We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us

Marshall McLuhan

DoorDash began with a simple mission: to enable every merchant to deliver.

Our story began back in the fall of 2012 at a small macaroon store in downtown Palo Alto. The four of us were working on building technology for small business owners and getting feedback on an app we’d built. We spent a long time talking with Chloe, the store manager, learning about her day-to-day life. But in the end, our app didn’t solve her most important problems.

Just as we were about to leave, Chloe bursted out, “Well, there is one thing I wanted to show you.” She took out a thick booklet. It was pages and pages of delivery orders. “This drives me crazy. I have no drivers to fulfill them and I’m the one doing all of it.”

And that was the lightbulb moment.

Over the course of the next few weeks, we interviewed over 200 small business owners all over the Bay Area – from San Mateo to Mountain View – and we kept hearing the same thing over and over again: deliveries are painful.

At the same time, we had a strong need ourselves. We all came from big cities where food delivery was a common thing. But out in Palo Alto, none of the restaurants delivered. So we decided to do something about it. We put our coding hats on and built our initial prototype in a few hours.

January 2013, Palo Alto Delivery was born.

Half an hour later, we got a phone call – it was our first order! Next thing we knew, we were delivering food every single day all over the Stanford campus. We were students by day, delivery drivers by night. We learned so much as drivers that we now have every team member start as a driver in their first week at our company. We later changed our name to DoorDash in June.

Since then, the team at DoorDash has been working insanely hard to do everything we can to provide the best delivery experience: from hiring drivers, working with restaurants, delighting customers to building out our complex, dispatch system.

When we first started, we were trying to solve our own problem of getting food delivered. But soon, it grew quickly within the Stanford community and beyond. We found out that many families and office workers in the area have the same problem. When we deliver food, it’s as much about delivering happiness as it is about bringing convenience.

Our Vision

Ultimately, our vision is to build the local, on-demand Fedex. We are a logistics company more so than a food company. We help small businesses grow, we give underemployed people meaningful work, and we offer affordable convenience to consumers. We’re tackling some of the most difficult logistical challenges that come with on-demand delivery – both in engineering and in operations.

In the mean time, we’re excited to announce that we raised our $2.4 million seed round from a terrific group of investors that includes: Khosla Ventures (Keith Rabois – former COO of Square, Yelp Board member), Charles River Ventures (Saar Gur), SV Angel, Paul Buchheit (Creator of Gmail), Pejman Mar Ventures (Pejman Nozad), Andy Rachleff (co-founder of Benchmark), and Russell Siegelman (former KPCB partner).

We’re looking to expand the founding team and grow into new cities. We want people who are excited about our mission to empower small businesses and build out the world’s first real-time logistics company. Let us know if you’re interested in joining us.

More to come!

I’ve always been interested in tech startups but never actually got around doing one. I had the domain name BuzzBlaze.com sitting in my account and decided this was my chance. We came up with the idea to build a better RSS reader.

Six months later, we launched and BuzzBlaze took off like crazy. One week later… it died. A few weeks later, we shut down BuzzBlaze. Since then, many of the features and visions we had for BuzzBlaze became reality, with the rise of Pulse, Flipboard and Washington Post’s Social Reader.

BuzzBlaze was a failure. We made every single mistake in the book. As I’m working on my current projects, I always reflect on BuzzBlaze and try to learn from the mistakes. Hopefully, you’ll find my experience with BuzzBlaze insightful too.

With this in mind, here’s the story behind the rise and fall of BuzzBlaze:

The Idea

BuzzBlaze is essentially an RSS reader on steroids. The idea was stemmed out of this quote I came across:

“Our ability to create information has far exceeded our ability to manage it.”

It occurred to me that the problem of information overload was becoming increasingly difficult to solve. As a media junkie (having just sold an online magazine few months prior), I immediately thought of content consumption – why not create a service that would allow people to manage the information that they are exposed to through news and blogs in an organized, efficient and relevant way?

