DoorDash, one of the many startups aimed at restaurant delivery, has hired former Tinder CEO Chris Payne as COO.
Former Tinder CEO Payne Moves to DoorDash as COO
DoorDash was founded in 2013 and since then there has been a rush into the restaurant delivery space, including by rivals Postmates and Caviar.
Payne will report to CEO Tony Xu, helping him scale the on-demand service that has attracted $60 million in funding from top Silicon Valley venture firms Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Sequoia Capital. (KP’s John Doerr and Sequoia’s Alfred Lin sit on the board of DoorDash.)
“I would say 2015 has been a year of hyper-growth for us and now I need a partner to help build on what we have done as the complexity of the business grows,” said Xu in an interview today.
Indeed, DoorDash has tripled its employees to 150 this year and is now in 22 markets across the U.S. and also in Canada, largely helping local restaurants deliver their food and also with other logistics software. It has also signed national partnerships with well-known brands like Taco Bell, KFC, 7-Eleven and Dunkin’ Donuts
DoorDash was founded in 2013. In recent years, there has been a rush into the space, including by rivals Seamless, EAT24, Postmates and Caviar. But Xu said that “the demand for our service keeps growing as more customer behavior shifts to an on-demand system.”
Payne has a lot of experience in marketplaces and data use, as an exec at Microsoft and then eBay. He was selected as CEO of Tinder last March with much hope that he could corral the famously dysfunctional dating startup in the wake of the demotion of co-founder and CEO Sean Rad. But Rad prevailed and returned as CEO in August, with Payne leaving due to what one investor described as essentially a bad fit.
That’s not a knock on the talented Payne, given — well — Tinder.
He thinks DoorDash has a big future. “This is in many ways computer science and applying mobile solutions with our partner workers and merchants,” Payne said. “It is a huge market and I got excited about all those things and creating a business operation at scale across the U.S. and then across the globe.”
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
