DoorDash for ___
A lot of start-ups paint their vision for the future by describing their company as the "Uber for ___", the "Airbnb for ___" or the "Netflix of ___". But this week, the first of those comparisons lost a little of its lustre, as online food delivery service DoorDash officially became more valuable than Uber, hitting close to a $75bn market capitalization on Thursday.
That DoorDash is more valuable than Uber's Rides and Eats business is quite remarkable, considering DoorDash does just one of those things in basically just one country (the US was 99.5% of its revenue last year)... compared to Uber's operations that are well established across ~70 countries.
With 57% of the US food delivery market, DoorDash has been something of a beneficiary of the recent rise in the delta variant of coronavirus. Delta, and everything that comes with it, has reinvigorated demand for food delivery while doing the opposite for ride-hailing, which still makes up a significant chunk of Uber's business.
DoorDash vs. New York City
This week the company filed a lawsuit against New York City, over a new law that could see delivery companies share customer data with the restaurants fulfilling orders. Presumably if told to share the data, restaurants could deal with customers more directly, threatening the usefulness of the app.
That follows from the lawsuit last week which protests the now-permanent cap on fees that apps are allowed to take from restaurants in NYC that was first introduced during the early days of the pandemic. Shout out to the DoorDash lawyers who have been busy.
