DoorDash’s Toby Espinosa on helping local economies grow

“How can I help you grow?”

That was the very question the founders of DoorDash put to local businesses in Palo Alto when they were concepting the delivery platform. They found that local restaurants needed to reach more customers. And DoorDash aimed to open up that pipeline when it was founded back in 2013, according to Toby Espinosa, the VP of DoorDash ads, who joins The Current Podcast this week.

Espinosa joined the company in its early days in 2015. Over the last decade, the company has grown into an online marketplace servicing more than 37 million customers monthly who place orders on the app. Espinosa has seen the company continue to thrive. In October 2021, DoorDash launched an ad platform, which was again inspired by asking local businesses about what they needed.

“That’s how the ad business started. Core to who we are, it’s a growth business,” says Espinosa. “We have customers who want to grow faster, and what we then tried to figure out was how can we help serve this promise for these customers while also helping our marketplace continue to grow.”

Espinosa says that the core of the DoorDash business is local, even for national brands like McDonald’s or Chipotle, many of which have local franchises. “The brand is national but the spend is local,” he says. DoorDash has created tech to allow buyers of media — including local franchisees — to manage both the national and local brand on its platform.

DoorDash also delivers consumers a little bit of joy in a busy world, says Espinosa. He talks about the company’s partnership with the streaming platform Max and why that collaboration is such a good fit. What’s better than a food delivery and a good show at the end of a hectic day?

“We’re trying to give everybody a little bit of time back again — this concept of putting the weight of other things on our shoulders as a company to help people, to help local economies grow, that is what we are trying to do at DoorDash.”