We found our pain point and decided to set off with the goal of changing the way people read news online. The solution we came up with was a social news application where you could follow your friends to see what they are reading and have their recommendations pushed to you. To put it bluntly, it was a fancy RSS reader with a social layer built on top.

Then came the hard part – differentiating ourselves from the competition. Keep in mind that we were doing all of this in the pre-Pulse/Flipboard era. We looked through the existing solutions out there:

We quickly realized a commonality – all the RSS readers out there were ugly. Even though RSS has been around for years, it’s by no means a consumer-friendly technology. Since both Tony and I both have strong design backgrounds, we wanted to make RSS readers beautiful. The experience of reading news online should be like browsing a magazine.

And that’s how BuzzBlaze was born.

Building The Website

We were both pretty comfortable with photoshop and HTML/CSS and quickly threw together a mockup in a few days, which laid out the dashboard drag-and-drop interace, widget panels and friend activity stream:

Six months later, we turned our mockups into real products:

Since Tony and I were both front-end developers, we had zero clue about building a large-scale web application. So we just picked PHP as our development language – I have no idea why we didn’t pick something like Ruby (Rails) or Python (Django). We had to hire a third developer to help us build the backend systems. This decision later came back to haunt us…

Launch

Our marketing strategy was pretty simple – create a private beta landing page and promote the heck out of it. Having done internet marketing for the past five years, I was pretty confident with our campaign strategy. We used MailChimp to capture the email addresses and ended up with a prelaunch list of around 2000 subscribers.

Those weren’t just random 2000 subscribers – they were targeted and super active. In fact, on launch week, we sent out three different emails. When we opened the stats, we couldn’t believe our eyes – our clickthrough rates were 15-18x the industry average!

On launch day, we got ourselves in tons of media outlets, including TheNextWeb, YoungEntrepreneur, FastGush and much more…

All this resulted in over 500 active users in the first 48 hours of launch. In fact, one of our test users was Mark Cuban! As far as our marketing went, we went flawlessly and couldn’t have done any better.

Crash And Burn

But, our traffic quickly spiraled down and three weeks later, we had zero active users – most just logged in once and never came back. Two months later, we shut BuzzBlaze down and moved on.

There were several valuable lessons we took away from the experience:

Lesson #1: Hype Only gets You So Far

We had an awesome marketing campaign. We got on tons of media outlets. However, our product didn’t live up to the hype. Truth be said, BuzzBlaze was a pretty lousy product – we should have realized when we didn’t even used BuzzBlaze ourselves. It turns out we didn’t build something people actually wanted. We never researched the market and didn’t understand people’s needs.

When people sent in feedbacks during the private beta phase, we never iterated on them and shipped out updates – partly because we had no freakin’ clue how to code a lot of the features. Hype only gets you so far. Your product needs to live up to it.

Lesson #2: Poor User Experience

There’s much more to building a great product than making it look beautiful. BuzzBlaze looked slick, however, it did not feel slick. The website was far too slow and the feed search was confusing to use.

When people first signed up, they were presented with a blank screen. It was way too slow for people to add feeds to the dashboard – what we should have done was suggest existing feeds to add and pre-populate people’s dashboards with categories they can select.

Another issue was that we built an email confirmation system when users signed up. However, for some reason all of our emails went to spam, so a lot of people just signed up but never activated their account. It turns out email deliverability is a pretty complicated thing in itself, with weird stuff like SMTP, email headers etc. We had no freakin clue what SMTP was before that point.

Design isn’t just about having a great user interface, it also entails user experience (especially during the sign up process) – we confused the two.

Lesson #3: News Has Gone Mobile

This goes back to our first point – we didn’t research well enough. We failed to realize the current state of the journalism industry and the trend of news going mobile. By the time we have launched BuzzBlaze, apps like Flipboard and Pulse have already gained significant traction. It was too late for us to pivot. We focused on web when we should have focused on mobile.

