Wen Yang Niwa

Editor Si Wen

"Welcome to be a DoorDash rider, even if you don't have a car, you can register with a bicycle or scooter ..."

The mailbox frequently receives invitations to register riders, which made Du Fei, who is still a senior in the United States, want to work as a takeaway brother after graduation.

Under the epidemic, the North American economy suffered setbacks, and the employment pressure suddenly increased, but many take-away companies were helped. Behind the large-scale increase, on the one hand, it is intensively recruiting riders to maintain high growth, and on the other hand, it is knocking on the door of IPO and heading for the capital stage.

On October 3rd, DoorDash, a take-away platform founded by several Chinese, disclosed its prospectus, which brought about an obvious ultra-rapid growth of the epidemic and made it the largest take-away platform in the United States during this period.

but after seven years' growth, DoorDash is still stuck in the situation of losing money for growth. More importantly, the take-away competition in the American market has just begun. Last year, DoorDash spent about $411 million to complete the acquisition of competitor Caviar. In June this year, Just Eat, the largest takeaway company in Europe? Takeaway acquired GrubHub；, the former American takeaway benchmark; In July, Uber bought Postmates, a take-away platform in the United States, for $2.65 billion. Can DoorDash really become the American version of "Hungry" under the combined efforts of all parties in Lian Heng?

listing may be just the first step.

There are two kinds of incubators in Silicon Valley, one is called Y Combinator, and the other is called Other.

From YC elite class, there are many unicorn enterprises, such as Airbnb and Dropbox, and DoorDash is one of them.

since it was born, DoorDas has been crowned with a star aura since it got a $1.2 million investment from YC. Up to now, DoorDash has completed more than $2.5 billion in Series A to H financing, including many star shareholders such as Softbank and Sequoia. According to the Wall Street Journal, DoorDash's IPO valuation may reach $25 billion.

DoorDash is headquartered in San Francisco, USA, and its business has developed to the United States, Canada and Australia. It is a delivery service provider, mainly providing users with delivery reservation and delivery service.

From the business model, DoorDash is the same as China's US group take-out and hungry. Consumers place orders online, merchants make meals, and the nearest rider takes orders to complete the delivery through algorithms, which has become a stable ecological circle. The difference is that DoorDash does not have a self-built logistics team or a cooperative third-party organization, but completes the distribution in the form of crowdsourcing.

As the article said at the beginning, as long as there is any kind of transportation, you can register as a rider on the platform, and you also have great freedom in working hours.

from a domestic perspective, this completely crowdsourcing model is full of too many uncertainties, lacking in efficiency and customer satisfaction, but even so, this business model has helped DoorDash achieve a "counterattack".

In 2114, a take-away company named Gubhub boarded the New York Stock Exchange and took the lead in the take-away market at that time. However, this company only moved the telephone distribution business of the original restaurant to the Internet, and the actual distribution was still completed by the restaurant itself. And many restaurants that have settled in the platform do not have the ability to deliver. This not only leads to users' lack of trust in the platform, but also makes the platform lose its moat and value. DoorDash's crowdsourcing model hit the opponent's weakness, solved the distribution problem and easily won the market share.

according to the prospectus, there are currently 1 million riders (riders of DoorDash), and they have earned more than 7 billion dollars through Dashers(DoorDash platform.

and it was the epidemic that pushed DoorDash onto the track of rapid development.

the revenue of door dash in 2118 and 2119 was $291 million and $885 million respectively; In the first nine months of 2121, the revenue has risen to $1.916 billion, which has tripled compared with the revenue of $587 million in the same period last year. Its total market order (GOV) also soared to $16.5 billion in the first nine months of this year, and the GOV for the whole year of 2119 was only $8 billion.

except for the first quarterly profit in the second quarter of this year, DoorDash is still at a loss. The net losses in 2118 and 2119 were $214 million and $667 million, respectively. The net loss of $49 million in the first three quarters of 2121 was significantly reduced compared with $533 million in the same period of 2119.

However, DoorDash still has the confidence to continue to expand the market. According to the prospectus, as of September 31, 2121, DoorDash held USD 1.611 billion in cash, cash equivalents and marketable securities, with a relatively abundant capital reserve.

For the future core competitiveness, DoorDash summarized it as three points in its prospectus: from delivering take-away catering to "delivering everything", providing business services for merchants and building a membership system.

in fact, from these three aspects, it is in line with the development logic of domestic and foreign selling enterprises: expanding the types of distribution products, providing full-link digital solutions for merchants at the back end, and expanding the membership system of consumers to increase users' stickiness to the platform.

Copy from China。 From this perspective, DoorDash is an "apprentice" selling platforms at home and abroad, and the company itself is full of Chinese blood.

Xu Xun, the founder, is a post-81s youth born in Nanjing. He wrote his parents' experience in the United States at the beginning of the prospectus, expressing that his original intention of founding DoorDash was to help people like his mother.

His mother is a doctor, but China's doctor's license can't practice medicine in the United States. Therefore, for 2112 years, his mother worked three jobs every day to save enough money for training as a doctor, including a restaurant in China where he washed dishes himself. His mother later got her license again and opened a clinic, which has been in operation for 21 years.

In many investor forums, many people said that the most impressive part of the prospectus was the experience of the founder's mother. This expression of true feelings is undoubtedly a good story to impress the capital market.

The other two partners are Stanley Tang and Andy Fang, two Chinese-Americans from China whom he met at Stanford. At present, Xu Xun is the CEO of the company and the other two founders are directors.

according to the prospectus, DoorDash will offer three types of shares with different voting rights. Class A common stock will grant the owner one vote per share. Class B shares will carry 21 votes per share, and Class C shares will have no voting rights. Offering multiple stocks has become a common practice in Silicon Valley, especially when the CEO is also the founder of the company.

