SevenRooms + DoorDash, the exec take

DoorDash hopes the SevenRooms acquisition will supercharge its efforts to operate inside restaurants — including reservations.

image via Unsplash

On Tuesday, DoorDash announced the $1.2 billion acquisition of SevenRooms, a reservations and customer relationship management platform. The deal, expected to close later this year, has the potential to bring restaurants further inside DoorDash’s orbit.

Restaurants want to know “everything that’s actually happening about their guests and inside their dining rooms, as well as other channels,” DoorDash CEO Tony Xu said during the company’s first-quarter earnings call, also on Tuesday.

Xu said SevenRooms’ tech will augment DoorDash’s platform business, the set of tools, like direct ordering and in-restaurant QR codes, that help restaurants operate.

This acquisition “is a huge step forward for DoorDash’s commerce platform,” Parisa Sadrzadeh, DoorDash vice president of strategy and operations, told me in an interview. “The investment that we’ll be able to make in the suite of services SevenRooms has built, I think, will be very powerful for merchants across the globe.”

I spoke with Sadrzadeh and SevenRooms co-founder and CEO, Joel Montaniel, on Wednesday, the day after DoorDash announced their intent to acquire SevenRooms. Given potential regulatory scrutiny and the fact that the deal is likely months from closing, neither offered too-specific details about what comes next. Instead, they spoke a high-level, using terms like “cultural alignment” when I asked about the companies’ combined future. But the motivation behind the acquisition is clear: DoorDash wants restaurants to use its products not just to run a delivery business, but also to better manage what’s going on inside.

And yes, reservations on DoorDash are on the table.

Our conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Expedite: DoorDash is a familiar consumer brand, but a lot of the newer tools, like the commerce platform, are meant to be almost invisible to a diner. How should we expect that to evolve?