Tony Xu

Tony Xu was born in Nanjing, China, and immigrated to the United States as a child, growing up in Champaign, Illinois, where his mother worked as a physician and his father pursued an academic career. Xu worked at a young age washing dishes and busing tables at a Chinese restaurant, an experience he has frequently cited as formative to his understanding of the operational realities of the restaurant industry. He studied computer science and economics at the University of California, Berkeley, before attending the Stanford Graduate School of Business, where he met his DoorDash co-founders. Before starting DoorDash, he worked briefly as a product manager at Square, giving him exposure to merchant-facing technology products.

Tony Xu has served as CEO of DoorDash since its founding in 2013 and is the public face of the company's strategy, culture, and long-term vision. His operational philosophy — rooted in his personal experience as a restaurant worker and his insistence that DoorDash executives perform regular Dasher delivery shifts — has defined the company's culture of ground-level operational understanding. Xu has been consistently recognized as one of the most influential technology CEOs of his generation, appearing on Forbes' Midas List and multiple other rankings of technology leadership. Under his leadership, DoorDash navigated the competitive wars of the mid-2010s, the pandemic-driven demand surge of 2020-2021, a landmark IPO in December 2020, and the transformative acquisition of Wolt in 2022. Xu holds equity stakes in DoorDash that made him one of the wealthiest technology founders of his cohort following the IPO.