoia Capital and Singapore GIC, according to statistics of the company. CNBC.

A year later, DoorDash went public. Fang stepped into the billionaires club of the world and currently owns a fortune of $1.1 billion. Two years into the pandemic, food delivery app DoorDash has made amazing strides as users’ demand for orders has skyrocketed. Answer CNBC, Fang said that even in the post-epidemic period, the company still recorded good growth compared to before Covid-19. After being successful in the US, DoorDash began to expand to some international markets such as Germany and Japan.

“We are still working non-stop to build a smart logistics network. Every little detail is taken care of by the operation team such as where the delivery driver can park the car in the city, how much it will cost. How long does it take to make a pizza, or how long does an ice cream stick stay cold… Every little detail is carefully calculated, requiring a high degree of precision that sets DoorDash apart from other brands. another food delivery app,” said Fang.

Khuong Nha