This College Project Changed Food Delivery Forever
By Kelli Luu | 30 Oct, 2025

Four students from Stanford University founded DoorDash, an app that would widely benefit entire communities around the world.

The frustration of being a broke college student in a dorm, craving a delicious meal, but the restaurant doesn’t deliver is what inspired Tony Xu, Andy Fang, Stanley Tang, and Evan Moore to co-found an app that changed the world, DoorDash. 

It all began in 2012 at Stanford University when a group of friends noticed that it was a complete struggle to get food delivered from mom-and-pop restaurants. For a class project, the four students developed a service which was initially called PaloAltoDelivery.com, in order to help local businesses deliver food. The website consisted of just a list of local restaurants, a phone number, and the names of the four founders who were personally delivering food to customers. 

Within hours of their launch, they received their first order — pad thai noodles. For Tony Xu, this was more than meaningful. He immigrated to the United States when he was five and helped his mother open her own Chinese restaurant, so his goal was to help small business owners succeed. From this point on, Tony and his friends knew that not only would this help their own cravings, but it would also benefit small restaurant owners who are trying to keep up. 

In 2013, their company was rebranded to DoorDash, a site that would later find its way beyond college students in college towns to corporate workers in big cities. In 2020, DoorDash went public on the NYSE, making these friends billions. 

Today, DoorDash has a reported net worth of $115 billion and it has been led by Tony Xu who took charge as CEO. Andy F ang became the company’s Chief Technology Officer and Head of Consumer Engineering. With his background in computer science, he was able to put together the entire technological backbone of DoorDash. Stanley Tang served as Chief Product Officer during the early phases of the company, heavily focusing on user experience. Finally, Evan Moore acted as the quiet co-founder early on, helping with operations and ideation, but eventually left in 2014. 

DoorDash delivers millions of orders everyday, but underneath the surface, this platform is truly connecting communities by helping customers get what they need, allowing drivers to earn on their own time, and giving small restaurants the opportunity to be seen outside of their neighborhood.