DoorDash’s CFO on the company’s Fortune 500 debut: ‘Our goal wasn’t to build a food delivery business’

“We have three customers: consumers, merchants, and Dashers,” CFO Ravi Inukonda told me. “When we first started, our goal wasn’t to build a food delivery business. The goal was to build a local commerce business.”

But DoorDash quickly noticed that food delivery was a high-frequency use case, with people generally eating three times a day—or 100 times a month. That led to the company building out two strong networks: a “very powerful delivery network,” and one for consumers, Inukonda explained. After beginning in the U.S., where it now has over 60% of the food-delivery market share, DoorDash can be found in over 30 countries.

The company, founded in 2013, has been adding categories like groceries, alcohol, and retail, and has partnered with Walgreens, CVS, and 7-Eleven. As of Q4 2023, over 7 million consumers are ordering in grocery each month, which is 20% of DoorDash’s overall user base.

“Our goal is, How do you help consumers discover the best of your local neighborhood?” Inukonda said. And consumers want more selection and affordability, he said.

About half of DoorDash customers have subscribed to DashPass, which costs $9.99 per month or $96 per year but waives all delivery fees, saving customers over $10 billion globally since 2018, according to the company. Fees for non-DashPass members have been reduced by 12%. And, last year, DoorDash began accepting SNAP/EBT payments from grocery store partners with more than 4,000 combined U.S. locations.

During the COVID pandemic, Inukonda told me, DoorDash worked to strengthen partnerships with local food merchants and helped build out their e-commerce platforms, and that has now extended to other categories like retail. “Our partnership with merchants has truly been transformational in how we’ve grown as a business,” he said.

Every quarter, everyone on the firm’s leadership team spends a day with merchants. Last quarter, Inukonda said he spent time in a Philadelphia restaurant, working in the kitchen and serving food. “It helps us understand the merchants’ pain points,” he added. The leadership team also spends one day per quarter as a “Dasher,” a driver for DoorDash.

Inukonda, who became CFO in March 2023 and has now been with the company for about six years, also pointed to DoorDash’s use of technology. “We’re very proud of having built a very efficient logistics engine that’s been powered by machine learning for the past 10 years,” he said. The company is also developing an AI voice-ordering product. “We’re slowly starting to roll that out; we’re early on the journey,” Inukonda said.

Sheryl Estrada
sheryl.estrada@fortune.com

Leaderboard

Daniel Foley was named CFO at Complete Solaria, Inc. (Nasdaq: CSLR), a solar technology, services, and installation company, effective July 1. Foley will report to CEO TJ Rodgers. Foley has more than 25 years of experience in finance. He has worked in both public and private companies and early in his career, he was an investment analyst at Bear Stearns. 

Christopher M. Mathieu, CFO at TriplePoint Venture Growth BDC Corp. (NYSE: TPVG), a financing provider to venture growth stage companies, is retiring from his position, effective as of the close of business on Aug. 9  will continue to serve as an advisor through Dec. 31. Mathieu has served as CFO of TPVG since July 2019. The company has initiated a search for a successor. 

Big Deal

Finance and IT teams collaborate on technology transformations. A new report by SolarWinds (NYSE: SWI), a provider of IT management software, is based on a survey of nearly 700 IT professionals about their views on AI. Despite a desire to adopt AI, very few respondents have confidence in their organization’s readiness to integrate the technology due to limitations in data and infrastructure and security concerns, according to the report.

“While talk of AI has dominated the industry, IT leaders and teams recognize the outsize risks of the still-developing technology, heightened by the rush to build AI quickly rather than smartly,” Krishna Sai, SVP of technology, and engineering at SolarWinds, said in a statement. 

IT pros cited AIOps, (using artificial intelligence to streamline IT operations and service delivery) as the AI technology that will have the most significant positive impact on their role (31%). That ranks above large language models (27%). To ensure successful and secure AI adoption, IT pros recognize that organizations must develop thorough policies on ethics, data privacy, and compliance, according to the report.

Going deeper

NTT DATA, a global IT infrastructure and services company, has released its inaugural Lifecycle Management Report.  The research found that 94% of C-suite executives surveyed believe legacy infrastructure is greatly hindering their business agility. Just 51% of enterprises have fully aligned their technology approach to their business strategy needs. Meanwhile, 71% of organizations say their network assets are mostly aging or obsolete. The report offers insight to help leaders mitigate these risks. 

The research was conducted over 2022 and 2023, gathering data from over 248 million NTT DATA, active assets across 130 countries and supported with responses from up to 1,400 senior technology decision makers.

Overheard

“Some forward-thinking companies are reimagining retirement with a new approach, and I decided we would create an alternative option at Optima Office: flextirement.”

—Jennifer Barnes, CEO of Optima Office, writes in a Fortune opinion piece. Barnes describes “flextirement” as a work arrangement created to “ease the transition between full-time employment and retirement with flexible hours, reduced workloads, and phased approaches to leaving the workforce.”