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- DoorDash founder Tony Xu tells the story of baking cookies for hundreds customers after a crisis
DoorDash founder Tony Xu tells the story of baking cookies for hundreds customers after a crisis
In 2013 — the year the company was founded — DoorDash almost died when seemingly everybody in Palo Alto tried ordering from their website after a Stanford football game.
Normally a demand surge would be a great thing, but at this point DoorDash hadn’t even raised a seed round and had no way of fulfilling the demand.
As Tony explains:
“No one usually complains of too much demand, except when you have no ability to fulfill the demand or to shut off the website that kept receiving these orders when you don’t have enough drivers on the road.”
Every delivery ended up being at least an hour late. Hundreds of customers were upset, and Tony remembers calculating with his cofounders what the refund cost would be:
“We thought what the right thing to do was to refund everybody. But that would take away about 40% of the bank account, which was already quite low.”
Ultimately the cofounders decided to refund all of their customers, and then they figured out away to flip a negative situation to a positive one:
“We stayed up that night and baked cookies so that we could deliver them at around 5am, before everybody had woken up.”
Eventually this story became part of DoorDash lore and provides a great example to all founders of what it means to be customer obsessed.