Ryan NisbetOperations, Delphi · Operations at Delphi

The Night DoorDash Nearly Failed

16 Oct 2025 · 1 min

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1:15

In this interview excerpt, founder Ryan Nisbet recounts the most harrowing moment in DoorDash’s early history, occurring nine months after founding in September 2013. A heavy rainstorm coinciding with the first Stanford home football game caused an unexpected surge in food orders that the fledgling platform could not handle. The resulting service failures left many first‑time customers with a terrible experience, threatening the company’s reputation at a time when it had only about three to four weeks of cash runway left. Nisbet describes the panic and the critical question of how to respond when a startup faces a potential collapse.

Chapters

What was the darkest moment of your journey as a founder and what did it teach you? I'll say the one that stuck out to me the most was actually a moment very early on at DoorDash. It was maybe 9 months into the company. It was September 2013. DoorDash has just been around for a few months. Uh, and I remember, uh, this was also the night of the first Stanford home football game. Everyone was excited for the game. They wanted to order food. And also it was raining hard that night. So, and if, and, and for us, like when it's pouring rain, that's when demand spikes. And we were just completely unprepared that evening. Orders just kept flooding in. And of course it ended up being a complete disaster. You know, like, and then a lot of the time for a lot of these customers, this was the first time they ever used DoorDash. And it was like the worst experience possible. Like they're never going to use DoorDash again. And oh, by the way, like we probably have about 4 weeks of runway, 3 weeks of runway left. So, so we got back and it's like everything was disastrous and we're like, holy crap, what the hell just happened? And it's like, like no one's ever going to use DoorDash again. And so the question became like, what do you do in that moment?