American City Business Journals
Executive of the Year: Tony Xu, DoorDash CEO and co-founder
It was Stanford University’s first home football game of 2013 and the phones of DoorDash’s four student co-founders were blowing up with calls from angry customers. The nascent food-delivery company Tony Xu and the others had founded in their dorm rooms three months earlier was weeks away from running out of cash — and it was running out of chances. Seven years later — about a month into the pandemic shutdown in April 2020 — Xu, now the company’s CEO, had to make a similar call, this one on a far grander scale.