Uber and DoorDash say they're just getting started

To the moon! (Not really. Not yet.)

DoorDash CEO Tony Xu in 2016, when the company had one line of business: restaurant delivery. Now, Xu says, DoorDash is like five different companies, each offering merchants something different. (Photo credit: Noam Galai/Getty Images for TechCrunch)

Leaders at Uber and DoorDash want investors — and everyone else — to know that they’re just scratching the surface of possibility. They are very, very small. And still in early innings when it comes to the total number of transactions they can insert themselves into.

I’m paraphrasing, but not much. During their respective earnings calls on Wednesday, both Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi and DoorDash CEO Tony Xu repeated versions of a familiar refrain: by the numbers, they say, their companies are just getting started and have a ton of room to grow.

Uh, what?

This message is hard to reconcile with each company’s mega-valuation. Uber’s worth almost $200 billion, DoorDash is valued over $100 billion. In restaurant terms, that market capitalization is roughly comparable to current valuations of McDonald’s ($220b) and Starbucks ($100b), respectively.

But unlike McDonald’s and Starbucks, which might see superfans a few times weekly, DoorDash leaders believe there’s room to increase the number of occasions a consumer uses the service by an order of magnitude.

“Food is the most sought-after category for convenient consumption,” Xu said on Wednesday’s call before reminding listeners that the average consumer eats a meal 20-ish times per week, or more than 100 times per month. For now, he added, “we still lose the vast majority of those occasions to the pantry or a different form of consumption.”