For a Chinese family newly arrived in Champaign, Illinois, in 1989, a trip to McDonald's was a luxury. Tony Xu wrote that himself in 2017. He was five, and the family had come, in his words, with only a few hundred dollars.
He was born Xu Xun in Nanjing. His father was a graduate student in aeronautical engineering and applied math at the University of Illinois. His mother, Julie Cao, had been a doctor in China, but the United States did not recognise her licence. Money was tight and the family relied on federal assistance, as CNBC reported from Xu's own account. His mother took jobs wherever she could, and Xu started a lawn-mowing business at nine. He washed dishes at the Chinese restaurant where his mother worked. He and his father chose the name Tony, from the TV show Who's the Boss?, at the immigration office.
Xu studied at Berkeley, worked at Square, RedLaser and McKinsey, then went to Stanford's business school.
What most people hear about DoorDash is that it grew out of a Stanford class project. What is less told is the line Xu gave CNBC on 9 December 2020, the day the company listed: his mother worked three jobs a day for 12 years, one of them at a local Chinese restaurant, before she opened her own clinic. That is the wound under the company. His IPO letter said DoorDash exists to help people like his mother, who came here with a dream to make it on their own.
Xu studied at Berkeley, worked at Square, RedLaser and McKinsey, then went to Stanford's business school. There he met Andy Fang and Stanley Tang, who had roomed together and built a social calendar app. In January 2013 they launched PaloAltoDelivery.com with Evan Moore. They often made the deliveries themselves. The first order, the AP reported, was pad thai with prawns and spring rolls. In summer 2013 Y Combinator gave them $120,000 for 7 percent.
The price came later. A 2017 lawsuit from couriers claimed misclassification, and DoorDash agreed to a tentative $100 million settlement in 2022. A New York City pay settlement reached $131.5 million. In 2019 a data breach affected 4.9 million people, and in 2022 the company cut about 1,250 corporate jobs.
On 9 December 2020 DoorDash sold shares at $102 and raised $3.37 billion. Xu recalled to Bloomberg TV delivering hummus out of his Honda. In 2025 the company reported $13.7 billion in revenue and $935 million in net income, and its market value was about $78 billion in November 2026.
His parents came to this country, Xu said, to make a better life for him. A founder can carry that debt quietly, and decide what to build with it.