Building an Autonomous Delivery Experience with DoorDash Co-Founders Andy Fang and Stanley Tang

Hi, listeners. Welcome back to No Priors. Today, I'm here with Andy Fang and Stanley Ting, co founders at DoorDash. We talk about how you can ask DoorDash in natural language for food and groceries, what that means for the future of agentic commerce, their delivery robot, Dot, how DoorDash has been a robotics company for the last eight years, the data advantages of their network, and what all this means for 9,000,000 dashers and 3,000,000,000 deliveries a year. Welcome. Andy, Stanley, thank you so much for being here. Real excited to talk to you about, all the crazy stuff DoorDash is doing. I thought we could start with what's going on with, agentic commerce at DoorDash. I feel like you have one of the largest rollouts of actually using AI to change what people consume. Yeah. So what was the backstory here? I mean, it started a couple of years ago, honestly, in terms of, like, our attempts to try to make a play here. It actually originally, we were bullish on voice as the modality. And it ended up not being the the thing. That ended up not being the thing, but maybe it will in the future, but that didn't really land. But the thing that was very interesting for us was just this natural conversational experience. And I think you know, what we've seen is just people being able to naturally translate what's in their head into this interface versus trying to do some research online and then try to do some keyword optimization stuff. Like, people just found it easier to search for things, either more nuanced kind of restaurant discovery searches or different tasks on the grocery side. And, yeah, we've just seen a lot of interesting traction that's upheld as we've expanded the rollout. What are you seeing in terms of behavior change from the user side? Like, do I eat or buy differently? Yeah. So I would say on the restaurant side, we are seeing people 50% of trajectories of people using Ask DoorDash for restaurants. 50% of those trajectories are people ordering from places they've never ordered from before, which is huge because that's one of the hardest metrics historically for DoorDash for us to, move. And so that's been big. And then another one is on the grocery side, we're seeing a lot, higher basket sizes. Like, I would say, like, 40% larger basket sizes on grocery. And so people are, like, you know, they'll take a picture of what's in their fridge and they'll say, help me stock up my fridge. Or they'll do meal planning with, like, maybe they have some dietary constraints. Or they're like, hey, I wanna, like, cook a pasta dinner this weekend with my family. Or even just like, hey, help me reorder, like, my, you know, my usuals. And, like, that's a lot easier than tapping through the the traditional experience. That's wild. I've never thought of DoorDash as difficult to use, but, …