Lesson #4: Waiting Too Long To Launch

We came up with the idea around May/June 2010. We started developing around July. We had a target launch date of September. We ended up launching in February 2011. Six months was way too long to get our product out the door.

One of the biggest reason was that we were simply not technical enough – we didn’t know anything about the backend and relied heavily on our third party developer. Whenever we wanted something done, it will take around two days for the developer to reply. And maybe another two days to explain it. By the time he actually understood the feature, a week has gone by. The turnaround time was way to slow. It didn’t help that in September, I headed off to Stanford while Tony was back in Hong Kong.

Furthermore, the fact that we didn’t know too much about the backend meant it was completely reliant on blind trust. The site turned out to be very sluggish. Looking back at the code (know that I’m pretty technical), it was pretty crappy.

We also tried to do way too much for version 1.0. We basically tried to pack every single feature we could think of into the product, as opposed to focusing on building an MVP (minimum viable product) to test out our hypothesis. As time went on, we added more and more features, which dragged the launch date further and further back.

Ultimately, for BuzzBlaze, we failed to look at the big picture.

What’s Next

BuzzBlaze was a great experience for both Tony and I. It was just the fact that we got to be part of the startup culture. A large part of being an entrepreneur is about building stuff – and building stuff fast.

While BuzzBlaze was a failure, I’ve definitely learnt a lot of the lessons. Even just building it helped me understand how web applications work (frontend, backend, integrations etc). I learned more HTML/CSS/Javascript than I ever would I have learned from a textbook. The key is to fail fast and move on.

It’s great to see apps like Pulse and Flipboard taking off. We knew we were onto something with our idea, but at the end of the day, it’s really about the execution.

As part of my learning experience, one of the first apps I’ve built is called TaskMob, which is a simple and elegant to-do list. It just got released on the AppStore today (be sure to give it a try and let me know what you think )

I actually built TaskMob back in July and never intended to launch on the App Store. But a few weeks ago, I decided why not just launch the app for fun. So I decided to polish the app up a bit with a slick user interface.

The app itself is pretty simple – it’s definitely not one of those power-user task managers with complicated user interfaces and features. Instead, it’s just a simple and lightweight to do list for the average-joe like myself.

TaskMob is free so be sure to give it a try by going to the AppStore. Click here to download

Here are some some screenshots:

Home Screen

Add Task

Rearrange Tasks

Search Tasks

Completed Tasks

But the change that intrigued the most is the language. I grew up in a very westernized environment since Hong Kong was a former British colony. English is my first language so the last thing I expected to shock me was the language barrier. Yet little did I know how different American English can be…

I listed a few examples in this post (the left is US English, the right is UK English):

The Obvious Differences

Football vs Soccer – This is probably one that almost everybody knows. But it’s still a little awkward saying “soccer”

Biscuits vs Cookies – My parents call it cookies as well, so this wasn’t a big deal either

The Non-Obvious Ones

Jumper vs Sweater – It became an inside joke where my friends made fun of me for calling it a “jumper”

Revise vs Study/Review – People gave me a blank stare when I said, “Let’s go revise for the exam.” They think I’m trying to “fix” the exam

Toilet vs Bathroom/Restroom – Apparently, it’s “uncivilized” to call it a toilet. So how do Americans distinguish a toilet from a room where you rest or take a bath?

“I Forgot” vs “I Forget” – Americans prefer using present tense…

Rubbish Bin vs Trash Can – Americans don’t call it rubbish. Or even bin.

Torch vs Flashlight – When I said torch, they thought I was referring to a wooden stick with fire on top of it…

Maths vs Math – A half-british half-american friend corrected me this. Americans drop the “s”

Trousers vs Pants – A hipster friend corrected me this. I usually wore jeans so this was something I only found out much later in the year

Rubber vs Eraser – Apparently, rubber means something else in the US…

CV vs Resume – Here, job recruiters ask for your resume, not your CV

Boots vs Cleats – These are the shoes you wear for those who play football (aka soccer)

Anti-clockwise vs Counter-clockwise – Don’t they mean the same thing?

