Tony Xu

Tony Xu
Born	Xu Xun Template:Birth year and age
Birthplace	Nanjing, China
Nationality	American
Occupation	CEO of DoorDash
Known for	Co-founding DoorDash
Education	Stanford Graduate School of Business (MBA)
Spouse(s)	Patti Xu
Children	2
Awards	Fortune 40 Under 40 (2020)
Website	[https://about.doordash.com Official site]

'Tony Xu (Template:Lang; born Xu Xun, c. 1984) is an American businessman and billionaire who serves as the co-founder and chief executive officer of DoorDash, the largest food delivery platform in the United States. Born in Nanjing, China, Xu immigrated to the United States with his parents at the age of four and grew up in Champaign, Illinois, before eventually settling in the San Francisco Bay Area. Xu's trajectory from the child of immigrant parents—his mother worked as a restaurant worker and later a medical professional—to the helm of a publicly traded technology company has been a recurring theme in coverage of his career. After earning degrees from the University of California, Berkeley and Stanford Graduate School of Business, and working at firms including McKinsey & Company, eBay, and PayPal, Xu co-founded DoorDash in 2013 alongside Stanley Tang, Andy Fang, and Evan Moore. The company held its initial public offering in December 2020, and by 2025 it had grown to command more than twice the U.S. market share of its nearest competitor, Uber Eats. Xu was named to Fortunes 40 Under 40 list in 2020 and is, together with his wife Patti, a signatory to the Giving Pledge.

Early Life

Tony Xu was born Xu Xun in Nanjing, Jiangsu province, China, around 1984. He immigrated to the United States with his parents when he was approximately four years old. The family initially settled in Champaign, Illinois, where Xu grew up.

Xu's mother played a formative role in shaping his understanding of the restaurant industry and the challenges faced by small business owners. She worked in restaurants during the family's early years in the United States, an experience that Xu has cited as a significant influence on his later decision to build a company focused on helping local businesses reach customers through delivery services. In interviews, Xu has described watching his mother work long hours in restaurant kitchens, often for modest wages, and has connected that experience to DoorDash's stated mission of empowering local economies.

As an immigrant family, the Xus navigated the challenges typical of new arrivals in the United States. Tony Xu's mother eventually transitioned from restaurant work to a career in medicine, a trajectory that reflected the family's upward mobility. Xu has spoken publicly about how these formative years instilled in him an appreciation for the struggles of small business owners, particularly restaurant operators, and a personal motivation to create technology-driven solutions for them.

Education

Xu attended the University of California, Berkeley, where he earned his undergraduate degree in industrial engineering and operations research. He subsequently enrolled at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, where he earned a Master of Business Administration (MBA). It was during his time at Stanford that Xu developed the initial concept for what would become DoorDash, collaborating with fellow students Stanley Tang, Andy Fang, and Evan Moore on a class project that explored the logistics of food delivery for small restaurants that did not offer their own delivery services.

Career

Pre-DoorDash work experience

Before founding DoorDash, Xu accumulated experience across several prominent technology and consulting firms. He worked at McKinsey & Company, the global management consulting firm, where he gained experience in business strategy and operations. He also held positions at eBay and PayPal, two major technology companies based in the San Francisco Bay Area, where he developed familiarity with marketplace platforms and digital payments infrastructure. Additionally, Xu completed an internship at Square, Inc. (now Block, Inc.), the mobile payments company founded by Jack Dorsey. These collective experiences in consulting, e-commerce, and financial technology provided Xu with a broad skill set that he would later apply to the founding and operation of DoorDash.

Founding of DoorDash

DoorDash was founded in 2013 by Xu, Stanley Tang, Andy Fang, and Evan Moore while they were students at Stanford. The idea originated from a research project in which the founders interviewed small business owners in the Palo Alto area about the challenges they faced. Many restaurant owners identified the lack of affordable delivery infrastructure as a major constraint on their business. At the time, delivery services were largely limited to restaurants that could afford to hire their own drivers, leaving the majority of small and independent establishments without any delivery option.

The founders created what they have described as a "super simple, ugly web page" called Palo Alto Delivery, which listed menus from local restaurants and allowed customers to place orders online. In the earliest days, the co-founders personally delivered orders themselves, gaining firsthand insight into the logistical and operational challenges of last-mile delivery. This hands-on approach informed the company's subsequent technology development, as the founders built routing algorithms and logistics software designed to optimize delivery times and reduce costs for both restaurants and consumers.

The company was accepted into the Y Combinator startup accelerator, which provided early funding and mentorship. DoorDash quickly expanded beyond Palo Alto into other Bay Area cities and, eventually, into markets across the United States.

Growth and market expansion

Under Xu's leadership as CEO, DoorDash pursued an aggressive growth strategy that distinguished it from competitors such as Grubhub and Uber Eats. Rather than focusing primarily on dense urban markets, DoorDash targeted suburban areas, where competition was less intense and where many residents had fewer dining options. This suburban-first strategy proved effective, allowing DoorDash to build market share rapidly in underserved areas before expanding into major metropolitan centers.

By late 2025, DoorDash had become an $85 billion company by market valuation and held more than twice the U.S. market share of its nearest competitor, Uber Eats. Fortune magazine characterized the company's rise as having "won the delivery wars," a reference to the intense competition that defined the food delivery industry throughout the late 2010s and early 2020s.

Xu expanded DoorDash's business model beyond restaurant food delivery to include grocery delivery, convenience store delivery, and other categories of local commerce. In the company's Q4 2025 earnings call, Xu stated that DoorDash offered more choice than Amazon in the grocery delivery space by working with a wider range of grocery chains. The company also introduced restaurant reservation services and other features designed to expand its role in the local commerce ecosystem.