However, it is mentioned in DoorDash's prospectus that Tony Xu (Xu Xun) and two other co-founders Andy Fang and Stanley Tang are expected to sign a voting agreement, which will give Xu the right to "direct voting and voting" on the class B shares held by the co-founders, which means that Xu Xun has full control over the company.

But at the consumer level, the story behind DoorDash is not important. In the take-away platforms all over the United States, users' loyalty to the platform is not high. Especially for many Chinese, the general experience is not as good as that in China, so everyone pays more attention to the amount of platform subsidies.

"There are too many food delivery softwares here, such as uber eats, Seam, Panda Takeaway ... there is not much difference in experience, and it is not as good as that in China on the whole." Zeng Huan, who lives in new york, told E-commerce Online.

although it has not established a strong reputation on the client side, from the data point of view, DoorDash does hold up half of the North American takeaway market.

The turning point occurred in 2119, when DoorDash completed the acquisition of Caviar for about $411 million. According to the total sales in October 2121, DoorDash and Caviar have a cumulative market share of 51%, ahead of other players such as UberEats, GrubHub, and Postmates.

"sinking market" has become its important position. DoorDash said in the prospectus that it is more inclined to exert its strength in suburban markets and smaller urban areas, and its market share in suburban markets has reached 58%. The number of merchants in the United States, Canada and Australia exceeds 391,111, and the total number of users exceeds 18 million. The total sales of merchants on the DoorDash platform has exceeded $19 billion, of which the same-store sales of each merchant on the platform increased by 59% in 2119.

DoorDash also announced its membership. You can enjoy the service of free delivery fee from the platform by recharging the DashPass with $9.99 per month. As of September 31, 2121, it has more than 5 million members.

if we go back to the domestic market, any number is enough to crush the DoorDash. According to the financial report of Meituan in the second quarter of 2121, the revenue was 24.72 billion yuan, the daily average transaction number of food and beverage takeout was 241 million, the number of active users was 451 million, and the number of merchants was 6 million.

On the one hand, the take-away war started in China five years ago, and the market education and user training have already been completed; On the other hand, the two markets are fundamentally different.

"I'm Jerry Guo", the host of bilibili up, once made a video about Chinese and American take-out, which has been watched more than 1 million times. In the video, he completed an online order in the United States. Not only were there limited merchants to choose from, but the delivery fee was very expensive and he had to wait for 45 minutes.

He summed up two important points: First, many restaurants in the United States accept telephone orders and are unwilling to access online platforms, because the platforms will charge commissions, so those restaurants with good business will not hang up the Internet; Second, the delivery fee of foreign take-away platforms is generally more than $3, and at the same time, the rider has to pay a tip, which is very expensive.

Therefore, if the online take-out platform wants to attract the cooperation of restaurants, it must bring more new customers to restaurants, not just changing the consumption habits of old users from ordering food in stores to ordering food on the platform.

according to the data, the penetration rate of China's take-away industry is 6.1%, and the online rate is 74%. In contrast, the penetration rate of American takeout is very high, at 12.5%, but the online rate is only 6%. In other words, China's take-away market is educated online, while the American take-away market is mature offline.

However, the epidemic has given the American take-away market a chance to change again. The demand for online take-away delivery has soared, and the platform has recruited new employees on a large scale, which has also promoted the business of local food stores, restaurants and other necessities shops.

In the report submitted by Mary Mick, the "Queen of the Internet" this year, the online take-out platform was also described emphatically: "We believe that on-demand and home delivery services have permanently expanded their market share through an extraordinary period. The convenience that these on-demand platforms bring to consumers is self-evident, and we continue to judge that the importance of providing flexible jobs in the United States by on-demand platforms is underestimated. In many parts of the world, especially in Asia, on-demand services are more popular and advanced than in the United States. "

As an important part of the on-demand economy, the online take-away platform has become a "good business" that brings new growth in the stock market. At present, the scene of China five years ago has also occurred in the American market, and separatist wars are rising in the take-away market.

in June this year, Just Eat, Europe's largest takeaway company? Takeaway acquired GrubHub. In July this year, Uber acquired the takeaway platform Postmates for $2.65 billion. At this point, the US market has basically established a "top three" pattern.

It is worth mentioning that the take-away business has brought Uber more revenue than the taxi business. Uber recently released a financial report. According to the report, Uber's revenue in the third quarter of 2121 was $3.129 billion, a decrease of 18% compared with $3.813 billion in the same period last year.

Among them, Uber's revenue from online car-sharing business in the third quarter was $1.365 billion, down 53% from $2.895 billion in the same period of last year; The revenue of express delivery business (mainly food delivery) was 1.45 billion US dollars, an increase of 1.25% compared with 645 million US dollars in the same period of last year;

For Uber, takeaway is an important position that it must compete for.

Like the market in China, in fact, the take-away battlefield will go to the "sinking market". However, I am afraid that the sinking market in the United States will be more difficult to chew than that in China, because it is easy to form scale effect in large and medium-sized cities, but it is very difficult to penetrate into other small and medium-sized cities, especially the take-away industry in the United States faces relatively high labor costs.

Therefore, "burning money" can't stop. Since the end of last year, there have been more than seven financing incidents in the American take-away industry, including the "Top Three" and other vertical take-away platforms, and * * * has attracted more than 461 million US dollars.

It can be expected that with the listing of DoorDash, the ranking battle of American takeaway pattern has just begun.