CompanyGraph
DoorDash, Inc.
DASH · United States
Connects people who want restaurant food delivered to their door with nearby independent drivers who pick it up and bring it over.
DoorDash connects consumers, restaurant kitchens, and independent drivers within a 30-to-45-minute window, but whether any given order actually completes depends entirely on how many Dashers are already within pickup range of that specific restaurant at that specific moment — national driver supply cannot cover a local shortage. Because every city neighborhood is effectively its own independent supply problem, DoorDash has to seed each new submarket from scratch: recruiting drivers, installing tablets in kitchens, and retraining staff block by block, which is why the Wolt acquisition mattered — it handed DoorDash already-functioning driver density and restaurant relationships across European cities rather than requiring that groundwork to be paid again from zero. Once those local relationships are in place, they become sticky: restaurant staff are already trained on the tablets, and Dashers have learned which kitchen entrances to use and which pickup routes work in their area, so competitors looking to displace DoorDash would have to rebuild that local familiarity zone by zone. The structure that makes all of this work, though, depends on Dashers remaining independent contractors — if state laws like California's AB5 were enforced broadly and required DoorDash to treat drivers as employees, the flexible local supply that underpins delivery in every submarket would have to be rebuilt under a fundamentally more expensive labor model.
How does this company make money?
DoorDash charges restaurants a commission on each order, typically between 15 and 30 percent of the order value. It also charges the customer a delivery fee, usually between two and five dollars per order, plus service fees and small order fees on top of that. Restaurants can also pay DoorDash to have their listings shown higher in search results and recommendation feeds inside the app, which is a separate advertising revenue stream.
What makes this company hard to replace?
Restaurants that integrate DoorDash tablets into their kitchen workflow have to retrain staff to manage menu updates and incoming orders — switching to a different platform means doing that again. Consumers have their payment details and delivery addresses already saved in the DoorDash app, which removes most of the friction from placing the next order. And Dashers who have worked in a specific area have learned which restaurant entrances to use, how kitchens manage pickups, and which routes work best — that local knowledge does not transfer if they move to a competing platform.
What limits this company?
The real ceiling is how many active Dashers are within a few blocks of a given restaurant at a given moment. The app and routing software can handle millions of orders across hundreds of cities without breaking a sweat — that part scales easily. But if drivers in one neighborhood are scarce on a Friday night, no amount of surplus drivers across town or in another city fixes that. Every local shortage directly caps how many orders can be completed in that zone, no matter how large the platform gets overall.
What does this company depend on?
DoorDash cannot operate without iOS and Android app stores to distribute its consumer and driver apps. It relies on Google Maps API for routing and showing drivers and customers where to go. Stripe and other payment processors handle every transaction on the platform. Restaurant point-of-sale system integrations connect kitchen order management to incoming DoorDash orders. And cellular data networks keep real-time driver location tracking running for every active delivery.
Who depends on this company?
Independent restaurants without their own delivery staff depend on DoorDash to reach customers beyond walk-in traffic — if DoorDash stopped, those restaurants would lose online ordering revenue entirely. Suburban consumers who live more than a 15-minute drive from restaurant variety would lose access to that food. And Dashers themselves would lose a flexible income source that requires no specialized skills, no fixed schedule, and no upfront commitment.
How does this company scale?
The order matching algorithms and the mobile apps themselves can expand into new cities at very low added cost — that infrastructure is already built and replicates cheaply. What does not scale automatically is everything local: signing up restaurants, handing out tablets, retraining kitchen staff, recruiting drivers, and building enough driver density in each new neighborhood to make deliveries actually work. Every new market requires that groundwork to be done again from scratch, which is why the Wolt acquisition mattered — it skipped that seeding cost in European cities already covered.
What external forces can significantly affect this company?
Gig worker classification laws like California's AB5, and similar regulations at the state or municipal level, pose the most direct threat by potentially forcing DoorDash to treat Dashers as employees. Federal immigration enforcement shapes how many people are willing to take flexible delivery work in the first place. Rising gas prices eat into what Dashers actually take home, which pushes drivers toward other gig options and shrinks local supply. Rising automotive insurance costs have a similar effect on driver economics.
Where is this company structurally vulnerable?
Laws that reclassify Dashers as employees rather than independent contractors — like California's AB5 — would be the most direct structural threat. The entire local driver supply model depends on flexible, contractor-based work. If Dashers had to be treated as employees with minimum wage guarantees and benefits, the cost of keeping enough drivers active in each zone would rise sharply. The economics that make local density possible would collapse, and the whole fulfillment model — including everything transferred through the Wolt acquisition — would have to be rebuilt under a much more expensive structure.