I’m sure there are tons more, but these are the ones from the top of my head that I use in my everyday life. It’s definitely not easy to change something you’ve been saying for 18 years…

UPDATED: (11/28/2012)

A few more that I’ve picked up since I wrote this post:

Tipex vs Whiteout – The first time I asked for tipex, my American friend stared at me with a complete blank look and I had to point at the object

Training vs Practice – I just found this out today. Sports team in America “practice”, not “train”

Match vs Game – Speaking of sports teams, Americans practice for a football game, not a football match

Car Park vs Parking Lot – I still say car park to this day. Parking lot just sounds weird… it’s a place where you park your car – hence car park.

Secondary School vs High School – Probably due more to the difference in the two education systems

Primary School vs Elementary School – Same as above

Year vs Grade – Another education difference. You’re in “12th Grade” as opposed to “Year 12”

Petrol vs Gas – Apparently you drive your car to the “gas station”. How can a liquid be gas?

Boot vs Trunk – I’ve converted. I now call it the car “trunk”

Lorry vs Truck – Also converted on this one. Truck sounds more masculine.

Lift vs Elevator – You take the elevator up the building in America.

Z(ed) vs Z(ee) – The first time I said “Zed” (to pronounce Z), my American friends laughed at me…

Bill vs Check – When you’re done with your meal at a restaurant, you ask for the “check”. Bill just sounds so much more classy.

Sofa vs Couch – Americans like to watch TV on their couches

Ground Floor vs First Floor – First floor in America is ground floor in Britain. First floor in Britain is second floor in America. Always have to plus/minus one every time I fly back home

Prawn vs Shrimp – For a long time, I thought these were two different types of food… Until I looked it up and realized they were the exact same thing!

Supply Teacher vs Substitute Teacher – I was watching a YouTube video yesterday and it kept calling them “substitute” teachers. Had to look that one up

Break Time vs Recess – This is more of a high school term. I’m just so used to having break times

Trainers vs Sneakers – Trainers? Sneakers? Both sound pretty weird to me.

Mum vs Mom – Mum sounds a lot sweeter

Caravan vs Trailer – When Americans go camping, they take their trailers

For those of you who don’t know, BuzzBlaze is a social news aggregation website that allows users to discover and share content online. We want to redefine the way people consume media online by providing the best news reading experience on the internet – on one elegant interface.

Unlike many other social news readers (or RSS readers), we’ve built BuzzBlaze to be inherently social – we want to empower people to be content curators and allow people to easily find out what their friends are reading.

Along with my co-founder Tony Chen, we have worked extremely hard to get to this stage. It’s been a long journey but it’s only the beginning. We’ve already begun developing Version 2.0 and have greater things to come that we can’t wait to show you!

Over the coming weeks, we’ll begin rolling out private beta invites. There are still some minor bugs (hence, beta) and we hope this transition will help iron these out.

But rather than having to sign up on the waiting list, I’ve decided to give out exclusive invites – just to my subscribers. You can sign up through this link:

Click Here To Sign Up For Private Beta

Let me know what you think and send us your feedbacks!

I’ve also attached more screenshots below for you guys to check out. Enjoy:

Click Here To Sign Up For Private Beta

I literally had the best seat in the house (front row, dead center) and that was because I was a BASES member/volunteer so we had two rows of seats reserved which was pretty cool. While I was helping out with giving out with registering the attendees, I managed to take a quick photo of Mark Zuckerberg’s name tag:

One main theme that was obvious throughout all the talks was that the team and execution was far more important. Rarely did they talk about how to come up with the killer “idea”. Here’s a quick summary of what I learned:

Andy Bechtolsheim

Founder of Sun Microsystems – Andy mainly just talked about the importance of innovation and gave us some cool stats on how much companies spend on their R&D. It turns out Apple – widely regarded as the most innovative company – was the company that spent the least amount on R&D based on the percentage over their profit.

