Andy Fang

We ran out of whiteboard space and are on the walls @AIatDoorDash Come push the frontier with us - we’re looking for summer and fall research fellows. Any education or experience level, unlimited compute, mentorship from senior researchers, and full publication support + a very generous stipend.

To best support its merchants, @DoorDash is building an intelligence system with a suite of AI agents. From @andyfang:

Today, @TIME named DoorDash one of the 10 Most Influential Companies in Retail as part of this year’s #TIME100 Companies list. What started as a mission to empower local economies has grown into: 🌏40+ countries around the world 📦 500,000+ products available in under an hour across the average U.S. consumer 📍 10B+ deliveries completed From AI-powered merchant tools like SmartScale, to our delivery robot Dot, to the Autonomous Delivery Platform that optimizes delivery methods across all orders, we’re developing technology to level the playing field so local retailers can compete and thrive. We’re building the infrastructure for the future of local commerce, expanding access to the products consumers need and the local businesses that power our communities. time.com/article/2026/0…

DoorDash, one of the world's largest local commerce platforms, is building stablecoin-powered payment infrastructure on Tempo for its marketplace of merchants and Dashers across 40+ countries. Hear from @andyfang, co-founder of @DoorDash on why:

In 2014, DoorDash ran on a guy named Steve. Every dasher shared their location with him on Find My Friends. Order comes in, Steve finds the closest one, texts them. It worked until it didn't. We sat next to him and turned that manual process into software. Steve went on to build and lead our support org. I've spent the last year watching the same pattern play out across every industry. Smart people manually holding critical workflows together because their systems haven't kept up. AI helps, but mostly as an assistant - it makes you faster, it doesn't take work off your plate. That's what we’re building at @conveyAI. Digital teammates that operators train themselves, that run autonomously, and that fully own a process end to end. Today we're out of stealth. Grateful to NBC Universal, Samsara, Faire, TelevisaUnivision, Unity and our other customers who bet on us early. The era of asking your best people to manually run critical business processes is over. The future belongs to the 100x operator.

My conversation with Tony Xu (@t_xu), co-founder & CEO of @DoorDash. 0:00 DoorDash MVP in 43 Minutes 1:39 How Delivery Worked in 2013 3:17 Small Business Roots and Insight 5:48 Why Restaurants First 8:24 Palo Alto vs San Francisco 11:03 Early Customers and Unit Economics 15:22 YC Summer Three Questions 19:50 The Hidden Complexity of Delivery 22:02 Competing on Invisible Details 23:54 Chaos Data and Experiment Loops 30:58 Trust Reset Every Day 31:30 Stanford Game Meltdown and Refunds 34:41 Scaling Through Experiments 37:37 Customer North Star Metrics 40:10 CEO Customer Support Habit 42:55 Anecdotes Versus Data 46:52 Eternal Mission Local Economies 50:09 Turning Data Into Merchant Growth 59:12 New Products Beyond Delivery 1:01:14 Autonomous Delivery Strategy 1:05:06 Hiring Rhodes Scholar Navy SEALs 1:12:46 Driver Switch Experiment 1:13:42 Who Delivers and Why 1:15:33 Hiring for Action 1:18:07 Earned Secrets via Experiments 1:20:01 Money vs Problem Solving 1:21:18 Thousand Days of Hell 1:26:04 Staying Sane as CEO 1:30:07 Ignore the Stock Price 1:31:44 Two Operating Systems 1:35:17 Internal Venture Stage Gates 1:38:17 Learning from Founder Peers 1:42:29 Jiu Jitsu Lessons 1:44:37 AI Changes the Loop 1:47:01 Data Needs Action 1:48:24 Closing Thoughts Includes paid partnerships.