DoorDash files for IPO, says it had revenue of $1.9B and loss of $149M in the first nine months of 2020, vs. revenue of $587M and loss of $533M a year ago
DoorDash's public prospectus converts the confidential filing it made with the SEC in February into a full financial reveal: nine-month revenue of $1.9 billion against a loss cut to $149 million from $533 million a year earlier, with the pandemic-driven surge in U.S. food delivery doing most of the work. The S-1 gives outside investors their first complete look at the unit economics of the leading U.S. delivery app before it prices.
The filing starts the clock on pricing: the prospectus sets the stage for an offering that ultimately targeted up to $2.8 billion raised at a valuation of up to $32 billion, with shares listed at $75–$85.
Second-order effects
Raising roughly $3 billion of fresh equity gives DoorDash capital to fund its own logistics bets, including the in-house delivery drones it has said will fly starting in the fall.
A public DoorDash forces rival delivery platforms to defend their own loss trajectories against a disclosed comparable — 'narrowing losses on surging GOV' becomes the standard the whole category is judged by.
Third-order effects
If the pattern holds, the 2020 cohort of pandemic-inflated delivery platforms will have used a crisis demand shock to cross the profitability-trendline threshold needed to go public — locking in consolidation around whichever player converts temporary volume into permanent share.
Public-listing scrutiny shifts the sector's competitive axis from subsidy-fueled order growth toward disclosed adjusted EBITDA, since the S-1 format makes quarterly losses a headline event rather than a private metric.
The trend: Pandemic-accelerated food delivery platforms are converting crisis-era volume growth into public listings, trading private subsidy wars for quarterly disclosed losses.
This is DoorDash's mission, according to CEO Tony Xu in company's public filing today: “DoorDash exists today to empower those like my Mom who came here with a dream to make it on their own. Fighting for the underdog is...what we stand for as a company” https://sec.gov/...
Doordash briefly turned profitable during the pandemic. To the extent that this whole year has been a huge trend accelerator, perhaps it indicates that all these money-losing delivery companies have a better path to making money than people appreciate https://www.bloomberg.com/..…
it is a shocking missed opportunity that none of these companies has yet given their employees swag in the form of platform shoes pls fix thx https://twitter.com/...
“In a clear sign of the pandemic's effect, DoorDash had 543M orders through Sept of this year, compared with 181M in the same period a year earlier” https://www.nytimes.com/...
After working in infrastructure for a long time, the way I read S-1's is to google for “AWS” and “GCP” and try to understand their cloud economics and disaster recovery. From Doordash's today: https://www.sec.gov/... https://twitter.com/...
DoorDash is still losing money. But numbers going in right direction. Net loss in first nine months of 2019: $533M. Net loss for first nine months of 2020: $149M. And the revenue growth is bonkers. $1.9B so far this year vs. $587M a year ago. $DASH https://www.sec.gov/...
Tidbit from Door Dash's IPO filing at the SEC: Company warns that its mandatory arbitration and class waiver provisions are under “increasing public scrutiny” and it might not enforce them “to minimize these risks to our reputation and brand.” https://www.sec.gov/...
DoorDash, the largest food delivery start-up in the United States, revealed that it is losing money even as the coronavirus pandemic has spurred a huge surge in orders, according to financial documents released as the company prepares to go public https://www.nytimes.com/...
“Our former Dasher pay model has also led, and may continue to lead, to some consumers providing lower tips, or no tips at all, to Dashers, which could impact the amount that Dashers are able to earn on our platform and our ability to attract and retain Dashers.”
DoorDash's IPO paperwork showed the food-delivery service turned a surprising profit during the pandemic before falling back to a loss last quarter https://www.wsj.com/...
IPO rush to end the year: Airbnb, DoorDash, Wish and Affirm all set to list, adding billions of dollars to the record total of more than $140 billion raised on US exchanges already this year. https://www.bloomberg.com/... @crystalttc @Katie_Roof @BloombergDeals
Now that the election is over and the markets are fine, we spent all week figuring out which companies are going public in the next IPO window between Thanksgiving and Christmas. It's not just Airbnb! Watch out for Doordash, Wish and Affirm https://www.bloomberg.com/...