Paul Graham

Founder of Y-Combinator – Paul was definitely one of my favorite speakers of the day and talked about the current state of the VC vs Angel vs Super Angel market, why there are super high valuations and how founders can take advantage of that.

Andrew Mason

Founder of Groupon – Andrew basically talked about the failure of thepoint.com and how that evolved into Groupon. His six keys were basically:

1. You’re building a tool, not a piece of art. Don’t be blinded by vision
2. Recognize and embrace your constraints
3. Have a growth plan
4. The best tools aren’t always that cool
5. You’ll probably fail
6. Quit now

Reid Hoffman

(I didn’t take a photo…) Founder of Linkedin – Reid basically just talked about how to take an idea/product to market and get users on board. And make sure your competition sucks.

Ron Conway

Godfather of Angel Investing – Ron was brilliant. His speech was basically the story of how he met the founders of Google, Facebook, Twitter and Napster – and at the same time bashing the movie “The Social Network” and how it was nothing like the Zuckerberg he met five years ago. He kept on emphasizing how those people were exactly like us and if they can do it, anybody can do it. Having read “Outliers” by Malcolm Gladwell, I don’t exactly buy that. But still, the stories were pretty fascinating.

Dalton Caldwell

(Didn’t take a photo) Founder of Imeem – Not much to talk about here. Basically just bashed the heck out of why you shouldn’t start a music startup.

Adam D’Angelo

Founder of Quora – Adam talked about the early days at Facebook and why he started Quora. The best quote I got out of was “It’s okay if something doesn’t scale if it strengthens your position”.

Mark Zuckerberg

Obviously, this was the highlight of the event. Mark was surprisingly outgoing, funny and very confident – his public speaking has definitely improved drastically compared to two years ago. He made a few remarks about “The Social Network” and how the movie got random details such as the shirt and fleece he was wearing exactly right. He said Facebook buy companies because of the people, not the company.

But the most interesting part came during the Q&A where he was asked how Facebook was going to break into the Chinese market. While Facebook aims to be open and transparent, Mark talked about how you should respect local cultures and that Facebook was not about spreading American values. His plan is to first focus on the other markets such as Russia, where western companies have also struggled. So if Facebook can prove it can be the first American company to succeed in Russia, then hopefully they can convince China.

Unfortunately, I missed Tom Preston-Werner (founder of GitHub) and Brian Chesky (founder of Air BnB) due to numerous reasons…

But anyways, during the breaks and afterwards, I had the chance to “chill” with some of the attendees outside:

Robert “Scobleizer” Scoble

MC Hammer

And of course…

Mark Zuckerberg!

Startup School was an awesome experience. Hopefully there will be more cool tech events comining up in Stanford! If you get the chance, definitely go. It’s the best way to meet new people.

We’re *very* close to finishing the final prototype. So in the mean time, here’s a sneak peak…

In this clip, he talks about the key components needed for a startup to be successful. Marc’s advice was very useful as I’m currently in the middle of launching a web startup myself. Enjoy:

To summarize, the three necessities for startup success are:

1. A Big Market

This can be broken down into two parts:

• Is there a big existing market that you think you can go after and displace incumbents?
• Or do you believe there is a new market that will be big?

2. A Killer Product That’s 10 Times Better

It must be a 10x leap happening in the technology landscape. So is your product 10x faster? 10x cheaper? 10x better? In order words, is there a fundamental technology or economic change that causes you to justify having a new company?

3. An Outstanding Team

You need a founding team of complementary skill sets. This usually includes one or more super-strong technologist as well as a market/salesperson who has a good understanding of business.

You can watch the full one hour presentation Marc gave at Stanford here.