The Founder Who Almost Undersold Everything
In the spring of 2013, four founders working out of an apartment submitted an application to Y Combinator with roughly 150 customers and $10,000 in total sales. When asked how large their business could become, DoorDash cofounder Tony Xu offered what felt like a bold answer at the time: $100 million in revenue.
He was off by several orders of magnitude.
DoorDash hit that $100 million annual revenue figure in 2018 — and then kept accelerating. In the first quarter of this year alone, the company posted $4 billion in revenue, forty times the founders' original lifetime projection, in a single three-month window. Total orders across the United States and more than 40 other countries reached 933 million in that same period, a 27% increase year-over-year. The company now carries an $87 billion market valuation.
'I estimated something like $100 million of revenue,' Xu said recently on the Uncapped with Jack Altman podcast. 'Thankfully, we're a few orders of magnitude off.'
The 'Greedy Algorithm' for Builders
Xu's advice to the next generation of founders is direct: resist the instinct to play it safe.
'I think a lot of times you kind of, as an entrepreneur, have to take the greedy algorithm,' Xu said. 'You have to keep going all the way and seeing if there's more.'
The observation carries weight precisely because it comes from someone who almost made the opposite mistake. 'It's very hard as an entrepreneur when you're working out of your apartment, to know what that size could be one day,' Xu added. 'Turns out a lot of people eat food.'
Xu is not alone in preaching the gospel of outsized thinking. Chess.com cofounder Danny Rensch, who reached a $1 billion valuation in 2023, told Fortune that the platform's growth required a degree of self-delusion. 'The belief that you see something that doesn't exist yet, and how delusional that is, is the requirement for every successful entrepreneur,' Rensch said.
Serial entrepreneur Mike Repole, who cofounded Glaceau and BodyArmor and sold both to Coca-Cola for a combined $9.7 billion, frames persistence in blunter terms. 'The first five years for an entrepreneur, I call the survival years. Every single day, you could go bankrupt,' Repole said. 'Crazy people change the world.'
Grindr CEO George Arison, whose platform now carries a $3.2 billion market cap, echoed the sentiment at Fortune's 2024 Brainstorm Tech conference. 'One of my motives in life is doing impossible things,' Arison said.
What the Numbers Say About Ambition
The DoorDash trajectory is a clean argument for free enterprise doing what bureaucracies cannot: convert an unproven idea, a small apartment, and a modest seed pitch into a logistics network spanning more than 40 countries and nearly a billion quarterly orders.
The lesson here is not simply motivational. It is structural. Markets reward founders who refuse to pre-negotiate against themselves. When capital is free to chase vision rather than comply with regulatory permission structures, the gap between a $100 million ceiling and an $87 billion outcome is exactly the kind of gap that gets closed. Tony Xu's story is not an outlier — it is the system working as designed.
