This week on Bullish, I sat down with DoorDash CEO Tony Xu to talk about the future of on-demand food delivery. In January, DoorDash teamed up with Starship Technologies to test food delivery via robots.
On this episode of Bullish, Xu and I discussed the evolution of the on-demand space, challenges to profitability, predictions for the future and autonomous delivery.
“I think it’s not a world where any sudden changes are happening,” Xu said about robot delivery. “In many ways I believe, and we at DoorDash believe, in a world where technology and humans coexist to help each other.”
In 2015, people in the U.S. ordered about $210 billion worth of food for delivery or takeout. But two of the big players in the space, GrubHub/Seamless and Eat24, only generated a combined $2.6 billion in food sales, according to Business Insider Intelligence.
That means there’s still a lot of room for competition and variation — whether that’s picking up food from restaurants and delivering it or making food in-house and delivering that, or something entirely different that we haven’t even heard of yet.
Check out the episode at the top to hear more.