IPO and billionaire status

DoorDash held its initial public offering on the New York Stock Exchange on December 9, 2020, under the ticker symbol DASH. The IPO was one of the largest technology offerings of the year, occurring during a period of strong investor appetite for technology stocks and, in particular, for companies that had benefited from changes in consumer behavior during the COVID-19 pandemic. The offering made Xu and his co-founders billionaires. Forbes reported that the IPO "delivered three billionaires" among the co-founding team. Fox Business similarly reported that the IPO turned Xu into a billionaire.

Prior to the IPO, Forbes had projected that the offering would "mint" Xu and his co-founders as billionaires based on the expected valuation.

International expansion and Deliveroo acquisition

DoorDash expanded its operations internationally through both organic growth and acquisition. In 2025, the company completed its acquisition of Deliveroo, the London-based food delivery platform that operated across multiple markets in Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. On October 2, 2025, Xu published an open letter to the Deliveroo community following the closing of the transaction, outlining his vision for integrating Deliveroo's operations with DoorDash's platform and technology. The acquisition significantly expanded DoorDash's international footprint and marked one of the largest consolidation moves in the global food delivery industry.

Artificial intelligence and autonomous delivery

Under Xu's leadership, DoorDash has invested in artificial intelligence (AI) and autonomous delivery technologies. In February 2026, The Wall Street Journal reported that DoorDash was positioning itself for an "AI future" with significant investment in research and development, including preparing to deliver items ordered through AI chatbots' shopping lists.

In a September 2025 interview at Fortune's Brainstorm Tech conference, Xu addressed the company's efforts in autonomous delivery, including drone deliveries. He stated that the path to autonomous deliveries was filled with "lots of pain and suffering" but indicated that the company was approaching what he characterized as "the first inning of commercial progress" in this area.

The company's Q4 2025 earnings report showed revenue growth of 38 percent in the fourth quarter, driven by new U.S. customer acquisition and the addition of new services. However, the company also signaled significant future costs associated with its investment in AI and autonomous technologies, which led to some concern among investors.

Ghost kitchens and personal investments

Xu has made personal investments in the ghost kitchen sector, which involves commercial kitchen facilities that prepare food exclusively for delivery, without a traditional dine-in component. Business Insider reported that Xu used his personal wealth to back ghost kitchen ventures, reflecting his broader interest in the evolution of the restaurant industry. The growth of ghost kitchens accelerated during and after the COVID-19 pandemic, as delivery-only food preparation facilities became an increasingly common feature on food delivery platforms.

Personal Life

Tony Xu is married to Patti Xu. The couple has two children. They reside in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Xu and his wife are signatories to the Giving Pledge, an initiative started by Warren Buffett and Bill Gates that invites the world's wealthiest individuals and families to commit the majority of their wealth to philanthropic causes.

Xu has served on the board of directors of the Silicon Valley Community Foundation (SVCAF), a community foundation focused on grantmaking and civic engagement in the Bay Area. He has also been a member of TechNet's executive council, a bipartisan network of technology executives focused on policy issues affecting the technology industry.

Xu has spoken publicly about his identity as a Chinese-American immigrant and the influence of his family's immigration experience on his worldview and business philosophy. The South China Morning Post and China Daily have profiled him in the context of Chinese-American entrepreneurship.

Recognition

Xu was named to Fortune's 40 Under 40 list in 2020, a ranking of influential young leaders in business. The selection recognized his role in building DoorDash into one of the largest technology companies in the United States.

The Financial Times profiled Xu in 2020 as part of its coverage of the food delivery industry's rapid growth and the competitive dynamics among major platforms.

By December 2025, Fortune described DoorDash under Xu's leadership as an "$85 billion behemoth" that had "won the delivery wars," noting the company's dominant U.S. market share position. The Los Angeles Times had earlier profiled Xu with the headline "How a dishwasher's son built DoorDash into a $1.4-billion company," a reference to both his family's humble beginnings in the United States and the company's early-stage valuation at the time of the 2018 article.

Stanford Graduate School of Business has featured Xu in its publications and events, highlighting his approach to leadership and his emphasis on attention to operational detail as a competitive advantage.

Legacy

As the co-founder and CEO of DoorDash, Xu has played a central role in the development of the on-demand food delivery industry in the United States. DoorDash's suburban-first growth strategy, which Xu championed, reshaped the competitive landscape of the industry by demonstrating that food delivery could be viable and profitable outside of dense urban markets where competitors had historically concentrated their efforts.

The company's evolution from a Stanford class project built on a rudimentary website to a publicly traded corporation with an $85 billion market valuation represents one of the notable startup-to-IPO trajectories of the 2010s and 2020s. DoorDash's growth contributed to broader shifts in the American restaurant industry, as delivery became a standard expectation for consumers and a significant revenue channel for restaurants of all sizes.

Xu's acquisition of Deliveroo in 2025 extended DoorDash's model internationally and consolidated the global food delivery market. His investment in AI and autonomous delivery technologies has positioned DoorDash as a company with ambitions extending beyond food delivery into broader local commerce and logistics.

Xu's personal story—as the child of Chinese immigrants who arrived in the United States with limited means—has been cited in media coverage as representative of the immigrant experience in American technology entrepreneurship. His commitment to the Giving Pledge, alongside his wife Patti, signals an intention to direct a significant portion of the wealth generated by DoorDash toward philanthropic purposes.